ORLANDO — Space companies such as SpaceX and United Launch Alliance would like a word with you.
The commercial space giants have leveraged social media to encourage direct conversation with the public, using tools that were not available to government space agencies in the days of the lunar landings and the space shuttle.
A major goal for the new space race is to engage a new generation through Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Using social media is a way to convey the drama of a launch, communicate accurately and build support for the emerging private space race.
“I can instantly engage with people, go back and forth and have a dialogue with them in a way that wasn’t possible before social media,” said Tory Bruno, CEO of the Lockheed Martin-Boeing space partnership United Launch Alliance. “It provides a means to communicate instantly and ubiquitously.”
Bruno and ULA were relatively late arrivals to the social-media universe for live launch coverage. Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos started broadcasting flight tests on YouTube in 2013, and he now shares videos of his launches.
The shift toward social media in the industry was led by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the 45-year-old South African born executive who has racked up 4.4 million followers on Twitter. SpaceX first tweeted in 2009.
Musk and Bezos had a closely watched exchange on Twitter back in November, after Bezos bragged about landing his company’s New Shepard suborbital rocket as “the rarest of birds” and Musk replied with a photo of the SpaceX Grasshopper rocket, saying his company had done it earlier.
Bruno’s decision to start broadcasting live didn’t sit well with some employees, who were not accustomed to being in front of a camera. ULA has much older roots in the defense industry.
But Bruno said it has so far worked out just fine. The company first accompanied a broadcast launch with commentary on YouTube in June.
“I just had a personal conviction that it was the right thing to do and that it would turn out well,” he said. “For everyone else, I think it was terrifying because it’s different from what we traditionally do.”
He recently ramped up his activity on social media, featuring young engineers who build rockets onto various platforms to communicate directly with space enthusiasts.
Bruno is trying to grow his followers, having joined Twitter in 2014. He’s at 7,500 followers there, but usually reaches a lot more by using ULA and launch hashtags.
His first tweet, posted in early December 2014, shared a picture of the Delta launch vehicle and its payload, the Orion spacecraft, on a Florida launch pad.
“What a beautiful bird!” he wrote in that tweet, posted just past noon Dec. 3, 2014.
ULA has also taken to Periscope, the live-broadcast app, with engineers getting more specific about launches and rockets.
For instance, engineer Andrea Lehnhoff took to Periscope to answer questions as the company prepared for a June 23 launch of a U.S. Navy satellite at Cape Canaveral.
Some topics included the rocket’s configuration, its travel path to the launch pad (“For how big it is, it’s surprising how quickly it moves”) and how much the rocket weighs (fully fueled: 1.3 million pounds).
“That puts a face on it,” Bruno said. “These giant rockets are not built by some nameless inhuman institution. It’s done by real people who have a passion for their work.”
New social media platforms, like Periscope’s launch in 2015, have allowed the space companies to broaden their reach.
“Never before in the history of the world have we ever been able to instantly push a button and spread news,” said Shelley Costello, of social-media management company Creative Web Concepts, which has had such clients as Pizza Hut and Smoothie King.
The space industry also has a compelling financial reason to foster communication with its fans, she said.
“When the government wants to spend money or pass bills for funding the aerospace industry, you are more likely to get it done when you have laid the groundwork making people fall in love with the space industry and making them believe it’s best for our future,” Costello said. “This industry is best shared using social media.”
The live coverage makes for tense drama during launches.
About 10 minutes after a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral the morning of June 15, a live broadcast on SpaceX’s YouTube channel caught a loud cheer, then an equally loud groan at the company’s mission control in California.
The rocket had just tried to land on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after it had delivered its payload into space. But video cut out so SpaceX employees remained uncertain what had happened.
Minutes later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted on Twitter that the rocket had experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
That’s a playful, euphemistic translation for “the rocket exploded.”
“It’s important to educate and excite the public about space,” SpaceX spokesman Phil Larson said. “Tools like social media, webcasts, YouTube videos are all part of that equation of sharing the information and bringing the excitement of spaceflight to the public.”
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