I feel like concepts like "this has to a have an economic impact" really limits what discoveries can be made and adds some blinders ... I'm not opposed to some

I feel like concepts like "this has to a have an economic impact" really limits what discoveries can be made and adds some blinders ... I'm not opposed to some concept of that, but what feeds science is OTHER science, often not even directly obvious how the impact plays out. I'm thinking of the old Connections TV show where huge advances are lead by tons of experiments and failures. You don't get the big advancement without the other failures / attempts and more general science. Similar to the article, you have to fund ALL that science, if you're going to get some applicable output. Not just "do the last step first". We didn't go to the moon JSUT because we decided sometime in the mid 20th century to do so...