[freetonik]

>There is zero profit to be made at the end of the chain.

Think of all the "sales" that comprise such things as space missions (ones without immediate real-world use) or large hadron collider. Or any other large, expensive, long scientific project. If you measure the outcome purely in money within decades, these things can be said to be zero or negative profit.

How much profit was at the end of the chain of the current Artemis lunar mission? Well, zero or negative, but lots of companies and people up the chain made meaningful progress and made a living. Quantum computing is just like that in my opinion.

The biggest problem in my eyes is the "game" of commercialization. This technology is in early research phase, but it's so expensive and not immediately game-changing that the public funding was never enough. So, companies started to play the "we sell products" and "we do IPO" games, which IMO doesn't make sense.

[sigmoid10]

I don't think any of your comparisons are accurate. Artemis may be a publicity stunt and a jobs program by congress, but the companies are in it for the long term mission of commercializing space. And SpaceX has clearly shown there's already a lot of money to be made with commercial space programs.

The LHC/CERN on the other hand is officially a pure science project, fully funded by public institutions. Their goal is not to go IPO and raise money for more experiments from some vague promise of potential future commercial applications, even though they probably exist.

[whattheheckheck]

Profit is serves as a decentralized coordination for the allocation of scarce resources of the infinite number of commodities and combinatorics of products and services that exist in the world.

Have you read Basic Economics by Sowell?