In November 2011 Insight Labs convened a group at NASA’s Langley Research Center to consider how space exploration fits in to the economy, culture, and political climate of today’s world. Among the major problems the Lab tackled was how NASA can take greater responsibility for inspiring the public to imagine the future. In the following interview, Labs Content Director discusses several solutions to that challenge with Stephen G. Jurczyk, NASA Langley’s Deputy Center Director. Together, they also imagine how NASA could set a global agenda for human space exploration and how that agenda could be carried out.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: What do you think was the most significant idea to come out of this Lab?

Stephen Jurczyk: Although there wasn’t a consensus, I do think the idea of building a kind of grassroots support and engaging the public to get the attention of decision-makers to support NASA was probably the biggest idea for me. That’s where I ended up.

Another concept that resonated with me was the idea that up front, in every single project that we do, we ought to build in a piece that addresses why the public should care and what benefit they will receive from their investment in NASA. It should just be a part of planning the mission or the program. That could be a way in which we move the needle on public engagement.

ABN: I thought one of the interesting things about that idea is that it is grounded in some of the things NASA already does, namely its educational mission. How would you characterize that component of NASA as it presently exists?

SJ: There are two education components. One is direct interaction with and support of teachers where we have a series of projects and programs that do two things. They train teachers either while they are in school (pre-service teachers) or while they are in their teaching careers. We show them how to use the inspiration of NASA missions to motivate their students and we also provide materials with NASA content for the classroom.

Then there is a set of education and outreach activities that directly engage students and the public about what NASA is doing in aerospace and science. We are actively encouraging public and student participation in NASA’s research and development activities. Each program or project is supposed to have an education or outreach component to it now. Our science programs do it especially well. But to get the full picture of education,  you would have to look at all those categories.

ABN: So how would you contrast the existing model with this new idea of incorporating education and outreach as a design principle on aeronautics and exploration projects?

SJ: I think engaging the public and encouraging their participation is just the right way to proceed. NASA doesn’t have a lock on all the smart people in the world. However, public outreach takes time, thought and energy. Right now it’s often being done as an afterthought. That’s a reflection of the culture of the organization and the value it places on those activities. In this new model, it would be one of the top mission objectives. It would need an element of culture change as well as allocating resources appropriately to accomplish it.

ABN: Could you help me imagine how this might work for some specific NASA project, real or hypothetical?

SJ: Well, whenever we set up a project, we define a number of positions – project manager, deputy project manager, etc. You would have to define someone who was fairly high in that structure as communication coordinator and would be responsible for education, outreach, and advocacy.

It would be the responsibility of that person to generate a specific plan for that project, including the people and financial resources it would take to accomplish that plan, which would then be approved by the manager of that project and the Office of Communication.

Then we would review how they were executing that plan in the same way we would review how the team was designing and testing systems. It would be an element of the project just like the hardware and the software. It would be an element that was valued in the same way as the project’s design and analysis. You would measure it as a part of measuring the success of the project. The element of the plan would be consistent, but the execution activities would be different for different projects.

I’m not a communications person, so I don’t know exactly what this kind of plan would look like. I do think that one group that might be getting it right is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In their planetary missions, they engage the public and superconstituents to get the word out. They make it a priority. They could probably do even more of it, but for me they provide the proof that it is both do-able and valuable.

ABN: One interesting point you folks raised during the Lab was that NASA Langley can use the Space Act to form partnerships with organizations like Boeing to work on aeronautics projects. Then someone suggested that you could use the same principle to partner with outside companies or organizations that specialize in education, outreach, and the public imagination.

SJ: I think we could do that under our education charter as well as the charter we have for disseminating broadly the results of NASA missions. There are a number of ways we could do that under the authority we have without some new authority to advertise or take out television time. That would be a great discussion to have with some folks out here who are a lot smarter about what we can and can’t do under the Space Act.

ABN: Let’s assume that you can. What do you imagine a NASA partnership in the name of education or the imagination might accomplish?

SJ: I think we could more directly connect the things that we do in our programs to people who are not necessarily techies – to get them excited more effectively. We talk about NASA being the future or needing to own the future. That is something that could be very powerful as a way to connect with a broader or more diverse audience. Along with that, you have to say, “Here are some things we are doing or could do in the near future that would have immediate impacts that you will personally see and feel and could directly improve your quality of life.”

People think that we can’t afford NASA or can’t afford “the future” because we have problems here and now. They ask why we aren’t putting that money into education or fixing problems here on Earth. So we also have to tell them about the things we are doing that have near-term impact. It’s a balance of telling people about the future and where we’re headed, and the things we are doing now that connect with that vision.

ABN: It seems to me that there is another sense in which the telling is the impact. So if one million more people have a solid understanding of your Mars rover missions, for example, it’s good for NASA, it’s good for your public support, it’s good for your legitimacy in society, but presumably it’s also doing a lot of work in the world, making people think about space and physics and engineering and things that will make them smarter. The political benefit for NASA is just a positive externality.

