&gt;If we wanted better sneaker materials or retractable football stadium roofs surely we could have accomplished those tasks for far less money.<p>The problem with this type of attitude is that discovery doesn&#x27;t work like this.  Incremental improvements can sometimes work this way, but big discoveries do not.  If there had been a mandate to &quot;find a way to communicate without wires&quot; I&#x27;m going to guess that it would not have gotten very far.  Instead, this came about as a side effect of pure science research.