[dagw]

Private enterprise is already financing ambitious projects once sought only by state provisions on their own merit. Such as Virgin Galactic

I'd like to open by saying that I have nothing but respect for Virgin Galactic. I still get chills thinking back on watching the SpaceShipOne flight. I also largely agree with your stance.

That being said the argument could be made that all Virgin Galactic is doing is taking all the hard work and science done by the old state funded model and trying to repackage it in a simple cheaper form for "mass marker" consumption. That's not Science, that's business and engineering. And no one would disagree with that fact that Capitalism is great at business and engineering.

Capitalism rocks at taking concepts out of obscure theoretical journals and putting them in a form that affect our daily lives (often for the better), no argument there. I'm somewhat less convinced that capitalism rocks at getting those concepts into those obscure theoretical journals in the first place.