Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your use of the term technical innovation, but weren't the Manhattan Project, NASA and many military projects innovation by mandate that were extremely successful?
It's quite one thing to form agencies with specific science and engeering goals (Manhatten Project, NASA) and populating them with experts and billions of dollars, quite another to expect the same results from other departments without that background.
And even then: the progress that SpaceX has made in the last few years is an almost text-book proof of my point. NASA provided SpaceX with a wealth of knowledge and experience that has been very poorly utilized (dollar for dollar) over the last 20 years. Within a very short time-frame we've suddenly seen innovation in the space sector like we haven't seen since the Apollo programme.
As for the military sector - given that maintaining a monopoly over the application of military force is (fundamentally) the primary function of government, it's not surprising that this is the one area of government that has understood it's place for a very long time: issuing contracts with stated operational aims and leaving the private sector to provide the innovation. Yes, the system is flawed - the F-35 programme is a bit of a disaster - but even then it can be at least partially blamed on government agencies interfering with the procurement process.
Yes, but it doesn't take lots of experts and billions of dollars to build an API, I would think.
And yes, we've seen tremendous innovation from SpaceX - but where would they be without that knowledge and experience from NASA? Just because NASA has been turned into a bureaucratic mess with funding that bounces around doesn't mean they haven't created a lot of value and new knowledge, most of which would never have been funded by the private sector. Government work isn't about having good returns on money spent, which strikes me as both a blessing and a curse.
I wonder how many current day innovations have sprung from the initial work of places like the DOE National Labs, and how many might in the future, for all that it's a government program.
> Yes, but it doesn't take lots of experts and billions of dollars to build an API, I would think.
Refer (3) in my original top post. This is something they would prove remarkably adept at achieving.
> ...but where would they be without that knowledge and experience from NASA?
Exactly! A thousand times so! Releasing their knowledge and experience that only a government funded entity could have amassed (c.f. raw data), has sling-shot a private enterprise capable of rapid innovation. This is precisely why I think that releasing the raw data is the most beneficial outcome.
Not really. No appointed official woke up one morning and thought "let's make an atom bomb". A bunch of scientists came to the govt and said, "we can make an atom bomb, we just need the funding".
