The interesting question for me is how to buy those 9/10 failures more cheaply. Can we get our $1 billion failures for only $100m each? Or even $10 million? Then we can buy a lot more successes.

I think the main barrier there, though, is that funders have to be in favor of interesting failure. With the described mega-science funding project, there's a big incentive to come up with dramatic plans that are novel and promise certain success.

I think the tech industry isn't perfect at this; we can all name companies that spent way too much money for what they learned. But our FFF/seed/A/B funding model gets us a good discount on interesting failures.

You've got no clue what you are talking about, do you? The thing is that many mega projects fail because of ridiculous reasons; mostly because high ranking people make dicisions outside the range of their expertise. Startup projects have very different characteristics and different stakeholders (i.e. mostly private). If 90% of the money could be saved then that's pretty bad.