Lets say it is a hypothetical telescope that has no other use than banana/orange arbitrage. If you don't think that addition makes the analogy more accurate, you haven't seen market-data parsing FFPGAs.

And don't forget this:

"By March 2009 Spread was moving dirt. Soon it had 125 construction crews working at once. [...] At 825 miles and 13.3 milliseconds, Spread's circuit shaves 100 miles and 3 milliseconds off of the previous route of lowest latency. [...] Spread won't disclose cost, but Jason Cohen, the chief operating officer of Allied Fiber, which is building a nationwide network, says laying cable through easy terrain runs $200,000 per mile. Half of Spread's route, however, is through tough virgin terrain, pushing forbes' estimate of its cost toward $300 million."

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/outfront-netscape-jim...

And, back away from the hypothetical, obviously from my post I think Galileo's telescope was great overall.