While I'm just guessing on all my rocket science comments, analysis of public opinion data *is* something I do professionally, and I'm afraid I'd disagree that this is very encouraging. Fairly tepid support overall.

I'm meaning to write more on this once we get some more polling data and once I get out some proposals that have suffered with all this Mars distraction.

But first a few quick thoughts. The key is looking carefully at the cues given in the question wording. Frankly, they could have been a lot more neutral.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040112/D801FID01.html

The strong support for robotic exploration along with strong support for continuing manned flight is partly a function of the wording:

Question 2 suggests that robots are more "affordable" than humans and gives no competing argument as to why humans might be preferred. A context-free "robots or humans" question, or one that included, "others say humans can do better science than machines" would have significantly changed the result, I suspect.

Question 3 puts the "continue manned flight" in the context of the Columbia disaster. Well, who wants to seem to be too frightened to try again? Even if you thought ending manned flight made sense for economic reasons, the wording implies that if you say "cancel it", you're doing it because you lack the guts to keep trying. And, the way it is phrased, it's asking if we should continue ANY human presence, not, should we keep spending 100% of what we planned on Shuttle/ISS.

More broadly, all these answers are consistent with the view, "let's keep the status quo". Even when there are doubts about a particular program, it's hard to get a lot of support to eliminate it entirely -- suggests that we've been wasting money and making mistakes all along. Much less cognitive dissonance to just not increase our efforts.

And, I suspect spaceflight has become pretty ingrained in US national identity. No one wants to say, "let's quit altogether", even if they're not particiularly supportive of any particular proposal. That MIGHT be enough to get some of Bush's proposals through -- what else would we do? And the admin seems to be setting itself up to burn bridges (retire shuttle and ISS as early as possible) that will put us in the Moon/Mars or nothing position.

That being said, the support for a big effort is weak. A 50/50 split on a program a popular president is proposing, in an area where there's not a lot of deep-seated ideological opposistion, isn't particularly high. And, given all the media attention to Spirit and it's smashing success, I would have expected higher numbers. I think Mars exporation questions in the immediate wake of Pathfinder got much more positive numbers. If it's 50/50 at the time we've got brand new color photos showing up on the evening news, it's only going to go down from here.

So much for my brief remarks. :) I'll want to see more polls before really coming to judgement.