In my years of profesional involvement with GPS, I was astonished to learn of the great ingenuity and innovation displayed by the private sector in developing and applying this technolgy, often in ways that were totally unanticipated by the government.

The system was originally developed for military purposes, but private enterprise and capital were able to fully exploit it, introducing technical inprovements and extensions with ground-based signal transmitters, on-line signal processing over the internet and multiple ways to make the technology accessible and useful for navigators, surveyors, often exceeding the original capabiities and specifications designed into the system. I'm sure they also took risks that led to dead ends, but that is inevitable, and probably necessary, to fully take advantage of this new utility.

TB is right, you can't expect a monopolistic government bureaucracy to be able to foresee all the potential of a new technology, and neither will it have the mandate, resources or motivation to bring them all to the market. Lots of people and companies were needed to do this, government alone could not have pulled it off. People, the entire nation, have to take risks and raise capital to make it work.

By providing the utility to the society as a whole, the entire resources of the economy were mobilized to be able to extend and improve it, and fully exploit it. But those satellites would never have launched themselves, and none of the necessary tech needed to get them there (not to mention technological spinoffs and basic research) would have come about if left to individual entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to get the ball rolling. Individual people and firms can develop new ways of processing a signal and displaying the results so it is useful to, say, commercial aviators, but no single person or company is going to develop and finance a constellation of 80+ satellites and the the enormous ground infrastructure needed to maintain them. No one person, company or bank was ever going to risk billions on building this all up from scratch. It was just too risky, and the payback too far off in the future.

This pattern has repeated itself over and over again since the dawn of civilization, but America has been the nation that has perfected it, particulary since the end of WWII. It would be disastrous to our long-term future if we abandoned it now because of some mistaken concern about its short-term costs.

Space has become profitable because of government investment (mostly for military or national prestige motives). But now GPS, environmental and mapping platforms in space, and communications satellites have been exploited by the private sector into useful products that have transformed the global civilization. And many space endeavors with long-term but uncertain economic potential have also been snuck in the back door which would never have been considered by purely commercial private enterprise. (Think Hubble). Neither a centralized state bureaucracy nor a laissez-faire capitalist economy could have pulled this off by itself.

This is so obvious only a slavish obsession with ideology could fail to understand it.