[antimagic]

You're kidding right - this would have lowered my taxes by about 20 cents a year, or 3E50 total. Careful not to spend it all at once. So much for lowering taxes.

Simply put, Rosetta's budget was about 70m Euros per year over 20 years. That's like funding maybe two schools, or one hospital ward, spread over the whole EU. None of these enrich humanity as much as Rosetta is.

As for employment, well, the project is creating exactly the right sort of jobs for the European economy - that money is being spent in Europe, helping to usefully occupy the European aerospace industry, and thereby keeping engineers and scientists in work.

[johndevor]

>That's like funding maybe two schools, or one hospital ward, spread over the whole EU. None of these enrich humanity as much as Rosetta is.

Really? You're basically saying you'd prefer a robot on a comet over thousands of healthy and educated peers. Who are you to decide this?

[jarek]

> Really? You're basically saying you'd prefer a robot on a comet over thousands of healthy and educated peers. Who are you to decide this?

Coming from an American this is pretty ironic. The choice in ESA-funding countries isn't between two schools and illiterate children, it's between further improvement to two good schools already affording excellent social mobility and a comet landing.

As for who decides this, the voters do as part of the democratic process.

[acqq]

It's much better to compare the cost of the whole Rosetta mission (cca 1 billion EUR) to the cost of the just one type of fighter jets, just for the UK: cca 30 billion EUR. Apparently the fleet is only around 100 planes at the time, giving the cost of the Rosetta for the whole Europe equal to the cost to the UK for just three planes in the UK military fleet of a 100 of such planes. It's mind boggling.