No, I think only, or mostly only the government will make huge cost sacrifices to do big things. The private sector isn't going to make huge sacrifices for the advancement of humanity. They're willing to make big investments for the sake of their businesses, but if there's no clear path to making a lot of money then business owners won't be interested.
Sure, the government will piss away huge sums without doing much besides feeding those who are involved, and making some rich. Results are nice, but not essential, after all it's all OPM.
In the event results are achieved, cost control isn't exactly first and foremost in the list of priorities.
In the instance of the space race (and the weapons deployment platform race which ran alongside it), I'm not so sure that just national prestige and the advancement of science were number one, so much as the ability to put a warhead where we wanted when we wanted to, which has an intangible benefit, one hard to measure in dollars--even though changing the (surviving) road signs to Russian would have been a mite spendy. So, the world gained (no apocalyptic nuclear war), and money was spent, not just on the devices, but the delivery systems, and we got some neat pics and rocks too. There is a potential long term gain in that, as well, from satellite images of the planet to information on low G environments and even the moon itself (how to land and be able to take off again). That may well come into play down the road on another planet, and likely should have in my lifetime, but time will tell. That doesn't mean a lot of money wasn't wasted, either.
In industry, yes, there has to be some benefit, whether it is immediate (although that can be short sighted) or long term (should a company be willing to make that investment for future returns). Wise companies keep costs from waste controlled (something government is notoriously bad at), and find ways to use off the shelf tech to do a job and refine that.
As another example, hydraulic fracturing as a completion method has been around well over half a century, but the adaptation of that to horizontal wellbores and multistage fracs (and the tools to do it) have been refined significantly, and those developments (continuously being refined) are what is fueling the present oil production in the US, as well as the ability to switch to natural gas for power generation purposes without making that same fuel too expensive for the millions of homeowners who use it for heat and cooking.
Many of those developments were made an experiment or a prototype at a time, until something that performed as desired was developed.
