[quesera]

The unusual part of nasa.gov is that all pages and assets are served by Akamai.. www.nasa.gov CNAMEs to Akamai. I'm sure that's not unheard of, though I've never noticed anyone else doing it.

So for nasa.gov to go to the same servers without the ugly redirect hack, you'd have to set nasa.gov A records to Akamai addresses. That would probably require a bunch of their servers in Anycast'ed address space, syncing content, etc. Non-traditional for Akamai, but not impossible.

I wonder if NASA gets a special deal from Akamai. No one else seems to have this problem, and most people who can afford to pay Akamai can certainly afford the hardware and admin costs to run their own primary web infrastructure.