At least part of it is that NASA is good at marketing. They make cool shit and hype up the public so we all know how cool it is too. Soon they'll be launching a NASA+ streaming service that's completely free. All their video and live content in one place. They're genuinely one of the coolest public entities I know about, and part of why I know about them is because they're so good at marketing their projects to the lay public.

Why did we talk so much about James Webb

At least on /r/europe on Reddit, I think because it was being launched by a European rocket from a European spaceport, so there was a lot of discussion about Arianne. The scope was extremely expensive, so rebuilding it probably wouldn't be an option, and Arianne 5 was a particularly reliable launch platform.

Amusingly, this new Euclid scope is the mirror opposite of JWST: a principally-European scope launched by an American rocket from an American spaceport.

I suspect that this was in the context of the James Webb Space Telescope launching and (a) having a complicated "unfolding" process and (b) being so far out that it couldn't be the target of a Hubble Telescope-style repair mission, so people are thinking about telescopes activating and maybe not working.

Well there was Hubble...

In space things don't always go as expected, and it's hard to send tech support. So it's always a relief when your 1.5b project works as expected.

It's a lot less when you consider that it took 10 years to develop, build and launch that thing. That's 10 years of wages for technicians, scientists, programmers and all the associated jobs - secretaries, cleaning staff etc.

And that's the beauty of funding science: the money goes straight back into the economic cycle and also funds the training and education of the young scientists who are learning the ropes. This thing has funded probably dozens of PhD's and hundreds of master students.

Let me tell you about the marvel at L2 called JWST

Searching for dork energy in mere 6 years is worth it :D

That’s a hell of a lot of money for a single telescope.

I mean, right here you can see telescopes being sold for $49.99 on Amazon. It makes one question the entire budgetary process behind this Euclid scope.

EDIT: Not to mention that the Amazon one comes with a tripod, and as best I can tell from this article and Wikipedia, the Euclid scope doesn't have anything of the sort. If we could get Josef Aschbacher here right now, I think that the no-tripod issue would definitely be an incisive question to raise with him.