Public Opinion About Space Exploration - Public Knowledge About Space Travel

In July 1999 the Gallup organization conducted an extensive poll on space issues to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. One of the questions concerned the number of astronauts who have actually walked on the Moon. Figure 9.14 shows that only 5 percent of those asked correctly answered that twelve different men have walked on the Moon. A vast majority (77 percent) of the respondents guessed too low. Another 11 percent guessed too high, and 7 percent had no opinion.

As shown in Table 9.2, only 50 percent of the people asked in July 1999 correctly named Neil Armstrong as the first person to walk on the Moon. Gallup reports that young people aged 18 to 29 were most likely to give the correct answer, despite the fact that the event occurred before they were born.

Other astronauts receiving votes included John Glenn (13 percent), Alan Shepard (4 percent), and Buzz Aldrin FIGURE 9.14
Public opinion poll on how many men have walked on the Moon, 1999 (2 percent). More than a quarter of the people asked (28 percent) could not come up with an answer at all.

Gallup asked the same question back in July 1989 on the twentieth anniversary of the first human lunar landing. At that time only 39 percent of respondents gave the correct answer. The other 61 percent either did not know the answer or gave an incorrect answer.

Over a three-day period in early August 2003 Gallup pollsters asked 534 adults whether there were any U.S. astronauts in space at that time or not. Exactly half of the people contended that there were no U.S. astronauts in space at that time. Another 35 percent believed that U.S. astronauts were in space, while 15 percent had no opinion or did not know.

In reality there was one U.S. astronaut in space at the time. NASA Science Officer Ed Lu was aboard the ISS. The ISS has been continually inhabited by at least one American astronaut since 2000.