McCready leveraged the website Who Pays Writers?, an anonymous, crowd-sourced database of publications pay freelance writers (and how much). He analyzed 520 entries between 2014 and 2016. His conclusions, summarily, were grim. Most writers cannot survive the competitive freelance market by writing alone.

I entered the workforce as a science communicator in 2021, five years after McCready’s analysis. Today, 64 million people work as freelancers, and about half of them are Gen Z professionals like me. Every so often I return to McCready’s article for insight, but as time passes, I wonder how many of his conclusions remain true in 2026.

I’ve scraped over 5,600 entries detailing the pay rate, article length, when they were paid, and other information from publishers across the internet using Who Pays Writers. The data was originally captured from the website in February 2025 and is available here for transparency.

Writers care about being paid in dollars and cents. While writing for exposure is a tale as old as time, the object of desire is to make a living putting words to paper. Ryan McCready’s original analysis of the crowdsourced Who Pays Writers database divides payment into two categories: per word and per article.

Technically both categories will reflect the same information, but the distinction will make it easier to digest. An author paid two cents a word for a thousand words receives the same payment as an author paid twenty cents a word for a hundred words. Writers usually get paid by the word, but we also keep track of the clips, or articles, we write.

Let’s start with words.

How Much Is A Word Worth?

Ryan McCready’s original analysis concluded that the majority of freelance writers made around $0.17 per word. My 2025 data shows that the median pay rate has ticked upward to $0.21 per word. While this represents a modest 23% increase, it has failed to keep pace with the significantly higher inflation seen over the last decade.

Accounting for all 5,600 entries, the average pay sits at $0.72. To the far left of the chart, we can see one person was paid six dollars per word—unheard of in the journalist world. It makes the average top heavy, pulling it higher than what most people experience. The median pay for a freelance writer, by comparison, is $0.21. A median number takes the middle fifty percent, shaving off the top and bottom twenty-five percent of a sample which may reflect extreme or unusual situations. It should better reflect what the majority of writers experience in the freelance world.

McCready’s original analysis points out that his data (like ours) is top heavy, which could lead to inaccurate conclusions later on. He breaks down the data into defining categories so the results are more easily understood. From his findings, he concluded that the majority of freelance writers make around seventeen cents per word. Our findings show that rate has raised to twenty-one cents per word.

The gap between the average writer and the elite has narrowed; the Top 10% now earns only 30% more than the mean, compared to 400% in 2016. This likely indicates that a larger volume of lower-paid writers is contributing to the database today. Results also show gains for Middle 50%, growing to $0.21. As we move towards the Bottom 50%, their pay per word rate has doubled. They’re earning a little less than half of what the Top 50% earn.

The Per-Article Reality

Freelance writers aren’t really concerned with word counts; they are concerned with “clips.” It may be easier to work on one large project that pays a “lower” pay per word count than writing several short projects with a “higher” pay per word count. While the average pay in my sample is $986 per article, over 80% of writers earn less than that. The majority of writers earn closer to $224 per article. This chart reflects a larger range than the first Pay Per Word chart.

When digging into the Top 1%, the numbers appear highly skewed. One entry for Wired suggested a payment of $33,600 for an 8,000-word piece. While it’s possible a lucky freelancer earned half of an annual teacher’s salary from a single story, the more probable explanation is a data-entry error. This highlights the inherent risks of relying on unvetted, crowdsourced databases.

Just like with Pay Per Word data, I matched McCready’s segments with the Pay Per Article data. Here, we can see the Top 1%’s numbers appear very skewed. Could the average pay per article essentially double while the top 10% remained relatively the same?

Despite these outliers, the trend is clear: nearly half of the articles submitted were paid less than $0.25 per word. While the percentage of writers making less than $250 an article has shrunk from 80% to 53% since 2016, the “ceiling” for traditional journalism feels lower than ever.

