Why you should be Angry, in General
The problem, from a non-childish - I have too much time on my hands I'm going to write a blithering post on the Space.com forums so people can really see how I feel - perspective, is multifaceted. This means that you shouldn't really blame just NASA , just Congress, just the southern States, just Bush, or just Obama.
The problem is literally everywhere. Knowing something about the legislature and working as a bureaucrat I know how budget battles are fought, and NASA has fought them poorly, if at all. My saying goes like this, "you're either willing to fight a battle with Congress over funding, or end up fighting a battle of non-existence." When Congress sees you as being irrelevant, you become nothing but another agency with another appropriations request, not something special, patriotic, noteworthy, plaque made ready, or monumentally dedicated. When the game becomes like this, a game of recognition, you've lost the battle before it's started.
Willing to fight a battle with Congress, on the other hand, means you're willing to make them mad. You're willing to show them your fists rather than your palm-faced and outstretched hands. This is not easily done by NASA whose mandate comes from the President and appropriated through the same source, the whole process of which is inherently political in nature.
So far, you've seen that the "problem," the thing one must be angry at, has already split in three. That includes NASA itself, Congress, and the President. Further complicating the matter is the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), whose job it is to help the President and OMB draft requisite appropriations figures. This introduces two more complicating factors into the equation, neither of which operates to under a belief in NASA - it's culture, history, workforce, or product. They operate under political motivations and actuarial cost saving measurements. NASA was established, however under a belief, it was not established under a notion. This fact creates problems as to how the idea of NASA should be approached in today's day-n-age.
To recap, we've seen how NASA, Congress, the President, OSTP, and OMB are the problem, and hopefully you're beginning to see the big picture here. When an issue, or topic covers such a wide diverse range of federal ranking, it is because the topic touches a broad range of Americans in general.
These problems are not so much technical then they are administrative. To build a safer, better, bigger, cheaper rocket is always a teams objective no matter if that team is given $1B to make that happen, or$13 billion . But technical problems are just another underlying problem with NASA that too often gets swept under the carpet. Apart from the whole host of problems with NASA and the things that surround it , NASA lacks a cultural and unified workforce. Such a cubicalized, siloed environment that surrounds NASA extends a lack of creativity and innovation among the people at NASA, further adding to the problems that exist there.
The belief that NASA should exist has always been there,, the polls indicate this as much. But man layers of reform need to be adopt before we ever go far back into Space.
From a flat traditional standpoint. There seems to be three groups of people at NASA. Those who support beefing up ISS, those who support we return to the Moon as soon as possible, and those that say, 'hey let's skip the Moon and go straight to Mars. Under ideal circumstances, all three should be worked on at the same time. Each one has it's different purposes and each one works off the other in developing NASA technologies and spaceflight.
So , there you go, the a complete short on NASA and, 'yes,' it could use more funding, but that doesn't mean it has what it takes to search their souls for that beef that gave them the fire from Icharus.
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