I thought it was worth sharing that Lawrence Livermore Nat'l Lab is set to provide a monolithic telescope made from a single piece of fused silica for flight on the US Space Force's upcoming Victus Haze mission, scheduled for launch in 2025.
Victus Haze is billed as a "tactically responsive space" demonstration mission set to prove that payloads and providers can accomplish procurement, launch, and commissioning of spacecraft in tactically relevant timeframes. Victus Haze will be operational "within hours" of launch according to the USSF. The mission is being run out of the USSF's Space Safari Program Office, an acquisition program office charged with responding to high-priority, urgent needs.
Monolithic telescopes are not new and several are known to have flown in space before including on the ISS as well as on space domain awareness platforms (i.e. satellites that keep track of other satellites). A CN user by the name of "rik ter horst" shared images, test plots, and a writeup of a 30mm f/10 monolith in 2013 that they constructed 15 years prior. And a google search yields a well produced "How to make a monolithic telescope" video on Hackaday, here.
The advantages of the monolithic design in spaceflight include the overall rigidity of the system and lack of need for collimation, mounting systems, or moving parts. They do have limitations however and have fairly specific use cases where they make sense to employ, to my knowledge. But most of all I just think they look cool.
