I'm surprised it got through. $23B is a lot of money, and it will cost A LOT more when you start adding up the operational costs. In comparison, the space shuttle was $1.5B per launch "amortized" over 135 launches.

One of the effects of the Space Shuttle is that it hogged the budget of NASA (around 30%). Really worthwhile exploration and other space science programs got less funding because the Shuttle program was so big in cost.

Is the FCC going to do the same for Physics? There's an opportunity cost here that isn't getting addressed.