Apathetic Gen-Xers Worry Administrators Planning For Future

NASA wants to get younger people excited about its future plans for space exploration. The problem is, most don't really know anything about the storied agency.

Brevard Community College student Adam Humphries studies ten minutes from the Kennedy Space Center, but couldn't answer questions about Discovery's recent mission to the ISS.

He told the Associated Press, "It's not something that everybody is really into. It's not interesting anymore. There's nothing new that everybody can catch onto."

NASA says recent studies reveal little to no interest among America's younger crowd in the agency's future manned Moon and Mars missions. This has agency image-makers scrambling for a way to impress a media-saturated generation with instant access to technologies undreamed of during NASA's heyday.

"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.

NASA will retire the shuttle in 2010 in favor of the Orion spacecraft which it hopes will take man back to the Moon and on to Mars. These missions are the key to inspiring a new generation of NASA groupies according to agency administrator Michael Griffen.

"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 in a recent interview.

The space agency plans to use some of the fancy technology enjoyed by young people to spread its message. Communicating via podcasts, YouTube, MTV and at major sporting events are all ways NASA has considered to help.

NASA will have to compete with crazy conspiracy theorists for bandwidth though. A video available for download on YouTube resurrects the old saw NASA faked the Moon landings of the late sixties and early seventies.

And that doesn't bode well for NASA. For a jaded generation whose baby-boomer parents tell them not to trust the government (perhaps rightly so), and who gets the vast majority of its news from TV, if it's video it must be true...

FMI: www.nasa.gov