The American public has had an abiding fascination with space exploration. Hoosiers had a special interest in the Apollo program because many of the astronauts, including Gus Grissom, had ties to Indiana. While humans haven't set foot on the moon in over a generation, space-related stories continue to hold our attention, whether those stories involve photographs from the surface of Mars, or the recent detection of ice on the moon, or the images from deep space produced by the Hubble Telescope, or the announcement that Senator John Glenn will return to space this fall. The recent prediction, which has now been discredited, that an asteroid might collide with the Earth early next century dominated the news for several days.
Space exploration continues to enjoy widespread public support.
The challenge for NASA will be to achieve its objectives over the next 20 years, including the building of a Space Station and possibly a human mission to Mars, in an era of constrained federal budgets. NASA budgets, for example, have been relatively flat in recent years. NASA has worked to streamline its operations by cutting costs, shifting more responsibilities to the private sector, and partnering with other countries. It remains to be seen, however, whether those efforts will succeed in bringing NASA's ambitious program in line with budget realities. The International Space Station is to be a configuration of laboratories placed in orbit by the U.S., Russia and other international partners that will allow astronauts to live and work in space for months at a time.