NASA is the space agency everyone still treats like a swashbuckling pioneer, when in reality it has become the world’s most expensive project management office. The Apollo era gave it a myth it will never escape, but since the Shuttle it has functioned as a conveyor belt for pork-barrel contracts, funneled through Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, and whatever new “prime” Congress wants to keep alive. The agency doesn’t “do” space anymore. It outsources, coordinates, and occasionally cuts ribbons at launches run by companies that move faster than it ever could.

The Space Launch System is the perfect example. Conceived as a jobs program to keep Shuttle-era factories humming, it was sold as America’s “return to the Moon.” What taxpayers got was a decade of delays, $20 billion in sunk costs, and a rocket so expensive it can only launch when Congress feels particularly generous. The hardware is solid, the economics are insane, and NASA pretends it’s progress because scrapping it would admit the whole thing was political theater from the start.

The flip side is commercial space, where NASA finally admitted it couldn’t do everything and threw money at SpaceX, Orbital, and now a rotating cast of startups. That gamble paid off: SpaceX delivers cargo and crew to ISS with boring regularity, something NASA itself failed to do affordably. Artemis is riding the same model, with NASA writing the requirements and SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others building the landers. The “return to the Moon” looks heroic in press releases, but in reality it’s NASA stapling its logo on private-sector hardware and making sure Congress sees American astronauts on top of American rockets.

Science is where NASA still shines. Hubble, JWST, Mars rovers, missions that actually advance knowledge rather than politics. But even those are bloated by procurement culture, with costs doubling and schedules slipping until launch day becomes a miracle.

JWST took so long that an entire generation of astronomers aged out of the workforce waiting for their data. When the thing finally unfolded, it felt less like a triumph of engineering and more like relief that the embarrassment was over.

NASA’s real role today is symbolic. It reassures Americans that the country still “leads in space” while the private sector does the heavy lifting. It is a cultural brand more than an engineering powerhouse, sustained by nostalgia and congressional appropriations. The U.S. needs NASA because it makes the whole enterprise look like national destiny rather than Elon Musk’s side hustle. But the truth is clear: NASA is no longer the explorer, it is the referee.