It's become fashionable these days to bad-mouth Nasa.
But I think a thousand years from now this is going to be how America is remembered, just like we remember 15th century Spain for discovering the New World, and little else it accomplished (for example, they kicked Islam out of Western Europe once and for all).
NASA publicizes its missions extensively before they are carried out, when the possibility of humiliating failure is still very real. That is something, as an American, I am intensely proud of.