McCready checked his results by counting the number of articles in each of the selected ranges. Applying the same method, I found similar results. Nearly half of the articles submitted were paid less than twenty-five cents per word. Less than twenty-five percent earn more than fifty cents a word. While most writers are still making less than $250 an article, the percentage has significantly shrunk from 80% to 53%.

McCready’s conclusion in 2016 suggested only the top 10% of writers can afford to have freelance as their their sole source of income. My analysis shows that likely remains true, but perhaps the top 10% can’t make that meet needs anymore. Times have changed in the past decade, with both a evolving media environment and rising consumer prices. Writers may have the ability to earn income more easily—or more reliably—from other independent revenue sources like Patreon, Substack, and Ko-fi.

How Much Should I Write to Quit My Day Job?

How much do you actually have to write to leave your day job? To clear the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr), a writer in the Bottom 10% must churn out 16 articles a month—essentially one every other day. If you want to reach the American median wage of $28.84 an hour, that same writer would need to publish a staggering 62 pieces a month.

The burden of output becomes even more daunting when we shift our gaze from word counts to finished assignments. To clear the bar for the federal minimum wage, a writer in the Bottom 10% must churn out 16 articles a month—essentially one every other day—while those aiming for the American median wage of $28.84 an hour would need to publish a staggering 62 pieces in that same window. That is more than two finished, polished stories every single day of the month, including Sundays. By contrast, the “freelance elite” in the Top 1% only need to secure a single high-paying assignment to exceed that same monthly median wage. For the Middle 50%, the reality sits at a grueling 20 articles per month to reach the median lifestyle, a pace that leaves little room for the deep research or creative breathing room that high-level science communication requires.

So, here we are. A decade has passed, a global pandemic reshaped the workforce, and Gen Z has taken the helm of the freelance ship. What have we learned?

While the floor has risen slightly—with the bottom 50% of writers seeing modest gains in their per-word rates—the “ceiling” for traditional journalism feels lower than ever. The fact that a median writer must still produce the equivalent of a Roald Dahl novel every month just to hit a livable wage is a sobering reminder that the “starving artist” trope has simply been rebranded as the “hustling freelancer.”

However, the data reveals a shift in the way we work. In 2016, you were either a “successful” writer for a major masthead or you were struggling. In 2026, the middle ground is widening. We are no longer just selling words to publishers; we are selling brands to audiences. The modern freelancer isn’t just checking Who Pays Writers?; they are checking their Substack conversions and Patreon tiers.

If you want to survive on words alone, the traditional “per-word” model is a treadmill that only the top 1% can run comfortably. For the rest of us, the path to a sustainable career isn’t just about writing more words—it’s about owning where those words live.

The freelance dream isn’t dead, but it has evolved. To make a living today, you have to be more than a writer; you have to be your own publisher.

Takeaways for Today’s World

So, how do McCready’s 2016 benchmarks hold up today?

The treadmill hasn’t just maintained its pace; for the average freelancer, the incline has grown significantly steeper. To survive today, the path isn’t just about writing more—it’s about finding independent revenue sources like Substack or Patreon to supplement a model that hasn’t changed in a decade.

Special thanks to Nicole Williams from Come with Me for reviewing an early draft.

I watched the @ISS_Research account sunset on X today. My academic research made me feel like the NASA’s Social Media overhaul would only make the fight for science truth more difficult.

The American space agency decided to reduce its social media footprint by archiving dozens of social media accounts in June 2025. NASA will rely on the remaining thirty-five accounts to disseminate an avalanche of information. This consolidation effort is at the direction of the administrative suite, appointed by the current president. The efficiency argument is straightforward: streamline communication to help the audience focus on your core message.

For a government science agency, I disagree with the approach. Government science agencies have a responsibility to communicate to the public what research is being conducted with taxpayer funds.

The Public’s Changing Relationship with NASA

To understand why this decision concerns me, it's helpful to look at how public communication, especially for an agency like NASA, has evolved over time.

