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the taxpayers think, "More missions are failing than used to -- NASA is losing its edge."
Taxpayers regard missions as discrete entities of roughly equal stature, not pie-slices of budget allocations. Go grab someone off the street and ask him to compare the cost of the Mars Pathfinder and the Viking landers. The average person will assume they cost roughly the same.
Much of the public sees the modern NASA as a bunch of buffoons who can't even convert pounds to kilograms.
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A related phenomenon is that when it comes to government-related activities most people think they are experts. There is some research on this, but I can't recall the cites off the top of my head. The point is that when Mr. X's car breaks he goes to a mechanic, and when his tomato plants aren't growing he asks an experienced gardener (or just lets the plants die), but as soon as he hears a 10-second soundbite on the "Drive at Five" about the federal budget or some new point of public policy he thinks he's qualified to accurately critique the policymakers. I think some of this spills into NASA territory as well. Example: A few years ago I was on a commercial flight to New Orleans (I think) and several minutes into the flight the pilot said we had to return to the airport because the aircraft had experienced "an engine stutter." All of a sudden everyone on the plane was an aerospace engineer, authoritatively explaining causes and effects of such a stutter. Of course there are various explanations for this phenomenon, from psychological to biological, there is even a class-oriented analysis, but whatever the explanation I think this is a part of people's reaction to NASA failures. People really do often think they could have corrected NASA's mistakes if they had been involved.