This came up on an earlier thread; there didn't seem to be a good place to post it though, so starting a new one...

I had a chance to chat with Brian Chase, NSS executive director, a couple of days ago, and asked him about the "polls". He explained NSS hasn't done any sort of scientific polling for a while, but they have done member surveys, usually along with fund-raising letters. They get a lot of responses back (membership is 10's of thousands) and it takes some effort to compile the results; they had an intern in the office over the summer who went through a representative sample of recent member survey responses, and the numbers should be in the next issue of "Ad Astra". So, I guess the answer is to wait till then.

Anyway, there's certainly no deliberate effort to downplay these things; just typical organizational inertia.

We chatted about some other things going on too; Brian was a little upset at the "anti-human-space" contingent drummed up for the recent congressional hearing. But he also pointed out something I hadn't really grasped - the science committee of the house actually has little say in what happens at NASA or elsewhere in federal space funding - it's actually all controlled by the appropriations committee, which never hears from anybody but NASA administrators on space issues. It's really quite sad how NASA's been tossed around by congress for so long; surely there's a better system, but similar problems afflict other federal departments too, to some degree (Dept. of Energy I knew about). Another thing they're working on pretty hard is ensuring the regulatory environment for the new X-prize startups is in place to allow them to offer commercial services as soon and as smoothly as possible. It looks like that project is going well (so far). Good things happening in private space, at least!