Same thing for the computer (Turing), satellite telecommunications, and basically everything (DNA, relativity, quantum mechanic, computers, radioactivity are fields were a huge chunk of the applications (and most of the ground work in fundamental research) have come from public spending and planning
It’s worth distinguishing public spending in general with heavily centralized public spending.
Thomas Kuhn wrote about how productive scientific fields are driven by the researchers in those fields tackling the problems they consider to be tractable and moving the field forward. In many cases those researchers are paid by public spending.
Centralized big public spending projects however need political buy in and require the researchers to justify their research projects by the needs of the political agenda that funds their projects.
Government planning seems to be useful when it comes for scaling up a technology. At the start of the human genome project it was easy to state the goal of sequencing the genome and the requirement to build better sequencing technology to achieve that goal.
It’s worth distinguishing public spending in general with heavily centralized public spending.
Thomas Kuhn wrote about how productive scientific fields are driven by the researchers in those fields tackling the problems they consider to be tractable and moving the field forward. In many cases those researchers are paid by public spending.
Centralized big public spending projects however need political buy in and require the researchers to justify their research projects by the needs of the political agenda that funds their projects.
Government planning seems to be useful when it comes for scaling up a technology. At the start of the human genome project it was easy to state the goal of sequencing the genome and the requirement to build better sequencing technology to achieve that goal.