In 2014, I was working at JPL, and lamenting the demise of OpTIIX. This was to be an astronomical telescope, robotically assembled on the space station, to demonstrate that with better design tools and active feedback, we could actually make something work in space that was too big to test on the ground. I was in charge of the laser metrology system, which measured all the mirror positions and then put them back where they were supposed to go, compensating for thermal expansion, manufacturing defects, and assembly errors. It would have been a pathfinder to a future ginormous space telescope, and a step up for me as well, managing a $15M mission system. JPL, Goddard, and Johnson space centers collaborated on it, and in only a few months, the team built an extremely stable line-locked laser prototype, simulated the closed-loop performance of the entire telescope under a variety of perturbations, and even demonstrated a backlash-free gimbal arm to point the telescope. We had a plan to build it, and the hardware and data to validate the assumptions. The line managers and project leadership assured us that we knocked it out of the park at the Preliminary Design Review, whose board included NASA’s director of science. And then, the mission shut down and everybody had to find a new job in a hurry.