I understand the analogy and respect the spirit, but NASA was formed in 1958, put its first satellite into orbit the same year and three years later put man into orbit during the Mercury program... all while running the X-planes as a side venture:
Mercury's total cost was 227 Million USD in 1965 dollars, a whopping 1.6 billion USD in 2010 and involved some 2 million people. Each of the six Mercury missions cost 265 million USD.
Each subsequent venture, Gemini, Apollo and on into Orion of today cost an increasingly large amount. It was hardly frugal in its infancy due to a little competition with the Soviets we like to call the "Space Race".
To make the analogy more accurate, you'd want NASA's predecessor NACA - National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.
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Sorry for being a stickler, but I'm kind of a space geek
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https://defence.pk/threads/us-space-program-a-thread.380100/page-16#post-8114055