This seems to me a totally natural progression. Governments have the resources to do New Untried Things, to fund Pure Research and Crazy National Pride Projects

This seems to me a totally natural progression. Governments have the resources to do New Untried Things, to fund Pure Research and Crazy National Pride Projects, and so they do them because no one else can at the time that they are done. But good governments are supposed to be inefficient. Much as we hate bureaucracy, an efficient government is a terrible, scary thing. Inefficiency keeps it in check. So it falls to private enterprise to pick up where governments leave off.