New Poll Shows Support For Space Funding Cuts

Just goes to show how ignorant people are with respect to how important the space industry is to the entire American economy as a whole.

All they see are shuttle launches a few times a year, not everything else, and they definitely don't see the thousands of companies throughout the nation that contribute to the entire space program as a whole.

Reduce space exploration and you reduce growth in the one area that's been the most beneficial to the human species over the past 75 years: technological development.

I wish I had a way to get out there and get on more news and radio shows faster, but I'm only one guy doing it all on his own. I hope I can help change those numbers significantly, because space exploration is the one thing we need to be investing MORE into for the long term stabilization of this country.

Had they asked the question this way: "Are you in favor of laying off 100,000 people by cutting back on the space program" I bet you'd had a very different result!

Sure... let's cut back on the one human endeavor that can give us effectively unlimited raw resources. Let's cut back on the one human endeavor that can insure the survival of our species even if we totally screw up our planet, or one of those big rocks whizzing by actually hits us.

Who needs those things when the corporate world's $million bonuses are threatened?

These are hard economic times for many Americans, so the poll is not too surprising.

But it just shows that our politically correct mission to LEO program over the last 38 years has not captured the imagination of the American people despite the fact that we now spend only half as much in today's dollars on our space program as we did back in the 1960s. Now people want to cut NASA's meager budget even more!

While I think most women tend to be more hostile to space adventurism, I also believe that if NASA had focused the manned space program on space colonization and commercialization, it would receive much more support from women.

Marcel F. Williams

Frank...I agree. But the public would probably also want these people to work on more pressing issues and problems. I have not found anyone outside of our spacegeek circles that gets very spun-up about mining plants on the asteroids or tankers bringing back He-3 from the Moon. Most reasonably intelligent people acknowledge the importance of maintaining strong educational programs and active R&D. This has become even more important as global competition has shifted from a military focus to a more economic one. Most Americans would be happy to maintain a sizable federally funded R&D workforce, but they want it to work on products that a more relevant to the problems we face, which are significant indeed.

I hate to be cynical, but reasonably intelligent people are a minority in America. If they weren't, we wouldn't be looking at a national shortage of scientists & engineers or schools that give diplomas to legions of scientific illiterates. I hope that the new guy at the top of NASA PR acts swiftly to turn this perception around.

Sorry folks, this is not a "guns or butter" issue. Marcel hit the nail on the head. Not many are inspired by LEO.

Paraphrasing a bit, Wernher Von Braun once told Bernie Lay that kids will not be inspired to become engineers and scientists by the problems here on earth but by the inspiration of space exploration (not LEO, my distinction). Once they became the engineers and scientists for space, they would find that their training equipped them to solve many of earth's problems.

"Cutting the NASA budget" and "cutting back on space exploration" are not at all the same thing, since almost all the money NASA spends might as well be thrown into the fire. There's no one to whom the conquest of space is more important than it is to me; in fact, as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing else that really matters. Most Americans feel very differently...but that's because they've forgotten, or never knew, what a real space program is like.

Adam Smith, smiling in his grave, with delight at the vision of a 0-g cirque du soleil concert, complete with performing artists dressed as monkeys, for the entertainment of wealthy space tourists?

If that’s what it takes to advance technology and exploration, then so be it. Getting people and things into space is plenty complex, to say nothing of any economic analysis toward the best approach. I’m sure Guy Laliberte will need yet more smart and capable scientists and engineers and technical staff to put on that kind of show.

Guess we'll see what happens soon enough.

I assume that by 'exploration' the poll is referring to all exploration, including all the missions that are exploring what is going on with Earth's climate.

How shorted sighted can you get.

Humans. Ugh.

The poll and article are specious in light of them NOT telling you the number of people polled...could have been 1,500 or 150,000 or 15 for that matter. Citing percentages is bulldinky.
Percentage of what?

Like Joe Stalin said..."It ain't the votes that count. Its the guy who counts the votes that counts."

Patrick' Law #1:

The success of WalMart is directly attributed to the "Dumbing Down" of America.

Seems to me also that there's the problem of qualitative vs. quantitative reasoning going on. Do you want a space program or the healthcare crisis solved? Sure, let's solve healthcare. 'Cept, of course, canceling all of NASA won't provide even a tiny fraction of the resources necessary to solve healthcare.

