Inside OutThe high price of big science

What price big science? Can we really justify the billions spent on what for most humans will always be extremely esoteric issues – especially when a climate crisis faces us, when health and education budgets and other government services are being cut, and millions in developing countries lack electricity and clean water, and lose their homes and even their lives every year in natural disasters that could be mitigated by better-built houses and stronger infrastructure?

At the risk of inviting the withering contempt and animated challenges from scientists, dreamers and visionaries from across our community, I would argue that much more down-to-earth attention needs to be paid to this question than it currently gets.

For the generously tax-payer-funded marketing arms of the 60,000-strong NASA or the European Space Agency, or the builders of China’s supercollider, which would if approved cost US$21 billion in today’s dollars by the time it is working in 2050, my question is perhaps an outrage – a matter of “flat-earth” idiocy. A small price to pay, they say, to split an atom at fantastically high speed that will tell us lots about the origins of the universe.

A number of serendipitously converging events over the past week forced these awkward questions on me – first, but not foremost the debate on the mainland over the supercollider. Then on Friday, the European Space Agency’s €1.4 billion 12-year Rosetta mission came to a dramatic end as the spacecraft deliberately committed suicide by crashing into the Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which it has been orbiting for the past two years. The mission was without question a technical miracle – six times round the sun before eventually arriving alongside the hip-bone shaped runt of a comet for two years of data analysis and photography.

The Rosetta mission is at the cheap “firesale” end of space research. NASA’s Space Shuttle programme, which involved 135 missions between 1972 and 2011, cost an estimated US$196 billion. The International Space Station, which has been operating since 1985, has cost US$160 billion and is claimed to be the most expensive thing ever built. Hubble – perhaps the most impressive telescope and camera ever built – will have cost US$14 billion by the time it falls out of service in 2021.

It is undeniable that a lot of good stuff has come from such ambitious and visionary activity. We would never have developed GPS, for example. But the value of many scientific projects is often ludicrously overstated. How many times have we been told that such and such a multi-billion dollar project will make an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the origin of the universe, or the origins of life on earth.