There's a common theme amongst many of those heroic feats: They tended to occasionally catch fire, fall out of the sky and/or explode at inopportune times.

It's the difference between prototype and a production. The Saturn V rocket and the Concorde were both prototype-grade vehicles. The marvel of them is that they worked at all. Now that we've proved the point, we won't put either "into production" unless it's reliable enough to be boring.