As you pointed out in your original comment, VC's will def fund moonshots and big growth ideas with 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 chances for payoff. These don't make short term profits, but they have the potential to do something dominating.
SpaceX against a huge established industrial base. That's going to be VC type funding, not traditional funding streams. We had govt initially doing everything they could to shut spacex out, doing block buys, trying to crush them on paperwork etc.
My complaint is simple. We know the current billions spent under current approaches have not cured a wide variety of illnesses. So what harm is there in spending some, relatively small amounts of money, on other ideas.
What's interesting is the reaction from folks like you, NIH, academics and others. It's vehement rejection. But why not instead demonstrate your approach results in a cure. The rejection is because you know you are sitting on nothing.
We see this with spaceX. Established astronomers are crying bloody murder. But this is in part because they are afraid. Their huge thirty meter telescope gravy train (decades of funding into their labs) is at risk of being totally trumped by cheaper access to space, where telescopes work great.
Established businesses tend to be risk averse. So in short, a role to play here for new ideas.
Note: Be careful about snarky comments, those are best avoided on HN, and can be a bit embarrassing in hindsight if you try to be snarky but inadvertently are correct and then have to try and walk back a point that you didn't mean to make.