As outlined in my advertising thesis, published in 2021, there are four models for conducting effective public relations: publicity, public information, advocacy, and relationship building. Developed by Grunig and Hunt in the 1980s, a company’s approach to informing the public can fit one of these four models.

The first model, publicity, seeks to deceive or heavily influence the public. You can think of it as propaganda or a cover-up to misdirect the general public. One example is the tobacco industry in the 1960s minimizing health risks of cigarettes depsite understanding the impact of smoking on individuals and public health.

The second model, public information, focuses on educating the general public about a topic. From the 1960s through the 1980s, NASA relied on this model, which focused on sharing accurate information through mass media to influence the public’s interest in the space program. Walter Cronkite and Jules Bergman became household names from their coverage of the manned space program.

The third model, advocacy, adds a new element to the equation: two-way communication. While defined by the word 'advocacy' in academia, this approach fosters and facilitates discussions with the public about a topic. In the 1990s, NASA began tailoring its messaging to meet the needs of different groups of people. Communicators may share with a senator how NASA benefited their state’s economy or highlight how astronauts inspire kids to choose STEM degrees. Access to the internet and the ability for the space agency to publish their own content made this change possible.

The fourth model, relationship building, became readily available to NASA during the 2010s at the dawn of social media. NASA could invite the public to participate in their science efforts, from conducting open science missions to adding someone’s name to a Mars Rover Ridealong. Individuals could feel a personal connection to the space agency and find value in that relationship.

The shift towards this relationship-building model was a natural progression for NASA, recognizing that its mission extends beyond mere information dissemination. Crucially, this evolution underscores a point often forgotten in our profit-driven society: government agencies are not businesses.

Government Agencies Aren’t Businesses

We often forget that public goods do not have to be profitable. By definition, a public good is a commodity or service that benefits society (non-excludable) and does not reduce availability for others (non-rivalrous). Public schools, law enforcement, and roads are all examples of services that benefit everyone and is available to everyone.

Our capitalistic society focuses on generating wealth and privatizing goods. Science is a long-term endeavor that trickles knowledge over decades. Overtime, the benefits of science can emerge. One example, our long-term efforts to study nuetron stars using X-ray technologies led to a medical breakthrough for a better CT scan. The initial astrophysics technology was patented in 2015, but other researchers began exploring medical applications five years later. The discovery on both ends could not be rushed and used careful and calculated efforts to lead to their eureka moments.

As NASA continues to shrink its communications department (in addition to its social media presence), American citizens are losing access to the science and technology discoveries they fund with their tax dollars. If NASA does not communicate about scientific advancements it has completed, there is no way a medical researcher can make the connection between neutron stars and better CT scans. Science is not done until it is fully communicated. Science is a long-term investment in our society to making the world a better place.

Where the Agency (May) Stand

Given this understanding of science as a public good and a long-term investment, the agency's decision to drastically reduce its communication channels warrants a closer look. While I don't have all the internal information, here is my perspective on what these changes might mean for NASA. My perspective does not reflect NASA’s opinion or the opinion of my employer.

As the agency shared in many replies, NASA’s social media portfolio grew to more than 400 accounts across dozens of platforms. The goal of this social media consolidation effort is to reflect a more cohesive and simplified message across the agency to inform, educate, and inspire the public.

One potential problem is the firehose of information that still needs to be communicated to the public. Hundreds of those NASA-affiliated accounts are actively sharing updates about education opportunities, available data, and recent discoveries across the universe. By reducing to thirty-five accounts, a flood of information will still need to be shared, but there will be fewer ways to share it on social media.

There are many ways to get information from NASA, including newsletters and the agency website. However, social media has unique online relationship-building aspects that cannot be replicated in other models. Social media fosters conversations and interactive collaboration with the public on a nationwide scale. Creating a more unified message across fewer accounts could mean decreasing the dialogue with the public about the agency’s goals and missions. NASA may revert to a public information or advocacy model, depending on how these changes are fully realized.

