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That would be cool, but VERY expensive. We'll be lucky to get a revamped shuttle at this point. Most satellites are put in space by unmanned rockets anyway. They fail much more often than our manned flights do, but since noone dies, it's not as big of a deal.

I don't think they could detect planets in other solar systems with this. I think the article is referring to studies of planets and moons within our own solar system. The way they detect planets around other stars is extremely cool, though! There is so little light given off by these things that it's unlikely we'll be able to directly see many, so they have to infer these planets existence through other means.

If you have two stars, say with about the same mass, they will orbit not one or the other, but a common point in the middle, like a dumbbell being spun around. The Earth and the sun do the same thing, but the Sun is so much bigger that it's really not detectable and it looks just as though the Earth was orbiting the stationary Sun. The thing is that planets the size of Jupiter are so big that they actually force a little wobble in the Sun's position as they go around each other. We can detect this little wobble in other stars and have shown evidence of dozens of planets about the size of Jupiter that way. There is a professor where I work who is trying to prove the existence of planets around stars with large clouds of dust around them by looking at patterns in the dust. We'll see if she turns up anything!

The Keck and ESO's VLT should be able to see larger exo-planets directly. Keck is almost ready to begin a search for exo-planets and the VLT should be ready in a year or two. Keck has already demonstrated adaptive optics and interferometry capabilities, but I don't think it has used both at the same time. It will need all of these methods to see an extra-solar Jupiter.