Since then, almost all NASA missions and centers have started Twitter accounts. But only a few have really recaptured the same magic. Viral success is hard to repeat, and not every communications officer has McGregor’s flair. What NASA needs is a group that can help teach the agency how to break out of its insular traditions.
With that objective in mind, S. Pete Worden, the director of NASA Ames, decided in 2006 to turn loose a bunch of twentysomethings on the center. They formed the Collaborative Space Exploration Laboratory, or CoLab, which became the focal point of the participatory exploration movement within NASA. In June 2007, CoLab and NASA Ames hosted the Participatory Exploration Summit, which sought to link like-minded projects from across the agency with partners ”outside the gates.”
Taking many of their goals and ideals from the interactivity of Web 2.0 applications, the center has tried to spark collaborations that go beyond the traditional aerospace companies with NASA contracts. Lab members have used the experience of Stardust@home and similar projects to help the scientists running new missions connect with amateurs. CoLab is also behind the CosmosCode project, which is designed to provide an open-source collection of aeronautics and astronautics software.
Somewhat fittingly, CoLab’s biggest presence has been in that most ephemeral of digital spaces: Second Life. Volunteers helped build CoLab Island, which serves as the virtual location of weekly meetings between NASA and outside volunteers.
But making space accessible is difficult. Web 2.0 platforms—Twitter, Facebook, Second Life—are a great way to reach a certain type of Web-savvy amateur, but they leave out a big part of the potential audience. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to engaging the public. While the Clickworkers project is as easy a way to kill time as playing solitaire, the work eventually gets repetitive. Contributing to NASA’s open-source software is much more intellectually stimulating, but it’s an option only for those who know how to code.
Another problem is that even innovative programs have trouble shaking off the stigma of being mere ”outreach and education” activities—in other words, not important. ”We’re going for ’inreach’ as well,” CoLab project coordinator Delia Santiago told me when I visited in October, referring to contributions from the outside that demonstrably help NASA rather than just cost it money. But she knew that CoLab still needed to prove its case. ”We have to show our relevance,” she said. ”We have to show that we actually add value.”
The CoLab staff was seeking no less than a cultural change within NASA, quite an undertaking in a big, lumbering bureaucracy. Since my visit, the CoLab program has ”paused for a bit,” according to Santiago, although many of the programs it championed live on.
Maybe NASA wasn’t quite ready for such a big shift. Take the case of Ariel Waldman. She was hired at CoLab specifically for her social-networking skills, but the contractor she worked under had standard rules that expressly prohibited using social-networking sites at the workplace. After trying without success to get permission for three months to use the tools she needed, Waldman gave up and started her own Web site, Spacehack.org. It collects and organizes the disparate and jumbled set of events, projects, and communities for amateurs interested in space—and it does so better than any NASA site.
It’s a long-held axiom among some segments of the space community that while robotic missions are great for doing science, you have to have a human program, because that’s what excites constituents and Congress enough to pay the bills. Others perceive a true need for people in space.
”Robots discover. Humans explore,” Kent Joosten, a systems engineer at Johnson Space Center, said at a space conference last year. ”Exploration is a personal endeavor. There are hundreds of thousands of boot prints on the moon.” He has a point—astronauts on Mars could think on their feet, without relying on delayed radio instructions. Even roboticists agree. ”Some aspects of exploration will never be done by a robot,” Sims says.
But rather than a human spaceflight program that supports the rest of NASA, interactive robotics might become the new public crowd-pleaser, if it hasn’t already. Dittmar Associates’ surveys of 18- to 25-year-olds found that they had little interest in or knowledge about either NASA or Constellation, the program to return to the moon, but they were excited by Spirit and Opportunity.
Generation Y represents only about 15 percent of the workforce in the United States today, but experts predict that percentage to nearly double in five years. Persuading this group to take part in virtual space exploration could extend political support for the U.S. space program beyond Texas and Florida.
And the next generation of Mars robots is likely to be even better, eventually providing streaming high-definition video and more. ”The vision is sort of the Star Trek holodeck,” says NASA Ames’s Worden. ”What does the Martian wind feel like on your face?” he asks, a question that can be answered only in virtual reality, not in Mars’s thin carbon dioxide atmosphere.
Assuming that NASA realizes the benefits of bringing Mars back to Earth, we might eventually have thousands of answers to that question.
For more articles, go to Special Report: Why Mars? Why Now?
