Is that process and operational knowledge so useful to society that it's worth that big money though? It does not transfer to other, more useful projects so eas

Is that process and operational knowledge so useful to society that it's worth that big money though? It does not transfer to other, more useful projects so easily. Compare launching LHC with something like launching ITER or solving environmental problems. Much more useful projects, but the LHC process and operational knowledge value there is minimal. It is not clear to me we need to sustain CERN on life support just because they got good at building big particle accelerators. Times change, priorities shift.