NASA Tweetup Recap

Last Friday I departed for Orlando with my family. The idea was for me to watch Discovery get launch on November 1st. I was going to take part in a Tweetup sponsored by NASA and be allowed to watch the launch from the media site about 3 miles away. While I took part in the Tweetup my family would visit the Magic Kingdom and when we were together we would hang out by the pool at our resort. Right before I left on Friday I got word that the launch was to be delayed. This meant that our Tweetup was pushed back as well, giving me all day Sunday to spend with my family.

On Monday the Tweetup got started (you can see a bunch of videos here thanks to @joelglick). And right up until about 4PM everything was going very, very well. By then we knew the launch was delayed until Wednesday and we were going to get on buses and have a quick tour of the launch pad and Saturn V center. However our buses did not arrive. Soon enough we learned that instead of 3 buses coming for the group there would only be one, and that people who were heading out of town that night were given priority for the tour. After that people were given a chance to join and I decided to head out for the tour, knowing that there was another tour on Tuesday afternoon that I could take part in if I wanted. Plus we still had the RSS retraction to watch on Tuesday night as well.

My family decided to visit Universal Studios on Monday (turns out that the Harry Potter park is not the best place for a 6 and 7 year old). When I got home my son looked at me and said “Papa, where were you today, you missed all the fun!” Ouch. Hey, it’s great that he had fun, I know. And I tried to say that I had fun as well but it was clear that it hurt me to think I had missed out on having fun with them as we had done on Sunday. And I think it hurt him as well.

After the kids went to bed I talked with Suzanne about changing my flight and coming home on Thursday. I didn’t like the idea of not being with my family as they traveled home but I really felt confident that the shuttle was going to launch on Wednesday. So I paid the $150 change fee (thanks for your understanding Delta!), extended my car reservation, and went to bed. The next morning we made our way to the airport only to find that their flight was canceled. Instead of a direct flight getting my family home about 2PM, they would now need to connect through Atlanta and not get home until 9PM. Not good times. And just for good measure Delta was kind enough to place my family in row 41 for their tight connection and then not assign them seats together for the last leg home (did I already say ‘thanks’ to Delta for how well they treated my family?) Yes everyone arrived safe and sound, including their luggage, and for that I am grateful of course. But I was told by more than one Delta representative that my family would be well looked after. I don’t consider seating a 6 and 7 year old by themselves away from their mother to be “well looked after” and will reconsider which airline gets my 2011 business.

By the time I drove out to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Tuesday to watch the RSS retraction I was already being told that the launch was in peril due to a mechanical issue. I drive out there anyway and by 5PM we already knew that Wednesday was out. We didn’t know the new date yet and found out later it was bumped for 24 hours. We went out to the pad anyway for more photos and then came back.While driving to KSC I was aware that the tour group for that afternoon was getting a tour of the VAB, something we didn’t get to do the day before. I was disappointed, but I wouldn’t trade the time I spent with my family for those few hours on Tuesday afternoon.

And I have been burning time ever since, waiting for my 11AM flight to take me home tomorrow. I find myself thinking about the 20 minutes I spent watching my children play with Legos while we waited to head back to the airport on Tuesday. I think about the smiles I saw on their faces the past few days. I miss them very much.

[And I’ll be in Seattle all next week. So Thursday and Friday are very important for me. I hope I get to see them smile some more in those few precious hours.]

Am I disappointed in how everything played out? A little bit. But I am more excited about all of the things I did get to see and do. The time I spent with my family was amazing. The smile on my daughter’s face as we were on Splash Mountain is something I will take to my grave and beyond. I got to be a few hundred yards from the Space Shuttle. I got to eat where the astronauts eat. I got to pee where Walter Cronkite peed. Yeah, I soaked up a lot of history and was awed by everything. I got to meet amazing tweeps, some astronauts, and some amazing people that work behind the scenes at NASA. I heard an astronaut say that his “bucket list” had a line item of “want to be a football coach” and thought about all the football coaches that wish they were astronauts. The dedication of NASA employees to do their jobs so well, to continue promoting space exploration, and to eat freeze dried ice cream is amazing. I consider myself quite lucky to have been able to spend even a few minutes with everyone.

But the biggest lesson of all was given to me at about 5PM on Tuesday. I had dropped off my family at the airport, heard that I missed out on the VAB tour, and just learned that the launch was delayed again. I was standing with a handful of tweeps and we were telling each other about the delay when a member of the press (I like to say “old media”) walked by and said “…I just came from the press briefing and they didn’t say a word about the delay…” I didn’t hesitate to respond with “Well, maybe you should have been reading Twitter instead of attending that briefing.”

Not sure he was amused but he did start asking questions about Twitter. We told him everything he wanted to know and even invited him to be “embedded” with us during the event. He declined. And I think I know why: he would probably be made fun of in his “old media” circle once he started hanging out with us. He would run the risk of not being taken seriously as a journalist, which could be risky for his career. Why take the chance?

The lesson I learned is this: Old media is all about being the one to break a big story and social media doesn’t care who broke a story first, all we care about is the knowledge. We were all very eager to spread knowledge (and yes, being the internet, you always need to check your source). We don’t care who gets credit, we just want the information. We consume information like a fat kid consumes chocolate. Old media wants the knowledge as well, but it wants to guard the information in a silo. It wants to be the one that everyone watches and listen to for that knowledge. It is about ratings and selling papers. And it reminds me of developers who guard their code in an effort to make certain that everyone knows they have value.

Just as it is hard for that developer to hang on forever it is going to be very hard for the old media to hang on. I understand that writing a good story takes time, and that the old media has formed good relationships with the people they write stories about. That was very much on display for me on Monday. And I think there will always be a place for that type of journalism. Even in the online world there are gravity wells of information. We trust some sites over others. Hell, I know people that trust Wikipedia more than they trust people who work (or have worked) for Microsoft and written the code for the SQL engine.

There is no doubt that the internet is killing our culture, just read The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture if you want to read more about that. I don’t believe the internet is killing anything. I do believe the internet is helping us to evolve. Gone are the days where I am going to watch a news broadcast and believe that the words coming out of that persons mouth don’t have an agenda behind them somewhere. Every famous media personality has had an agenda of some kind, from Edward Murrow to Walter Cronkite, but we trusted them. Today more of us trust Jon Stewart than Katie Couric, right?

To me what matters most is not if you are first but if you are right, if you are honest, if you are trustworthy, and if you have high morals so as to avoid temptations. Jon Stewart doesn’t want to be first to tell you a story, but he may want to be the first one to make you laugh at a story. We don’t believe he has any agenda and therefore more of us trust his “news” reports than anything the old media would cough up our way. It’s because we feel as if he is just having a conversation with us, the same way we have conversations with our friends either in person or online.

Everything happens for a reason. It was not my destiny to see a launch this week, but it was my destiny to understand more about where social media is taking all of us. And so far I like the trip. And why not? Social media got me to KSC this week, which also served as a reason for my children to visit the Magic Kingdom. Not too shabby.