A weekday in May, 1961. Miss Hill's second grade class in South Pittsburg TN. We all come in to find one of those 23" B/W metal case TV sets on a 4ft tall roll-around AV stand in the corner ....we're going to watch TV in school! Didn't matter what, we were excited.
Mid afternoon Miss Hill rolls the TV to the front of the room, pulls up the rabbit ears and, as the set warms up, tells us briefly of the space program. And we watch Alan Shepard's sub-orbital flight, from preflight coverage to splashdown and recovery. For most of the class it was an interesting diversion, but I was fascinated. From then til I graduated high school nine years later I kept stacks of magazines and scrapbooks of everything I found about NASA; built detailed models of all the launch vehicles and capsules; could quote from memory all the missions from Mercury through Apollo, names of the astronauts, the vehicles, the dates, flight data, mission goals. A major disappointment was finding I could never be an astronaut (because I wear glasses), so I became an engineer.
Public support decreased long before the Columbia incident. Space flight had become mundane; initially there was the "us against them" challenge of getting to the moon before the Soviets, but once that was done most people lost interest. The last three moon landings were canceled for budget reasons, subsequent flights were so highly technical and scientific that the average person wasn't interested. And the original allure of the space program, and the vision of the future we had developed, never materialized. The pushbutton world of the Jetsons never arrived; the space station, rather than the majestic rotating wheel of science fiction (epitomized in the movie 2001), turned out to be an uninspiring tinkertoy contraption in low orbit. The expected moon colony wasn't forthcoming, an expedition to Mars would not occur in our lifetime. For the foreseeable future spaceflight was something reserved for a few dozen highly trained specialists, not for the common man. There was no exploration involved, which would certainly have stirred interest; and unlike the past, where any able-bodied man could go to a port city and sign on for an ocean voyage to see new parts of the world, we would never experience more than TV coverage of space walks to repair the Hubble. For most people the entire space program after the moon landing (and even before for some) was a waste of tax money that could be better spent elsewhere (does no good to point out virtually every major technological advance in the past half century was a direct result of the space program).
I find it a sad commentary that today we have individuals so wealthy they can afford their own private space programs.