Washington Post Poll on Space Spending

Shut it down. I'm alone out here, and that's how I like it.

As long as airlines fly people to their destinations, people will fly in space. If economic and social crises rise to the point where the number of people flying on airlines dramatically lowers, we will see a cessation of manned space travel. This is highly unlikely to occur since the government is simply printing money and giving it away to banks and others to stimulate the economy and control what people do with their own money.

The public will typically ignore people going to space as long as they perceive their money is safe and they can afford and are allowed to fly on an airline to a typical destination. There obviously is no data to back this up, but I said it here first.

Some of you really need to do research before you make comments. The "NASA" rocket that failed recently was not owned by NASA. NASA launches unmanned spacecraft via contracts with commercial launch vehicles. Spaceflight is a high risk venture and 2-4% of rocket launches fail. That's just the way it is.
Spaceflight represent a long term investment in the future. We will expand human presence beyond the Earth in the relatively near future. There are resources in space to be exploited and if we want the human race to survive we must move some people off the Earth. We currently have all of our eggs in one basket. Life is precarious. It would not take much to wipe out humans on Earth. (Diseases, asteroid/comet impact/a gamma radiation burst, etc) NASA also develops technologies that have many other applications that find their way into our everyday lives. The entire NASA budget is barely 0.6% of federal outlays. NASA is a small agency by government standards.
NASA is not going away. President Obama has requested an increase of about $1.5 billion for NASA next year. We are a part of the Universe. Earth is not the Universe all by itself. This "Earth-centric" view is outdated.

Taking a line from digg: mirror?

Obligatory "do you think expressnightout.com is spending enough money on its servers: snipe...

In the spring of 1969 the Gallop Poll asked Americans which programs in the federal budget they think could be cut to help newly-elected President Richard Nixon to balance the budget. Some 69 percent said NASA as their no. 1 priority for cuts. Nixon then summarily gutted the space agency, canceling the last 3 lunar missions and the second Skylab.
Eventually, the budget crunch will face the civil space program of today. If all of us who support space exploration don't come together-and soon-to craft a new working model of cooperation, together, the same fate will face Constellation in the post 2010 time frame.
NASA did well under Obama's first budget.
But don't be fooled-hard times are still coming and budget battles lie ahead.

Surprisingly the comments were mostly in favor of NASA. I would have really thought that given the nature of our economy, many more would chime in with the usual "we need to take care of our problems here on Earth first" pablum. I know that a internet poll is not a scientific gauge of public opinion, but I'm still surprised.

Frank,
I know what you're saying about 1969, but I think that was very different time. The average citizen got their information from a limited source of news outlets, the overwhelming majority of which(by 1969)viewed space exploration in a very negative light. The average Joe in the street saw little benefit to him from space exploration and therefore felt it was a waste of money.

Today's situation is quite different. News is available from many different sources. Remember that blogs like this one helped to bring down the career of a major network newscaster. In addition, the news media is beginning to view exploration in a much more positive view when it is covered. Finally enough peole understand that the pivotal event of 1969 was not Woodstock but Apollo.

Of course there are similarities between 1969 and today. Our economy began to stagnate then too. Add in the oil shock of 1973 and we're really looking the same. Naturally Nxon could not balance the budget by gutting NASA anymore than Obama can. But unlike those dark days of the early 70s, we can and have made our voices known.

Now that I see the layout of the online poll, I know that lots of people probably found this as a result of pro-space sights like nasawatch, and thus the results are highly skewed.

Keith: could you let us know the state of the results when you first got wind of them to give us a less skewed read on the poll?

Over the next fifty years, the only clean renewable power technology that can completely replace the burning of fossil fuels and provide for even modest world growth is Sunsats. The sun is five times more intense in space. So the land use requirement is actually much lower than earth based solar and wind, because the large rectennas can be placed over the top of algae photobioreactor greenhouses we will need in the Southwest anyway. Like the large hydro-electric dams of the past, this is going to need coordination at the federal and international levels. It is like co-generation, the rectannas will keep the algae greenhouses warm and double their daily production rates.