President Ronald Reagan strongly supported NASA's space programs and research during his period in office. It was during his time that the six year hiatus on launching missions to space was broken with the Columbia Space Shuttle.
Despite his constant support and endorsing of NASA's efforts, his Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as 'Star Wars', which consisted on shielding the nation with an outer space defense mechanisms that would intersect and destroy Russian missiles during flight with both space and earth based laser stations, proved to be too far fetched and required technologies that still needed decades of research at the time. This made the initiative impossible to develop and sustain. It was cancelled by later administrations.