![Artist’s illustration shows the ejection of a cloud of debris after NASA’s DART spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/DART2CROP-800x515.jpg)
ESO/M. Kornmesser
The Pew Research Center published the outcomes of a brand new public survey on Thursday, the 54th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. The survey assessed Americans’ attitudes toward space exploration and space policy issues.
Similarly to 5 years ago, the survey found that Americans broadly support the national space agency, NASA. Three-quarters of respondents had a good opinion of NASA, in comparison with just 9 percent with an unfavorable opinion.
Nonetheless, as several previous surveys have found, the general public has far different priorities for NASA than are expressed within the space agency’s budget. On this recent report, based on a big survey of 10,329 US adults, the best support got here for “monitor asteroids, other objects that would hit the Earth” (60 percent) and “monitor key parts of the Earth’s climate system” (50 percent). Sending astronauts to the Moon (12 percent) and Mars (11 percent) lagged far behind as top priorities for respondents.
Moreover, support for deep space exploration by humans was especially low amongst women. Just 9 percent of female respondents listed sending humans to the Moon as a “top priority” for NASA, and seven percent of girls said the identical about sending humans to Mars.
![The percentage of men and women who say the following areas should be a 'top priority' for NASA.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/nasa-survey-1.jpg)
The proportion of men and ladies who say the next areas must be a ‘top priority’ for NASA.
Pew Research Center
These priorities are available in stark contrast to the funds NASA actually spends on exploration. In fiscal 12 months 2024, for instance, NASA has asked Congress for $210 million to proceed the event of the Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission. Planned for a launch in 2028, this planetary defense mission will detect, track, and characterize impact hazards from asteroids and comets. NASA also proposes to spend about $2.5 million on Earth Science missions.
Meanwhile, the space agency has asked for about $8 billion to fund its ongoing Artemis program missions next 12 months, including rockets, spacecraft, and landers, to permit for a human landing on the Moon later this decade. NASA officials say the Artemis program will allow the agency to learn skills and techniques that can eventually allow astronauts to fly to Mars within the 2030s or 2040s.
Protect the planet
Despite this disparity, NASA has stepped up its planetary-defense activities. Lower than a decade ago, the space agency spent lower than $50 million a 12 months on detecting and tracking potentially hazardous asteroids, issuing notices and warnings of possible impacts and taking the lead in coordinating planning and response across US government agencies.
The agency, in concert with the European Space Agency, took a notable step forward in November 2021 with the launch of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, which intercepted a near-Earth asteroid after which impacted a small asteroid in 2022. This demonstrated the aptitude of NASA to potentially deflect an incoming asteroid if a threatening object is found.
Overall, these survey results reinforce the notion that while public support for NASA is fairly broad, it doesn’t run that deep, particularly for human space exploration. And where NASA spends nearly all of its funding is where the general public—in surveys, a minimum of—appears to be least interested. So what does this mean for space policy?
For a very long time after the Apollo program, NASA and space policy leaders lived in hope of seeing one other era of support for a big space-exploration budget. Within the Sixties, NASA’s budget peaked at about 5 percent of federal spending. Now it’s about 0.5 percent. If NASA’s budget would just double or triple, space enthusiasts would say, consider all of the wondrous things we could accomplish.
But those days are never coming back. The US public likes having NASA and astronauts and seeing cool things occur in space. But by and huge, their priorities are way more Earth-bound. As Phil Larson, a key space policy official on the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, told me a number of years ago, “The overwhelming majority of the general public thinks that we should always have an area program that saves Earth.”
To NASA’s credit, the space agency finally seems to have acknowledged this. As an alternative of shooting for the Moon with a much larger budget, it has nurtured a business space industry. Through public-private partnerships on lunar landers, spacesuits, and other activities, NASA is starting to suit its deep-space exploration plans inside the current budget it receives from the federal government. It has also prioritized landing the “first woman on the Moon” the following time humans go there. Perhaps that can win broader support for lunar exploration in future surveys.