Marketing the Moon: How NASA Sold Space to Earth, Brain Pickings
“One year after the surprise launch of Sputnik, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was founded. The U.S. space program was determined to be markedly different from the Soviets — it would be an “open program” in which facts and data would flow freely between the agency and the public using an extensive public relations program, explain authors David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek in Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program (public library). It was a radical proposition: NASA, not the military, would release information and information would be released before, not after, a mission — an antithesis to the typical military strategy of confidentially. Tragedy would be reported alongside success.”
NASA used to do a lot of things better. It appears the agency has lost its way.
The way in which the Shuttle shut down was handled without any prospects for a replacement in sight, and laying off our people without thought of taking care of them. And give me a break about we needed the money. Needing the money meant you were going to re-employ a similar number of people almost immediately. There is something seriously wrong with NASA’s management processes.
And just what is the deal with Orion. Why is an Apollo repeat taking a decade and a half and billions upon billions of dollars? It did not have to. It was only by poor management that we got into this position.
NASA’s marketing? In the Apollo days it was a centralized effort in which Headquarters and the field centers were working in the same direction. Today it does not appear anyone has a plan. We do not know where we are going.
Not a single civil servant was laid off. On contractors. Who cares about them? A lot of new people were employed, but they were in different congressional districts. It’s all about power, not science.
Orion is taking so long for the same reason that everything else NASA does is taking so long. Large contractors decided that NASA makes a good cash cow to get them through the “leaning” down of the DoD. So they keep dragging their feet, every decision has to be made in a committee and passed through NASA’s own committee process. That way if something doesn’t work, no person can be singled out as being in fault.
How I yearn for the days of Wernher vonB.
Yes. Besides the mess that NASA doing management creates, I suspect the cost of contracts using the old mainstays of LM, Boeing, Ball, ATK holds a hidden premium. All these contractors are loaded with baby boomers with hefty salaries along with the generally excellent benefits these corporations provide. The startups you see now in private industry have a lot of 20 and 30-somethings and without top-heavy managerial systems. Lockheed-Martin makes a great spacecraft bus and like ULA they could claim experience, performance and reliability but given a chance, small companies could likely develop space probes a lot cheaper. There are now engineers cutting their teeth on nano and micro-Sats and others on reusable launch vehicles.
What NASA did well – the public relations and dissemination of information, was during a simpler easier time in the 1960s. A brand new agency, the most lofty and grand objective you could imagine, the country’s and free World’s honor at stake. Made to order.
The Tale of Two Cities. The story of NASA public outreach and education involves parallel story lines. You have to the Moon, the Space Shuttle, ISS and now SLS/Orion and on the other hand you have space probes and telescopes revealing the grandeur of our neighborhood – the Solar System and of every other aspect of the Cosmos. They pose separate and different challenges to public outreach and education. The latter is one of the greatest stories ever told; and underline those last four words. The former reads more like a Greek tragedy where bureaucracy and the least honorable traits of societies are entangled with the purest of human traits – the yearning to explore. Beginning with the seven astronauts, the symbols of that burning desire have been hand picked to perform their technical duties near flawlessly and to give a minimalist gee-whiz description of their experience while withholding any objections to how NASA human exploration is managed and developed.
Well, part of the deal with Orion is that it is NOT an Apollo repeat. Every part of it is better than the Apollo spacecraft. it’s much larger, the TPS is more robust and was reformulated to be more environmentally friendly, the avionics and communications hardware are much better than anything that has been flown in a manned spacecraft, the environment is a mixed oxygen/nitrogen at sea level pressure rather than 100% oxygen, etc. yes, the cost and the development time are indefensible, but it’s a good spacecraft.
Sorry to disagree with you.
Orion IS effectively an Apollo repeat, just using systems available 50 years later.
The two are the same shape.
Bigger size for a self contained manned vehicle is not always a good thing, especially when it is so big and massive it cannot hold the crew it was originally designed for.
The Columbia committee said to separate crew from cargo. Here a major part of the cargo is the dead weight of the spaceship.
The TPS is not more robust than Apollo. It has the capability to return from the moon as did Apollo. It does not have the capability to return from the planets. That is an upgrade from the current design.
Avionics-I hope its a bit more up to date than the fifty year old Apollo systems. Not sure why it is so expensive given how mainstream avionics are now.
ECLS is not a terribly sophisticated system in a vehicle this size. But you cannot say its any kind of an upgrade from Apollo since so far the ECLS system is not designed or functioning. I’m amazed this system is lagging and cannot be ready until the 2021-2023 time period.
Power and thermal are a lot less sophsticated than on Apollo.
Remember, Apollo we started from scratch, had to figure out what it needed to look like, how it needed to be designed, then design, build and test and we did it in about 6-7 years on Apollo. This program has been going that long and we are still well over that far away from a real working spaceship.
All in all, your one correct statement is that neither cost nor schedule for Orion are defensible.
so your conclusion is based ON ITS SHAPE???
don’t tell me you’re one of those batshit-crazy “spaceships must have wings” guys.
Well said!
“Can we take one of these posters?”
“Well, it is canceled, but you can take one.”
Went back to my old middle school to help out a science fair. Apparently NASA gave the NES coordinators a huge crate of CxP stuff a few years ago to pass out. What’s left were a huge stack of Ares posters (100+), a huge stack of EOS 3D bookmarks (which is rather cute), a huge stack of stickers, and a few Orion paper models. I was seriously laughing when I saw them. Really? Is that all?
I brought my LEGO Curiosity model. The students and their parents have more interest in that than the Orion presentation (which is what the station is actually about).
During Apollo, if I needed information for research purposes, NASA staff bent over backward to assist me. Post Apollo, it was and is a bureaucratic nightmare and constant passing the buck. The Apollo era management knew that you had to sell the program to the American people to get the funding to keep the program going. Today, all NASA cares about is pleasing Congress and their pie in the sky programs to keep a workforce employed on dead end projects. Most of the news media is not interested in NASA and could care less about holding NASA’s feet to the fire as they do with other governmental agencies unless there is a major tragedy. For them, what NASA does is not sensational enough.
I am not one of those people that wants to stay stuck in the past, but it is not a bad thing to take your successes of the past and incorporate it in moving forward. NASA’s future is in deep trouble.