Despite anecdotal evidence of the American people's interest in space exploration being correlated with liberal political views and a lower level of religiosity, a few studies suggest that under certain conditions, more conservative views may support it even more. Using the available data from the Pew's American Trends Panel, our research seeks to clarify the interactional effect of political and religious preferences on the level of interest in the space programs and commitment to space politics support for the private industry. We hypothesize that the simultaneous presence of conservative views in both accounts of politics and religion may be linked to the underlying concept of "space nationalism," i.e., the belief that the US should lead in space exploration, resulting in a higher level of support for space exploration. In order to test our hypothesis, we present the results of several iterations of multivariate regression models. As our primary outcome variable, we constructed an index of "Support of Space Policy" combining the level of personal views (for example, knowledge about and interest in space exploration), concrete policy preference (for example, funding), and outcome expectations (for example about Mars colonization and Private Space Industry development). We operationalized our regressors as follows. We used two distinct measurements for political preferences, first, as a scale ranging from too liberal to extremely conservative, and second, as self-identification across the US political spectrum. Our second main predictor, religion, is a composite measure encompassing conventional indicators of membership, attendance, biblical literalism, and level of the salience of the religious experience. Finally, we include the level of agreement with the ideas of "US space supremacy" and "national industrial interest." Controlling for robust socio-demographic variables, such as race, gender, income, education, and scientific knowledge, our findings show a statistically significant difference between political clusters and religious identification. Our results confirm that a combination of political and religious views, correlated with space nationalism, is a robust predictor for conservative's support for space exploration support.
