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This is complete nonsense. If this person knew of current goals and challenges of earth based telescope design - not to mention the challenges of free floating space based design, he would not make these sort of remarks.
The direction has moved from 8 to 10 meter class grouped in interferometer clusters to much larger instruments on the 25 to 50 meter class, and current plans have yet to advance interferometer cluster solutions as goals. To go to larger classes of instruments there are four big challenges - quality of optics, gravity, the earth's heat and , of course, developing adaptive optics solutions of this scale to resolve the problems of the earth's atmosphere. The European Southern Observatory has done studies on a 100 meter instrument call OWL and reached the conclusion that they cannot build it with current technologies.
A lunar scope greatly mitigates the challenges of the last four of these challenges and the possibility in the future of manufacturing glass in a near weightless and vacuum environment on the moon would in the long term reduces the optics change as well.
Space based telescope of this size pose whole new classes of design and maintenance problems and would most likely require a constant human presence at the site. They would also need to be out at Lagrange point or in orbits are out the moon to accommodated the sort of wavelengths that are now of interest in astronomy. True, they could be in LEO orbit if there were designed with the right cooling systems, but here again we have a significant design and maintenance issue.
Spaced based instruments of this kinds are decades away from pratical deployment.
Place on top of that the current direction in Radio Astronomy for extremely large and high powered arrays and you have a prefect match up for lunar based astronomy.
So comments like this seem to me to be motivated by other impulses. Surely this fellow is not that ignorant about what is going on in astronomy today. My guess is is that it is politically motivated. All most all of the criticisms of the new NASA plans come from the left; their problem seems to be the mere fact that it was proposed by the GOP. If a Democrat came up with this plan they would loudly proclaim it as a "grand new vision." It shows how corrupted by politics our national and international scientific and academic institutions have become.
There also seems to be another factor: It would again place us years ahead of anyone else, and there are forces in this world that do not like that notion at all. Some of these forces reside int the Democratic party.
blast from the past ping.
Astronomers plan telescope on Moon
3 January 2002
New Scientist
Duncan Graham-Rowe
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1735
Maccone also wants to give the region around the Daedalus crater some form of protection status, to create a permanent quiet zone that would be safe no matter what technology is developed in the future. "The far side is in my opinion a unique treasure that should be preserved for the sake of humankind," he says.