Last Tuesday's landing of the Space Shuttle Discovery in the deserts of California capped a tense two weeks in which the safety of the vehicle and the seven astronauts it contained was never 100 percent assured. The loss of foam insulation during liftoff was eerily reminiscent of the last shuttle mission in 2003, when the Challenger burned up during re-entry, killing everyone on board -- an accident that was blamed on insulation.
How did the news of this danger, reported during the mission itself, affect the public? In June, a CNN/USA Today poll found that 74 percent of Americans thought that the shuttle project "should be continued." However, in a CBS News survey carried out after the Discovery's launch July 26, only 59 percent of the respondents said that the project was "worth continuing." Even with the margin of error factored in, it's a significant drop. CBS characterized the results as "a new low" in public support for the shuttle.
This support is critical since a lot of tax money is being spent on the space shuttle and the International Space Station it serves. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been criticized since the Challenger accident for not addressing the foam problem seriously enough. Some critics have said that it's unsolvable, and that if NASA publicly acknowledged the difficulty of the problem the whole program would have been shut down. As it is, planned launches have been postponed indefinitely, but the agency still insists that the program will continue, even if all the shuttles are to be retired by 2009.