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.