You bring up a good point, but I think this actually really nails the issue. The point is not that government bureaucracy cannot achieve great things. Our achie

You bring up a good point, but I think this actually really nails the issue. The point is not that government bureaucracy cannot achieve great things. Our achievement of putting a man on the moon was supposed to be a product of the capitalist system. In reality it was mostly socialist in execution as a heavily publicly funded affair directed by a state level organization primarily with state employees to achieve a bureaucratically directed goal. The point is what happens when what the government thinks is good and what the people think is good differ? And we also saw this exact scenario play out in space. We never really managed to bring space to into the capitalist system. And once the government 'won' the space race, their interests shifted from space. Not only did progress halt but we technologically regressed. We put a man on the moon in 1969. Today, half a century later, we're struggling just to try to send a man around the moon - let alone land on it. No human has left low earth orbit since 1972! But at the same time space has now been genuinely introduced into the capitalist system and so long as the people have a desire for more, the odds of us entering into another 50 year regression are rapidly approaching 0.