Skeuomorphism is a design approach where digital interfaces retain certain elements from their real-world counterparts. For example, the notes app on iOS looks like a real-world notepad, with its leather binding and yellow lined pages, including a torn paper effect along the top where previous pages have been pulled out of the pad. (Obviously these pages do not exist in the digital world, and therefore this design choice is an attempt to insert "realism" into the UI for the purposes of familiarity == skeuomorphism)
It must be unbearably frustrating building this stuff to work around the limitations of 10+ year-old technologies when the superior tech inside even the phone in your pocket could achieve so much more.
Almost all of the radiation effects appear to be single event upsets (SEUs). So in principle, it should be possible to design robust software to detect and recover from faults (SEUs do no permanent damage to hardware).
There have been efforts within NASA to design robust OS extensions -- redundancy, watchdogs, heartbeats, checkpoints, etc. -- so that fast/cheap COTS hardware could be used, at least for some functions like image processing. This has never reached critical mass and been carried to completion, however.
So yes, as you guessed, there is significant pain and heartburn that computational capabilities are so far behind. Engineers have to spend a lot of time and cleverness squeezing, say, stereo vision processing, or image compression, into the hardware available.
It seems to me that the realisation/delight of discovering all of these incredible benefits to society that come out of NASA carries more than enough weight without requiring the whole "wtf" twist to make this interesting. If anything, it comes across as sounding like NASA hasn't actually done awesome things ("what did they ever do for us?!"), instead of the intended emphasis on the many, many unknown awesome things that affect the world daily.
I get that, and I do usually enjoy the heavily sarcastic approach sites like this take to make their point ... it just seems to me that "wtf [organisation]" is something more akin to how i'd emphasise how unbelievably ridiculous, say, oil companies are for yet another spill/cover-up/buyout etc
In this situation, the intention is really to celebrate the fact that NASA makes awesome stuff and the whole WTF comedy angle seems a bit awkward to me :)
[EDIT] I just realised out exactly why it seems awkward to me ... http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/ works because it's sarcastically about what he's done, whereas "wtf NASA" is aimed directly at NASA and comes across as angry. The URL needs to be something like "wtfhasnasaeverdonefortheworld.com" (like the page heading) for the joke to really work I think
