> Graphene Flagship was an irredeemable disaster
According to whom, based on which metric?
This is foundational material and chemistry research, with UK, Germany and Spain at the forefront for an industry which will probably need another 10 years to fully unfold.
For sure other China and US were able to invest more, but should the EU have not invested at all?
> Clean Sky Joint Undertaking was also a disaster
Also here, based on which metric?
The cost was split in half among the EU and industry players, and those companies (i.e. Airbus, Saab, Rolls-Royce, Safran, Liebherr, Thales) are all still at the forefront of their respective industries, despite competition from much larger markets.
It's a sensible strategy to support them while steering aspects of their R&D towards a specific set of common goals for the EU.
Yeah, among others they had a goal of achieving a 50% cut in CO2 emissions just by improving fuel efficiency, a quite ambitious goal they didn't reach. But they set and co-funded the direction and achieved a 30% reduction.
They also had a goal of achieving 50% noise reduction for aircrafts, and ultimately developed concepts with up to 70% lower noise-production. Without such funding I doubt that such research would have even been conducted.
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So yes, there's a much larger list of failed Horizon projects, fully agree. And many of them shouldn't even exist in hindsight. But it's research, it's supposed to be an uncertain field with uncertain commercial value. I rather have the EU fund 5 moonshots with 3 of them questionable than decide to not fund any research in Europe unless the commercial value is first proven by someone else.
There are areas I don't know how they would even be funded by a for-profit market without such initiatives, like the Rail Joint Undertaking which aims to develop and harmonize the European rail system across borders of EU countries.