Where Are the Moonshots?

By Gordon LaForge

When the Chinese firm DeepSeek built an artificial intelligence system for a fraction of the cost of leading American models, alarmed government officials and tech leaders proclaimed it a “Sputnik moment.” But it was just one Sputnik moment among many over the past few years. Russia’s purported development of a space-based nuclear weapon, China’s testing of hypersonic missiles, even a deep-sea critical minerals deal between Beijing and the Cook Islands—these events, and others, have all drawn comparisons in national headlines to the Soviet satellite launch.

We live in a hyperbolic time. But it does seem that technological supremacy is once again up for grabs. China is closing the innovation gap with the United States and has even pulled ahead in areas, including 5G and lithium-ion batteries. The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a bipartisan panel of private and public sector leaders created by Congress to issue tech and defense recommendations, warned in 2021 that “for the first time since World War II, America’s technological predominance—the backbone of its economic and military power—is under threat.”

Following the original Sputnik moment in 1957, a wave of innovation cemented American technological primacy and produced era-defining technologies: integrated circuits, satellite communications, the internet. Today, despite the alarm bells, no such national effort has materialized. We have iPhones, Netflix, and ChatGPT, but where are the moonshots? The space programs and Manhattan projects?

Alexander Karp, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of the software company Palantir, grapples with this state of affairs in The Technological Republic, a self-described “political treatise” cowritten with Palantir head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska. Palantir provides big data analytics primarily for national defense and intelligence agencies. The company gained prominence for helping the US military detect improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan. It has also faced criticism for its work with law enforcement agencies, notably Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Karp laments that the government has stepped away from technology development, “a remarkable and near-total placement of faith in the market.” In his view, Silicon Valley, which owes its existence to federal investment and worked hand-in-glove with the state to produce the breakthroughs of the post-Sputnik era, has “lost its way.” Instead, founders who claim to want to change the world have created food-delivery apps, photo-sharing platforms, and other trivial consumer products.

This critique is resonant. The decoupling of technological innovation from larger societal goals is an urgent and worsening problem. Beyond the geopolitical ramifications, Karp rightly notes that “when emerging technologies that give rise to wealth do not advance the broader public interest, trouble often follows.” Many of today’s ills—loss of trust in institutions, a youth mental health crisis, pervasive disinformation—are downstream of technologies built in single-minded pursuit of growth and profit, with little regard for the public good.

Today, despite the alarm bells, no such national effort has materialized. We have iPhones, Netflix, and ChatGPT, but where are the moonshots?

Less resonant is Karp’s diagnosis of the source of the problem. In his view, America’s tech leaders have become soft and timid. They fear doing anything that might invite controversy or disapproval, like taking on a military contract or supporting a national mission. They are of a generation that has abandoned “belief or conviction in broader political projects,” he writes, trained to simply mimic what has come before and conform to prevailing sentiment.

This all has its roots, Karp argues, in a “systematic attack and attempt to dismantle any conception of American or Western identity during the 1960s and 1970s.” A mindless, strictly enforced relativism now reigns: “A broad swath of leaders, from academic administrators and politicians to executives in Silicon Valley, have for years often been punished mercilessly for publicly mustering anything approaching an authentic belief.” The thought regime is so pervasive that discussion about what makes the good life, what national allegiance should look like, or what constitutes a just society have become “essentially off limits … beyond the meadow of permissible discourse.”

Many of today’s ills—loss of trust in institutions, a youth mental health crisis, pervasive disinformation—are downstream of technologies built in single-minded pursuit of growth and profit, with little regard for the public good.

Karp’s claims feel divorced from reality. Debates about justice and national identity run riot in America today. A glance at Elon Musk’s X feed or Meta’s content moderation policies dispels the idea that controversy avoidance is the tech industry’s North Star. Internal contradictions in Karp’s argument abound. For instance, in one part of the book he criticizes tech leaders for sheep-like conformity, while in another he lionizes the “unwillingness to conform” as the quintessence of Silicon Valley. It doesn’t help that Karp makes his case not so much with evidence but with repetition of his claims and biographical snippets of historical figures.

