Cape Canaveral, Fla. – Even though he goes to college in the shadow of the Kennedy Space Center, Adam Humphries can’t name any of the astronauts who just returned home on space shuttle Discovery.
He also has no idea why they paid a visit to international space station Alpha.
“It’s not something that everybody is really into,” said Hum phries, 18, a student at Brevard Community College, less than 10 miles from the space center. “It’s not interesting anymore.”
NASA’s image-makers are taking a hard look at how to win over Humphries’ generation – media-saturated teens and 20-somethings growing up on YouTube and Google who are largely indifferent to manned spaceflight.
Recent surveys show young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA’s new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2020 and eventually on to Mars.
“If you’re going to do a space- exploration program that lasts 40 years, if you just do the math, those are the guys that are going to carry the tax burden,” said Mary Lynne Dittmar, president of a Houston company that surveyed young people about the space program.
The 2004 and 2006 surveys by Dittmar Associates Inc. revealed high levels of indifference among 18- to 25-year-olds toward manned trips to the moon and Mars.
The space-shuttle program is slated to end in 2010 after construction of Alpha is completed with 13 more shuttle flights. The recent 13-day mission by Discovery’s seven astronauts was part of that long-running project.
When the shuttles are retired, they will be replaced by the Orion spacecraft, which NASA hopes will take humans back to the moon and then on to Mars.
Even though the Dittmar surveys offer a bleak view, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin believes ventures to the moon and Mars will excite young people more than the current shuttle trips to low Earth orbit.
At an October workshop attended by 80 NASA message spinners, young adults were right up there with Congress as the top two priorities for NASA’s strategic communications efforts.
Tactics encouraged at the workshop included new forms of communication, such as podcasts and YouTube; enlisting support from celebrities; and forming partnerships with youth-oriented media such as MTV or sports events such as the Olympics and NASCAR.
This story has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to an error by the Associated Press, it incorrectly reported the target date for returning astronauts to the moon. The target date is 2020.
