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But you also get Sputnik, Gagarin, Apollo, Voyager. You get microprocessors and Internet. You get nuclear energy (though you will be right to mention industrial fusion reactors which are always 20 years or so away :))

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One difference between solar power and Apollo is that the people in the government who did Apollo were worried about the Soviet Union handing our collective rear ends to us, possibly on a radioactive platter. Key stakeholders knew there were consequences for getting it wrong, e.g. their homes and families potentially getting vaporized.

The subsidies for the Solyndra debacle are still viewed by many partisans as a reasonable price for a laudable attempt to do the right thing, instead of a massive waste of capital. Failure? What's that?

I don't know much about Solyndra. But you are right that people getting the money for research need to be honest and motivated. In my opinion, this applies to most people working in science. It is just that research is hard (and possibly getting even harder [1],[2]) and motivation alone is not enough. If you have a "serious problem" to solve, you will most probably need to throw tons of money and people at it.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/02/07/the-difficulty-...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6694932/Have-we-discovere...

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