What You Can Do

This change is implemented. I cannot speak to any reason why NASA would revert to its previous focus on a relationship-building model for online communications.

Looking at the bigger picture, if you want to support science and how its communicated with the public, Here are a few actions available to you:

• Learn about NASA science conducted across the nation, planet, and solar system and how it benefits your life.

• Educate yourself about the proposed cuts to NASA’s budget, which proposes to reduce funding for science programs by over 50%.

• Make your voice heard by calling your political representatives with 5 Calls.

While this class was focused on the art and copy of the advertising industry, there were opportunities to learn broadly about the creative process as studied by academics.

The untrained eye sees creativity as an endemic gene in the artist’s DNA, believing once scientists break open the human genome then they too will have the opportunity to flip the switch and select a paintbrush. This worldview is insulting, though it’s only acknowledged in whispers.

Creativity is a skill. It comes with practice. With painstaking hours, with the candle lit late into the night, a creator scribbling out plots across a well worn notebook and sketching designs in the weathered art journal. In the morning, the sun greets the desk, but the creator and their notes are not there. They’re gone for coffee, bringing their scrawled out handwriting with them.

Why do we only think of one kind of creative?

Every so often someone posts a listicles on about “How to boost your creativity.” Keeping a notebook on hand, cutting out distractions, try doing things differently… many of us has heard of these things before. I don’t subscribe to it.

Analternative definitionis a person who produces from original thought and expression. Borrowing intertextuality from literary studies, however, there is no such thing as a true original. Our brains are constantly stewing together everything our minds have been exposed to throughout the day. Merging together our media, our hobbies, our worldview…

With an interconnected world, all that a person can produce is build upon the work that has come before them. Sometimes this can be in the form of plagiarism or parody. Other times it’s allusions or translations. But by building, or interpreting, a work, we use our cognitive creative abilities to add to the human experience. The cult-classic TV show Futurama wouldn’t be what it is if it didn’t have satirical references to Star Trek or the erroneous use of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.

Incubation, that stew of everything, is one of the five steps in the creative process, according to Social Psychologist Graham Wallas.

1. Preparation — the stage where humans identify the problem and gather information about it.

2. Incubation — allowing the subconscious to work on the problem, allowing for surprise connections that a conscious mind may not realize

3. Illumination — the EUREKA moment, when everything clicks together

4. Verification — taking the problem and solution, leading to testing and feedback.

5. Reflection — considering the final results and remembering the process

When you scrutinize this list, it’s not far from the scientific method. Rather than a streamlined structure, this creative process incorporates the intricacies of life into the scientist’s process of discovery.

1. A scientist prepares and identifies a problem. They research previous experiments, gathering previous information. They beginning testing their own science and engineering experiments and troubleshooting procedures.

2. Contrary to popular belief, scientists are normal people. They allow themselves time away from the lab. Taking a coffee break, allowing formulas and principles ruminate and rest in the brain. Speaking with colleagues candidly about life or work.

3. The lightbulb clicks. The hard work pays off. The experiment produces results that were unknown previously. The scientists has created a new idea, potentially adding incrementally to the vault of collective human knowledge.

4. Before to be completely added to the vault, peers review the results to make sure that it holds to the standard of science.

5. Many people might consider the final result and remember the process, using the conclusions to build on their own new experiments in the future.

Some argue that this discovery isn’t actually creative. Why the hell not? A person took the literature that preceded them, found a hole or a twist to improve the human experience and understanding, then created the knowledge that we now have today.

So if it’s as easy as five-steps…

But is the creative process the formula that produces both Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone or the discovery of the molecular structures of DNA? Yes…and no. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat. Pray. Love., shared her understanding of creativity in a 2009 TED Talk.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll never have success?” Gilbert postulates. The notion of being a professional creator is daunting. From the moment you decide, teenager or adult, people ask about their fears for you. Once you have conquered the rejection and created the masterpiece, the questions evolved. “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to keep writing for your whole life and you’re never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?”

