The Impending Dearth of Space Observatories

I mentioned this in class.  Currently, there are a huge number of NASA-funded telescopes in space taking data for astronomers.   But that's all about to change.  Within the next couple of years, the telescopes will be rendered useless due to limitations both physical (eg. running out of cryogen), and fiscal.  Check out the plot.   In the last 10 years, we've been blessed with a large number of phenomenally powerful space telescopes.  In the next ten years, there will far less data coming in.  Fortunately, there's still plenty of science to do with the data we have.  And the outlook for ground-based telescopes isn't quite so bleak, as ALMA and eVLA are both coming on line soon.