SJ: I agree. You have to really answer the question of why we are doing this. It has to be deeper than “Hey, we’re going to Mars and it’s going to be really cool and we’re going to do some science.” The large majority of people are not space nuts. They may not appreciate the technical challenges. You have to connect with them on a more personal level.

ABN: How would you describe that level?

SJ: It’s on that level of NASA creating the future, pushing the boundaries of what we can do and achieve and, most importantly, connecting our missions to a clear benefit to the tax-paying public.

ABN: In the Lab, Brian Timpone of Journatic talked about the idea of NASA providing educational content in a more direct way. His working assumption was that the educational sector is becoming much more diverse and that children and adults are getting education from a much greater variety of sources. He proposed that NASA could become a provider in that space. What did you make of that?

SJ: The agency has run kind of hot and cold on this idea. Because of the things that NASA does and the talent we have, we could provide educational content and inspire people to go into science, technology, education, and math. But there is also a federal Department of Education.

I think there are some ways in which we can appropriately deliver educational content that is more impactful to a much broader audience. One thing that we have thought about and have been trying to nurture for a while is using modeling and simulation as a way to engage and educate people about science and technology. Modeling is really not very different from educational gaming. A game is based on mathematically modeling real physics, real chemistry for an imaginary world. We do it for the real world.

So we could come up with ways to deliver that kind of content to a broader audience. As budgets start getting squeezed, NASA has been pulling back from some of those sorts of educational activities. But it could be done through a partnership where others use their talent and their resources and NASA content to develop that kind of thing. It wouldn’t all have to be funded by NASA.

ABN: Sure – I would think that real-world space exploration modeling would be a good tool for education in any case, one that education and gaming companies would be interested in. If it came with the NASA expertise and brand and endorsement, so much the better.

So, it seems to me that both of these big ideas have something in common. It’s the principle that NASA should actually take responsibility for inspiring people. We all talk about how the lunar landing or the space shuttle inspired people, but it doesn’t seem as if NASA measures it in the same way it measures other mission objectives. That doesn’t seem to exist now.

SJ: I would say it doesn’t exist in a consistent way across the various NASA organizations. The Mars exploration rovers have an incredible number of hits on their website and turnout at events. So we have examples of that kind of engagement, but only on certain activities and only sporadically.

ABN: And it’s not on a “mission” level. We talked about including this component from the beginning of a project. Now I’m thinking about the end. Ideally you’d get to a point where you’d say, “Okay, we launched the rover. It landed. We did the science. We did the analysis. But until 10,000 people have absorbed the lessons of that science, this mission isn’t complete.” Right now it’s not at that level, right? What would that look like?

SJ: We have these things called “level one requirements” – the highest-level requirements of a project. It’s a checklist like you describe. So one of those requirements — or elements on the checklist — would be a communications plan, i.e., educating students in the results and engaging the public in critical ways during the mission.

ABN: So let’s say that happens, that education and inspiration become a “level one requirement.” What impact would that have on the country?

SJ: There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the decrease in students in this country going into science, technology, engineering and math. In the past we have been economically successful because of our ability to innovate. We’ve been able to get out of tough situations by innovating, including national security challenges. If we don’t have that pipeline of folks coming up, are we going to have that intellectual horsepower to continue to innovate in the way we have in the past? I think that providing inspiration to kids in elementary school and high school to go into science and engineering could help solve this long-term challenge this country has. And we have to engage them early – while they have all the options open.

I also think NASA can work more collaboratively with industry to drive some innovation – not all of it, obviously – to improve U.S. economic competitiveness. Increasing awareness of everything NASA does would create more important grassroots support for doing that.

ABN: It’s interesting to think about accomplishing that effect through education and outreach rather than, say, contracts to the aerospace industry. I mean, NASA has broad expertise in how people use science to solve practical challenges or apply technological innovations. I think of those TV commercials that are aimed at people with a new invention – what if their next stop were NASA? Presumably NASA has sophisticated internal processes for evaluating new technologies.

SJ: Yes, we do, actually. We do technology portfolio analyses, considering the various potential applications of technologies and what the requirements might be to integrate them into a system. Then we ask what the positive effects (if any) might be on performance and reliability if you did integrate it into a system.

ABN: And in a developed economy, that’s the real test.

SJ: It’s the difference between invention and innovation. You can invent all sorts of things that are not practical from a cost or reliability standpoint. When you invent something that provides value to someone else, that’s innovation. Many innovations take inventions that have been around for a long time and integrate them together to provide value in a new way.

ABN: I thought another interesting theme that emerged from the Lab was the role and the character of the NASA brand. How would you describe that brand?

