Inside the Pluto Public Relations Machine

An anonymous reader writes: They knew it was going to be huge, but even the communications team — which had spent months planning for the event — was surprised by the magical atmosphere and worldwide excitement surrounding NASA's New Horizons Pluto flyby. The communication needs were monumental and required good planning, a ton of teamwork and attention to detail. This is how they made it happen.

Comments

And to Think It Might Have All Been Ruined

[Kunedog]

the magical atmosphere and worldwide excitement surrounding NASA's New Horizons Pluto flyby

It sad to know that a large section of the press would have been happy to ruin the moments the pictures came back (and shit on the public's excitement) by trashing one of the scientists, just because a women he was friends with made a shirt that pissed off a few ideologues. I'd love to hear what the Horizons PR team thought about that, when it happened to the ESA mission.

Re:Doesn't his comment sum it up?

[Rei]

It's hard for me to remember the last time an unmanned NASA mission has gotten this much public attention. Maybe some of the high budget Mars missions, but I'd say that's questionable for the more recent ones. This really turned out to be not just a science windfall, but a PR windfall for NASA as well. New Horizons was a cheap mission (as far as space exploration goes), and it's exceeded everyone's expectations, revealing a young, geologically active world driven in manners never before seen, with formations never before seen. The fact that it came on the heels of the "Pluto Is Not A Planet" controversy drove what would already have been high public interest up to even higher levels. Then the fact that out of pure luck Pluto gave them a giant "heart" formation on their last high-res pre-flyby images to plaster all over the news was just icing on the cake.

NH director Alan Stern is also a very different character from Taylor, and one that I really like. He's been an incredibly passionate advocate for exploration and for open access to data as well as supporting youth interest in science. He's also been one of the leading voices against the IAU Pluto decision, analogizing it to the USGS declaring that there's only 8 rivers in the world in order to make the list easier for schoolkids to memorize. His view is that "cleared the neighborhood" is fundamentally flawed in numerous ways while hydrostatic equilibrium is a very meaningful dividing line, both from the public's perspective on what one naturally interprets to be a planet (the "Captain Kirk" test), and scientifically (it involves the destruction of primordial materials and the creation of altered materials and the release of energy). He takes it so far as to say that moons in hydrostatic equilibrium like Titan, Triton, Ganymede, Europa, etc deserve a title like "planetary moon" or similar - a recognition of "what they are" being at least as important as "where they are".

Re:Doesn't his comment sum it up?

[Rei]

Those are huge numbers for a space mission. You're calling 1600 people / 250 reporters covering a NASA press conference small? That's freaking insane. By contrast, people generally have more interest in human endeavours in space than robotic, but when NASA held their press conference to interview members of the Colombia crew live from space (which turned out to be the last chance before they died), only four reporters showed up. The "Martian microfossil" press conference had about two hundred.

Seriously, you think one in every 2000 people on Earth, from newborn Vietnamese infants to elderly Masai tribesman, logging onto NASA.gov to read about a relatively low budget mission to be a poor showing? How often does anyone go to NASA.gov? Look at how much the page views for their entire website spiked from NH. Tiny percentage of their budget, cut their distance to the top of the net rankings in half.

783000 people streamed bloody NASA press conferences. When does anything like that ever happen?

450 major papers had it on their *front page*. We're not talking blogspot.com, we're talking NYT, LA Times, etc. When was the last time you ever saw anything like that? Maybe the Columbia disaster?

This should have been "moon landing"-ish, are you out of your gourd? The Apollo Program as a whole consumed about 5% of a year's worth of the US GDP. New Horizons consumed 0,005%.

Maybe I'm reading you wrong. Maybe you're joking. I sure hope so...