I fear things you mention are exceptions that don't scale - that can be mostly traced down to a bunch of individuals believing in a mission and having a means to accomplish it, supported by lots of people doing it for money or being coerced. That, and religion, which is a way of rewriting people's cost/benefit calculations at scale. So with cathedrals, I'd expect most people involved were either paid, coerced by violence, or coerced by their religious beliefs; with Voyager, I expect there was a bunch of scientists and managers who cared and got public money to command, and thousands of people who were simply paid to do their jobs.

I'd love to see money go away as a factor, but I can't see how - especially for projects that require large existing industries (leveraging economies of scale).