It worked pretty well for the Manhattan Project and the Apollo missions. I think that you're romanticizing technological progress a bit if you don't believe that more money (often) leads to more progress.
Good points though. Tons of resources, people working in secret, and a total absence of "market feedback" have yielded big, impressive results before.
contrast with deep neural network, there are no models to predict overfitting or undertraining beyond what training cross validation say. hardly the same situation. there's no model that can predict a network confidence and network output as a classifier is still very rough even before it gets converted into car commands (i.e. see Uber report)
those cited project had a theoretical framework on which they were built upon. neural network are still rooted in 'tune them if they don't work' stage.
The good news is all we have to do is shift back to massive government investments in basic research to course correct and compete with entities like China(who seem to have a clearer picture of how Capitalism actually works in practice).