[Infowarrior] - Can Twitter save NASA?

[Richard Forno]

Can Twitter save NASA?

August 8, 2012 By Scott Sterling

http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/can-twitter-save-nasa/

As Curiosity collects data on Mars, the rover’s Twitter banter is stoking flames of publicity back on Earth, which may be the key to keeping the feeble ember of the space program alive.

Judgment Day, as foretold by the Terminator series, must be near. We sent a robot to Mars earlier this week and it started tweeting back to us with facts about the mission. It also engaged in some banter with Sesame Street and dropped the popular “I’m in you!” Internet meme. It’s like a titanium version of Kevin Smith.

And it’s also the best thing NASA could have done.

What was probably started as a joke in one of the JPL’s meetings (probably by the guy with the mohawk) has turned into one of the biggest PR coups NASA has had in years. People love the tweeting rover, even if it’s not precisely the rover that’s tweeting. You can tell them that the Curiosity rover cost $2.5 billion and they will say, to a man, that the money was well-spent because they are now emotionally involved.

The American people haven’t been emotionally involved in a space mission since the Hubble Space Telescope, and that’s the fundamental reason why we barely have a space program today.

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Curiosity isn’t the solution itself. Its mission is designed to last for more than a year and a half. People will have forgotten about it long before then. But the lesson of involving the American citizen in the space program again is a lesson that can be reused over and over again.

NASA needs to start selling itself once more. Show us benefits. Show us excitement. Show us leading the world and we’ll be willing to bankroll anything, but we have to be invested in the process. Involve us, and not just when it comes time to name a spaceship.

Believe it or not, the politicians still listen to us occasionally. If we want something, like a person on Mars instead of a personable robot, they will find the trillion dollars it takes.

But if you let us forget that NASA exists, we will.

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