That is an excellent question, and yes, 200 years of history show many things.
Whether we like it or not, the military and the wars that we go through are strong drivers of innovation. Also, in parallel to that, is the role of different fuels. Coal was the main fuel 200 years ago. Then we went into oil and nuclear, so fuels drive a lot of the economy decisions.
I will give you a very simple example of how things are taken from the military and transposed. Originally, about 110-112 years ago, submarineswere actually gasoline-powered, and that was dangerous. Safety was an issue, and so they converted to diesel engines. The first engine was actually converted to a diesel engine for submarine use; submarine use actually drove diesel use, which was then replicated in automotive vehicles. There were a lot of challenges.
Going specifically to your question, succinctly, while military and government-type initiatives for things like space are out there and while governments do invest heavily in those particular sectors, the role for the R and D community is to actually take that military technology and get it down into a cost-effective area where it can be done commercially. That is what much of the work that NRCan and NRC do involves: helping hand-hold those commercial companies through the cost de-risking challenge and actually making those products further applicable to commercial and public use.