Earlier quoted context omitted.
But would NASA out-perform a research university with the same budget, tasked with addressing the aforementioned problem/solutions directly rather than incidentally?
Yes. NASA is drastically different from an academic institution and the difference in administrative culture alone allows it to be a more effective multidisciplinary research organization working on everything from pure science to industrial ready technologies. For example, Black and Decker developed the first cordless vacuum after their engineers got an idea while working on cordless drills with NASA in the same res…
A Caltech scientist who had worked with DOE and NASA labs made an offhand comment about the kind of work that those labs are suited to do that stuck with me - he said they should be trying to solve problems that are "national lab hard" - kind of a play on NP-hard.
What he meant is that these environments are suited to solving complex cross-discipline engineering/science problems ("make the right measurements to understand the climate system", or "find the processes and materials to make air travel safer", or "put a huge infrared telescope in space").
These are not problems that are suited to a university research structure. They don't get solved with $300K/year grants, small collections of discipline-focused PIs, and transient grad students.