How NASA Might Learn Something From The Rest Of Us
Keith’s note: I saw this TV ad for Bayer aspirin the other day featuring a window washer. I found the commentary to be interesting. Usually TV ads are not very deep intellectually. Having done window washing exactly once on a much smaller building (only 6 stories) when I was in my first rock climbing phase in college in the 70s, (and having climbed things 10 times higher years later when I worked at NASA) I can relate to what the guy in the ad is saying about doing this for a living:
“The first time that I was up on a high rise cleaning a window I was terrified. But once I made it to the ground I was stoked. I needed to do it again. That moment when you are going over the edge is like getting on the rocket that is going to Mars. You need to be clear minded. I have to feel my best to be able to do my best …”
NASA is constantly trying to better convey to people just what it is that the agency does to be relevant to their daily lives. Sometimes they get it right. More often NASA is really only talking to itself and misses the mark entirely. Assuming that this window washer is more or less speaking honestly from his own experience, he’s relating how he does a risk/benefit analysis every day. Sound familiar? And his way of expressing it to others has to do with what he imagines an astronaut goes through. I wonder how many other seemingly commonplace occupations share these similarities – if only NASA would seek them out.
There’s a lot of talk during election time of “flyover country” or the “99%” – in other words the majority of people who usually do not figure into all of the rhetoric. Perhaps if NASA started to listen to people outside of the usual suspects that they usually cater to they might find memes and messages that they can use to better explain what NASA does and why it does these things. In the process, perhaps NASA itself can better understand what it is doing and maybe how they might tweak these things so as to be more relatable to the people who pay for all the shiny rockets. Just sayin’
Interesting. Most of my work as a photographer is for a military shipbuilding company. I climb cranes wearing safety gear, go up on cherry-pickers wearing a safety harness, sometimes fly in helicopters to take pictures and also go to sea to record gun firings and the like (in full flash gear). I often think that what I do is on the astronaut continuum, tasks where you think twice and move once and yes, there’s quite a buzz when you stand on solid ground afterwards! The 1980s Space Settler vision never came to pass, but I think that the Working Joe is closer to future reality than is the vision of NASA. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are going to need hundreds of guys like me for every Neil Armstrong.
Yes, and the skill sets they will have and motives will be much more like those in the early Heinlein stories and the Ben Bova “Grand Tour” series.
In addition to skills and motives, I also hope their will be some changes in image and behavior. Imagine a NASA press conference involving the construction worker from “Gentlemen be seated” or a rocket engineer who was “you would not have wanted… in your home” (“The green hills of Earth.”) NASA astronauts have always been a bit too groomed and presented with a carefully constructed, clean, Normal Rockwell sort of image.
I even remember someone (on this blog, I think) being shocked by the first sentence of _The_Martian_, because it involved a NASA astronaut using obscene language. I’m sure most, if not all, actual astronauts do, from time to time. But as long as people have an unrealistic image of astronauts (scratch that; people who work off Earth), I don’t think we’re really we can talk about an extraterrestrial society.
The key is that they won’t be working for NASA, but for SpaceX, Blue Origin, and a whole new set of private ventures, so NASA will probably be able to keep that image for it’s astronauts and just look at the rest as “hired help”.
BTW remember when SpaceX was going to use its own company astronauts to fly the Dragon2 with the NASA astronauts being mere passengers? Seems that idea and image was dropped along the way. More and more Commercial Crew is looking like Contractor Crew, with SpaceX just building the hire and NASA operating it.
Be Clear, Be Concise, Show Benefit. It is that simple.
And engage with effective storytelling whenever possible. Humans and storytelling have been woven together from the beginning; it is almost always the best avenue for communication.
I think you are wrong Keith. I don’t think a lot of NASA has any sincere interest in telling the public what they are doing and for thatr reason I don’t think they pay much attention to the rest of us. I think they think that if they do something then people will know what they’ve done. In a lot of areas they are doing ok-science, planetary, etc. but in some areas where they are not getting much accomplished, like SLS, Orion and ISS, they not only are not doing the job they also are not convincing anyone that they are getting the job done. As the IG pointed out last week, the more NASA seems to talk about some of these the less people believe them.