It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of developing new tech.
To put in optimization terms, private companies are good at following the gradient. Government funding is necessary to escape the well and find new minimas.
Government funding is a good thing, but it’d be even better would be if we could harness the free market. One solution could be to equip research institutions with the means to capture value from IP that follows on from basic research.
A recent example of 'basic' research coming to fruition in a practical fashion (eventually):
> "S glycoprotein signal peptide (extended leader sequence), which guides translocation of the nascent polypeptide chain into the endoplasmic reticulum" - part of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. I don't ever want to hear anyone question fundamental science again. 1/2
> The level of control and understanding we now have over our biology came from literally millions of person-years spent working on things that at the time were obscure and "useless". And now? We can leverage all this into a 95% efficient vaccine _at the first try_. 2/2
* https://twitter.com/PowerDNS_Bert/status/1342159339767934978
We have no way of knowing ahead of time what knowledge will be needed or "useful" in the future, so in some ways it is prudent to try to acquire as much knowledge of the natural world as possible and sort it out later.
Yes sillicon valley exists because of government money. But that was like 70 years ago. The world has changed and corruption is more severe. You will get no such bang for your government grant buck now.
The exact same thing the OP accuses government grants of perpetuating.
Your post is a perfect example that with startups that's just accepted and glossed over.
And it is the investors problem when a startup fails, and they are aware of it. But with governments, it is OUR money squandered away by politicians and their friends.
Are they really? What are the failure rates for both?
> But with governments, it is OUR money squandered away by politicians and their friends.
https://qz.com/1719019/wework-and-ubers-losses-may-be-subsid...
https://www.businessinsider.com/weworks-investors-include-pe...
Are you sure? This rather smacks of the "good old days" fallacy.
I've worked for the large, sclerotic organisations that once put man on the moon. They will take your 100bn, crush it in to dust, and outsource the production of 1 million pages of documentation in 32 languages detailing the workings of something your never asked for. All in the blink of an eye.
If efficiency is your thing go into business. The smaller the better. But if you want to have a chance at literal moonshot stay in your job and swallow inefficiencies that come from size, ample capital, and no expectation of monetary profit.
We aren't talking about a military research project like packet switching, or getting to the moon for the first time.
Important defined how?
The car wasn't. The mobile phone wasn't. Computers in their post-WW2 form basically weren't, for the last half decade if not more it's all been private sector. Yes, DARPA did some very early work on packet switching networks and their work became widely adopted mostly because it was free: nice. But the moment these inventions started to matter, all R&D was taken over by the private sector.
Governments spray so much money at things that I'm sure for almost any broad category of thing, you can find something they funded. But that's no evidence that stuff would never have been researched anyway, given the enormous and long term R&D efforts routinely mounted by non governmental entities. Look at AI: government funded institutions are constantly lagging behind.
It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of developing new tech.
Alphabet alone spends something like $21 billion on R&D per year. It doesn't take many years of that to reach $140 billion, and Alphabet is not the only company doing basic research.
Having spent many years reading research papers coming out of both academia and industry, my conclusion has been that the best papers are always those with corporate funding - some academic teams receive partly corporate funding and these tend to be in the middle, pure corporate labs tend to do the most exciting work. The bureaucrat-distributed money often gets allocated for decades to intellectual dead ends nobody cares about, purely through inertia and lack of institutional incentives to maximise ROI.
AI? Basically all funded by the private sector and has been for a decade. Universities try to keep up but complain they can't.
Chip design? When was the last time academia contributed much to that? Probably RISC in the 80s? There have been tons of breakthroughs in basic research in silicon throughout my entire lifetime, all of them privately funded. For example look at the recent Optane DIMM tech (based on new chalcogenide chemistry).
Compilers? No, the most advanced compiler in the world is Graal, which is more or less funded by grants from Oracle. The second most is LLVM, which was originally written by Chris Lattner as his master's thesis i.e. he paid for it with his own student debt. Apple pretty quickly saw that it was good work and took over the funding of it.
PL design? Here, academia has indeed done a lot of basic research into various ML derived languages like Haskell. But this has largely been reviewed carefully and then ignored by the languages people actually use - it was basic research into ideas that didn't work well and not many people really care about. All new languages that have got popular for real-world usage in the past 10 years are imperative languages that trace their heritage all the way back to C i.e. Bell Labs (Rust, Kotlin, Swift, Go, etc).
The reality is, the computer industry demonstrates that you don't need government funding of basic research. Industries will certainly accept such research if it happens to be useful because they were taxed to pay for it regardless, but they don't need it.
All those taxes are collected from companies, look at the nice graph that proves it:
https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/corporate-tax-ra...
I'm being ironic, the average corporate tax rate went from 40% in 1960 to 10% today.
Seriously though, some projects are just too expensive and risky for a privately funded venture. That's why public-private partnerships are created - it's always been like this and there doesn't appear to be an alternative.
From the R&D perspective NASA doesn't really have any say in how Starship/Superheavy are developed, which is the cutting edge of space launch. Nor does it dictate the timeline or milestones of the program. Not the same compared to the EU's initiative.
In fact, SpaceX's success shows a different path: let the private sector innovate, provide support in terms of know-how, credibility and potential contracts.
It's also quite funny considering that Goddard himself had to do a lot of work alone, fight public opinion and face the lack of support from the American government, military and academia, all failing to understand the value of the rocket to study the atmosphere and near space, and for military applications, over I'm sure other public-private endeavors that had the blessing at the time (perhaps all the atomic research that provided more strategic benefits?)
SpaceX was almost completely privately invested and private risk. Once they had shown that they were serious, NASA awarded them contracts, because it was a great deal for NASA, compared to what they would pay otherwise.
Its sad to see these kind of attempts to trash talk the SpaceX achievements.
Yes, Space X is a private company but they wouldn’t exist without the innovations that came out of NASA, a publicly funded organization.
[1] https://investinestonia.com/business-in-estonia/establishing...