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Apollo 16 astronaut John Young on the moon in 1972. Credit: NASA

A few days ago, the Pew Research Center published an article about space exploration support starting with this sentence: Many Americans are optimistic about the future of space travel, but they dont necessarily want to pay for it.

The articles impetus was this recent Pew Research/Smithsonian study called U.S. Views of Technology and the Future that said a third of Americans think there will be manned colonies on other planets by 2064. But long-range statistics from theNational Opinion Research Centers General Social Survey, Pew argues, demonstrate weak support for paying for space exploration.

We found that Americans are consistently more likely to say that the U.S. spends too much on space exploration than too little.At no time has more than 20% of the public said that the U.S. spends too little on space exploration, Pewwrote in the articleof the survey, which has been running for about 40 years.

Not everyone agrees with that interpretationof those numbers. In a personal website blog post published in 2013 (after the last GSS came out) NASA employee Dennis Boccippio said that financial support for space exploration has never been higher.

The International Space Station. Credit: NASA

The blog post, which referred to preliminary data from the 2012 survey, showed an overall higher favorability rating that was stronger than any GSS survey or at points cited before then from theNational Air and Space Museums Roger Launius. In particular, look at this graphthat Boccippio published on his blog.

The GSS surveys consistently show a slightly lower favorability rating for the survey question variant space exploration program versus space exploration but its very small. This may be one way to measure the difference between supporting the concept of exploration and supporting government programs, Boccippio said in an e-mail to Universe Today. Boccippio is NASAs manager of the center of strategic development at the Marshall Space Flight Center, but said he wrote the blog post as a private citizen.

The Pew research article seems fairly written, youve seen the graphic on my blog, so its a matter of interpretation. The fact that a large (30-40%) number of respondents respond were spending too much, and that the strong advocate/proponent population is small (10-20%) isnt really news, this has been consistent for decades, and one could as easily state from the same data more than 50% of Americans have consistently said were spending the right amount on it.

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How Much Of The U.S. Public Supports Space Spending? Depends On How You Read The Stats