Americans were never excited about space exploration.

This is an interesting study, but I found the HN title to be misleading. Here are the bullets from the concluding paragraph:

* The American public has long held generally positive attitudes toward the space program, but is not very familiar with its details.

* Over the history of the space age, an average of more than 60 percent of those polled rated the job done by NASA as either ‘‘excellent’’ or ‘‘good.’’

* Most Americans have shown support for space exploration and view it as important over the years, but also believe that federal money could be better spent on other programs.

* Most are also in favor of NASA as an organization, but are relatively unfamiliar with the majority of its activities and objectives.

* These polls also suggest historically close relationships between public perceptions of NASA and spaceflight depictions in popular culture, especially film. These images from popular culture, coupledwith real-world accomplishments in spaceflight, work together to create powerful visions affecting the public consciousness.

What a superb paper! thanks for posting this, I learned a good deal from it. I was astonished by figure 15, showing that although NASA,s budget has historically been about 1% of the total federal budget, the general public simply has no idea, with 15%+ of the public (in the 1990s) thinking that NASA consumes 50% or more of total federal spending. WTF.

It's a shame the data only seems to be available up to 1997 for the study. For those curious how recent private space initiatives have impacted these numbers, here are a couple more recent data points I could find:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/121736/majority-americans-say-spa...

http://www.people-press.org/2011/07/05/majority-sees-u-s-lea...

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/gen...