Was the Rosetta comet landing mission worth the cost?

One of the jobs of an economist is to ask this question daily. What else might these resources have been spent on? This concept is known as opportunity cost.Perhaps the mission can be justified in cost/benefit terms. But maybe it shouldn’t have to.

I’ve been organising my thoughts on this, so I’ve turned my attention to the costs. According to one estimate the mission cost €1.4bn, or €3.50 per EU citizen over several years. That’s still a lot of money, and it needs to be put in relative terms. That’s a mistake that most of us make, most of the time. For instance, you will hear howls of protest that over $4bn was spent on the recent US mid-term congressional elections. That is a lot of money, but it’s dwarfed by the amount spent by Americans on Hallowe’en ($7.4bn this year, including $2.8bn on adult costumes, $340m on pet costumes and $2.2bn on sweets).

Can the costs be justified in terms of all the other areas worth spending money? Ebola is a good example. This is a fundamental, crucial discussion that we have to use when we discuss how to make the world a better place.

It gets harder when you turn to the benefits side of the equation, especially when you think that some of the ultimate benefits might be derived in the future. Some of the benefits are vague and hard to put into monetary terms. This is similar to the problem of justifying the expense of climate change policies, the benefits of which (may) be enjoyed in the distant future. That’s hard to justify when there are obvious problems in the world today.

This debate catches a sense of what a big deal the Apollo moon missions must have been in the 1960s, and how vastly controversial is was. The cost of the moon landing came in at around 4-5% of US federal government spending over almost a decade. Was that worth it? How should the costs and benefits be measured?

The BBC covers the discussion here.

The great picture I used to illustrate this blog came from Buzzfeed. This link is fun too.