This is the great unknown.
And this is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
otherwise known as NASA.
NASA reached peak cool on July 20th, 1969, when it sent the first man
to the moon. However, the agency's impact on society goes far beyond
space. Some of the biggest advancements in technology started as NASA
experiments, from GPS systems and dust busters to freeze-dried foods
and laptop computers.
But Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famous astrophysicist, says NASA
partnering with Elon Musk's SpaceX is one of the biggest advancements
the agency has made since the moon landing.
Elon Musk is trying to invent a future.
He's thinking about society, culture, how we interact, what forces
need to be in play to take civilization into the next century.
And in May of 2020, with over 10 million people watching, NASA sent
men to space on a Falcon 9 rocket made by SpaceX.
Here's how NASA got cool again.
This is Suddenly Obsessed.
On October 1st, 1958, Dwight D.
Eisenhower formed NASA as a way to separate the military from a
civilian agency. In 1961, JFK announced his intention to send three
astronauts to the moon. On July 21st, 1969, with roughly 600 million
people watching, Neil Armstrong took those famous first steps.
In 1966, NASA reportedly spent as much as 4.4% of the entire U.S.
budget on the program.
Between 1960 and 1973, the U.S.
spent the 2020 equivalent of $283 billion sending men to the moon.
Then NASA experienced some major setbacks with the Apollo 13 mission
in 1970, the Challenger explosion in 1986 and the Columbia disaster
in 2003. But that didn't stop the agency from pursuing ambitious
goals, even as the political will to finance space exploration began
to wane. In April of 1990, NASA sent the Hubble Space Telescope on a
mission to photograph deep space, and it is still sending back high
resolution images to this day.
In November of 2000, humankind made long-term plans for space
exploration with the first human-occupied International Space
Station. When you associate NASA with cool because we're going off
the planet, we're working together as teams in space, we're looking
at going to Mars. We're looking at sending the first woman to the
moon in the Artemis program.
And I think kids see this, people see this.
They say, "These are the things that are possible."
Astronaut Scott Kelly spent nearly a year on the ISS back in 2015.
I paced myself and I didn't look forward to the end.
I kind of had a bit set in my mind that, OK, I now live in space.
This is my life. This is my job.
I want to do my job well.
It will be over someday.
And when it is, it's going to be great.
But on August 31st, 2011, NASA formally ended the space shuttle
program and the lack of missions found the agency's slipping out of
the public consciousness.
Once the human spaceflight program kind of took a pause about a decade
ago, you saw a lot of American interests fade in NASA.
However, two private American companies stepped in to help pick up
where NASA left off: SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk and Blue Origin,
founded by Jeff Bezos.
Two of the most powerful men in business.
There's been a push to privatize a lot of different efforts where
companies like Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are doing
more and more and getting involved and actually partnering with NASA
and other government agencies to complete tasks that in the past
would be solely funded and developed by NASA and its team of
aerospace contractors.
NASA sent the Curiosity rover to Mars in 2012.
But it's these companies and the powerful yet controversial figures
behind them that are raising NASA's profile both nationally and
internationally. And it catalyzes interest in all the other things
that SpaceX and other private companies are doing.
In May of 2020, SpaceX successfully launched two NASA astronauts into
space on a Falcon 9 rocket named after the famous Star Wars
spacecraft, Millennium Falcon.
The crew safely docked at the ISS and the Falcon 9's boosters returned
safely to Earth. It was the first time SpaceX sent humans into space,
a longtime goal of Musk and his crew.
On August 2nd, 2020, the astronauts splashed down off the coast of
Pensacola, Florida. The first time there was an aquatic landing in 45
years. The developmental costs of NASA's commercial crew programs
totaled about $6 billion, but NDGT says Musk's impact is hard to
quantify. Other people don't realize it yet.
But we are on the frontier of the future of civilization.
And no, I don't think he gets his full due from all sectors of
society, but ultimately he will when the sectors that he is
pioneering transform the lives of those who are currently have no
clue that their life is about to change.
I think some of the biggest things for human space flight are these
partnerships with these private companies that NASA is partnering
with. If we get boots back on the moon with a habitat.
You know, we're looking at letting people stay there for longer
durations then just bouncing around on the moon and getting back in
the vehicle and coming home.
But getting the public to recognize just how far NASA has come
required buy-in from the agency's most visible assets: The
astronauts. Each NASA mission has its own social media communication
strategy. When I was the commander of ST S-118 in 2007, the public
affairs officer that was assigned to the astronaut office came to me
and he says, "Hey, Scott. We would like you to tweet about your
training and then you'd be the first person to tweet from space."
And I said, "What is that?"
Kelly might not have been the first astronaut to tweet from space, but
when he finally did, they received a ton of attention.
And questions.
Thousands and thousands of them.
I get a question from President Barack Obama.
It was, "Hey Scott.
Did you ever just look out the window and just freak out?"
So that was cool. Kelly and NASA came to embrace the power of social
media once they saw how much interest the posts were gathering.
I think it's a great way for NASA and astronauts that are really the
most visible part of the organization.
Not necessarily the most important part, but the most visible part.
It's a great way for them to connect with the general public.
It's been pretty impressive to see how each different NASA mission or
NASA program will have a Twitter account that engages people with
video clips and interviews and live feeds from Periscope, from the
International Space Station to Q&A's with whether it's engineering
teams that are working on robots at NASA's JPL Center in California
or it's astronauts onboard the space station itself.
While jaw-dropping images of the Carina Nebula and live tweeting Bowie
covers of Space Oddity got clicks, NASA's generosity when it comes to
using its logos is making the agency popular with younger
generations. There are two variations of its logo.
The first one, nicknamed the meatball, is round with the insignia
representing a planet.
The stars represent space.
The red V-shaped wing stands for aeronautics.
The circular orbit around the agency's name represents space travel.
NASA created a second sleek logo called the worm, but it was
officially retired in 1992.
And since NASA is government funded, it doesn't make a profit on
licensing the logos.
Companies can ask for permission to use either logo on anything from
clothing, coffee mugs, lunchboxes, bedsheets, among other things.
You can still find the worm and meatball logos on all sorts of
products today, including the Falcon 9 rocket.
NASA has done a great job with the licensing of their brand.
In particular, they've made it very easy for people to use their logo
marks. Both the worm and the meatball.
The only stipulation on the use of a NASA mark is that it not be
listed as an official collaboration.
NASA had an opportunity to clamp down very hard on the use of that
mark and keep it constricted.
They made the decision to do the opposite.
Those classic logos, the meatball and the worm, are by far the most
identifiable logos across all demographics for NASA.
When you see a kid in south central L.A.
that's wearing a NASA shirt, you know that things have changed a lot
and that it's cool. But brand awareness can only do so much.
Public interest is what fuels NASA.
I'll quote my twin brother Mark, who also was an astronaut.
Going to Mars is not about rocket science.
It's really about political science because we know most of what we
need to know to do it.
What we really need is the political support and the funding.
I know we'll get there someday.
I'm just not going to make a bet on when.