The Missions of Astronomy (2009)

Towards the end of the article, Weinberg makes the point that a great deal of the money that Congress allocates for science is, in effect, wasted on manned spaceflight. I think there is a similar sort of poor allocation of resources when it comes to space telescopes, particularly optical telescopes.

The original argument for optical telescopes was that they could image sources at far higher resolution than is possible on the ground because they didn't have to contend with the atmosphere. At a good site on a very clear night, you might be able to get down to ~0.8 arcseconds or so. But in space, the atmosphere isn't there, so you can get 0.05 arcseconds of resolution on the HST. Over the decades, though, astronomers substantially improved adaptive optics which counteracts the effect of the atmosphere. The bigger telescopes can now actually exceed HST's resolution under good conditions and were far cheaper to build.

It's certainly the case that there are just some measurements you can't make unless the instrument is in space. But even then, there are lots of cheaper space projects that tend to be given short shrift over the much larger projects like HST and JWST. I remember in college one of my astronomy professors bitterly complaining about how JWST had effectively sucked up nearly all the project funding for a full decade.