Which is the most talked about NASA mission?

Mars landers.

The Viking missions are not well remembered, but think the more recent missions had good press.

No one talks of science any more. I bet if you were to ask anyone under the age of 40 who was the first man on the moon or the first man in space they could not tell you.

More is the pity.

But, I bet, by god, they could tell you what Kim Kardashian’s latest f*ck fest or who Usher nailed in the bathroom at the club.

My rough guess:

Tied with first:
Challenger – 1986, exploded 71 seconds downrange live on TV killing seven astronauts.
Columbia – 2003, disintegrated in the atmosphere above California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas on upon re-entry, live on TV, killing seven astronauts.

Then:

Apollo 11 – 1969, landed first man on the moon with live transmission from the moon’s surface to the world’s TVs.
Apollo 13 – 1970, almost didn’t make it back from an aborted moon landing due to an oxygen tank explosion damaging the spacecraft. It was touch-and-go for ten hours with live TV commentary.
Apollo 1 – 1967, exploded on the launchpad killing three astronauts.

^^ so you’re saying that disasters made headlines rather than successful mission.

^^No. I’m saying that people are more freaked out about disasters and death than they are about missions that go well—and the media knows this. When did they ever cut live into programming to report the moment of the Mars landing? How many people know Voyager is still out there and still responding?

Yeah.. you’re right.

The Mars landing from a years back (7 minutes of terror ) is as exciting as any NASA project, and it was remarkably sucessful.
The Hubble telescope is probably the most popular, and the International Space Station is probably doing the best work.

@rojo Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin.
Also, everybody is talking about science these days, especially if it has to do with space. I dare say there is a significant lack of attention towards humanities rather than sciences.
You’ve been in the wrong crowd of younsters.

I’m in a science group and we meet online twice a week. You are all invited to join.

What is the name of the group, @cazzie ?

The group is called ‘Science Friday’ and we meet in an online virtual world called Second Life at a place called Spaceport Alpha on Fridays and listen to the NPR show, but often expand or go off on tangents when the topic is boring or not science. Our avatars sit around a table and we listen to science shows both there and at another place called Nuba on Sundays and listen to a show called The Naked Scientist from Cambridge University (from the BBC).

The Hubble Mission. Pretty much everyone on the planet has seen at least one of its pictures.

The Hubble Mission and then the rescue of it. Super cool stuff. I agree.

So many important ones.

My list:

the Challenger explosion

the two Mars pathfinder missions that were scheduled for months and lasted years.

Apollo moon landing

Landing on a Comet.

Hubble space telescope.

Apollo 13

@Sneki95 I am so pleased to hear that the rest of the world is not as scientifically backward as I fear we are in the US.

Two words…Tim & Peake

Repair of the Hubble.

@rojo

Plenty in the US who are under 40 aren’t as scientifically backward as you want to presume they are ether. If anything, in my experience, the scientifically backward crowd tends to run older. But I’m not going to presume that speaks for the 40 and up set as a whole.

In answer to the question, I’d definitely have to say the Challenger disaster. The build-up leading to it was pretty immense to begin with, due to the “teacher in space” thing. Then when it exploded….well, nothing gets folks buzzing like a good tragedy.

@Darth_Algar it isn’t just the 40 and under crowd. It is the 40+ ones that have almost completely undermined the US Space program. And, it is not like they decided that the money and resources would be better spent making the lives of Americans better, no, they decided they needed to privatize the military and then give all the money to companies like Halliburton and Titan and pay ungodly sums to military equipment suppliers for defective products or even normal products that they could go buy at Sears for a fraction of the cost. Not to mention putting and keeping US soldiers and sailors in far off foreign lands because every other country in the world does it. Oh Wait! No they don’t! WTF?!?! Why do we have to then? Because how else can we support the M-I-C if we don’t keep fighting, using, and restocking?
The only way space will get any attention is when we decide that we need, for some reason, to place military bases in it.

“The only way space will get any attention is when we decide that we need, for some reason, to place military bases in it.”
That is the only reason you participated in the space race in the first place.
Because that Sputnik could have been a warhead.

Space is already militarized I know but we do not have military bases out there.

Yet.

That we know of.

Speaking of the military…in 2012, the budget for NASA ($20 billion) was smaller than the air conditioning bill for the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq ($20.2B). WTF humanity?

You guys sounds like just the peeps that would enjoy the science group. I took a new person into Second Life last week and we went to a poetry reading. It was Saturday so nothing scheduled for the science group but I think she still learned a lot and had fun.