One more thing I meant to add..

Now, 80 years later, the government wants to spend even more money to develop technology that might have been under continuous development for all those years if the government had not spent money on an alternative that was not economically viable.

Economic viability is not the only measure of whether something is worth doing or not. There's little financial incentive to offer a basic education to poor inner city kids, but I'm glad our government does so (or at least tries to) because it makes us all better off. Private charity hasn't and can't respond adequately to all of society's issues, so I'm glad we have a government to tackle problems that don't seem to offer a profit opportunity.