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Keynote Address:
No Guts . . . No Glory—Why NASA Needs to Relish the Risk to Stay Relevant
The workshop opened with a keynote address from a professional communicator, Miles O’Brien.
O’Brien discussed the changing media environment where few major media outlets today have science
correspondents. He provided statistics on what polls indicate the public is interested in learning about
from the media, and offered advice on how NASA and the space community can better communicate,
including the use of new social media tools like Twitter.
O’Brien was the science correspondent for 17 years at CNN and said that he lost his job at CNN
when CNN’s science unit no longer was able to attract sufficient financial sponsorship. Today he is a
science reporter for PBS News Hour, as well as for the website Spaceflightnow.com, where he continues
covering space shuttle launches, but in much more detail than when he was with CNN. He believes the
mainstream media miss a lot by covering space shuttle launches only to ensure they are present if an
accident happens, not to talk about the science or engineering of the mission. On Spaceflightnow.com, he
can thoroughly cover each mission and the website has found there is a lot of sponsorship interest from
the aerospace industry.
Using his life story as an example, O’Brien recounted the dramatic changes underway in the
media industry today, particularly the decline in newspaper readership. He strongly urged everyone to be
on Twitter and congratulated the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for embracing it as a method of
communicating about its science missions. He said that the Mars Phoenix mission was the first space
mission to “tweet,” thanks to JPL’s Veronica McGregor who tweeted in the first person as though she
was the spacecraft. In a taped interview that O’Brien played for the audience, McGregor said that people
who thought they were not interested in following space missions found that they were fascinated if they
could get the information in “tiny updates day by day.”
O’Brien showed a chart of indicators of what topics people say they get enough news about versus
the topics on which they want more. The data show that 44 percent want more coverage of scientific news
and discoveries (see Figure 1 in the Workshop Overview). He believes social media is the way to provide
that coverage. He recommended that scientists not think about how to get on the CBS Evening News, but
how to use social media instead: “All of you should be tweeting” and “sharing the enthusiasm of what you
all do.” He stressed that people must be honest and accurate when they tweet because a wide community of
people is reading and will know if you are wrong or trying to spin a message.
During his talk, O’Brien said that the media do not cover “incremental” stories, like that of the
International Space Station, very well. Instead, the media and their audiences care about “the human
adventure, not about the widgets.” 1
“Fear, greed, and thrills” is what people care about, he said. In the context of the space program,
he argues that John F. Kennedy’s decision to send people to the Moon was based on fear. Conversely,
Richard Nixon agreed to the space shuttle program and sold it as routine—a space truck. “That was not a
very good way to sell the program,” because the public would “not be a part of the ride.” Which brings us
to our current president, O’Brien said, who wants the commercial sector involved in human spaceflight.
O’Brien believes that will engage and excite people in a way the space shuttle never did.
1
As a member of the panel for Session 2 later in the day, however, he modified that statement to say that with
the advent of social media, “maybe incremental is OK.”
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During a question and answer session with the audience, O’Brien agreed with a workshop
participant that video games are a great way to engage with kids of a certain age, saying that we have “to
meet them where they are.” He cited Richard Garriott, son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, who made
a fortune making role-playing video games and then spent some of that fortune for a ticket on a Russian
Soyuz spacecraft to fly to the International Space Station, as an example of someone who also sees this as
a way to connect with the public.
He also said that NASA has to “step back from unrealistic promises” on dates and deadlines for
accomplishing human spaceflight goals. They worked fine in the 1960s when NASA had a blank check,
he said, but that is not true today because “we have an underfunded space program.” The debate should be
about whether space exploration is important to us—for our children, education, and competitiveness. He
asked rhetorically why India wants a human spaceflight program.
SSB member Charles Woodward asked if the best way to engage public interest is “boots on the
ground or technology on the terrain.” O’Brien responded that people need to feel that they are part of the
mission, and including the public in “the ride” has to begin early. He cited an example of how engineers
fought attempts to put a camera on the Apollo 11 lander because of weight considerations, but 8 to 9
weeks before the mission “saner minds prevailed” and a camera was included. “NASA is run by
engineers, and there are no mission requirements for public affairs,” and that has to change, he said. He
added that “it cannot be tacked on” at the end, but must be part of the mission from the beginning—a
“clean sheet mission requirement.”
In a discussion of how personalities like Jon Stewart2 factor into this debate about public
engagement and social media, O’Brien said that people have become their own news producers. They
have heard the news before watching Stewart or other news personalities. They tune in to those programs
because they want to know what that personality’s take is on it. He noted that “the fact that people laugh
at the jokes means they must have heard the news or otherwise the jokes wouldn’t be funny in the first
place.”
Science journalist Andrew Lawler asked about how to differentiate between journalism and
public relations and how to get information out that people will trust and that does not have a hidden
agenda, even though nothing is agenda-free, in his opinion. O’Brien agreed that nothing is agenda-free,
and the key is to make sure the agenda is not hidden. He used his experience on Spaceflightnow.com as
an example. O’Brien said that instead of selling advertising spots to the aerospace companies that support
the website, they sell their interviews with him. However, at the end of the workshop Lawler said that
paying someone for an interview is ordinarily frowned upon in journalism (see Session 8). O’Brien
defended the Spaceflightnow.com arrangement by saying that he still asks all the hard questions, and he is
open with the public about the arrangement: “You can say we’re bought and paid for by those contractors
. . . [but] if we tell people that . . . this is a paid interview, and I still do the questions I would normally do
. . . that’s definitely a new kind of journalism. . . . I don’t think it’s dishonest in any way and . . . I haven’t
pulled my punch once yet. Maybe that’s one way to make all this stuff profitable in the future, I don’t
know.”
SSB chair Charles F. Kennel asked how the story of the retirement of the space shuttle and the
somewhat uncertain future for the human spaceflight program should be told. O’Brien answered that the
absence of the space shuttle “let’s a little more air into the room” and allows the media to focus on
NASA’s other activities. He returned to his themes that the ISS is a compelling story and that
commercial human spaceflight is exciting. The multi-year gap between the end of the space shuttle and
the availability of a replacement U.S. crew transportation system is “horribly unfortunate,” but he
believes commercial human spaceflight is a positive development. It will be possible to tell the story that
instead of 500 people flying to space over the past 50 years, as is true today, there will be 500 people
flying into space every month in the future. That should be a “very exciting” story, he said, adding,
“we’re taking free enterprise into orbit” and there are great storylines there.
2
Jon Stewart is host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central.
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