Yes.

“The short answer to all of those questions is yes,” Gilbert opens up. But she’s afraid of lots of things, like seaweed. Flipping the questions, Gilbert simply asks, “Why?”

Unchecked, creative ventures can drain the life force of an individual, leaving cracks for alcoholism, depression, or worse to fester. Often misattributed to author, journalist, and notoriously heavy drinker Ernest Hemingway; Humorist Peter De Vries wrote a character saying

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober.”

“Creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable,” Gilbert continues. The social normative that acts of creation is always correlation to this suffering, that “artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish.”

This repugnant thought, that writers and artists are doomed to tragedy, is utterly ridiculous. Is there a famous scientist you can name that lead to cognitive instabilities because of their line of work? Galileo Galilee, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Rosalind Franklin… even Sigmund Freud! What can a scientist do that a creative can’t?

A bit of Apollo, a bit of Dionysus

De Vries’ character was a poet, one of the hardest creative professions. While deviously simple to write a poem, it is hard to convey such great emotion in so few words. In the 1964 novel Reuben, Reuben, the poet had once told a New York Times journalist:

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober … and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

Creativity isn’t just this unprompted and intoxicated writing, and science isn’t always bureaucratic red tape and test tubes. You need both to create anything in this world. Unlike a blank canvas or open document, unlike calculus or a chemical equation, it’s a bit of mediated magic and mathematics.

Continuing with a Greco-Roman theme, Elizabeth Gilbert discusses the “disembodied creative spirit” of creativity. In those ancient times, the people believed creativity was a divine attendant to human beings, from “some distant and unknowable source, for some distant and unknowable reasons.” The Greeks called them “daemons,” and the Romans called them “genius.”

Different than a clever person, there was a magical entity lived in the interior of an artist’s studio, peering out from time to time to guide the creative and assist the outcome of their work.

Gilbert recognizes this as a psychological construct, a barrier between the artist and the work as a protection. It’s something scientists readily have, when they separate themselves from the lab. Stepping out of the lab, out of the working space, creates a physical and mental barrier. A scientist is judged by their work, yes, but there’s other limiting factors too.

Perhaps the didn’t have the technology they needed at the time, like William Samuel Henson. Or perhaps they made the best with what they had like Samuel P. Langley. However, the perfect timing with the perfect wind conditions and the precise photograph led William and Orville Wright to become the first aviators. The creative genius living in their walls of their bike shop had to be working overtime for that one.

In those Roman times, the ancient artist couldn’t take full credit because an invisible hand helped him, whether it was because his creative genius didn’t have the precise timing, or right skills, or even maybe the creative overslept and didn’t help the artist on that piece so it came out poorly.

I don’t know the full story of how Da Vinci became himself, or Lovelace, or Einstein, or Franklin, or Freud. Perhaps one day they were sitting on the bench in a particular rumination or a moment of emotional frustration, taking all the knowledge and ideas accumulated over the years, and then with a touch of the invisible spirit of Genius, everything simply clicked.

The Moon’s mountainous terrain.

Computing Machines.

Energy is equals Mass times the Speed of Light squared.

Deoxyribonucleic Acid.

Oedipus Complex.

🖌️Liberation.🧬

Personally, I subscribe to the Elizabeth Gilbert’s Theory of Creativity.

That everyone is creative, just with different media and elements.

That calculus and chemistry can require a touch of good karma to make everything go perfectly.

It’s hard to be a scientist, to research in the rigidity of numbers and scientific laws with the restraints decades or even centuries old.

It’s terrifying to be creative, to feel like you have to top the previous work you’ve done constantly while bearing a part of your soul.

So why not learn from one another? Scientists, keep the evidence-based science method, but remember the need for incubation and a step back from the lab to stew with a coffee in hand. Creatives, keep the creative process (whatever yours is), but remember the individual piece isn’t a piece of you.

We all need that invisible helping hand.