Karp’s preoccupation with what he calls “soft belief” misses the deeper structural reality. Innovation is not merely a function of the mindset of individual founders; it depends on an ecosystem of public and private institutions—tax policy, regulations, the financial system, education, labor markets, and so on. In the United States, the public aspects of that ecosystem have weakened over time, while the private sector and its attendant interests have flourished.

The post-Sputnik era featured public investment and government capacity unprecedented for peacetime. From 1956 to 1967, annual federal research and development spending increased from $5 billion to nearly $15 billion, fueling basic scientific research in multiple government agencies and other public institutions. Federal funding for university research quintupled. The National Science Foundation’s budget increased nearly 30-fold. Congress created new mission-oriented science and technology agencies, like NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and bolstered existing ones, like the National Institutes of Health. These agencies and others paid out billions in contracts to aerospace, electronics, biomedical, and communications companies. The government liberally licensed its patents to the private sector and served as the first customer for many new technologies, reducing market risk.

In the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, and the economic and geopolitical crises of the 1970s, faith in government dwindled. John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” gave way to Ronald Reagan’s “The government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Markets were the answer. As part of a privatization drive, the Reagan administration cut support for nondefense technology development and reduced scientific capacity. Starting in 1981, private industry surpassed government as the largest source of US R&D spending.

Karp’s claims feel divorced from reality.

Today, government R&D spending as a share of GDP is a third of what it was in the 1960s. State capacity overall has dwindled: In the 1960s, roughly 1 in 25 American jobs were federal, while today, fewer than 1 in 50 are. Much of the work of government is performed by private contractors. Powerful incumbents, like the major defense contractors and big tech firms, pour money into lobbying to oppose reform and protect their advantages in an ossified bureaucracy.

Tech companies create mass consumer products not because of a lack of ambition but because that’s where the money is. Unlike patient, mission-oriented government investment, venture capital and private shareholders demand sizable returns on short timelines. Hundreds of billions are now flowing into artificial intelligence, a transformational technology that, in the United States, is being developed almost entirely by the commercial sector. With investor pressure to deliver returns, it is no wonder that more of AI development is going toward consumer and enterprise applications than toward scientific research or public interest applications.  

Other factors are at play, including onerous regulation and congressional inaction, but if there is a leading cause of America’s innovation deficit, it may very well be excessive privatization. Karp’s solution—that tech leaders change their mindset to admit “creative friction,” reject “intellectual fragility,” resist the “unrelenting pressure to conform and mimic what has come before,” and commit themselves to “the ruthless pursuit of results” —would do little to alter the imbalance between public and private capacity.

Unlike patient, mission-oriented government investment, venture capital and private shareholders demand sizable returns on short timelines.

The Trump administration has been widening the gap further. In its effort to remake the government, it’s hollowing out federal agencies, especially in science and technology. Programs have been terminated, funding withheld, government scientists fired. Billions of dollars in research grants to universities have been suspended or rescinded. The administration’s FY 2026 budget proposal calls for cutting funding for NASA by 25%, the National Institutes of Health by 37%, and the National Science Foundation by more than half. At the same time, private interests are dictating or capturing an ever greater number of state functions and policy domains.

America’s tech companies, the most valuable and arguably most powerful corporations in the world, are undoubtedly a source of national strength. But they are neither designed nor motivated to address the serious challenges that face the nation: geopolitical competition, climate change, pandemics, inequality, polarization. It should be obvious that the leadership of strong public institutions is essential for carrying out national missions. A restoration of the technological republic would mean increasing federal investment in science and technology, rebuilding the capacity of government agencies, enacting civil service reforms to attract the brightest technical minds to public service, and carrying out measures that would amplify the public interest and constrain private ones.

Instead, Karp’s treatise seems to spring from a belief that he expressed in a February earnings call: “Whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir.” This conflation of the gains of private companies with the good of the country explains much of what’s gone wrong in the United States today—whether in technological innovation or elsewhere.