The Artemis II mission to the moon elicited a fair amount of excitement and positive news coverage, at least in my casual reading. And on top of that comes another popular movie about space exploration.
But despite this recent excitement, space exploration remains a low public priority, as decades of U.S. survey data show. For a long time, the General Social Survey has asked this question:
We are faced with many problems in this country, none of which can be solved easily or inexpensively. I’m going to name some of these problems, and for each one I’d like you to tell me whether you think we’re spending too much money on it, too little money, or about the right amount.
Respondents then see a list of issues or problems, one of which is “space exploration programs.” One way to summarize opinion is to subtract the percentage who say we are “spending too much” on the issue from the percentage who say we are “spending too little.” Here is what the trends look like from 1973 to 2024:
A couple of things stand out. Overall, there has been more support for funding, averaging across all the issues. (See the thicker black line.)
However, space exploration (the orange line) has routinely been a fairly low priority. Yes, there has been an increase in support for more funding. But space exploration still elicits less support than most other issues. Indeed, it’s only about as popular as “welfare,” a spending category with a well-known stigma.
For example, in the 2024 survey, only 20% favored more spending while 29% favored less. The rest (51%) just wanted to maintain spending. Thus, the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to NASA aren’t exactly popular, but neither is there a groundswell for spending increases.
Maybe other space missions will change this, such as the planned moon landing or even a Mars mission that brings yet another popular space movie to life. But for now, there is a disjuncture between the inspiring images and stories you see from Artemis II and what the public actually wants to spend on space exploration.
