Out of curiosity, what makes this notable?
I think many IT employees have a vested interest in Red Hat and the direction of "enterprise Linux". Seeing an organization like NASA show a willingness to use a Red Hat alternative gives credibility to that alternative.
So let's say that some Rocky or Alma Linux user or developer wants to make a change. They are RHEL clones, so they can't do that. But they can now contribute the change to CentOS Stream, which is the upstream for both RHEL and their own distro. That change can be reviewed and tested by the community + Red Hat, and then land in RHEL a few months later.
This isn't theoretical, to use one example, Facebook uses CentOS Stream in production and contributes back a significant amount.
Disclosure: I do work for Red Hat. But it never made sense to me why people say that the "CentOS community was destroyed" when it didn't really have much of a community, it had _users_, which is different. It has more of a "community" now than it did previously, because the development is actually open as opposed to Android-style "throwing bundles of code over the wall".
Pretty sure it's just for free beta testing
NASA seems to be taking the lead here and saying "we're going with Rocky". I think this move will encourage others on the fence to do the same, and build more of a community around the product not owned/maintained by Amazon.
CentOS Stream is not "bleeding edge". Every update that goes into CentOS Stream has already gone through the Red Hat QA process, and the updates are restricted to only the kinds of things which previously would have gone into RHEL. That is, mostly security updates and bugfixes.
It's a little bit ahead of RHEL, but it's not like Fedora, much less Rawhide.
CentOS is now bleeding edge? Would you describe Debian Stable as bleeding edge also? On your contiunuum, where would you place Arch and Fedora?
Given the stage of the lifecycle, you'd be pretty silly to adopt AL2 on-prem at this point. AL2023 probably won't be appropriate either. Rocky is the way to go.