Name: How SpaceX Made NASA Cool Again
Uploaded: 2021-05-27T05:43:08.000Z
Duration: 9 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

And this is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

But on August 31st, 2011, NASA formally ended the space shuttle

program and the lack of missions found the agency's slipping out of

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,

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

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

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,

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

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

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."

Kelly might not have been the first astronaut to tweet from space, but

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How SpaceX Made NASA Cool Again

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