Why? I'd rather the Gov the spend money on programs than corporations on RND.
Agreed. To add perspective, I don't believe corporations will give a crap about the people (extreme example, Amazon) like we believe our respective governments should. I'd rather have bad spending on keeping people alive than no spending at all.
Instead of actually promoting innovation, they tend to become a subsidy for the tech industry.
Meanwhile Joe Schmoe bought yet another iPad (which wouldn't exist without the government inventing much of computer tech) to go in a landfill in two years. But at least he funded Apple's ability to make a brand new, basically identical model, next year.
How do we measure who has a "good" track record on spending money?
To avoid pure anecdotes, the Government Accountability Office actually studies this every year: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-20-440sp ...
That's not to say I don't believe in government spending. I don't know that there is a much better solution, and any conglomeration of humans is going to have roughly equal capacity for doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing, hopefully weighted more towards the "right" thing with solid leadership...
R&D would get us fastest nice things like space colonization, longevity, megastructures, the next step on the Kardashev scale.
NASA doled out public money to prime contractors for various pieces of the program (North American, Grumman, Rocketdyne, Douglas, IBM...) and the primes subcontracted various pieces as they always do.
This is not to understate the tremendous engineering effort of organizing such a huge program, but it’s not like this achievement was done by a bunch of government workers alone.