To be fair, almost a half of that NASA budget was used to pay for the Space Shuttle, that was a plane with many technical problems that use suppliers from almost the 50 states to gain political support in the congress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget

Untrue according to your own source. It was $513b from 1980-12, and that's in 2007 inflation adjusted USD. If you used 2014 adjusted USD for both NASA would have come out worse.