[SiempreViernes]

You can look at optical astronomy for how the "market" would look like if it was only science driven: all innovation happening on government funded projects, with very few companies worldwide having some manufacturing capability.

In any case, calling Goodard a entrepreneur seems pretty strange: he was a professor interested in rocketry firstly as a means of recording the state of the atmosphere at very high altitudes. To the extent the market gave him any attention it was as a source of cheap entertainment by making people laugh at him.

[m4rtink]

I should have worded it better - not Goddard himself but the early pioneers of rocketry in general in the US, Britain, Germany and Russia, if they could have developed the technology without military influence.

Still you might be right that it might have never got the funding it needed like that and stayed a pure niche for ever.