I don't think it's reasonable to count incidental benefits from projects, such as the WWW from CERN. The same basic problem of sharing information between scientists would still have existed without CERN, and who's to say it or something even better, with fewer of HTTP/HTML's limitations wouldn't have been developed if TBL had been working on a different project?
The space race argument is another old sore, it turns out many of the discoveries ascribed to it were actually developed independently, but then were used by NASA who ended up getting the credit. Teflon is often cited, but was actually discovered in 1938 and patented in 1945.
Yes a lot of great technologies were developed for Apollo and used in other areas, but many or perhaps all of them would have been developed eventually anyway.
I don't think it's reasonable to discount all the subproducts from such an investment just because many would have been developed eventually anyway.
In this vein, it's just as easy to discount the people who did the inventions/discoveries because someone else would have eventually made the discovery/invention anyway.
Of course that the main project has to be sound, and cannot be justified only due to the subproducts, but "would have happened anyway" is not a solid argument to discount the subproducts, mainly because you cannot know if it would, nor when it would.
Consider the invention of the airplane. The Wrights certainly invented it, but if you take a good look at what the other experimenters were doing, it's a pretty good bet that others would have gotten the pieces together in probably another 5 years.
(The Wrights succeeded arguably because they had the first directed research & development program, while the others basically just bumbled about trying things in a seat-of-the-pants manner. None of them, for example, seem to have done any calculation of how much wing area was needed or how much power was required.)
On the other hand, consider how vaccination was invented or any other "accidental" discovery/invention.
I'm aware that there are inventions that even happen at almost exactly the same time, especially when the research on the subject is ripe enough.
But when chance is a factor or the subject is not researched enough (or at all) then the confidence of an hypothesized invention happening in a close timeframe to the actual invention diminishes greatly.
Governments are quite often rather inefficient, but they are really large. For example, rockets could not have been developed by private enterprise, because it took something like thirty years (and substantial investment) to build somewhat reliable rockets. [1]
A bit more abstract: businesses are good at small incremental development steps, since most of the steps need to have a market. In contrast a government can invest in projects which are both very long term and very expensive, because they have a reliable revenues (taxes).
The space race argument is another old sore, it turns out many of the discoveries ascribed to it were actually developed independently, but then were used by NASA who ended up getting the credit. Teflon is often cited, but was actually discovered in 1938 and patented in 1945.
Yes a lot of great technologies were developed for Apollo and used in other areas, but many or perhaps all of them would have been developed eventually anyway.