I N OCTOBER 1957 the Soviet Union launched the first space satellite—a development that astonished the American establishment. “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses,” fretted Lyndon Johnson, then Democratic Senate leader. Determined never to be surprised again, President Eisenhower established the Advanced Research Projects Agency ( ARPA ). He gave it a $500m budget (£3.4bn today) in its first year, but no office, no laboratories and no permanent staff. Its job was to “anticipate the unimagined weapons of the future”. How it was to do so was unclear.

The agency ended up shaping the modern world, helping to create missile defence and stealth technology, as well as the internet, the personal computer, the laser and GPS . It did so by rejecting normal procedures. Project managers were given enormous freedom to spend money on what they saw as the most promising technologies, creating communities of brilliant researchers united by a common vision. As Sharon Weinberger notes in “The Imagineers of War”, a history of the agency, ARPA (which subsequently became DARPA , with the D standing for defence) tackled national-security problems “unencumbered by bureaucratic oversight and uninhibited by the restraints of scientific review”. The meeting that led to approval for ARPANET , a forerunner to the internet, reportedly took less than half an hour.

Now Downing Street is trying to recreate it in Britain. Doing so is a long-held ambition of Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser, who has written that he wants to “make Britain the best place in the world to be for those who can invent the future.” As part of this goal, the government has promised to double research funding to £18bn in the next five years. An as-yet-undecided portion of this will go to a new agency, which will spend the cash on the sort of high-risk, high-reward research the private sector eschews. As Mr Cummings has noted, ARPA ’s budget was “trivial compared to the trillions of dollars of value” it created.

Officials have been calling science-policy experts in America and Britain for advice about how to make the idea work. One response is the importance of a unifying mission. Unlike ARPA and earlier British schemes to encourage research into new military technologies, the agency will have a civilian focus. The current thinking is that it will be aimed at very pure maths or physical sciences. Mr Cummings has written that researchers will receive no micromanagement, with “bureaucratic cancers treated like the enemy”. Tyler Cowen of George Mason University says that in some ways the approach represents a return to earlier forms of patronage, like that disbursed by the Medicis, rather than the form-filling of modern academia.

The great not the good

Perhaps the most difficult task will be finding the right people to run the agency. They will need a combination of imagination, energy and expertise. As a report by Pierre Azoulay of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) and colleagues notes, since the ARPA model gives such freedom to administrators, the agency’s quality is heavily dependent on their talent, and there tends to be a fast turnover of staff. Those running it will have the chance to decide on the institution’s priorities and on precisely how to hand out its cash. They will also have to create the right spirit, something which may take time. ARPA itself got off to a rocky start, surviving calls for its abolition early on.

The trick is to find research that is absurdly ambitious, but not in fact absurd. The second project funded by the original ARPA in 1958 was an interplanetary spaceship powered by a series of nuclear explosions. The organisation’s head admitted at the time that the tricky thing was doing this in a way that “the inhabitants are not killed”. Other projects that initially seemed beyond the realms of possibility, such as stealth flight, turned out to be within them. In total many more projects ought to fail than succeed. “There’s nothing easier than to borrow the rhetoric of ARPA without the operating principles that make it work,” cautions Mr Azoulay. “One big success can justify all the failure 100 times over.”

Another task is to adapt the model to a very different research system. In the early 1960s, ARPA gave money to great universities, like MIT , Berkeley and Stanford, which have equivalents in modern Britain, but also to independent research institutions, like the Stanford Research Institute and RAND , which have fewer obvious counterparts. One hope is that government will be able to cut red tape in higher education to free dons to do more far-sighted work. Richard Jones, a physicist and science-policy expert at the University of Sheffield, says that a possible overlap with the government’s so-called “levelling up” agenda, to boost deprived parts of the country, would be to build research capacity in new places. The agency’s own location is unimportant, however. “ ARPA hasn’t got any labs,” notes Mr Jones. “ ARPA is just a bunch of people going around with suitcases, writing cheques.”

If that sounds like the Treasury’s nightmare, that’s because it is. The ministry has resisted previous attempts to loosen research funding, and civil servants are currently trying to work out how to keep tabs on the progress of a British ARPA . Eleven years ago the American government established ARPA-E to develop advanced energy technology. Most observers think it is too soon to judge whether it is a success. In ten years’ time a British equivalent will be vulnerable to an axe-swinging chancellor looking for money to spend on his or her priorities, especially if the agency does not yet have much to show for itself.