Pneumatic Mirror Telescope Research. It turns out that the idea has proven to work passably well as a way of creating lightweight telescopes. Spray on an epoxy layer and the mirror can hold its pressure for a year. Perhaps I should have taken the idea more seriously.
Needless to say the pneumatic approach won't work in space, though perhaps some sort of electrostatic tensioning might. Not something I care to speculate about just now.
Bruce D. Holenstein and Richard J. Mitchell. "Robert H. Koch’s Work on Lightweight Medium-Aperture Mirrors." J. Astron. Space Sci. 29(1), 79-84 (2012)
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