Sixty years ago on Feb. 20, astronaut John H. Glenn orbited Earth three times. The Mercury capsule Friendship 7 placed on top of an Atlas LV-3B launch vehicle (a modified intercontinental ballistic missile) reached a height of 162 miles and a speed of 17,544 miles an hour. After 4 hours and 55 minutes, it splashed down 800 miles southeast of Bermuda. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin did a single orbit the year before.
So yes, the space race was on. “Come on Space Truckin’.” By the 1969 moon landing, it was clear the U.S. had beaten the Soviets, though oddly by using a Soviet-like command-and-control structure, which “Star Trek’s” Romulans and “Star Wars’ ” Galactic Empire would endorse.
Remarkably, Glenn had no computers on board, only a few thrusters controlled by gyroscopes. There were a few issues and Glenn briefly took control of the spacecraft. Semiconductor-based computers were later used in the Gemini program, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration became an important early customer of Silicon Valley. The invention of integrated circuits lowered costs for commercial computers and the space program. In the 1980s, the military funded the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit to develop fast chips, leading to talk that the U.S. government created Silicon Valley. Hardly. Even though semiconductors are now a more than $500 billion industry and computers in the multitrillions, we still hear echoes of Barack Obama’s July 2012 campaign speech: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that, someone else made that happen.” That thinking is as outdated as phone booths.
Last year Jeff Bezos ’ Blue Origin took 90-year-old William Shatner—Captain Kirk!—into space, though not into orbit, and they surely didn’t “boldly go” on a “five-year mission to explore strange new worlds.” A few months before, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic pilots flew slightly off course during a July flight. Even still, I’m trying to reserve an economy-plus seat. The Mercury program cost $2.2 billion in current dollars, more than $300 million a launch. Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced last week that launches into orbit will cost $10 million within two or three years. Could a Bezos-like private company have funded the space program in the 1960s? It’s doubtful, but that doesn’t make the space program a model for public or private investment decisions.
Let’s look at the numbers. In 2019 U.S. research and development spending was $656 billion—three quarters by business, the remaining $170 billion divided among the federal government, universities and nonprofits. Google spent $26 billion on R&D in 2019, Microsoft about $17 billion, Apple $16 billion, Intel $13 billion. I guess they did build that. For the record, federal money for research goes, in order, to the departments of Health and Human Services, Energy, and Defense, and then NASA.
A lot of that nonbusiness R&D spending is for basic research, as it should be.
