Gallery: 55 images for NASA’s 55th anniversary

A half-century of missions, from Mercury to the Mars Science Laboratory and beyond.

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[FlyingKiwi]

NASA still has some neat things in the works but it's in a transistional phase. NASA isn't about rushing new things out partially due to funding, more importantly due to safety. As you have mentioned in the article rushing things probably wasn't the best for NASA:

Project Apollo flew toward its goal with sure feet—until the entire program was halted with the deaths of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee in the Apollo 1 fire. Critically called "a failure of imagination," the fire was technically the result of frayed wiring sparking in an environment of pure, pressurized oxygen—but more correctly, the fire was the result of NASA management and engineers moving too fast to meet what seemed like an impossible end-of-decade deadline.

What's in the works is exciting to me, the Orion capsule and SLS (Space Launch System). Yes the development could probably have been made faster with more funding but it's still not something to rush. Private companies like SpaceX as well as a partnership with Russia is supporting the ISS currently while NASA spends it's allocations on developing this system.

More information can be found for these systems here:

Orion (NASA)
SLS (NASA)
Orion (wiki)
SLS (wiki)

As a side note (more directed at Ars rather than the author) the image galleries' captions are very hard to read on some of the photos due to the white text with a photo as the background. It would probably be better if the caption was below the photo rather than ontop of it.