NASA seeks to reverse apathy

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- 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.
And he has no idea why they paid a visit to the international space station.
"It's not something that everybody is really into," said Humphries, 18, a student at Brevard Community College, less than 10 miles from the space center. "It's not interesting anymore. There's nothing new that everybody can catch onto."
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 and largely indifferent to manned space flight.
Recent surveys show young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 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.
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.
"If we make it clear that the focus of the United States space program for the foreseeable future will be out there, will be beyond what we do now, I think you won't have any problem at all reacquiring the interest of young people," Griffin said.
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