The issue of area of focus was brought up. Well, as we know, NASA operates in several areas (some of which, some think it should not). That said, we already flow $25bn into DoE, $4+bn into NOAA, $7bn into NSF. Does the diversity offered by NASA not add significant benefit? I think it does. The Federal government has a good, diverse portfolio of tech and science investment - I don't think we should overload it by betting it all on one area that's fashionable at one instant.

Someone once pointed out that no kid is going to be inspired into science and technology by making a jetliner 30% more efficient than it is today. Space will do that - and human space beyond LEO will do it MUCH better than anything else. The thing that differentiates the US is its focus on the future, and the space program is *the* emblem of that. Nothing is so inspiring, and I think it would be a huge mistake to collapse it in order augment an already funded area of federal R&D or (worse) to play-pretend like we're trying to solve even bigger problems.

These are hard economic times for many Americans, so the poll is not too surprising.

Folks, this is a hard reality for many of our working class neighbors. America is very different outside of the beltway. Neighbors are starting to verbally express their worry about their future and that of their children... IMHO they will begin to demand connection between government spending and their personal, economic future.

Someone once pointed out that no kid is going to be inspired into science and technology by making a jetliner 30% more efficient than it is today.

True, true... but at least their parents will be employed at Boeing long enough to get them through college!

Sadly the NASA that quietly provided core propulsion and airframe technologies the industry has been put in mothballs by lack of funds, lack of focus and lack of leadership. Same goes for almost all of NASA's technology development across the board.

This isn't at all surprising. Poll after poll shows that the average person belives that space funding should be reduces to support "solving problems on Earth". The one kicker is that when you ask the same person "what percentage of the national budget goes to NASA?" you'll get answers ranging from 10% to 50% and that they would prefer that 5%-10% would be more appropriate. So yes, the average person thinks that there should be cuts, but the average person also overestimates by several orders of magnitude just how much money is actually being spent.

Just imagine what 5% of the US budget would buy in space?

Hmmm...I'm wondering if many of the commenters here have ever taken a Rasmussen phone poll. I've responded to a few Rasmussens in recent years, mostly on political issues, the most recent being last night wherein Rasmussen tried to paint Obama into a dark corner. I've always found the Rasmussen polls to be frontloaded with bias, and designed to "build to a conclusion ". The questions are leading and one-sided, and if you give an 'unsatisfactory' response to a key point, the same question comes back later . Quite often the best response to a question is not offered as a choice at all. Rasmussen uses strong polarization. They are seemingly hired to jack up a predetermined rhetorical outcome.

Therefore, I have to question the source for this article.

But I would also love to take the Space poll itself.

Reminds me of a Gallop poll released just prior to the launch of Apollo 11. While a bare plurality supported the mission (47 percent for and 42 percent against) a large majority (62%) named space exploration as their no. 1 candidate for cuts if cuts were needed to balance the federal budget. Asked to rank space missions on a scale of national priorities, space failed to even make the list of the top 20. Result? In Sept 1969 Nixon canceled the Saturn V assembly lines, effectively ending manned space flight to the Moon or use of the big booster for other missions. He then proceeded to slash the NASA budget in each year, from FY70 to FY73 and funded the Shuttle with a bare bones $5 billion cap (in then-yr $$). Will history repeat itself????

Great review of history Frank but I submit that the politicians have been repeating history every year since cancellation of the Saturn V. Space exploration as a national priority and policy ended then and there with LEO being the policy since then.

We are going to have to face the fact that the politicians don't care about funding a real space program and the taxpayers don't care nor are they "inspired" by LEO.

I can't help thinking that interest in space exploration was shot down big time by the "Apollo on steroids" bummer. I think that it so profoundly disappointed space program interest that young people just turned off to it completely. People were thinking 21st Century and they got warmed over 1960's.

And where are the voices for a more advanced crew vehicle than Orion. So far I'm only aware of the protests of Buzz Aldrin (and my own, of course, which I know are not significant).

Sorry "Flash001" you're mistaken. Apollo on steroids had nothing to do with it. The year after year lack of funding for real space exploration did it. If you want to continue your campaign against Constellation, there are many legitimate reasons to do so and accusing it as the cause of this problem isn't one of them.

I heartily agree with Flash001. Not only is Constellation not worth doing, it's actually counterproductive (quite apart from the waste of money), since it gives the public the impression that space flight must be that pathetic, at least for a long time to come. And if even I consider it worthless, what can be expected of John and Jane Doe?

