I am pretty sure that something like this was conceived of by David E. H. Jones, under the pen name Daedalus, for one of his tongue-in-cheek columns in either New Scientist or Nature.
IIRC, the scheme, for creating a large space telescope in situ, went something like this: 1) create a flat film of some uncured polymer resin, polymer solution or heat-softened plastic on a large ring; 2) inflate it into a hemispherical dome by applying moderate gas pressure on one side; 3) allow the material to harden; 4) release the pressure, which will cause the bubble to adopt a parabolic shape; 5) use ion beam deposition to apply a reflective surface. I can't say whether my recollection of the geometrical claim on which this proposal is based is accurate, or, if so, whether it is correct.
Most of Jones's proposals were wildly yet entertainingly infeasible, but not always, and he is somewhat well known for conceiving of a form of 3-D printing (using a laser-polymerized monomer) before any serious proposals for the concept. There are a couple of collections of his Daedalus columns.
IIRC, the scheme, for creating a large space telescope in situ, went something like this: 1) create a flat film of some uncured polymer resin, polymer solution or heat-softened plastic on a large ring; 2) inflate it into a hemispherical dome by applying moderate gas pressure on one side; 3) allow the material to harden; 4) release the pressure, which will cause the bubble to adopt a parabolic shape; 5) use ion beam deposition to apply a reflective surface. I can't say whether my recollection of the geometrical claim on which this proposal is based is accurate, or, if so, whether it is correct.
Most of Jones's proposals were wildly yet entertainingly infeasible, but not always, and he is somewhat well known for conceiving of a form of 3-D printing (using a laser-polymerized monomer) before any serious proposals for the concept. There are a couple of collections of his Daedalus columns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._H._Jones