Keith’s note: Canada’s Chris Hadfield’s use of social media and other aspects of education and public outreach while on orbit has been masterful – even transcendent – and sets a new bar for others to strive for on future missions. Oh wait: NASA is eliminating Education and Public Outreach. Nevermind. NASA no longer cares about these things.
And Charlie Bolden agrees with this change in focus and wants to abandon half a century of public engagement. Utterly pathetic. Not what a true leader should do.
There will be no other NASA Watch updates today. Just this.
Watch it.

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member...

39 replies on “Transcending What The Space Station Usually Represents”

  1. I’ve seen many mentions of Hadfield’s videos, tweets, etc., but didn’t watch any of them until this one. Holy mackerel. Hadfield has done more to humanize ISS than everyone else who’s ever been up there. NASA/CSA/ESA/Roscosmos et al should be doing MORE of this.

  2. Trouble is, every time a US astronaut does something like this, there’s bound to be someone yelling “Did I pay for this with MY tax dollars?!” Which is truly pathetic.

    1. I agree with you about that but maybe this time will be different since he is Canadian. Just kidding – People will still ignorantly use this to fuel their arguments against wasted American taxpayer money. Amazing video and I wish he were American. Already has more views on Youtube in one day than the Gravity trailer flick. Talk about a way to capture the imagination.

      1. Chris Hadfield has done an amazing job – he’s a great guy. But even he couldn’t stop the nauseating Troll who’s going into the comments section of CNN and other websites, waffling on about how NASA is ‘faking’ the station and indeed not just Apollo but EVERY manned space mission is just fakery and special effects. Just when I thought the internet and some of it’s denizens couldn’t get any more banal, stupid and bizzare, I see clowns like that!! If there was but one Troll that I wish could actually punch in the face Aldrin-style: that guy would be it.

  3. I’ll give kudos to the first astronaut to sneak a cornbeef sandwich onboard the iss.

  4. I thought this was going to be lame, but it was actually awesome. Chris Hadfield has done an amazing job of making videos of interest to the general public. He has 900,000 twitter followers. He still is a bit behind Mike Massimino.

      1. Now 8.5 million. This has got to be a record of some kind (for anything coming from a space agency).

  5. Rachel Maddow had a nice bit about this on MSNBC last night. Once they get Commercial Crew going, they should send Educators, Students, Entertainers, Athletes, etc.. up during crew rotations.

    1. Which “they” are you referring to? NASA?
      After the loss of Christa McAuliffe in the Shuttle Challenger disaster, Reagan’s Teacher in Space Project was never mentioned again by NASA, so I’m guessing there might be an unofficial policy against this sort of thing, which is unfortunate. Private company efforts to start something similar never seemed to take off. Given the cost of a flight I guess that’s not surprising. Even with Commercial Crew in place, someone other than NASA will have to come up with a big chunk of money to do this. I think it’s a great idea, though.

      1. It’s not just an unofficial policy, it’s official policy. No amateurs on US spacecraft, just astronauts. The Teacher in Space program was ended by bringing Barbara Morgan into the astronaut corps – she flew one mission. The Journalist in Space and Payload Specialist programs also were shut down.

  6. “NASA is eliminating Education and Public Outreach. Nevermind. NASA no longer cares about these things.”

    No, the White House has decided to eliminate those functions from NASA and give them to the Department of Education. I doubt NASA or the other agencies where this is happening were consulted on the change.

    1. NASA AA for Education, Leland Melvin, was a co-chair of the interagency committee that came up with the plans to take things away from NASA/shut them down.

      1. Which committee? The only one I know with respect to the EPO consolidation/cuts is CoSTEM, co-chaired by Subra Suresh: http://www.whitehouse.gov/a…. But then again it seems like this whole business has been a shadowy process run behind closed doors, so there may well have been other contributors that those of us who are not insiders are unaware of.

      2. So? When a committee makes sweeping changes like this it’s usually because someone higher up the food chain has decided to do it and gets the committee to rubber stamp it. In this case, OSTP and ED have their fingerprints all over it.

        It certainly was that way for the Clinton Health Plan. A physician that volunteered for one of the committees quickly found out that his input, and that of the other members, were not really needed or wanted as the policy wonks in the White House knew what they wanted and dictated what the outcome of the committees would be.

        1. OSTP was against al of these education cuts and pushed back on them. But it was OMB that pushed them through – and of course, they set the budget – not OSTP.

