even the NSF is stuck with anecdotal evidence

[ursula]

This article doesn't answer my question. But it does have lots of other interesting tidbits, including a link to an article on the correlation between interest in science fiction and interest in the space program, and the fact that people with higher incomes are less likely to watch the X-Files, but equally likely to watch Star Trek.

Comments

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Since my last visit to your lj :) I've been reminded that a fair number of the people who have worked in some capacity for space programs wrote/write sf. There's a dialogic relation of some sort, then, between contributions to publicly accessible, imaginative writing about space and formative work behind the scenes that enables generation n+0.5 to rethink what's possible. I imagine that any studies of sf writers with ties to a space program will have been written by literary types--i.e., perhaps not the sort of analysis you'd want. There's a fairly good distribution of age and level of expertise / formal training among the writers that come to mind, too, which makes things more interesting, although I can't think offhand of anyone younger than Stephen Baxter and Wil McCarthy.