By: Jennifer Zhou

The first moon landing happened in 1969 and brought with it insurmountable pride to the United States during the Cold War. However, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center shows that over half of Americans think that NASA’s top priority should be watching for asteroids that might hit Earth instead of another moon landing.

A recent study by the Pew Research center, a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world, asked over 10,000 randomly selected Americans to rate the importance of nine NASA missions. The amount of people who believe that moon landing should be NASA’s top priority falls at only 12%. 60% of the sample group, however, believe that NASA’s priority should be monitoring asteroids. This might mean that NASA should explain more thoroughly the benefits and negatives of each mission.

The reason for this survey is that NASA, as announced in the Washington Post, is planning “to send four astronauts around the moon for the first time since the 1970s.” This new mission is the Apollo II, which is scheduled to happen at the end of 2024.

NASA also hopes to land on the moon by 2025. The United States is in a space race with China, who intends to land astronauts on the moon by 2030. Both countries have interest in the South Pole. China has also landed “a rover on Mars and a robotic spacecraft on the far side of the moon,” reports the WP?.

The poll also showed that 55% of Americans think that they will be traveling into space easily in the next 50 years. However, only 35% said that they would be interested. We can take away that perhaps NASA has not made the idea of Space traveling particularly appealing. The survey also shows that 32 % say that the space sector should be able to allow progress, even if NASA is not involved.

More information from the Pew survey shows that 41% say that companies are doing a good job of appealing space travel to humans, while 15% disagree, showing that space companies aren’t paying as much attention to appealing and advertising.

The issue of space debris is a reason that space companies are receiving low marks. 26% say that space companies are doing a bad job while 21% say that they are doing a good job. The rest aren’t sure how the companies are doing. Almost 70% of Americans think that there will be “major problems with debris” over the next 50 years, the survey found.

From this poll, we can take away how much NASA and other space companies need to advertise more and add more interest. Therefore, this survey has shown us a lot about the thoughts about space of Americas.