[zosi]

By saying that it's not working, you assume that a raw domain.com is "broken" if it doesn't resolve to an address which is presumably the same as www.domain.com, which is pretty much baseless. There's no technical reason for a bare domain to resolve to anything, it's just a popular convention to make it redirect to www.domain.com because most people who type that into a browser expect your web site to come up.

Why not just add a CNAME for convenience? Who knows. They may have an internal technical reason, or it may just be a case of "don't do something unnecessary just because it's easy". For what it's worth, government agencies have a pretty good variety - army.mil and navy.mil both have the same behavior as nasa.gov, whitehouse.gov and justice.gov both have redirects to the "canonical" www url and house.gov and senate.gov both serve the same content as their www versions without a redirect either way.

Regardless of their particular reason, I see no cause to assume that it's due to laziness, funding level or how "high-tech" they are. It's just a convention that they don't use, but you expect.

[TrevorBurnham]

It is "broken." You're right that "it's just a convention that they don't use, but you expect." But it's a convention that must prevent a handful of people from accessing their website each day, or at least causing them to Google "NASA" in confusion. There's no valid technical reason for doing this. It's a serious usability/findability fail.