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In case you didn\u2019t hear, we just went back to the moon.<\/p>\n
NASA has been heavily promoting the Artemis II mission for months, which concluded on April 10 after its four astronauts splashed down off the coast of California. No doubt, this venture was an objectively awe-inducing feat. The space agency successfully demonstrated the most powerful rocket<\/a> it’s ever built, the Space Transportation System, and tested Orion, its crew vehicle, with a crew for the first time. NASA\u2019s astronauts also traveled farther into space than ever before, and humans saw the dark side of the lunar surface with their own eyes (another major first).<\/p>\n But how excited did the rest of humanity get? Social media analytics companies that Fast Company<\/em> reached out to shared the numbers. Muck Rack found that between April 1 and 13, there were more than 42 million engagements on major platforms. On April 6 and 7, around the time the crew passed by the moon, there were about 1.3 million mentions of terms related to Artemis II, according to media intelligence platform Cision. Analytics tool Sprout Social says that overall there were more than 100 million engagements on both TikTok and Instagram related to the mission throughout that week.<\/p>\n \u200bNASA\u2019s YouTube Live coverage saw 61% growth in views from 2022, during the first Artemis I launch, up from 11.4 million to 18.4 million, again according to Sprout. Most of the streaming platforms that aired the lunar mission didn\u2019t respond to Fast Company<\/em>\u2019s request for comment,\u00a0but during the 6 p.m. hour on the day of the launch, NBC News Now saw its fourth-largest audience on record, according to Adobe Analytics and CloudFront. The rocket ship emoji was\u2014unsurprisingly\u2014the most popular emoji used in Artemis-related posts, according to the SaaS platform Sprinklr.<\/p>\n \u200bNASA, meanwhile, plans to release its own calculations soon.<\/p>\n \u200bWhile there certainly was excitement about Artemis and the return to the moon, the viewing numbers came nowhere near those of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, which roughly 500 million people<\/a> watched on television. To some, this comparatively more limited engagement with Artemis is evidence that space has lost its shine and is no longer as galvanizing as it once was. For others, the attention Artemis II did attract is evidence that space can still be a major global news story, even a positive one, despite an increasingly bifurcated media environment chock-full of serious and often depressing headlines.<\/p>\n Consider some other numbers: Nielsen, which tracks networks like Fox News and CNN, reports that about 18.1 million people in the U.S. watched live coverage of the Artemis II launch on the evening of April 1. That\u2019s a lot, but also notably fewer than the Super Bowl on February 8 (125.6 million<\/a>), or even the president\u2019s State of the Union address later that month (32 million<\/a>). Muck Rack found that the number of articles written about the Iran war far exceeded coverage of the Artemis mission from launch day on April 1 to splashdown 10 days later. Even NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, before the launch, seemed to acknowledge that Artemis would be competing with other stories.<\/p>\n \u201cSpace captivates everyone,\u201d Isaacman told Politico<\/em><\/a>. \u201cNow, I understand there\u2019s a lot going on in our lives these days. As I tell a lot of folks, when they\u2019re like, \u2018Do people realize that we\u2019re about to send astronauts farther into space than ever before, around the moon, to set up for subsequent lunar landing events\u2014do enough people realize that\u2019s happening right now?\u2019 There\u2019s a lot more than the three channels on the television set than there was in the 1960s.\u201d<\/p>\n window.addEventListener(“message”,function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var e=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var t in a.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data[“datawrapper-height”][t]+”px”;r.style.height=d}}});<\/p>\n This is not to say that NASA didn\u2019t plan an impressive publicity operation, which included plenty of social media posts and media engagements. NASA promoted a playlist<\/a> with songs the crew listened to during the mission, and has continued investing in an astronauts-as-influencers approach. The space agency also partnered with streaming companies like Netflix and HBO Max, and provided coverage on its own streaming service. In fact, NASA has a legal obligation to promote and share its content, per the terms of the 1958 Space Act, to the \u201cwidest practicable audience.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOur goal is to reach as many people as possible, whether that is via NASA+ directly, or through other streaming platforms,\u201d Lauren Low, a NASA spokesperson, tells Fast Company.<\/em>\u00a0\u201cWe are open to working with all platforms and would like to make sure that NASA is available on the platform of your choice.\u201d<\/p>\n This largely paid off. A liftoff post<\/a> on Instagram picked up more than 6 million likes, nearly as many as NASA\u2019s most popular post ever: a shot of the Carina Nebula, captured by the James Webb telescope<\/a>. TikTok drove the most engagement, with 121 million interactions, which included likes and reposts, according to Sprout Social. That\u2019s despite NASA employees, including astronauts<\/a>, not being allowed to use TikTok themselves, due to government regulations on some entities associated with China.<\/p>\n