NASA began a series of public conferences this week in which it discussed various new technologies that would be important for future long-duration human space missions. Focusing on such technologies is at the heart of President Obama's approach to manned spaceflight policy.
The problem is that NASA's funding doesn't allow the agency to pursue all the technologies, so it is asking the public to help it prioritize the technologies to fund. That might be a clever public relations ploy-- and it could be useful if "public" is carefully defined-- but bringing the American public at large into the process might not be the smartest thing. Every educational survey shows Americans generally are well behind the rest of the developed world in science and math. Closing that gap before giving the general American public a big voice in something as technical as technology development might be a good idea.
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