In the past, when these endeavors were carried out by nation states, all the baggage of bureaucracy was along for the ride. Fast forward to today, and you have individuals with the imagination and the means to dream big. It's possible to undertake something insane -- like mining asteroids -- on your own.I'm with you on the enthusiasm, but consider:
a) the history of previous innovations like railroads and flight. Private actors have always made big contributions, it's just that government was often an early client or monopoly grantor. The big projects that government finances and implements directly tend to be things like defense and infrastructure.
Edit: relatively low tech but large infrastructure - giant damns, highway systems, rural electrification. I've always thought of NASA as a half-defense project. But this is a tendency rather than an iron rule, the pendulum swings back and forth on public/private sector involvement.
b. Hell no, it's not possible to do these things on your own. you need a team (who share some executive power) and a pool of labor, and ideally you stay open enough (like Steve Jobs) to the innovative bubbles that bubble up from any part of your organization. An individual with sufficient capital and vision has the opportunity to overcome the economic inertia of a big project and get things moving, but to look at it as something you do 'on your own' is to fall into an ego trap right out of the gate. Extreme example of this: Muammar Gaddafi.
c. Bureaucracy is a side-product of organization. Government is bureaucratic because it has reasons to persist as an organization. But almost all commercial entities have bureaucracy of their own, proportional to the size and complexity of the organization. Bureaucracy can be annoying or inefficient, but it is not a bad thing in itself: it's just organizational infrastructure and an entirely rational division of labor. Naturally, there's a problem when the interests of individual bureaucrats or bureaux come into conflict with those of the organization as a whole, but that's often the result of an incomplete or inchoate conflict resolution process. In the right circumstances it can be an asset; the software company my wife works for originally threw its product together as an internal job-tracking tool for paper-based archive/records management. Nowadays what used to be its core business is outsourced to subcontractors.
The fulcrum of decision making was remarkably focused on a single point: him.
And yet the company has not undergone a dramatic collapse since his death. This is because he built a strong organizational infrastructure in which he played a central, but replaceable, role.
I don't know the end game for capitalism [...]
I don't believe there is one, any more than there's an end game for math or physics. Capitalism is in my view a phenomenon rather than a philosophy, as is communism (in the non-ideological sense of people doing things together for mutual benefit). As I get older I think a great deal of political conflict is the result of a confusion between means and ends, but that's another story.