    2. The idea of moving the education functions to Dept of Ed was something I heard directly from Bolden at an all hands shortly after he became administrator in 2009, and I heard the same philosophy from Gerstenmayer before that. Gerstenmayer wants NASA to focus on ‘engineering’. If I understand his philosophy, then I think he really does not see science, education, utilization, as primary NASA functions or responsibilities. I suspect that Leland Melvin, who after all has little background in this area to begin with, had his marching orders from Bolden, who thought he was getting great advice from his AA for space and exploration.

      The whole lot of them have done tremendous damage.

  7. Folks:

    What do you want to bet that somewhere in NASA’s records is a multimillion dollar study entitled something like “Improving NASA Outreach To The General Population (or: “Yes, We Still Have A Space Program!”)… collecting dust, too difficult and expensive to implement.

    I think Chris’ secret is actually quite simple. As far as I know, Chris’ son Evan is the only gatekeeper between his dad and us. No vetting, checking, committee discussions over ‘talking points’…no oversight of any kind at all. In fact, the Canadian Space Agency helped make this video (which actually took half a year to plan and implement).
    Let’s not forget Twitter pioneer, Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi, as @Astro_Soichi. He also took great pictures inside and outside the ISS, had many video conferences with Japanese schools children and interviews for TV from the ISS. Incidentally, he’s a JAXA astronaut.

    What can be learned from this? Could it be that there are just too many hurtles for NASA astronauts to jump over to take full advantage of the immediacy of social media?

    What can be done about this? Maybe it’s time for NASA astronauts to have another ‘Right Stuff’ moment, like when Mercury astronauts asked for flight controls and got them! They should demand the controls to social media instead of being “a bunch of silent chimps in a tin can”! I mean, NASA trusts them with everything else, they should trust what they say too.

    Something will have to be done. When the ISS ‘goes dark’, people in high places are going to complain; “Charlie, we want you to implement an outreach program like those damn Cunuks put together. Why didn’t you do this before, makes us look like damn fools!” …slam!

    The joke is, there was no program, in fact, just the opposite.

    tinker

    1. Tinker,

      Sometimes being smaller makes things much easier. We have10 provinces plus 2 territories in Canada and only about 10% of the population of the US instead of 50 states plus other holdings, so we don’t have to combine and reconcile nearly so many laws and processes.

      NASA, by nature of its size, and being an adjunct of a large government, pretty much has to be bureaucratic and constrained. It’s the nature of the beast.

      The other aspect of this is simply knowing how communicate with people. Do NASA’s astronauts, and its other public figures, ever get any training in how to communicate to the public? I’ve seen some pretty dry astronaut presentations and narrations over the years. They were obviously out of their element and weren’t comfortable at all doing PR work.

      If I had to guess at a cause, I’d say that they’ve simply never been trained or made to practice public outreach.

      Chris Hadfield, like a small number of people, seems like a natural, someone long comfortable talking with, and to, people, whether 3 people or 3 million. It’s really a matter of self confidence, which comes from knowing what you’re doing.

      I guess it doesn’t really matter now whether NASA folks are taught to communicate with the public or not since the government has decided not to pay for it any more. Right now EPO could be one of the most important things for NASA to be doing since, in theory, it’s the public at large through their elected representatives who decide on how much support NASA gets, and the public, as we’ve seen, has more misconceptions than familiarity with almost everything NASA.

  8. NASA has nothing to do with the elimination of Education programs. This is a federal mandate and consolidation of STEM programs across all federal agencies. It doesn’t matter if Bolden agrees with it or not. It was mandated by the President.

  9. It would be more impressive if it had been icing on top of a cake of top-quality, frontier-breaking science performed on the ISS. Unfortunately the ISS is not a science platform but a social media platform. In that context, it is a nice performance.

    1. RP:

      Actually, Expedition 35 broke a record in ISS utilization, both in number of experiments and hours running those experiments. What Commander Hadfield did on social media, including other music videos besides this one, he did in his spare time!

      If you are interested in the leading edge science on ISS, there’s always Google. Works for me. NASA does have problems letting us know in a nice, easy to find and utilize manner (as Keith often (and rightly) complains about).

      Still, that’s no excuse to blame the whole program for not getting the job done, because they are.

      tinker

      1. True, one has to look in Google because one doesn’t generally see ISS results trumpeted in frontline journals like Science, Nature, Phys. Rev. Lett, etc.

        The outside assessments, however, state at best that the results/benefits are inconclusive or incomplete.

        http://phys.org/news/2012-0…

        http://www.nap.edu/openbook…

        http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/745…

        http://www.nasa.gov/mission…

        The last link is telling. One has to dig into every individual sub link to look for publications/impacts. No one is going out of his/her way to highlight results. There are a few PRLs on colloid phenomena and not much else for the $100B to-date. The third link shows the ranking of journals that have carried ISS results but little on how many ISS publications made it into those journals.

