I attended a talk today by the founder and CEO of a major advertising graphics company for NASA and other companies. Aside from the beauty of space art, the portrayal of a picture or an animation is very valuable to communications. Scientists and engineers use artists conceptions all the time to more easily explain technical subjects to a wide audience ranging from peers, big-wigs, and laymen. Space graphics is a huge component of public outreach.

He began by speaking about a few of the projects his company has completed, such as the magazine cover of Aviation Weekly and an award-winning space tether animation that I had seen before in a presentation somewhere. No one in his company is a scientist or an engineer, so he talked about how artists use the "looks good, is good" motto and don't worry about whether a concept is physically incorrect until someone tells them that it is. He says he gets criticism about adding sound effects to motions in space, to which he replies, "There wouldn't be a camera in space, either."

He then walked us through the process of creating a video animation. First they storyboard the video by asking the question, "How do we want to tell this story?" They hand-draw cartoon-like panels to represent the visuals of the video. They show their concept to the client, who then adds technical details and makes changes. They use a CAD program to draw the main objects, starting with geometric shapes, then shading, then lighting, then texture, and sometimes they blend in real photographs. Photographs can also be used as background images. They film actors in costume (replica spacesuits, for example) against a blue wall to add astronauts to the animation; they even have a crane and bungee system for lunar scenes. They then send it back to the client, and more changes are made until the animation is finalized.

He showed us the same animation of the Aries and Orion launches for a manned mission to the Moon: first the cartoon storyboard draft, then the initial animated draft, then today's version after NASA's various changes. Right now there is a debate about the importance of showing astronauts and human reactions to the events. Some want to chop the video such that it's only a hardware show. Others think the human presence is important because that's what the audience will relate to.

We then had a lengthy discussion about why space exploration is relevant to every single person. Case studies done by NASA have shown that my age group thinks that space exploration has no relevance to their lives, when in fact NASA has touched pretty much every aspect of human life, both daily and in extreme situations. From common technology like microelectronics, cellular and satellite communications, heart monitors, anti-scalding faucet sensors, etc. to stimulated economy and entrepreneurship to better standards of living to emergency services such as severe weather alerts to scientific discovery, human exploration, and the quest for knowledge. Not to mention that we're going to run out of resources on this planet and we need space exploration for the survival of the human race. The disconnect stems from the fact that most people are clueless as to what NASA is doing, and it's the duty of people like us to educate, excite, and inspire.