Was the James Webb Space Telescope worth it?
Well, $10 billion is a lot of money. Even when spread over a couple of decades, that’s still a huge chunk of NASA’s annual science budget. (And given the recent Trump administration attack on NASA’s science budget, money is about to get a whole lot tighter.)
However, it is difficult to put a price on advancing our species’ understanding of the natural world and the wide Universe we’re swimming in. And Webb is doing an amazing job of that.