The system was originally developed for military purposes, but private enterprise and capital were able to fully exploit it, introducing technical inprovements and extensions with ground-based signal transmitters, on-line signal processing over the internet and multiple ways to make the technology accessible and useful for navigators, surveyors, often exceeding the original capabiities and specifications designed into the system. I’m sure they also took risks that led to dead ends, but that is inevitable, and probably necessary, to fully take advantage of this new utility.

TB is right, you can’t expect a monopolistic government bureaucracy to be able to foresee all the potential of a new technology, and neither will it have the mandate, resources or motivation to bring them all to the market. Lots of people and companies were needed to do this, government alone could not have pulled it off. People, the entire nation, have to take risks and raise capital to make it work.

By providing the utility to the society as a whole, the entire resources of the economy were mobilized to be able to extend and improve it, and fully exploit it. But those satellites would never have launched themselves, and none of the necessary tech needed to get them there (not to mention technological spinoffs and basic research) would have come about if left to individual entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to get the ball rolling. Individual people and firms can develop new ways of processing a signal and displaying the results so it is useful to, say, commercial aviators, but no single person or company is going to develop and finance a constellation of 80+ satellites and the the enormous ground infrastructure needed to maintain them. No one person, company or bank was ever going to risk billions on building this all up from scratch. It was just too risky, and the payback too far off in the future.

This pattern has repeated itself over and over again since the dawn of civilization, but America has been the nation that has perfected it, particulary since the end of WWII. It would be disastrous to our long-term future if we abandoned it now because of some mistaken concern about its short-term costs.

Space has become profitable because of government investment (mostly for military or national prestige motives). But now GPS, environmental and mapping platforms in space, and communications satellites have been exploited by the private sector into useful products that have transformed the global civilization. And many space endeavors with long-term but uncertain economic potential have also been snuck in the back door which would never have been considered by purely commercial private enterprise. (Think Hubble). Neither a centralized state bureaucracy nor a laissez-faire capitalist economy could have pulled this off by itself.

This is so obvious only a slavish obsession with ideology could fail to understand it.

May as well discuss politics, financial matters, or philosophy with a random word generator.

And how do you define R&D? Do you mean applied research to develop new products and systems? Or basic research in the sciences which may lead to the the engineering and technologies of the future. There is a big difference. I feel the role of government is to do the basic science research private enterprise can’t afford because of the high risk and long horizons between discovery and the market. You can count on business to develop promising new techniques, but few businesses can (or should) go for broke on high risk, but big payoff down the line, gambles. Everybody knows space will pay off big time; Eventually, but not tomorrow, or even the day after.

Besides, Janeway specifically mentions specific areas, and how they have prospered under government investment. In fact, if you actually read his article, this is precisely the point he’s trying to make:

“Why has it been in the world of information technology and, secondarily, biomedicine that venture capitalists have been successful? In brief: Only in these sectors did the state invest at sufficient scale in scientific research and in its translation to working technology.”

or

“At every stage, the innovation economy depends on sources of funding decoupled from concern for economic return. As economists have long recognized, such funding will not be delivered by competitive markets. Only an active state in pursuit of politically legitimate missions — national development, national security, conquering disease — can play the required role.”

“…sources of funding decoupled from concern for economic return…such funding will not be delivered by competitive markets”. Hmmm. And why the bristly response? Janeway’s arguments are certainly not anti-market, he’s simply suggesting both state and private institutions have valid, distinct, (but overlapping roles to play). That isn’t that unreasonable a position. Or as he puts it.

“Government cannot play the role either of entrepreneur or venture capitalist in creating the low-carbon economy. But entrepreneurs and venture capitalists cannot build this new economy by themselves. The venture capital model is radically unsuited to investment in fundamental science or in technological invention in its nascent stages. For the next generation of entrepreneurs and venture capitalist to have their opportunity to dance, they need government agencies as active and creative as those that served my generation.”

And in my generation, too. I worked for the nuclear power industry 40 years ago. Federal money was everywhere, even their accident liability insurance was government-subsidized, and the private sector got rich. But the industry failed to pick up the ball and run with it. When the cash flow stopped…the party ended abruptly. Just like space.

Besides, all those graphs are impressive, but they tell us nothing about what is happening now. They cover long-term trends, going back a half-century or more, trends pretty much independent of ideological fashions and fads.. And there is no data at all after 2008.

The idea that the guy who invented the wheel also gets credit for the Tesla doesn’t really hold up, and even the Romans built canals.
For a check on the “government as fountainhead” theory, examine the innovations that come from countries where 100 percent of R&D is government.