robzilla - 2:11 pm on May 28, 2012 (gmt 0)

My gut tells me there's just a checkbox on a managed dedicated server control panel for "[] www" that nobody checked and is unchecked by default.

Akamai doesn't do managed hosting. As I mentioned earlier, this is their Dynamic Site Accelerator at work, which can only be configured via a CNAME record, and that's obviously not possible for a 2nd level domain such as nasa.gov. They'd have to set up a redirect seperately. A simple fix, but perhaps we're missing something.