The most exciting thing going on in science right now, in my opinion, is the Kepler Telescope and its search for transiting planets. The process is a lof of tedious data collection and analysis. There is nothing to be done about the collection - the planets will transit when Einstein says they’ll transit - but the analysis is a backlog that can take up to a year.
This could be hastened by many months simply by releasing all data they collect to the general public and letting anyone who wanted to sift through it for planets. People would organize around and collaborate on this data immediately, and we’d get results back a lot faster.
Unfortunately, the mindset at NASA is the same mindset instilled by patents and copyrights: exclude everyone else. Rather than working on this as a global community, the data is hoarded so that only a handful can look through it. Are they worried that someone else might take their glory? As if they would not be lauded for their hard work on data collection.
Of course, the entire mission has been a violation of libertarian principles, but that’s a story for another post. In the interest of making the most out of this statist endeavour, the mission officials should outsource in the most free market manner possible. They won’t, it seems, and so we’ll have to wait many months and years longer than would otherwise be necessary.