SJ: I think NASA has positive brand recognition, generally speaking. I usually get a positive response when I tell people I work for NASA. I think people perceive that NASA is still about innovation, new technology, solving hard problems – the “failure is not an option” culture. People may give us more credit for innovations than we actually deserve, but “failure is not an option” – the idea that people at NASA are absolutely dedicated to the success of the mission – I think that is deserved. People here will do just about anything for the success of their project.

ABN: It seems to me that in some ways the NASA brand is so strong that you could actually treated it as an underutilized resource. There seemed to be an assumption in the Lab – justified, I think – that almost anyone in the world would be willing to work with you if you asked. What do you think are some things that NASA could accomplish in the world with such a strong brand?

SJ: One thing we could do is work with someone to totally reinvent how we transport things – people, things, materials. The “Jetsons” vision was that you would hop in your personal air vehicle and move from point to point. In this country, we love the freedom to go places and do things. A solution like that would help free us from being on the ground in cars on roads. Imagine if we could shed the cost of the infrastructure of roads and bridges.

The other thing is that if we would eventually want to open space up so it would be safe and accessible to anybody. As our science advisor said, we would want space to be part of our economic sphere, beyond just communications satellites and broadcast satellites. We could use it for things like tourism or resource utilization, so that space really becomes more of where we are living and operating and gaining economic benefit from.

ABN: This fits into what I wanted to ask you next. One of the things I really appreciated at the end of this Lab was that there is only one NASA – not just in this country, but in the world. After the session, Jeff and Howell and I had a long conversation about government agencies and how they can set long-term agendas. And it occurred to me that NASA is probably the only entity in the world that could set a global space exploration agenda for humanity. Does NASA have anything like a short, simple list of the five big goals Homo sapiens should be pursuing in space right now?

SJ: We do things like that. There is an international space exploration working group. If we are going to explore the solar system robotically or with people, we don’t believe the United States can afford to do that on its own or that we should do that on our own. So there is a multilateral group that includes several nations as well as the European Space Agency. That covers the exploration side.

On the science side, we have the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites, which attempts to coordinate the missions we are doing and share data so that we are not duplicating our efforts. That also helps us to develop collaborative ventures. I would say that on the international cooperation side, NASA really drives the agenda there.

ABN: I hear what you’re saying, and it all sounds great. But I don’t think it’s quite what I’m imagining. I’m thinking of something of the magnitude and simplicity of FDR’s Four Freedoms. So when Roosevelt articulated those freedoms during World War II, they were an intersection between the United States’ strategic goals and our philosophy about what every human being should enjoy, regardless of whether we were involved.

So you had four easy-to-remember strategic goals. In that case, they weren’t achieved through any formal process of international negotiation. But there are examples of simple, authoritative statements that are reached that way, like the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. What I’m asking is – regardless of the way it might have been created – is there a single, simple document that states, “Here’s what human beings should be going for in space right now”?

SJ: No, I don’t think so.

ABN: Would that be a worthwhile project?

SJ: I have to think about it. If we did it in a way where other nations felt like they had input and it made sense to them, I think it could be done. We have to be careful – NASA is often accused of going off and deciding what we are going to do, and only then negotiating what other countries will contribute. So we would have to be careful if it would be something that would drive the global space enterprise.

ABN: Let’s assume that it can be done in a way that has international legitimacy. I’m curious about something even more basic – how would you come up with the list in the first place? How do you truly decide? Jeff suggested you could do a survey of everyone with a PhD who works for NASA. But what do you think might be the process to draft a legitimate, substantial, simple, global agenda for space exploration?

SJ: Steve Sandford pointed out that the science side of NASA does this, though we’re talking about something more global and broader than what they’ve done. They engage a fairly broad cross-section of the science community within NASA, within universities, and within other government agencies. They come up with a hierarchy of what the big science questions are in the field of astrophysics, for example. It’s a fairly short list. Then they decide what research and missions would be needed to answer those questions. That would be the model where you go and get experts to decide.

We talked about doing something like that for NASA on the exploration side. But we thought you would want an even more diverse group. You would want scientists and engineers, but you might also want to have historians, political scientists, folks from media and the arts. For these very high-level objectives to resonate with a variety of people, you need a broad cross-section of people.

ABN: So if you’re a PhD student getting your start in astrophysics, can’t you go to this NASA document and say, “My dissertation research is justified because it’s consistent with this NASA document”?

SJ: Yes, that’s right.

ABN: So if you had this global space exploration agenda, you could imagine a similar thing happening with, say, venture capitalists. An engineer or entrepreneur could bring in this document and say, “Look, the technology I’m developing is worth funding because it is aligned with NASA’s agenda.”

SJ: Yeah. If we could get to that point, that would be amazing. It would be very powerful if we could develop a document that would be used in the way you describe.

