Yeah, but that seems pretty rational. VCs are only slightly less short-term than public markets. While rockets are awesome, it is not clear that there can be a 10 year positive return on them. It could be possible that a startup with a bunch of VC could develop a ton of useful rocket-related technology and still not see a financial return for 50 years.
By contrast, internet businesses return or bust in that timeframe.
It does appear that we don't have a great funding mechanism that is expecting long-term returns vs short term. Past the 10 year expected payoff mark, there's debt, and there's grants. VC is a possible solution, but, there is very little willingness to stretch funds out past 10 years, since the 10 year mark is kind of a benchmark that is marketed to investors in the funds. When you are playing with other people's money, 10 years is already a really long time.
VCs invest other people's money, who want to see a clear path to profit. They can't afford to invest in long term risky bet like space or fusion energy. VC is not the right model for space investment. Nothing sad about it.
It's also hard to crowdsource a space venture. Government's funds such as DARPA's or billionaire's such as Elon Musk's or Bezos's, or Paul Allen's in this case, make more sense. So our best bet to advance science is to have science friendly government in place. That or inspire rich people to be interested in science.
As an exception, there are segments that receive substantial investment, such as small rocket launch. Many many companies emerged in recent years such as Rocket Lab, Firefly, Relativity, Vector, Astra. Investors clearly see the market in near term for small satellites.
