I don’t think it’s remotely accurate to describe GPS as “socialist”. It was a military project. There’s a long list of military projects with more funding than GPS that have been invented and implemented since then.
Starlink is mostly a marketing thing, and is mostly based on science that had been funded during the Cold War.
The years you cite are when drone tech was developed and deployed in combat, and cryptography improved. The DoD funds all kinds of research through the university system that isn't public, you may have no idea what it brought us because it's too recent. The DoD is funding all kinds of projects today, despite our capitalist tendencies, for example: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/309821...
I don't know what you mean about Starlink being marketing. They've deployed more satellites than all other satellites to date combined. You said you thought a project this size wasn't doable today, yet there it is. It seems like you're arbitrarily judging what projects you believe are worthy of consideration in order to support a preconceived notion. Why do you believe GPS involved more invention or development than Starlink, drones, cryptography, machine learning, or anything else? GPS technology was also developed before the US Navstar project began, the science already existed and it wasn't some kind of lone independent invention.
The system of which the military is a major pillar is definitely also an economic system, and the fact that a major part of that system (the military "sub-system", in this instance) was run in a way that was antithetic to the stated ideology of that "all encompassing" system as a whole ("capitalism", in this instance) was quite interesting.
I'll give you drones, even though the drones that have had most of an impact in the present war are the consumer-oriented ones, which are not directly the work of any military system (I'm talking about the small drones that help with artillery targeting). The Bayraktars were quite rapidly neutralised by the Russians once they got the hang of it, and at this point they're merely a PR thing.
Cryptography is also a result of Cold War funding, in fact it's one of the quintessential results of that war when it comes to our industry.
> Why do you believe GPS involved more invention or development than Starlink, drones, cryptography, machine learning, or anything else?
Didn't say that, quite the contrary, most of those are the result of direct and sustained Government funding via the military, i.e. what I called socialism. Again, Starlink would have remained a pipe-dream without Reagan's 1980s Star Wars Program.
Anyway, I'm happy for the current status-quo, i.e. for the best and brightest in our industry golden hand-cuffed at FAANG companies, spending their best years worrying about their comps and about KPIs and OKRs, had they been part of a Manhattan-like or Apollo-like Government-run system then things would have been much, much, much worse (in terms of peace on this planet, that is).
