Ask the power brokers in Washington, and they will tell you it is a vital national imperative for NASA astronauts to return to the moon before China gets there.
“Make no mistake,” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said during a hearing in September. “We are in a new space race with China. And if we fail, there will be a bad moon on the rise.”
But if you ask people on the street what they think NASA should be doing, they might not put sending astronauts to the moon at the top of the list of priorities.
Indeed, it might be near the bottom.
But when it comes to space policy, the opinions of the power brokers usually win.
In the days to come, NASA plans to launch four astronauts — three Americans and one Canadian — toward the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
The mission, Artemis II, is often portrayed as part of a new space race with China.
In December, President Trump issued an executive order calling for the return of Americans to the surface of the moon by 2028 and the beginning of a permanent lunar outpost two years later.
“We’re going to be there, realizing the scientific and economic potential on the lunar surface,” Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, said in an interview in January.
The agency that Mr. Isaacman has led for since December carries out a wide portfolio of activities in space and on Earth. Its astronauts have been living on the International Space Station for more than 25 years. Two rovers on Mars are poking into ancient rocks trying to understand when that planet was warm and wet. Newer spacecraft are en route to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and a metal-rich object in the asteroid belt. The agency tracks the sun’s flares and the Earth’s changing climate. It is also building experimental supersonic airplanes that promise to slice through the air without generating loud booms.
Yet in 2026, as it has for years, the human spaceflight program, which includes Artemis, accounts for almost half of NASA’s $24.4 billion budget. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have steadfastly supported NASA.
When the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, surveyed more than 10,000 American adults about space in 2023, it found that their overall opinions of NASA remained high. When asked to rank the importance of nine activities undertaken by NASA, a majority of the respondents regarded all of them as a top priority or important but lower priority.
While more people than not supported sending “human astronauts to explore the moon,” it was nonetheless next to last in importance, and 41 percent said it was not that important for NASA or not worth doing at all.
Of the nine activities, only “Send human astronauts to explore Mars” scored lower.
At the top of the list were two of the other things NASA does: “Monitor asteroids, other objects that could hit Earth,” followed by “Monitor key parts of the Earth’s climate system.”
Americans’ blasé attitude toward human spaceflight is enduring. Five years earlier, Pew, asking the same questions, received almost the same answers.
“I do think we are missing the connection that NASA has to the broadest segment of the public, which are these aspects of NASA that impact their lives,” said Lori Garver, who, as NASA’s deputy administrator during the Obama administration, was a major proponent of taking a more entrepreneurial approach. That attracted nimbler aerospace companies like SpaceX, helping to speed some NASA missions at a lower cost.
Ms. Garver wondered if the mismatch of priorities could eventually erode support for the agency.
She was struck in particular by the high priority that people placed on spotting asteroids that might one day collide with Earth. When she became deputy administrator of NASA in 2009, she said, NASA was spending almost nothing in that area, maybe $15 million.
“For years, actually, it was less than NASA’s travel budget for headquarters,” said Casey Dreier, who leads policy efforts at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that advocates space science and exploration.
“Most people don’t think about this much, and when presented with that list, they prioritize what sounds most relevant to them,” Mr. Dreier said. “It’s good to understand the climate on the planet that I live. It’s good not to be killed by an asteroid.”
While protecting the planet from catastrophic asteroid impacts received more than $300 million in the latest budget, that is still just a sliver of what NASA spends. A single launch of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, like the one that will send the Artemis II astronauts around the moon, is estimated to cost $4.1 billion.
The ambivalence of Americans toward sending astronauts to the moon is nothing new. During the first space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, astronauts were national heroes and NASA was regarded positively. But people continually worried about the cost.
“It’s almost always about the budget,” said Roger Launius, a space historian who previously worked at NASA and the Smithsonian Institution. “It’s not like they have a real aversion to humans going to the moon or Mars.”
In poll after poll during the 1960s and early 1970s, a majority of Americans said the Apollo program was not worth the cost, with one exception.
In July 1969, the month that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first astronauts to step on the moon, a thin majority — 53 percent — agreed that Apollo had been worth the money. Spending for NASA peaked in 1966 at 4.4 percent of the federal budget and then started dropping. In recent years, it has accounted for about 0.5 percent, or less, of federal spending.
Part of the challenge, then and now, is to put forth a compelling case for why we choose the moon. Once NASA beat the Soviets there in 1969, many people saw little reason to continue.
And in some ways, the Artemis program is an even more difficult sell.
“Going to the moon and Mars seems pretty abstract,” Mr. Dreier said. “What does that do for me?”
Since President Trump started NASA on the Artemis path in his first term, the argument has been that a human presence on the moon could spark a new lunar economy, lead to new discoveries about the solar system and counter the geopolitical ambitions of China.
Mr. Isaacman said billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are now contributing a significant share of the costs. “It’s not all on the shoulders of the taxpayers,” he said.
He also pointed to helium-3, a lighter version of helium that is more plentiful on the moon than on Earth. It could provide an efficient fuel for future fusion reactors.
“What we might find, what we could discover, could have a material impact back here on Earth,” Mr. Isaacman said. “If helium-3 does become a source of new energy here on Earth, that can change the trajectory of humankind, right?”
NASA missions that do not involve humans, like the Hubble and Webb space telescopes and the rovers on Mars, have often garnered more excitement than the space shuttles and the International Space Station.
In a paper published in 2017, Dr. Launius observed that most people do not feel strongly about human spaceflight.
“The overall activities of NASA have been advanced by a small base of supporters,” he wrote, “challenged by a small group of opponents, and sustained by a larger number of people who accept a status quo in space exploration.”
A lack of public support for spending a lot of money on spaceflight “has been a fundamental reality of NASA since its beginning,” Dr. Launius added. “It is not changing, and probably not changeable, in the predictive future.”
Kenneth Chang, a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth.
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