This post is inspired by an article I wrote: Eureka! Creative Scientists Need Coffee Breaks.

Read the Article

What are the most memorable articles of 2019?

My philosophy is writing leaves pieces of yourself behind, because often the amount of research and time dedicated into one article leads to feeling like a part of you.

A new year dawns opportunities to reflect upon ourselves, and now is no different. While creating new writing goals for 2020, I pause to remember what I shared in 2019.

Dipping into the Martian Atmosphere, NASA Langley Research Center

This was my first article on the NASA Langley page. I had written two extended image captions earlier in the month, but this article was huge to me. I remember being nervous to talk with Dr. Rafael Lugo. I researched as much as I could about the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) project before I met with him.

We sat in a small office and simply chatted about this project. He was very nice, making it very easy to ask questions to. I had only done one sit-down interview for an article prior to this; all my previous experience was e-mailing bursts of short lists of questions. During our discussion, my confidence in asking the right questions grew, trying to understand the technical jargon and aspects of MAVEN. I may have asked questions like “How would you explain that to an 8-year-old?” or repeated back what I heard in my own diction to make sure I understood properly.

Learning about the aerobraking campaign, a technique MAVEN and other orbiters use to “dip” deeper into the planet’s atmosphere, was a treat. Writing about it was a dream. Seeing my name proudly on NASA.gov was something I never thought would happen. Truly, this first article couldn’t have been a better experience. An interesting and relatively simple topic, a scientist and engineer who communicates well, and a LEGO set visual of the orbiter.

Combating Antivaxxers and Misinformation — How Should We Proceed?, Let’s Get Sciencey

Vaccination communication has been a side-interest for a little while. I thought I knew how to talk with someone about health and science, it being my specialty in undergraduate. But I didn’t really understand how communication about this topic should be a conversation until I wrote this piece.

Let’s Get Sciencey reached out to me about becoming a contributing writer, and wanted my first article about communicating about vaccines. It made me nervous, at first, to write to someone I’ve never met. This was my first freelance article. At the time I was used to a conversation about a piece before it was published, but I had to quickly adjust to e-mailing back and forth. It’s not hard, just a different style of communication.

The entire article is split into a four parts: where the vaccine misinformation came from, what’s the truth about vaccines, explaining why vaccines are important, and how to respectfully talk to someone who has a differing opinion about vaccines. I researched long into the night, trying to get the best information on each subtopic.

When it was posted, I was so excited. Looking back on it I see some errors, like how it’s too long to hold the audience’s the attention and I covered four topics when I should’ve focused on two. But it doesn’t change that I really like how it turned out for where I was in my writing career at the time. It was a small milestone.

ACT-America: Barbecue, Cold Fronts and a Diversion from the Plan, NASA Earth Expeditions Blog

The experience of flying on a C-130 Hercules was incredible. It was the last article I wrote for NASA Langley before ending my internship: a science flight. This blog piece was going to be different than a traditional article like the MAVEN one.

Public Affairs Officer Joe Atkinson said I had freedom to take the article in nearly any direction I wanted. Which is absolutely too much freedom for a person with the tendency to overwrite like myself. Honestly, I had so many ideas it could’ve been a book:

“Flight of an Intern” publishes Summer 2019, featuring Andrea’s first science flight across half the United States. It includes exclusive interviews with scientists, the amount of Peanut Butter consumed to avoid flight sickness, and the jokes the crew shared during the encounter!

After some much needed advice to keep it to a reasonable length, I focused on the food everyone ate, a little about what I learned, and the casual conversations everyone had. After three or four rounds of cutting paragraphs (Again, I write too much. All of the time.), Joe and I decided that it was as close to the word count as I was going to get.

It was refreshing in some ways to write a candid article styled like a travel agenda, but still routed in science. It reminded me that all sorts of topics connect to science writing, similar to Grub Street’s article about how climate change will kill the Bloody Mary. Essentially, the experience encouraged me to branch out beyond news-style writing, even if it’s just for my own personal blog.

