The sky’s the limit.
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“Ah, fuck it!”
Is it worth it though?
The costs are truly astronomical.
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In 2021 humanity was spending a billion dollars a day on the products of Apple Inc.
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If it’s anything like the Apollo or Shuttle programs, even if it never produced a useful image, the level of tech development that comes out of it is likely to be worth it. The stuff we got out of those two programs was incredible in its assorted applications, plenty getting into everyday life (Teflon as an example).
And when you contrast the cost of James Webb vs things like the amount the US spends on its military each year, it’s peanuts, and a much better use of funds.
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When you contrast the sums wastec on many many things, legal and illegal, I think the Webb Telescope is / will be money well spent.
The clue to the post might be in the word ASTRONOMICAL 
I have no problem with the cost of the project at all !
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I hate to be the one to do this - because that’s a fucking great post with which I agree wholeheartedly - but the whole Teflon-developed-from-the-space-race is a ‘Q.I.’ tier urban legend, it was discovered in the 1930s and productionised by the 1940s.
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Oh! Well at least I can stop spreading that bit of misinformation now.
We’ve all done it mate.
You definutely can identify a lot of the 70s/80s computer industry as having come out of the Apollo programme, though.
I thought you might not, but I spent my working life living off science funding and there are very strongly held views by some pretty senior scientists that spending large sums on, in particular, particle physics and astronomy simply can’t be justified. It wasn’t a matter of whether any science should be funded (they were scientists after all) but they reckoned that spending the same money on smaller-scale research would return much, much more of whatever it was you valued - pure knowledge, practical spin-offs, awe and wonder etc etc. At one point the UK government split the Science and Engineering Research Council into two - the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences) and the PPARC (Particle Physics and Astronomy), in part to try to manage the fighting.
It’s a very live issue.
Unintentional discovery does seem to be quite a complicated thing to try and assess, especially in advance. A lot of pure mathematics (I know, not a science at all, but still an area of research), has absolutely sod all practical application. GH Hardy in his book A Mathematician’s Apology even revels in the fact that his work on prime number theory in particular would have no impact on mankind for either good or evil (I think he was mostly about dodging the evil bit). The irony being that his work is integral to almost all modern cryptography is pretty amusing as a result.
I remember standing on a crowded tube train with a guy a couple of levels above me in the power structure, on our way to a discussion about UK involvement in this https://www.xfel.eu/. The Germans had come over to try to talk us into it. It was going to cost a billion currency units (dollars/euros/pounds, all much of a muchness at that stage) and I guess they were hoping UK might put around 10% of that in, in some combination of cash and kind. I asked the guy I was with “On what basis might a decision be reached ?” when the sum involved was so enormous and the return so unclear. He shrugged his shoulders and said “Who knows what it might achieve, but if they can get the thing to work at all then it’s almost certain to turn something useful up sooner or later”.
Number Theory and Combinatorics are invaluable in microprocessor design, particularly the logic / math processor components.
Curiosity-driven science (all fields) is in a parlous state in this country (and many others), driven by the abacus-flicker mindset of philistines and vested-interests. It may seem right and proper that only the most obviously productive science gets core funding if your goals are short-term ones (getting re-elected / having a frying-pan that can get smoking hot without losing its non-stick . . . which still would be nice…), but like all oversimplistic short-termist policies it has unanticipated consequences…
The ‘buffer-zone’ is gone for starters, leaving core disciplines over-exposed, but with it are gone the more accessible facets of science - the ones that are readily-understood by the proverbial Clapham Omnicommuter, the ones that inspire minds, the ones that sometimes even switch-on the political elite.
If you insist on tangible goals, you create a reductio-ad-absurdam situation where science is little more than a semi-commercialised beauty contest. Up to a point, this is fine, but the thing about real blue-sky research is we may be generations away from it having any tangible applications, and those applications are likely beyond our C21st imaginations.
Science can enrich lives in non-materialistic ways, too - in much the same ways as the arts can, and even the most ordinary of us can contribute in small-but-useful ways: I’ve named and published new and previously-undiscovered fossil species after the enthusiastic amateur collector whose years of diligent collecting and research finally paid-off, and in astronomy, volunteers are immensely useful in processing data and observations that under-resourced researchers might never get near, bringing to light amazing new phenomena that have changed the course of science.
Meh, 'tis but a small fraction of what Dido Harding splurged on the UK’s Test n Trace programme.
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Fuck. And lots of stuff was missed out; Lead Paint; Asbestos Floor Tiles and probably loads of other shit… 
Are we nearly there yet.
When posted just 467 miles to go.
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And having got to zero distance to go that website seems to have gone belly up. Explanation:
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