robzilla - 9:43 am on May 21, 2012 (gmt 0)

It's a technical inconvenience that comes with most, if not all, site acceleration services. The www-part is actually a canonical name (CNAME) for a dedicated subdomain under akamai.net, which is the only way to deploy their Dynamic Site Accelerator. You cannot set a CNAME for your second-level domain, so there's no way to route all traffic from nasa.gov to Akamai through DNS alone. They'd have to set up a separate redirect on one of their servers -- which is a no-brainer, nonetheless.