Last week President Obama reaffirmed NASA’s commitment to send humans to Mars “by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth.”  In an op-ed published on CNN.com, President Obama said that such an undertaking will “require continued cooperation between government and private innovators.” To understand the reaction to this news, we analyzed Twitter data from the days following the announcement.  Unsurprisingly, the announcement generated a large amount of activity, peaking on October 12th with over 35,000 tweets that include the words “Mars.”  The activity dipped to 30,000 on October 13th before dramatically falling off in the remainder of the week.