>If we wanted better sneaker materials or retractable football stadium roofs surely we could have accomplished those tasks for far less money.
The problem with this type of attitude is that discovery doesn't work like this. Incremental improvements can sometimes work this way, but big discoveries do not. If there had been a mandate to "find a way to communicate without wires" I'm going to guess that it would not have gotten very far. Instead, this came about as a side effect of pure science research.
Going to the moon wasn't pure science research. Such research could have been an alternative use of those millions of man-hours of effort.
That said, I do take chriswarbo's point that it could have easily instead been even more baroque weapons or proxy wars, as well as yours and manaskarekar's about the uncertainty inherent in counterfactuals. I just wanted to make the point just finding some positives is not enough, you need to look at opportunity costs. If we both look at them and come to different conclusions, that's life, but at least we agree on the basis of measurement.
The problem with this type of attitude is that discovery doesn't work like this. Incremental improvements can sometimes work this way, but big discoveries do not. If there had been a mandate to "find a way to communicate without wires" I'm going to guess that it would not have gotten very far. Instead, this came about as a side effect of pure science research.