> The James Webb telescope cost 10 billion, but that was spent over 17 years, and it should work for 20 years or so. > Compared to the budget as a whole, it is

> The James Webb telescope cost 10 billion, but that was spent over 17 years, and it should work for 20 years or so. > Compared to the budget as a whole, it is insignificant. No. A lot of the cost of the JWST was driven by the limitations of the launch vehicle. Engineers needed to come up with the very complex folding and unfolding mechanism, and that was for a thing produced in a quantity of 1. Once the SpaceX Starship gets going, these limitations disappear. All of a sudden. I predict that by the end of this decade there will be numerous telescopes in the sky with capabilities surpassing JWST's, and built and launched for dirt cheap compared to JWST. One problem with science is and will always be this: things that cost $10 billion now might very well cost $100 million in 2 decades. The question that nobody asks when funding mega scientific projects is not what is the bang for the buck, but is it worth to pay big bucks for a given bang now, or can we wait 2 decades and get the same bang for 100 times less money?