Edawg:<br />u guys suck...<br /><br />Me:<br />If thats what your response will be to the general public, space advocacy is dead and buried LOL.<br /><br />Seriously, the biggest barrier to overcome IMO is shedding the percieved geek image that comes with interest in human spaceflight. The general public that I know simply could care less about it beyond the gee whiz factor. That factor shows up when there is a major achievement such as landing a man on the moon. The first shuttle mission, unmanned Mars landings. Once the honeymoon ends, its back to business as usual for GP which is question space spending louder than questioning the deficit. This because they have help from the mass media which is lukewarm towards human space flight as well.<br /><br />Which leads to the other perception which is at least partly true, the money spent. The billions of dollars and the perception it all goes to send a few people up and to support the ground personnell, welfare for engineers is what it has been called.<br /><br />If the media spent as much effort showing the deficit and commenting negatively about that as they have been so willing to do on spaceflight (Remember the "Troubled Hubble" moniker).<br /><br />For the record, the deficit is somewhere around $400 billion this year alone. NASA budgets are about $16 billion annually. The deficit is at a bare minimum, twice the size of all NASA spending since NASAs inception in 1958. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>