I don't have a good book to recommend offhand, but wandering a bit offotpic here, I know someone who worked on a military orbital program in the late '70 that was transmitting data from orbit at 800MB/s.

Some congressmen had not heard of this technology and were working to fund a completely different (iirc, civilian) program intending to develop essentially the same capabilities. They had to go give a few TS briefings to the congressmen to dissuade them from writing the redundant funding into the next defense spending bill.