ABN: Countries could do it too. You worry about NASA bossing people around, but imagine if this global agenda already existed. The Japanese or whoever could say, “Hey, you know how you guys laid out those five goals for human space exploration, and the U.S. is doing really well at one and two? We’d like to take on number four for a while, because it intersects with our national interest in such-and-such a way.” That’s much better than NASA assigning them a project.

SJ: Yes, that is where we would want to be.

ABN: And if you were talking about funding, people would know what they were missing if they didn’t give NASA any money. You could say “With this amount of money, we can only work on goals one and two out of the five.” Is that a naive view?

SJ: No, I think it could play that role. But we could also do it in conjunction with what you were talking about earlier. We might all decide that it is best for NASA to just pursue one and two, and the collaboration with the Japanese is the appropriate way to accomplish number four.

ABN: Or you could see that the X Prize is covering number five and no one in government needs to work on it right now.

SJ: Right. It seems like we’re talking about something that is a higher level of goals and objectives than what’s currently in the agency’s strategic plan. But at what level of detail would you have to describe these things so that they can be used in the way we’re describing? That’s the question.

ABN: Sure, it can’t just be “explore space.” It would have to be a specific, achievable goal. It could be “put a human being on Mars,” though I’m guessing that’s not it.

SJ: I believe it is – I believe the ultimate goal of U.S. space exploration activity is still to put a human being on Mars, though it’s not explicitly stated in our strategy. People are nervous about explicitly saying it, because the next question is “when,” and it’s very hard to pin down a date of when we would be able to do that. But I think that if you asked a bunch of people within NASA what the long-term goal of our activity is, it would be people on Mars.

ABN: This is exactly what bothers me, though. I mean, when it comes to scientific and technological advance, it’s kind of ridiculous to put dates on things. You may be able to say that the Iranians or whoever are five years away from an atom bomb, but you certainly couldn’t have said in the 1930s, “Yes, we will achieve an atomic weapon in the next decade.” They just didn’t know if it could be done. But you could get a big group of scientists together and decide if it was a workable, worthy goal. Then you have the Manhattan Project. And they could reasonably tell the president whether you’re getting closer or not.

It seems like we don’t have anything like that for Mars. We don’t have a way of telling the American people, “Hey, we got a step closer today,” or just as importantly, “Hey, we’re not going to take the next big step because you cut our funding.”

SJ: Right now you can get advocacy for that from a small number of folks on the Hill who have NASA centers or NASA support in their districts. But what’s motivating support for that is jobs and economic activity, not the goal of human exploration of Mars. The question is how we gain much broader-based support for a goal like Mars so when you say, “Hey, if you cut our budget we won’t be able to do this,” somebody actually cares. I think that’s the challenge.

ABN: But before they care they would have to know. I think if you had broad buy-in from other nations and the private sector, it would help. Boeing or MIT would speak up and say, “Wait, we contributed to a specific five percent of this big national goal. Why are you cutting funding for the other 40 percent?”

SJ: When the previous program to replace the space shuttle was cancelled, and when we were developing a new program based on what the president laid out and his priorities, we had a broader discussion about how we express our goals and objectives so people support them.

ABN: I think what we’re talking about is a world where it would be impossible not to do that.

So let’s pretend that the process for deciding this agenda is not polling all of NASA’s PhDs, but simply asking Steve Jurczyk. What’s your list?

SJ: I do think the destination we should be shooting for next is Mars. There are intermediate destinations where we can go to learn – we’re doing that on the International Space Station now, and there may be opportunities with our moon or the moons of Mars. We’re also developing systems and technologies that allow us to live in space and deal with the environment, the long-duration travel, the delays in communication, etc. I think a plan could be laid out in a much more concrete way that demonstrates all of the necessary technologies for Mars in a series of specific missions. That would help us to get to Mars and then go beyond there.

I think we could also take more advantage of robots as precursors to explore the environment, as well as robots working in collaboration with people to accomplish missions in a safe and productive way. There is more potential synergy between humans and robots that we are not leveraging as we should be.

ABN: See, that’s an interesting number two. If number one is “put a human on Mars,” number two might be “develop a way of exploring space with robots that is as satisfying as putting a human being there.” It’s a complementary but very different strategic path that could activate all sorts of people.

SJ: There are two camps within NASA – one says that information technology and virtual reality will advance to the point where the costs and risks of sending people on these long trips to harsh environments will not make sense anymore. That’s a small but interesting camp that thinks that’s what eventually will happen.

ABN: It seems to me that this is one of the advantages of shifting to this strategic approach. You can keep both goals. You could engage people in partnerships on robotic space exploration without detracting from the main Mars mission.

So there’s one more thing I have to ask – from your point of view, why are we up there? What’s the point of space exploration?

SJ: I personally do not believe that the human race is meant to be earth-bound. I believe we are destined and called to venture beyond terra firma. I believe we are meant to explore and live in other places.