Another question: are they already planning a successor to JWST? Is something better even possible? If it took more than 30 years, we should start sooner than later :)
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st... is correct. No NASA planning, including for space telescopes, shows any understanding of how much Starship changes the game. Instead of one, we can put up a network of telescopes. And try out crazy ideas.
Here is a concrete example. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231032662_A_Cryogen... lays out how a 100 meter telescope could be erected on the Moon to study the early universe with several orders of magnitude better resolution than the JWST. The total weight of their design is around 8 tons. With traditional NASA technologies, transport of the material alone is over $30 billion and it had better work. With Starship, transportation is in the neighborhood of $10 million. Suppose that precision equipment added $40 million to the cost. Using Starship, for the cost of the JWST, we can put 200 missions of this complexity in space. Using a variety of different experimental ideas. And if only half of them worked, we'd still be 99 telescopes ahead of the JWST.
So where is Starship? It is on the pad, undergoing testing. They have a list of 75 environmental things to take care of before launch. Which means that they likely launch this month or next. At the planned construction cadence, even if the first 3 blow up, by Christmas it should be a proven technology.
Another question: are they already planning a successor to JWST? Is something better even possible? If it took more than 30 years, we should start sooner than later :)