No, government bureaucracies are not the problem, bureaucracies are the problem. The only reason capitalism works is because the market imposes discipline through competition. Once you remove that, private enterprise becomes just as bad as public administration. When the two learn to feed off each other to their mutual benefit you get the worst of all possible worlds, what we have in the US now: pork barrel, monopolies, military-industrial complex, Halliburton, lobbies, corporate campaign funding, government contractors, corporate tax breaks and subsidies and so forth. Government and business are not rivals, they learn to cooperate very quickly to get fat on our tax dollars. Even the executives job-hop back and forth across the private/public border because the management positions are essentially self-suppporting, not adversarial.

As far as nuclear wastes are concerned, managing them is technically feasible (The French nuke industry does it), we just haven't found a way to do it here so its profitable for someone. The result is that the problem has been neglected so long that political opponents are now opposed to anything nuclear. They may be misguided, but can you blame them?

Returning to the issue of space exploration, as long as the energy costs of lifting mass out of earth's gravity well remain as high as they are, it is not likely to go anywhere. We may expect perhaps an order of magnitude cost improvement due to tinkering with our technology, but in order to make it worthwhile for free enterprise to get involved we're either going to need some radical technical breakthroughs or we are going to have to find some product of enormous value there which will make it economically feasible. So far, the only financial benefit of this type space has been able to offer is a platform to park our telecom satellites; and even that was only exploited with massive government subsidies. Even this area is fraught with risks, look at the contrast between GPS and Iridium. One was a great success, the other a financial disaster.

Our space program has been most successful (in fact, fantastically successful!) in the area of scientific exploration. It can be argued that this science benefit has actually paid for the whole cost, although the payoff has been so indirect that its difficult to see how it could have been carried out by private industry. I.e., the "profit" comes much after the investment, and its not clear how one led to the other. If our weather satellites had been launched by private industry how would they collect payments from the dirtside facilities which were protected from storm damage?

Gold bars stacked up on the lunar surface would still be too expensive to bring back profitably with present technologies. However, a working alien artifact from the asteroid belt, or a cupful of soil full of Martian bacteria would be worth any cost, because entire profitable new industries could arise from such discoveries. We need the equivalent of Canadian furs or Inca gold to make our Age of Exploration worthwhile. Until then, let the government send out its robot probes until they find something essential out in the solar system. Trust me, sooner or later, they will.