Segmented 4m space telescopes

Who ordered that?

A couple of years ago, Prof Buzasi at the US Air Force Academy, mentioned he had acquired a new toy...

"The United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado Springs has obtained a 4m-diameter, lightweight telescope from the discontinued Space Based Laser project. Originally designed and constructed for space, this segmented telescope is being reconfigured for use in a ground-based facility. The current optical design is an afocal Mersenne configuration with an extremely thin (17mm) glass primary. The telescope has 312 fine figure actuators for active shaping of the primary, as well as 42 piston actuators for phasing of the segments and adaptive optics capability with a 300-actuator deformable mirror and wavefront sensor. We are recoating and redesigning the optics (with new secondary and tertiary mirrors) and constructing a new truss and an alt-az mount with two Nasmyth foci capable of both sidereal and low-Earth object tracking down to altitudes of 200km. The telescope will be located in a new facility to be built next to the current USAFA Observatory."

Active optics, with full adaptive optics capability; 4 meter mirror!; light weight and segmented, designed for space deployment. I'm guessing this is the original LAMP mirror(?).
I don't think it would fit into any current payload capsule, so they must have intended the segments to deploy autonomously.

Neat. I guess this is some small part of what the $100 billion or so spent on Star Wars/SDIO/BMDO has purchased.
Story I hear is that it was going to be junked(!), since someone finally figured the Space Based Laser concept being worked on wouldn't actually work to shoot down actual missiles.
Good thing is this one was rescued and is being utilised.

Be neat to know what the status of putting the thing to use is.
Be interesting to know if there are more of these floating around, can't believe they only built one...
Be very interesting to know what the next few tens of billions were spent on.
ie have they really built space deployable 10-11 meter class optical segmented mirrors with active optics. If so, where can we get us some?

This is actually an interesting question - the open scientific community has some sense of how hard this problem is, since work on fairly large deployable segmented mirrors is proceeding for space science. There is also considerable transfer of people and expertise across the fence to and from classified programs.
So, on the face of it, the large space based mirrors are wishful thinking. Still. Concept demonstrators at best.
On the other hand the 4m segmented mirror was built in 1989 - that is pre-Hubble launch!
It would seem likely that some of the $100 billion spent at BMDO since then has done something to advance the concept, unless the whole space based laser concept is abandoned.
A lot of the time classified programs really do have nifty things done that work, although sometimes they're just producing hype and bullshit to justify their existence. For most of the last fifty years the US has been quite good to oversee classified programs with external committees of very good scientists - eg through things like JASON. - there have been worrying reports recently that JASON in particular is effectively shut down, and the implication was that it was because they were telling the DoD that some things they were doing were ill advised. If that is so, and this is the cause, it is a very bad sign for medium term US defence superiority.
It is however worth remembering that it was the Air Force which came up with the artificial star guidance for adaptive optics through the Starfire project.