IMHO John and Jane Doe are more worried about paying the mortgage and one or both being laid off than anything remotely to do with space flight. To these folks, I submit space looks like a complete waste of money, a throw back to a by-gone era. If they don't see any relevance to their lives, they will be inclined to say "cancel" and treat the whole thing as something of a extravagance.

That's certainly true today, but why are things so different today than they were in that "bygone era"? Isn't it largely, if not entirely, because of the cancerous growth of government that started with Lyndon Johnson? People have forgotten, or never knew, how little we spent, in 1960, on what might be called the parasitic elements of government. Why can't we return to the "bygone era"?

Well Conley you're agreeing with Flash doesn't help his argument and Frank is right on with his opinion that John and Jane Doe are more interested in paying the mortgage all the while wondering what the hell is going to happen next with the economy.

Conley, U.S. manned space flight has been pathetic because of our being stuck in LEO, not because of the means to get there. The vehicles were symbolic and did not inspire John and Jane Doe to support going to the moon, the mission did. I don't care if the next vehicle to get us out of LEO is a VW microbus and to imply that the public needs some type of "cadillac" in which to do it assumes that we are children only interested in the next shiny toy. Sorry, but your position supports symbolism over substance and we've had way too much of that over the last 40 years.

Conley, I think that you are on the right track with the bloated government argument. Just look at the missions with which NASA is tasked versus it's mission in the 1960's. Back in the '60's we didn't have to support massive numbers of bureaucrats that added no value to manned space exploration, nor did NASA have to spend our funds on earth observations, "climate change" studies, education "outreach", trips for scientists to the pyramids and conferences that have nothing to do with spaceflight. I could go on, but I think we all get the idea. NASA is now a funnel for our tax money to things that have nothing to do with space exploration.

Thanks for your second message, Mike, but your previous message indicates that I failed to make myself clear. Without real spaceships, we're not going to do anything significant in Earth orbit, much less on the Moon. As for colonizing Callisto, Titan, and Triton...!
There's nothing "symbolic" about the difference between Ares I and a gaseous-core nuclear rocket. Nothing could have more "substance". I can't overstate the importance of the fact that the government is robbing productive citizens blind to support a vast army of drones, some of whom are on the government payroll, making matters worse when they do anything at all, and some of whom are not on any payroll. But even if this were not the case, with fools like Griffin running NASA, the NASA budget is just as much money thrown away as is the Department of Education budget.

Conley you're all over the map on this one. With all due respect to the others on this thread and to Keith I must reply to your "clarification".

You first implied in your agreement with Flash that Apollo on steroids and it being "old technology" killed the spirit of the taxpayer. I disagreed and think that I posited a good argument against that point. You then said that the difference between Ares I and a "gas core nuclear rocket" is not symbolic but real. Well there was a nuclear rocket program in the early sixties called NERVA that eventually was cancelled due in part to a lack of public (read taxpayer) interest. (It was to be an upper stage for the Saturn V and was to be used for interplanetary spaceflight.)

If indeed we started that program again, would you, for consistency's sake argue that we would be using old technology and in effect killing the inspriration of the taxpaying public just as you agreed that Apollo on Steroids did? I think not because your last sentence of your last post shows me the axe you're grinding.

I must point out that Mike Griffin is not running the program anymore and if he was we would still be facing the same problem which is a lack of funding for a real space program. Again Ares I has many shortcomings but its not the vehicle, its the mission that's important. If NASA is only going to be an extension of NOAA, the Dept. of Commerce, the Dept. of the Interior, the NSF and the Dept. of Education and God knows what else, then I think that its past time for defunding NASA.

The whining about Griffin and Constellation is not going to fix the politicians mismanagement and bloating of a once great agency.

Rant over, thanks Keith.

