alternatehistory.com

The post-Apollo space program was a Cold War cold shower on NASA. There were all sorts of wonderful plans of continuing Apollo and using the Apollo hardware as the ground floor for all these interesting things NASA had planned, but in the end Nixon cut out all of that and the only thing that did survive the cuts was the Space Shuttle, a LEO vehicle which limited NASA to LEO manned operations. That, as well as space probes, Hubble, the ISS, and so on are what NASA has and what it uses to explore space. It's not exactly all that interesting or inspiring.
In Alternate History, usually the parallel reality is used to make NASA more interesting and to make it do what it didn't do; letting Apollo continue, making Moon bases, a Venus flyby, Mars landings, permanent space stations, and so on. This thread, however, asks the opposite.

In what different ways could NASA be mundane and what alternate reality, mundane NASA's could there have been?
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