The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created out of the earlier National Aeronautics Commission, which had been established to promote aviation by studying things that caused problems in aviation, like icing, weather analysis, Instrument Landing Systems, radio location aids, and other aspects of aviation that were not likely to be investigated by the private sector. The reason that NASA came to be was to oversee the program to send men to the Moon. The Soviet Union had never stated, nor did they ever state, the intent of landing men on the Moon. When the American program began having success, and was obviously moving quickly, the USSR did begin a secret program to try to beat the Americans, but it failed.
Government is supposed to be the collective will of the people embodied in agencies which work towards improving the lives of the citizens. Government is supposed to do those things which are necessary, but which do not generate great profit, are too risky and expensive to experiment with, and other actions which nobody else wants to do. Government had been paying next to no interest in space flight, because it was not something that anybody saw a need for at the time. Then, along comes the USSR, which had been extremely interested in space exploration, and which had invested in developing rockets that were large enough to not only send people into space, but to launch nuclear weapons at any country in the world.
The culture of the United States has become so focused on making money that the future has little or no importance. Research and development used to be a major part of most companies, as new products, new methods of production, and whatever else the folks in the labs could come up, with were considered essential to the long-term health of the company. But maximizing profits has become so vital that R & D has almost vanished. But the Future seems to have ways that make it impossible to ignore. Energy costs, resource scarcity, environmental changes, and others make it unlikely that we will be able to avoid change.
The success that the US experienced with the Apollo program was not followed up by anything, because making profits the old fashioned way was too important to threaten. The military-industrial complex of the US did not see space as a reliable way of generating government spending, and so defense was returned to the spotlight for appropriations. Space was suddenly cut off from any major funding, and NASA almost shut down manned space flight. Somehow, NASA administers where able to wheedle a few million here and there for manned space flight activities, and got Congress to agree to build a reusable launch system so that the US would have means of reaching space.
But there was no national imperative, no mandate, for space. Everyone seems to recognize that the Future is going to include space, but they don't have any idea about what should be done to work towards that future. The US developed the most advanced space craft in the world, but had no where to send it. American leaders didn't seem to know what to do with this wonderful asset, and refused to articulate any kind of goals for the space program. Eventually, it came to be realized that the advanced technology companies in the space program could not survive without government programs, because the work that they did was so far beyond consumer products. So NASA was able to continue, but not to grow or develop.
Now, we are at the point where, if appropriations for space exploration are not increased, the US will not be able to continue being active in space. So little money is being spent on space that we can not do anything of value. Yet, the future of our nation, and of our planet, is directly tied to our efforts to broaden the sphere of human activity. The finite resources of this planet are becoming increasingly expensive to extract and process, while the energy we need for our daily lives is rapidly rising in price to produce. And only a small fraction of the world's population is currently enjoying high standards of living. What will happen if more and more people try to live as those in the US do?
If humanity is going to survive, at some time the energy intensive, resource dependent heavy industries that produce so many vital products for our lives will have to be moved off-planet. All of the resources that we find on Earth, plus many more, are available somewhere in our Solar System. The energy output of our local star, the Sun, is beyond imagination. We can no more pollute outer space than we can make water wetter. Earth is the only place in all the hundreds of light years that we can see where we can walk unprotected under the open sky. It must be preserved, guarded, because there are people who are so greedy that they will destroy the Earth, completely and utterly, merely to enrich themselves.
I say, let these people expend their energy developing the Moon, the asteroids, building space stations, and reaping the rewards of preparing for the future before it gets here. But somehow, we have to develop the means to get to space, means that are not so primitive and unreliable as the ones that we have now. This is the task that needs to be given to NASA, to the scientists who study engines, aerodynamics, astrogation, high temperature physics, and on and on. The mission of NASA is not to build rockets to fly people into space, it is not to build mines on the Moon to extract resources from, it is not to send colonists to Mars. The mission of NASA is to LEARN how to do these things, and then to hand that knowledge over to the private sector. Right now, we are learning how to live and work in space, with the International Space Station. In a few years, what is being learned on this first major space station will be in use on several other space stations, space stations owned by private companies who are out to make money. That is what NASA is supposed to be doing.