Some day I hope I get to talk to an astronaut in space. I’ve
talked to quite a few on Earth, but to talk to one while he or she is in space
would be awesome, don’t you think? My most recent astronaut interview, though,
actually took me farther way from my goal than closer. My last astronaut
interview was with Chris
Hadfield while he was 62 feet below the surface on a NASA undersea mission.
I interviewed Hadfield during NEEMO 14,
an underwater mission to the Aquarius habitat. NEEMO is the NASA Extreme
Environment Mission Operations project, which basically sends groups of NASA
employees and contractors to live in an underwater habitat for weeks at a time.
Crews do this as an analog to space exploration, experiencing some of the same
tasks and challenges underwater as they would in space.
On the call, I was most interested in asking Commander
Hadfield about the team’s use of social media and how that was impacting the
mission. The team had an impressive social media lineup including @NASA_NEEMO and @ReefBase on Twitter, a NASA
NEEMO Facebook page, the NASA
Analogs Blog, the NASA
Analogs Flickr page, and NASAanalogTV
on YouTube. Hadfield said he was skeptical going into it but all the tweeting
and blogging ended up with quite the positive impact.
"When we were preparing for NEEMO
14, our crew here, they asked us take advantage of the fact that there are
other ways, through the Internet, to communicate, that you can report real time
through tweets or Facebook or blogs your thoughts and your transient emotions
and your real-time experiences. Which of course if you’re on a trip with people
that’s the most interesting part, is how do you feel now, what’s going on now,
how’s life flowing around you. Well, suddenly it’s not just a dry
after-the-fact report, but it can be a real-time voyage of what is happening.
And as a person who’s grown up with more traditional media, to me that’s a
foreign idea, and I’m suspicious of it because I don’t know how it’s going to
work, I don’t have any experience with it, and I know it’s going to increase my
crew’s workload to do it.
So let me say, I’ve been delighted
with what it has done both for the ability for us to interact with people all
around the world but also what it did for the crew. It has allowed us as a
group to constantly, almost be forced to, express out loud what it is we’re
thinking about and what it is we’re feeling and what’s special to us and what
is remarkable to us. And you really shouldn’t hoard something that is important
to you or something that is magnificent to you. And so by forcing people to
(say) “Hey, I just saw something really cool,” well, shoot, tweet it, put it
out there. And people have been twittering and tweeting and our lead hab tech
here, he was dancing and celebrating when he sent his very first tweet, which
sounds silly but now he is sending them every time he has a thought about
something that’s really important to him. And we have … gone from a few to a
few dozen to a few hundred to in the thousands of people that are directly
following what we’re doing down here, purely as a result of using a new
technology to help spread the human experience.
And it also, I think, allows us to
more clearly articulate it to ourselves and to each other. So I really enjoyed
it, and I’m a big proponent of it now as a crew to have that capability. So as
Andrew (Abercromby, a NASA engineer on the mission) is there talking to the two
crew members outside, he’s regularly posting information that they’re coming
across.
We invited people all around the
world to help us name parts of the reef. As we’re out there exploring unknown
parts of the reef, we come around a corner and we need to give something a name
so we can use it as a navigation point, and we have schools and organizations
and individuals from all around the world giving us names that we immediately
use and apply to these locations. When I play guitar … we have people offering
suggestions of what to play. Of course, not everyone is interested in
everything, but for the people that are interested in exploration and in diving
and in new understanding of some of the real hostile and extreme environments
around the world, this is a fascinating way to include them, and we’ve been
speaking to a lot of schools that way too.
We know there are whole classrooms
that are following along just as a result of the new social media that we’re
using. So I’ve been really pleased with it, and I think if we just look at the
way that we’re tracking it to see how many people are actually tied in, I think
it’s a really worthwhile thing to do."
A very awesome answer, I thought, to know that social media
tools like Twitter and Facebook and blogs are not only working as outreach
tools but helping to build crew morale by connecting them with the outside
world. That could be pretty important to know for six-month stays on the
International Space Station or even longer voyages to other places in space.
NASA is really diving into the use of social media tools
with a variety of blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages for the agency’s
many missions and projects. Here’s a listing of all the
different ways you can keep up with NASA’s blogs, tweets, flickrs and more, and
if you’re not a member already, join the NASA Students group on
Facebook for information about NASA student opportunities like internships
and co-ops. Maybe you’ll land a NASA co-op position like astronaut Karen Nyberg
who went on to become an astronaut and participated in 2006 in NEEMO 10. (Read
more about Nyberg’s pre-astronaut days and co-op experiences in this
feature article I wrote about her as she was preparing for the STS-124
space shuttle mission in 2008.)
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