It's a little nuts to me how many articles cite the $10 billion price tag as astronomical when we spent that in maybe 2 weeks during the peak of the Iraq War, and for what?
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.
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.
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.
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
We really did it for nothing but pain and suffering for millions of innocent Iraqi people. And the weakening of our own economy.
Worth it?
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.
Of course, endlessly spiraling costs is bad. People will disagree about what is acceptable here.
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.
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.