🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm disappointed that I've heard of no objective studies of the correlation
between the ratio of manned vs. unmanned spending and public support.
What interests people the most, by far, is people.  There will always
be exceptions, and people who sublimate that tendency in favor of knowing
about other *things*, like planets, and most of them are scientists or
of scientific turn of mind, which doubtless applies to most SPACE Digest
readers, but the majority of the voting public - I assert - would much
rather watch pictures of people standing on Mars than landscapes of
Ganymede.

They lost interest in the Apollo missions because the astronauts weren't
doing anything *new*, as far as they were concerned, even though we know
there was more science performed.  They lost interest in the shuttle
missions up to #25 because the astronauts were doing the same thing.
What will interest the public more than anything else is people doing
things that people haven't done before, which is a darn good argument
for not wasting money sending astronauts up on shuttles which don't
need them.

So what is the strength of the connection (people pioneering in space) =>
(public support for space endeavors) => (public support for congressional
action) => (congressional funding for space activities)?  I wish there
was more to go on than just opinion.  We might find out that we could get
more money for *all* kinds of space activities in the long run by doing
whatever it took to put people on Mars (in prime time, natch).

That connection certainly didn't seem very strong after the Apollo missions;
I hadn't moved to this country then, so I have only hearsay that the
Nixon administration decided it was tough luck for space whatever the
American people thought.  What *was* the mood of the American people at
that time?  Was their popular support for more space activity or not?
Was there as much as there is now?

Peter Scott (pjs@grouch.jpl.nasa.gov)