A solar gravitational lens will be humanity's most powerful telescope (2022)

Is there anything stopping you from putting 2+ satellites out "closer" but in the path of the lensed light, capturing the light simultaneously, and then resolving the image via async computation later? I think this is called interferometry and I know it's hard because you need _very_ precise timing, but I'm curious if that would be possible or not. (Maybe you can get the timing in sync with atomic clocks, or by sending a laser to both from a central point that lets them keep time with some very tight tolerance?)

Weird idea but I wonder if there are ways to take this from "crazy tech" to "hard tech".

The precision you need for interferometry depends on the wavelength, and being able to do this over astronomical distances at visible wavelengths would indeed be a challenge. I think the scale is timing more accurate than 0.1 nanoseconds and distance accuracy on the order of 100 nanometers. Near those orders of magnitude at least and over astronomical distances that might be measured in AU.

Then again the precision of the gravitational wave instruments measure distance on the order of the width of a proton, so who knows.

Terrestrial infrared and optical interferometry telescopes are on the bleeding edge right now.