Houston, we have a budget…. Public preferences for government spending on NASA and space exploration

Abstract

Public preferences for spending are generally associated with government appropriations in broad policy categories. One model of this relationship is that the public attitudes serve as a thermostat for spending, supporting greater expenditures when appropriations fall and vice versa. Public opinion correlates with budgetary allocations for large policy domains regarding defense and social spending, for example, but this link is not expected to hold with expenditures for individual agencies. Public knowledge about government agencies and issue salience of smaller policy areas is often limited. One exception is NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and support for expenditures on space exploration. Public awareness and support of this agency and the policy domain is high, in part because of frequent news coverage and fictional accounts pertaining to space exploration. This research examines the relationship between public opinion and expenditures on space exploration. Survey data are gathered from the General Social Surveys over several decades (1973-2024) asking whether government spending on space exploration is too much, about right, or too little. The general thermostatic model performs well, even when controlling for supplementary factors that appear related to opinions regarding government support of science and space policy. Moreover, the thermostatic model works better for spending for NASA than for the broader domain of science policy.