I don't usually have this much trouble making myself clear.
It makes no sense to say that "it's not the vehicle, it's the mission that's important". With chemical-propellant rockets, we can't even get into orbit at anything remotely resembling reasonable cost, and we can carry out no worthwhile manned missions beyond Earth orbit, regardless of cost. Constellation is pointless, not because it uses "old technology", but because it uses hopelessly inadequate technology.
Apollo's sole purpose was to beat the Soviets to the Moon. That being the case, all the technological decisions that were made were exactly right. In the early '60s, everyone assumed that, once we'd gotten to the Moon with vehicles that could be developed in the shortest possible time but that could do no more than take a few men to the Moon and back at staggering cost, we'd start over and do it right. Since we didn't, it could be argued in hindsight that Apollo was a big mistake.
I say that Griffin is a fool because he wasted a lot of time and a lot of money trying to redo Apollo. Apollo made sense in 1961, given that no one can foresee the future, but Constellation made absolutely no sense in 2004. Nobody but Griffin and a few other fools had the slightest interest in re-doing Apollo. Building a Moon base would have been another matter...but anyone who thought we were going to build a Moon base with Ares Vs was really a fool.
The vehicle is all-important, because it determines what missions are possible and what they will cost. Until we're ready to build real spaceships, I say let's just forget the whole thing. How much money have we wasted on the Shuttle, which has done nothing of any value except launch a very few heavy payloads that could have been launched a lot more cheaply by Saturn IBs? (And no, I don't consider building the so-called Space Station to be of any value. It wouldn't have been even if it hadn't taken 27 years...assuming that it's finished next year.)

I have to agree with Flash that 'Apollo on steroids' was exactly the wrong message to the taxpayers. Even if that was going to be the way to start the program, it should have been characterized in myriad ways that could have made it palatable: beginning the establishment of a lunar outpost, base or colony; in situ resource utilization; developing the technological capabilities to prevent an asteroid impact wiping out civilization. A redo of Apollo was never the way to sell it. Unfortunately as the Constellation management focused their effort, this became not just a message; Constellation got so focused on repeating the Apollo mission that nothing more ever became a program goal.

I'm not sure that it really had much influence on a lot of the public since there really was so little that came out of NASA. A large percentage of the public thinks that the Shuttle flies routinely and that its regular destination has been the moon, so they have little concept of why we are trying to repeat something they think we are already doing.

Mike Hilton is totally off-base with his comment that "in the '60's NASA didn't have to spend our funds on earth observations, "climate change" studies, education "outreach"...

NASA did develop much of the technology beginning in the 1950s and through the 1960s that established the first communications satellites (Relay, Syncom and Echo), the first weather satellites (Tiros) and earth observation/resources satellites(Applications Technology Satellites - ATS). In addition to human space flight, NASA was all about characterizing the earth from space, the space environment, and the moon and planets.

The NASA education and outreach program in the 1960s was first rate with not only the news media enlisted but with regular and frequent films/tv programs, radio programs being produced, and a wide variety of school programs including specialists carpeting the nation, a wide variety of great and frequent publications for students and teachers, and student experiment programs associated with Apollo, Skylab, Mariner, Viking and others. Many of the school programs were done by providing grants to colleges and universities to support research and secondary school programs were often done by enlisting the support of contractors and using organizations like the National Science Teachers Association as the arms and legs to reach out to the students. Some of these programs continued into the 1980s with the Shuttle student involvement program. We had some great leaders, like Gen Abrahamson. NASA human space flight provided the products that inspired earth day and the entire conservation movement.

In many ways, it is much easier and less expensive for NASA to educate and reach out to the public today. In the 1960s there was no Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, Sci Fi Channel, A&E, Biography, Weather Channel, Learning Channel, Science Channel, Military Channel, National Geographic Channel...NASA has more content available than ever before and more outlets are looking for content than ever, but in order to use it you need some people to organize it and explain it intelligently to the media outlets. NASA needs to carefully leverage its efforts.

The unmanned planetary program and Hubble have been doing reasonably well at educating and communicating to the public for the last decade.

Human space got chauvinistic over the last 15 years and re-focused its efforts on supporting its own internal bureaucracy; it appeared to take the cavalier attitude that it did not need public support.

Now NASA's human space flight program is going to be taking the hit for its attitude.

Nice post Miles but developing the technology and spending billions on the actual use of that technology is an entirely different matter, ESPECIALLY when it is not furthering space exploration and aeronautical research. The technology should have been turned over to the branches of government empowered to do the actual investigations. Sorry but we disagree with what NASA's mission should be and my position is not changed by the money that NASA spent on the ATS, Hubble, MER, or Skylab projects. Besides, Earth science should be left to the earth sciences universities and branches of government. If NASA ceases to be a unique agency tasked with its original charter (before being modified by the politicians looking to enrich their special interests) then funding should be cut on our way to a smaller government.

I won't even get into the HSF versus unmanned programs because that is not the issue here. Thanks for your point of view.

Conley, you do not have a problem with clarity, we simply disagree. Good luck.

How about polling those same people on whether they believe the $900B+ stimulus was worth it? When you ask a loaded question to a generally uneducated public the answer is a forgone conclusion.