[kbart]

Wasted taxes? Are you serious? The outcome of this mission might be immense considering what possibilities are open if we manage to perfect such technologies. I'd say it's the greatest our race achievement after the Moon landing. Besides, the whole mission budget is only 1 billion euros (~1.2 billion dollars). If talking about wasting tax money, consider F-35 project which cost 1 trillion dollars and still counting, that's 1000 more than this mission.

[acqq]

The unit cost of one single F-35 jet was in 2011 estimated to be around 300 million USD, that is, only three planes would pay for the whole (European, please note, financed by the tax of Europeans!) Rosetta mission.

The US plans to buy 2443 such aircraft (of course, financed by the tax of US citizens). Do they really need so many of them?

The military budget of the US was recently around 660 billion USD per year, that is, the US could finance some 600 Rosettas (each a multiple-decade project) every year with its military budget. Approximating the Rosetta life to 10 years, in these 10 years the US spent 6000 Rosettas for military. Or 18000 of F-35 fighter jets.