There’s an old saying in marketing, that you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. Which is why I’m always bemused by people who bemoan NASA’s PR abilities. Not that I admire PAO, but I have to agree with Clark Lindsey:
Why anyone at NASA thinks that simply doing better PR will arouse great interest among young people in the agency’s Apollo Do-Over is beyond me. I’ve not detected any great enthusiasm for it even among many lifelong space advocates who are well informed about it.
In fact, the more we learn, the less enthused many of us get.
Link appears broken. It should be pointing here. As an aside, Google considered the original story to be a “duplicate” of the Transterrestrial rehash. Rand, you are truly favored by the google gods. May your page rank remain high! 🙂
The problem with selling the “sizzle” is that there is no “steak”. A cold lump of flesh just refuses to sizzle.
I’ve been fascinated by all things space and especially manned space exploration since I first saw the night sky, but I couldn’t get very enthusiastic about this Apollo unless I’d get a ride.
Every time that I think NASA has bottomed out, I just read RocketsAndSuch and find out that it has gotten even worse. The latest debacle is that Ares V won’t be able to lift enough mass to orbit to accomplish the lunar mission.