Basic science is never cheap, but none of that money goes to the grad students.
Then again, military weapons are indeed insanely expensive.
Then again, military weapons are indeed insanely expensive.
Idk what your idea of budgets are for these sorts of labs but I think most engineers would be shocked at the shoestring budgets they run on (at least the ones I know are a fraction of the cost of a single engineering team).
Source: I paid grad students the majority of my research funding for 16 years, and so did all my colleagues.
Unless you’re building a new facility at CERN, etc, the bulk of research cost is people.
The “whole thing” is never cheap. Running something like a university — providing the environment, infrastructure, administration, facilities, compliance systems, equipment, libraries, grants offices, laboratories, and institutional platform that allow professors and graduate students to do research — is itself extremely expensive.
After all, if you look at the fiscal budgets of major economies, public spending on education and research is often much larger than military spending.