        The AMS may turn up something eventually or it may not. But man, that’s an expensive payload made more expensive by the ultraexpensive bus to which it bolts.

        But, there’s a singing astronaut. I’ll give you that.

        1. RP:

          Admittedly, the ISS follows Robert A. Heinlein’s axiom “an Elephant is a mouse built to government specifications”! Agreed. The ISS was designed and built to be flown and assembled by the expensive and underused Space Shuttle. Inefficient, I agree. Budget cuts meant that 20% of that hundred billion never got flown. Wasteful, I agree.

          But it’s the hand we’re dealt with and we’re still in the game. We didn’t fold when Colombia broke up, even if it meant a four years delay and seven lives. We won’t fold now that utilization is ramping up.

          Also, there is no price that can be put on the experience that sixteen nations has gained in fifteen years of space station construction. Oh, except maybe the payback of having the confidence to do a major repair outside on such short notice. If there’s a ‘coming of age’ moment for the ISS, a final exam, as you will, that space walk was it.

          Give it time. Write your Congressman and Senators, demand more clarity and access to ISS science. It ain’t perfect but it’s what we have. It can be made better. If you care (like I do), take steps to make it better.

          I have a saying:

          “If it’s a horse race, I bet on the best horse to win. If it’s a one horse race, I bet on that horse to finish!

          The ISS is, unfortunately, a one horse race.

          tinker

          1. I recognize your thoughtful reply and I’ll try to answer in kind. I’ve been watching the ISS for a long time as you have but can’t agree with your conclusions. It has used science as an excuse to exist all along and simultaneously starved real science that could have used the funding. It is sad to see JWST and planetary science pitted against each other (just one example) when just the sunk costs of the ISS have so little to show. As these costs mount, the claims of scientific benefit become more and more extraordinary. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This thing has to hit multiple home runs and I don’t see it happening.

            I can’t agree that the spacewalk was the coming of age. To me it is a circular story – we need astronauts to put this thing up and maintain it so it can maintain them in case it needs to be fixed.

            Not folding: I’m reminded of Dr. Strangelove. Gen. Ripper has ordered a nuclear strike and Gen. Turgidson says there’s no alternative to send the rest of SAC in to finish the job. Admitting errors and adjusting is central to the scientific enterprise. Continuing this path as some sort of homage to the fallen or as candy for the younguns is a terrible waste of scarce resources.

            I don’t want to keep funding a one-horse race when the race is to nowhere and the horse isn’t very good.

  10. Great video and P.R. tool and NASA wants to abandon these. What’s going on?

  11. I was truly gob smacked when I watched this. The simplicity of the way it was done against the background of the ISS and Earth was awe inspiring. A great way to bring Space Exploration back to Earth!

  12. Man, I am such a minority! I thought the video sucked. I watched for 30 seconds and got bored. Looked like a typical NASA attempt to reach out.

    1. You are a minority! But it’s OK because everyone is different.. I was blown away by the production of the video. How the audio was synchronized with multiple locations within the station. I am no expert in that kind of thing, but it looked awesome to me.

  14. Bolden’s seems to be a simple-minded philosophy that goes back to before his time at the top. Remember when NASA tried to move life science research to the NIH, but discovered that the NIH was not focused on, nor that interested in space based research. And then the time they tried to move earth imagery to some other agency like NOAA or Department of the Interior, but they discovered that if you want astronauts photographing the earth, you still have to go through NASA. That effort did not go too far either. Now they want to move education to another agency with the ‘right’ name. Its a non-starter. Dept of Ed, Smithsonian, NSF, all have and have had for many years their own space-related education people and budgets sand there is absolutely no reason to think they are going to do anymore in the future than what they have done in the past. What would make sense is to work smarter, get organized, decide what kinds of products would be most useful for STEM education, but this simple minded approach just shuts down existing efforts without defining a better approach. Hopefully Bolden and the people feeding these bad ideas will be gone soon -the sooner the better as they have doen the program great harm – and hopefully before it costs a bunch more people their jobs.

  15. This was fantastic. Well done Hadfield! I loved the floating guitar, totally typical of what you might see in special effects but no special effects required. And actually a great job on the altered lyrics.

  16. What an incredible performance. Hadfield communicates his passion for space exploration so clearly. Wow.

Comments are closed.