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.