Eureka! Creative Scientists Need Coffee Breaks, Let’s Get Sciencey

Inspired by an article from Vivienne Tam on why scientists need more coffee breaks, I took everything I had learned in my Creativity class that semester of graduate school and applied it Science. I loved the opportunity to bring a new part of non-science to the field. Usually I copy words of Bruno Latour or explain how different audiences need different levels of science explanation. This was different.

Social Psychologist Graham Wallas’s Creative Processes talks about how we solve problems creatively: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. My advertising classes use this to explain one of the methods for creativity. There are many different methods, and everyone has their own personal process, but Wallas highlights the general steps for the general public.

After reading Tam’s article, I immediately saw how her logic for coffee breaks met the criteria for incubation in the creative process. Essential, the significance of this is I had solid academic evidence to explain how scientists were creative.

Most science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is simply dismissed as uncreative. It’s something anyone can do if they have the skills. I disagree. STEM learns about the world we live and creates knowledge from it. While you can’t creatively answer “2+2=4,” current researchers are looking to answer questions that require a cycle of creative thinking. Recognizing the problem, looking to the sources to see if it’s been solved, developing your own way to solve the problem — all of these are parts of the creative process.

Many of my STEM friends simply accept themselves as not creative. Which isn’t true. They are simply creative with numbers and elements rather than paint and cameras.

Beyond the Metal: Investigating Soft Robots at NASA Langley, NASA Langley Research Center

I met two interns, Chuck Sullivan and Jack Fitzpatrick, who were helping develop soft robot actuators using 3-D printing. I thought their project was awesome. With permission from their project lead, I wrote an article. With the way the robots moved, I felt like a GIF or video was necessary to fully share the story. An image could not justify the sheer alien way the robot moved across a table. (There design changed a semester later, showcasing all of the hard work.).

Even though I led the story — and therefore showed the videographer, photographer, and social media lead what I wanted captured and how I wanted it shared — I still was learning. I would generally suggest something for a video, then Gary Bazinger would adjust the angle and be sure capture a little of everything. I might say I wanted “the interns controlling the actuator” as a photo, and Dave Bowman would take a few shots, then try a different one that I hadn’t thought of. Social Media Lead Natalie Joseph made suggestions for questions and phrasing so we would have a perfect audio. I loved how this was so different than a school project, that instead of “leading” meaning “telling everyone what to do,” it meant “directing the team and letting the team use their strengths.”

To my amazement, the NASA flagship page picked up on the story:

Which led to general reporters picking up the story. It felt viral. News sites I read shared it, including Fox News, Business Insider, and Interesting Engineering. It was a treat seeing how people wrote their headlines:

• NASA is Developing ‘Soft Robots’ to Help Explore Other Worlds (Space.com)

• NASA eyes soft robots for dirty jobs on the moon and Mars
  I shall call him Squishy. (cnet)

• NASA Is Developing ‘Soft Robots’ That Look Like Inflatable ‘Aliens’ (Live Science)

My absolute favorite was:

• NASA unleashes weird ‘soft robots’ which look like alien sex toys (Metro.co.uk)

(A title doesn’t get better than that. The theme continues in the article. You want this in your internet history, trust me. Read it.)

While it’s exciting to see something you created go everywhere on the Internet, it was more than that. Seeing it go everywhere solidified to me that I know a good story when I see one. I know how to identify worthwhile topics about science to share. It made me feel like everything I had learned in school and at my internship was valid.

Where will 2020 take me?

I don’t know yet. Still continuing a graduate degree, still writing about science, still sharing my two cents with the world. I’ve learned so many things, met so many wonderful people, and discovered more about myself than I could have imagined in 2018. All I know is 2020 holds a new year, new opportunities, and new stories. That’s what I’m looking forward to.

