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There's a lot of institutional inertia and forces opposing any change (and change itself is just churn).
The science side of things has a much better track record, but the interplanetary stuff is done by JPL, which isn't really NASA, and most of the rest is mostly a-political (modulo the Earth sensing stuff, which I'm continually surprised isn't cancelled for global warming reasons).
Then there's private enterprise, which seems to be doing better. But I'm not entirely comfortable with the "Guilded-Age" model of development.
So, I dunno.
Edit: when I wrote, "Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out...", that should be "pointed out to me".
"NASA’s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren’t affordable and likely won’t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency."
As an ex-NASA contractor (at the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center, and yes, I think that name illustrates some of the problems of NASA), I completely agree. Management is extremely broken. Fifedoms are the major organizational component. Personalities are the driving principles. No one solves problems; they work around them. Going through the motions of the established procedures without understanding is expected to produce the optimal result.
On the other hand, all of this is a direct result of the funding model. Legislative and administrative priorities change every few years. Much of the priorities involve spreading contracts across important Congressional districts. It's not a surprise that the plans they come up with are PowerPoint schemes that sound good but have no real chance of success.
An example: the Constellation program was supposed to re-use the shuttle solid rocket boosters to save money. Sounds good, right? Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out that they needed more thrust than the SSRBs provide. Proposed solution? Add another segment (of solid rocket motor) to the SRB. Unfortunately, that actually requires a complete redesign of the solid rocket motor. It would probably be more effective and cheaper to start from scratch. BTW, as far as I could determine, the current SLS program is the Constellation program with the names filled off.
(Said AE friend works for NASA building web apps because "they fly and that [pointing at the 1/5 scale model of Aries-1] doesn't.")
"Released last month without publicity, the report advocates using asteroids to produce fuel..."
But here we have an example of the same problem. Have one hard problem you apparently can't solve? Replace it with 10 harder problems that sound better. Pure public relations.