I thought NASA has been on a decent rise as of late? Maybe I am biased given my love for their success with curiosity, but I feel like I have heard more good then bad out of NASA during the last few years.
A lot of the good stuff (Curiosity, etc.) gets a ton of PR, but that doesn't mean there aren't day-to-day problems that are massive impediments for NASA. The mere fact that successive administrations get to come along and yank on NASA's long-term planning like a dog on a choke chain is really damaging to NASA's ability to actually break beyond LEO.
Until someone is able to marshal enough political power to force a change to this constant interference (and protect them long enough to accomplish their mission), NASA is going to continue to have trouble. Great engineers can still do incredible things even with bureaucratic and political interference, it's just so much more difficult than it needs to be.
I estimate less than 1/10th of money spent on NASA goes towards space research.
Even worse, they hire all the best engineers from the market.
I hope that we will close NASA someday, so that we can start doing space research again.
