You're on to something with that link in response to Jeff's lament. Science and space exploration are pretty much viewed by the public as spectator sports, something they don't expect to ever participate in but is sometimes interesting to watch; but all else being equal, if you just want to watch, I can see how football might be more exciting than the slow-as-molasses pace of most space operations.

Giving the public more opportunity to participate should really boost interest. It'll be years before significant numbers of ordinary people get to space, but in the meantime we already have a vast wealth of digital data being returned by automated missions and space telescopes, and the Internet to distribute it to the public.

You can look at what Doug Ellison's doing with unmannedspaceflight.com to see how it might work. Get the digital data out there, and lots and lots of people will work with it, analyze it, enhance it (but sometimes too much), and look at it. Just like amateur astronomy, the field of planetary exploration benefits a lot from thousands of additional eyeballs. (Caveat: It's also bedeviled by anomalism and psuedoscience, but I honestly think that that's a fair price to pay. When the public gets interested, scientists don't get to control the conversation, and sometimes you have to take the bad with the good.)

Then there's SETI@Home, a handful of online observatorites that let people control the scope, the program a few years ago at MSSS that allowed the public to nominate sites on Mars for MGS imaging...every time you let the public into the tent, it's a success.

I have faith that there's a lot more interest in science and space exploration out there than we usually see, and the reason we don't see it is the general inaccessibility of science and space. "Tear down this wall, Mr. Scientist!", to paraphrase Reagan...and watch the public come flooding in.