Everything you've mentioned except transportation, not counting the Interstate system, was done for national defense purposes, which are very much a duty of the Federal government.

Mercury through Apollo were political stunts. The sequence goes like this: Eisenhower let the Soviets orbit the earth first to let them establish an "Open Space" president; prior to that they were saying any satellites orbiting over their territory were illegitimate.

However at the same time we were competing for allies among the Third World, and our claims of technological superiority took a big hit. So the "space race" began. First was of course Mercury, put a man in orbit, then a couple of years later JFK committed us to "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth"

But it was just a stunt, leaving no infrastructure in place, heck, even finished Saturn Vs were left outside to rot (due to the inevitable delays, Nixon had to cancel the last planned Moon missions because of the sunspot cycle making them too dangerous).

The Interstate system was based on the German Autobahns, and President Eisenhower's experience trying to move on troops on our old system. However we've had a long and very mixed history of Federal involvement in transportation systems, such as the transcontinental railroad scams (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_of_America... or which went bankrupt (hint: the land grants were the real prize)).

The Internet was developed by/for/with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to allow the sharing of the then very expensive computers.

I trust we all know what pushed the initial development of atomic energy in the US, and as I understand it our first reactors developed to specifically produce power were for submarines, where they made a massive qualitative difference.

The Jupiter C and Vanguard rockets were inferior to the R7. But that doesn't translate into military inferiority (Eisenhower knew this, but the public didn't buy it).

The Americans didn't need the same capacity as the Soviets in rockets for several reasons. First, US nuclear weapons were supposedly half the size of the Soviets'. Second, the Americans had air superiority. Third, the Americans had land next to the Soviet Union (thus didn't need to fire as far). Fourth, the R7 that launched Sputnik took hours to load. And could not be on standby indefinitely.

Both space programs were stunts in the early days. But using a Saturn V to deploy nuclear warheads is like using a flame thrower to start a barbecue. It could have been done, but there are easier/cheaper ways.

You seem to think I agree with the view.

However, you do have to be somewhat blind to see that a large segment of the population, it's the Republican platform for instance, genuinely believe the government can do nothing right. Every failure, no matter how small, supports that position. No amount of facts change that position.

In a more general way, less and less peoples views seem to be swayed by any facts that disagree with their worldview. Everything has become an us vs them, my team is better, right and perfect view of the world.

You are misrepresenting the R's position. It's not that government can do nothing right, it's that government does things less efficiently than private enterprise.

Coincidentally this view seems to be held most strongly by those actively trying to prevent the government from functioning efficiently (or at all).

It's like purchasing a car, never doing any maintenance, and then when it dies saying: "whelp, all Fords are shit! I should have bought a Chevy"

The irony there is that his post ranted about people not being swayed by facts while misrepresenting an easy-to-understand fact for anyone not grinding some biased political axe.