h/t ToughSF (Nyrath is back too, woot): LUVOIR. This was designed in 2019 as a successor to Webb, or perhaps as a replacement on account Webb wasn't flying then and was touch-and-go if it ever would fly. Now Webb is flying so there should be some lessons-learnt here.
As a 2019 project they hadn't considered the Superheavy Booster. This should be good to get this cargo up to LEO for cheap. As for the second-stage, er.
I honestly would like some reason to care about LUVOIR in its 2019 form. I don't know if LUVOIR will be doing high-priority work.
High-priority work - to my mind - would be a low-parallax 'scope docked beyond our 1 AU, for astrometry. In English: lower the error around midrange stars, and get real parsec values for farrange stars like Betelgeuse. It is a scandal that we cannot constrain the luminosities of the 600-lightyear-range supergiants on account we don't even know how far away they are. Maybe park this thing at Deimos; give human mechanics a reason to go there.
Then there's the lunar-base, and the Uranus orbiter . . .
But really the high-priority work is get a LEO infrastructure such that whatever delivers cargo to LEO, can be boosted further. Deimos, Ceres, Hilda, Jupiter-trojan: anything. Even that STL2 where Gaia and Webb are at.
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