Before you meet Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (and mind-bogglage sets in) answer 3 very, very simple questions:
1) What country was America in that big war with in the 1960's?
2) What country does Kim Jong Il rule with an iron fist?
3) What is Neil Armstrong famous for?
Done? Good. Sheila (a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs) is pissed that you haven't learned the lessons of history: [Roll Tape]

North Vietnam... Goddamnit, she's on the Committee on Foreign fucking Affairs. [That wasn't a slip up; she was talking about Vietnam specifically ("58,000 dead"). She actually thinks there's a North and South Vietnam.]  Clearly, if Sheila had to get a real job, no business would put her in charge of anything important. But remember, we're talking about the government here... so (obviously) Sheila spent some time on the House Science Committee and on the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. That's right, she was literally in charge of goddamn rocket science. Un-fucking-believably, she somehow knows less about space than she does about Vietnam:

During a 2005 visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, Lee asked whether the Mars Pathfinder had taken an image of the flag planted on Mars by Neil Armstrong in 1969.

That explains it! We haven't gone to Mars because the people overseeing the space program actually thought we'd already been there.