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Internet Policies

NASA is Buzzworthy

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 7, 2012
Filed under ,

NASA Is the Government’s One True Viral Hit Factory, Atlantic Wire
“NASA may only consume0.5 percent of the federal budget, but it generates practically all of Uncle Sam’s viral marketing buzz.Never was that more apparent than on Monday morning following the successful Mars landing of Curiosity, the biggest and most advancedspacecraft ever dispatched to another planet. In an explosion of tweets, Tumbls, status updates, and blog posts, the Internet showed its love of NASA in a way other parts of the government could only dream of. So what’s NASA’s secret?”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

14 responses to “NASA is Buzzworthy”

  1. Andrew_M_Swallow says:
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    Today NASA’s Mars lander even got into Britain’s tabloid newspapers.  That is very difficult for a good news story that is not sport and does not have ‘big tits’.

  2. Anonymous says:
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    This is an amazing thing, as big as the landing itself in terms of public engagement.  

    Good job NASA!

  3. no one of consequence says:
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    “NASA is Buzzworthy”

    Uh-oh. Aldrin’s going to show up, any minute, wanting a cut of your ad revenues …

    🙂 Just … kidding.

    The success for NASA was that this was perceived by the world as a high wire “circus act” in the solar system “big tent”.

    The 7 minutes of terror video captured the attention, many showed up online to watch a extreme high dive into a bucket, expected a splat, and instead saw … perfection.

    Totally wowed them.NASA’s secret – “do what you say, and say what you do”.

    Hard in this culture.

  4. jlhpps says:
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    Priorities:

    1. The taxpayer OWNS NASA and everything it makes or does. Make sure all missions involve the taxpayers and their children. Let kids run MSL on occasion, for instance. JPL should design a control interface for non-NASA users.

    2. Do science.

    3. Improve the nation’s toolbox by inventing, designing, and implementing the tools and robots for NASA’s missions (transform Earth-based, human controlled technologies for mining, manufacturing, analysis, communications, terra-forming, etc.).

    4. Continually plan; make the plans understandable; include continuous improvement of the technological tool capabilities at hand and in the technological capabilities of the people through training, and on-the-job mentoring.

    5. Provide mind-expanding jobs. Lots of them.

    6. Assist the nation’s industries in applying technologies.

    7. Include more small businesses in NASA high tech missions.

    • Tom Dayton says:
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      For your #1, we (NASA) have come close by letting kids or adults use real mission operations software, though with fake data, and only for monitoring, not control.

      For your #3, we have open sourced the full, real, version of that software.

      For your #4, we post a new version every three weeks. (We use participatory, Agile, but very tightly controlled design and development methods (e.g., certified for ISS ops, CMMI Level 3).

      For your #6 and #7, we are asking industries (space and non-space) to use that software and to contribute open source code to its enhancement, as part of a worldwide open source community.

      Search the internet for “open Mission Control Technologies.”

    • ASFalcon13 says:
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       “Let kids run MSL on occasion”

      Not going to happen.  It’s not that NASA doesn’t like kids, but there are two factors at play here:

      1. Imagine the s**tstorm that would come down if something happened to the $2.5 billion rover while a kid (or any uncertified personnel, for that matter) was at the controls.

      2. Driving a Mars rover – or any other interplanetary spacecraft, for that matter – isn’t exactly “user friendly”.  There’s no big steering wheel or joystick sitting around that you drive the thing around with.  Instead, running a rover or probe is more like programming a computer at long range, with little tolerance for error.  Commands and sequences of commands are put together, and are put through simulations and peer reviews.  Once those packages are put together, tested, and approved, they’re handed off an operator that uploads them to the spacecraft over the DSN.  Or, in the rover’s case, they’re not even sent directly; at the moment, they’re handed off to one of the orbiter teams, who uploads them to their spacecraft which, in turn, will forward them on to the rover during a future overflight.  There’s no one person “driving the rover”.

      • Anonymous says:
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         There’s no big steering wheel or joystick sitting around that you drive the thing around with.

        You can actually drive a rover around on the Moon.  The Russians drover Lunakhod tens of kilometers.  The Lunakhods covered more ground than all of the NASA rovers put together, including whatever curiosity will do.

        And they did it 40+ years ago…..

        • ASFalcon13 says:
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          Well, good for the Moon and the Russians, I guess.

          We’re talking about MSL though, not a lunar rover.  Operating a rover on Mars is a whole different ballgame from operating a rover on the Moon.  Sure, the Russians were joysticking a rover on the Moon…they were also enjoying near-realtime feedback, not the up-to-40-minute two-way light times that MSL will experience.  Long light times like that have a significant impact on how you operate your spacecraft or rover.

          …and even if it we’re joystickable, my first point still stands.  I happen to know of a case where something like this happened – it was interns instead of kids, but it caused a s**tstorm nonetheless.

    • Paul451 says:
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      “1. The taxpayer OWNS NASA and everything it makes or does. Make sure all missions involve the taxpayers and their children. Let kids run MSL”

      Gak, no. The best thing about NASA is that it is the agency that does Serious Things. The worse part of NASA, is their tendency to undermine that nearly every time they try to do public outreach.

      [Example, in many SF series, particularly during the ’80s & ’90s, they always include a nerd or kid (or nerd-kid) character, supposedly for the nerd/kid audience to relate to. These characters are usually loathed by the actual audience, and tend to undermine the shows. We want to watch heroes, not the writers patronising vision of ourselves. We want to imagine we’re James Kirk (or James Bond), not Wesley Crusher. IMO, when NASA tries to appeal to children, it notably fails. When it just does its job, it succeeds.]

      “2. Do science.”

    • Prickly_Pear says:
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       Believe there is public participation on the HiRISE camera, aboard the MRO.
      http://www.uahirise.org/hiw

  5. Tom Dayton says:
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    My own NASA project’s public web site got a huge spike in hits starting
    half an hour after Curiosity landed, but we are unsure exactly why; were
    people just searching the internet for “NASA”?  For the subsequent day
    and a half the number of hits have continued to be above normal, but
    have been trending down again. We’ll be interested to see if our hits
    increase every time JPL publishes another striking image.

    • bdunbar_nasa says:
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      Tom — We’ve found that every time we have one of these events, the traffic spreads across NASA web sites, and to all areas of http://www.NASA.gov. Traffic to the main site is still running at 5X normal (2000X at landing). Hope you continue to ride the wave. — Brian Dunbar, NASA.gov.

  6. Sam S says:
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    The article answers its own question early on.  NASA’s “secret” is that it’s doing something people get excited about.  It probably doesn’t matter how media-savvy the USDA gets, corn will never be as exiciting as Mars.  The article mentions this, but then quickly changes the subject to how great NASA is at handling the architecture for a massively streamed event.  Of course, this would require an event worth streaming in the first place, and I don’t see a fish-kill seminar put on by the EPA as drawing in the elementary school set.

  7. Paul451 says:
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    Someone took this photo in Times Square during the landing: http://www.flickr.com/photo

    Note the awe and wonder in the faces. And read the caption about how the crowd reacted after touch-down.

    For all the (usually justifiable) criticism of NASA’s PR efforts, they nailed this one.