I think you’d be hard-pressed to get a scientist to admit that the money was lost. ;)
Honestly, it’s not obvious that it would have been possible to do Advanced LIGO without the experience from the initial run, which is kind of the point I was making: we don’t usually have tasks that humanity needs to get right on the first try, to the contrary humanity usually needs to fail a few times first!
But the initial budget was around $400 million, the upgrade took another $200 million. I don’t know how much was spent operating the experiment in its initial run, which I guess would be the cleanest proxy for money “wasted”, if you’re imagining a counterfactual where they got it right on the first try.
I think you’d be hard-pressed to get a scientist to admit that the money was lost. ;)
Honestly, it’s not obvious that it would have been possible to do Advanced LIGO without the experience from the initial run, which is kind of the point I was making: we don’t usually have tasks that humanity needs to get right on the first try, to the contrary humanity usually needs to fail a few times first!
But the initial budget was around $400 million, the upgrade took another $200 million. I don’t know how much was spent operating the experiment in its initial run, which I guess would be the cleanest proxy for money “wasted”, if you’re imagining a counterfactual where they got it right on the first try.