More than half of US adults expect that people will routinely travel in space as tourists in the next 50 years, according to a new report released on Friday.
The Pew Research Center survey report, however, showed that Americans themselves are not enthusiastic about travelling to space.
While 35 per cent said they would be interested in orbiting Earth in a spacecraft, 65 per cent said they would not be interested in this. About 44 per cent also think people will not routinely travel to space as tourists by the year 2073.
The survey on 10,329 US adults, conducted between May 30 and June 4, takes a wide-ranging look at Americans’ attitudes toward space, including the contributions of private companies, priorities for NASA and public expectations for the next 50 years in space.
About seven-in-ten Americans said it is essential that the US continue to be a world leader in space exploration, and 65 per cent say it is essential that NASA continue to be involved in space exploration.
This comes even as private space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are increasingly involved in space, and also because more countries, such as India and China, are pursuing their own goals in space, which could challenge the US as a world leader.
Looking to the future of space, a large share (69 per cent) of Americans expect problems with human-made debris in space from rockets, satellites and other human-made objects over the next 50 years.
But 58 per cent are confident that discovering intelligent life and building colonies (65 per cent) on other planets will not happen.
The share of Americans who think space colonies will be built in the next 50 years is virtually unchanged since 2018.
Further, Americans rank monitoring asteroids (60 per cent) that could hit the Earth and monitoring the Earth’s climate system (50 per cent) as the top priorities for NASA.
There’s far less public urgency for NASA to send humans to the moon or Mars and to search for other planets that could support life. Only 16 per cent considered it as top priority for the space agency.
Just 12 per cent of Americans said sending human astronauts to explore the moon should be a top priority for NASA, and only 11 per cent said this about sending human astronauts to explore Mars.
Larger shares think both of these things are not too important for NASA or that they should not be done (43 per cent).
In April, NASA announced the crew for the Artemis II mission, scheduled for late 2024, which would fly around the moon, taking astronauts the furthest from Earth since the 1970s.
The next planned mission would be for a lunar landing. Missions to the moon are considered important preparation for sending astronauts to Mars.
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