We used to joke at astronomy conferences that if we stopped by the nearest air force base and snagged a fighter jet we could fund all NSF Astronomy money for the next decade, and the math was probably within 10% tbh.

Someone that was sitting around complaining with us was more familiar with military gear and had some numbers on the cost of training the average fighter pilot. They calculated exactly how many pilot trainings it would take to fund all of NSF Astro for a year. That was nearly a decade ago now, so take it with a grain of salt, but it was in single digits iirc.

I had the same feeling. That’s a rounding error in some of the recent things America has spent money on like the infra bill and CARES act.

Yeah and when it is calculated over the period of time it was dispensed, that is hilariously cheap.

The defense budget for 2022 in USA is $768 billion for just one year. The budget for the entire development of the telescope was 1.351351% of that budget.

It's a rounding error compared to those, but it's not to the taxpayer. $10 billion split among roughly 100 million net-tax-paying Americans comes to $100 each. How many taxpayers would rather have an extra $100 than a space telescope?

That's a moot argument. We can use the Iraq war instead and do that same math, amounting to $11000 per tax payer.

Government budgets are well spent when they are used to do things that are impossible, unfeasible or unwise to do by individual people. JWST is a science investment, which is one of the wisest ways to spend public money.

I’d love this system if it meant I could vote against the third of my taxes that goes towards the Military-industrial complex.

Anyway I’m sure most Americans would’ve been happy with the 10 dollars a year or whatever it took over the time that 10 billion was spent

America doesn't have a poll taxation system, what's the spread on that $100 if it's adjusted for progressive taxation?

Maybe we are overlooking the "astronomical expenditure" double entendre.

Actually unintentional but I saw it after and chortled

agree, science and big projects like these are very much underfunded. All the mars reconnaissance missions were thrown together on a shoestring budget.

My friends were adamant that the US did it to steal Iraq's oil. Last time I checked, the vast majority of petroleum exploitation contracts didn't go to the US.

We really did it for nothing but pain and suffering for millions of innocent Iraqi people. And the weakening of our own economy.

Can’t be too specific because of Chatham house rules but I heard from three different high ranking US military guys at three different events that there was a non-trivial drive due to Saddam’s failed assassination attempt on Bush Sr in Kuwait

That’s not secret — GW Bush was vocal about Saddam being “the guy who tried to kill my dad.”

Ah cool, never really looked it up :)

Iraqi's no longer have the monster that was Saddam and are able to vote for their leaders. You can say that it wasn't worth it, that's a perfectly agreeable argument, but it wasn't just for nothing - it was always to remove Saddam.

Over 4000 US dead, $1.9 trillion expenditure, hundreds of thousands Iraqi dead, their health care and education systems wrecked and still not fully restored, a regional rival empowered and dominant in Iraqi politics....

Worth it?

I think it's a relative context thing. For example, Hayabusa2 returned an asteroid sample to earth for ~$150M, Perseverance is chugging around on Mars for ~$2.9B, Cassini cost about $3.9B (not sure if that's inflation-adjusted), etc.

Also keep in mind that the original estimate for the program was under $3.5B. That's a cost overrun of almost 3x, which is generally a red flag.

Cost overruns are expected for brand new tech. It’s hard to account for unknown unknowns.

Of course, endlessly spiraling costs is bad. People will disagree about what is acceptable here.

It doesn't seem like this sort of comparison is particularly useful. Never was anyone presented with the decision to pick between those two items for where to spend the next $10 billion.

So $10 billion on Web vs $10 billion split between 5 other missions that didn't happen, for example, might have been the sort of tradeoff that could be analyzed (then or now).

Or $10++++ billion to enforce the provisions of the UN agreement to end the Gulf War vs. the hypothetical concern that Iraq would create more geo-political problems in the future that would ultimately cost more than taking some action now. Also a tradeoff that is hard to evaluate in hindsight, never mind at the time (hard -- but not immune from criticism or evaluation).

I'm not saying that either of the choices, $10 billion on Webb or $10++++ billion on the Iraq war, were the right choices -- just that the comparison isn't particularly useful, IMHO.

I don't see it so much as a direct comparison of those two projects, but more as a reality check of how easily $10 billion can evaporate, spent toward non-science related things without a whimper of protest.

> So $10 billion on Web vs $10 billion split between 5 other missions that didn't happen

This is a false dichotomy based on the premise that the NASA budget couldn't just be changed, with an added assumption that the Gulf War 2 was either pay all the money we did or not do anything at all. Neither of those are true, which is exactly the point of the comparison.