This past July marked the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Previously, when reflecting on the time period at NASA, I thought of white, male engineers with thin black ties and pocket protectors scribbling our calculations using slide rulers. This uniformity went unquestioned for a long time in my life, until in high school. It began with learning about Margaret Hamilton developing the flight software used for the Apollo space program. In college, I read Hidden Figures, which highlights four African American women mathematicians at NASA Langley: Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden. Even as recently as this year, I’ve learned we have a handful of LGBTQ+ astronauts.

Often, diversity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) often highlight what can be described in a photograph. Increasing the demographic and psychographic diversity of STEM fields is critical, and others with more experience have spoken out on the subject. To me, diversity also includes in profession. I’ve touched on this before at Let’s Get Science-y, looking at where science goes beyond the laboratory. Writers, educators, legislators, artists, and citizens are all required to help science progress.

It’s always been this way, really. Looking at Bruno Latour’s Science in Action, we glimpse at how our world really operates. So often we hear stories told after the climax, after the facts are in the history book. For example, Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon in July 1969, iterating his famous words “That’s one step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” What isn’t shared as much is how we got there — I mean, really how we got there.

More than Engineers Helped With the Space Program

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy addresses United States Congress about urgent national needs, after Alan Shepard was the first American in space in January of the same year. Here, Kennedy shares the need for America to have a “clearly leading role in space achievement,” ultimately leading to the first announcement of going to the Moon before the decade is out.

From there, the science takes over, right? Note quite. The American people are enamored with the idea of men leaving our terrestrial planet in pursuit of a different terrain. Individuals across the nation wanted to learn more about the program: wanted to learn how astronauts train and if they have a sense of humor, whether we were using the NOVA rocket to reach the lunar surface or the Saturn V, the finer details of what goes inside a command module — heck, what is a command module. While all of us born after 1980 can take this for granted, but every American had to be taught how to get to the moon while the engineers were learning how to get to the moon.

The publicists, advertisers, and journalists step into the scene to fill in the scientific gap between the public and NASA. Astronauts toured around the nation, the pathway to the Moon makes the front page, and private companies showcase their technology in consumer media. All of these efforts take place for the convincing of the American public of the necessity and importance of the American Space Program.

Since there were no persons in space yet, artists were hired to provide images and animation to help with comprehension of technical information in a digestible package. Photographers and videographers recorded astronauts training, engineers working, hardware tests, etc. All before the Apollo program began.

Of course, I’ve highlighted humanities because that’s my personal background and education, but there is a laundry list of people who supported the Apollo program in the 1960s. School educators teaching in public classrooms. Financial departments calculating costs and return on investment for the technology. Seamstresses meticulously sewing together spacesuits. Cafeteria workers at the Space Centers providing meals. Science fiction writers further disseminating new science ideas. Even the Walt Disney Company contributed. Truly, every discipline can be connected to the space industry in some way.

President Kennedy understood this from the beginning. “It will not be one man going to the moon… it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there,” he said in the May 1961 Congress session. It takes a variety of people to succeed.

Well that was then, what about now?

While some used to consider NASA and the space industry as a relic from the past, recent events renewed interest in the American public. SpaceX launched a Tesla Cherry Roadster towards Mars. The president has announced a mandate to return to the Moon with a sustainable presence by 2024, jump starting the Artemis program.

And with all of this, remains the same jobs as past. The American public will need to be educated in the scientific endeavors as they happen. Businesses will need help reaching out to the right backers to fund their CubeSat experiments. Legislators and lobbyists will have help navigate political turmoil that we call Washington, D.C. Astronauts are a slim portion of our population, and a slim portion of the industry when all is said and done.

As Latour outlines in his book, none of these activities look like “science.” They aren’t in a lab, they don’t involve mice or special training, and often a calculator isn’t even required. But they are science. Each educator, each legislator, each artist, each journalist, all contribute to science via progressing scientific messaging to audiences, allowing less barriers and more understanding. This scientific literacy helps the world as a whole more science forward. The entire space industry will never progress with engineers and scientists alone.

It’s not just space, though. Every STEM discipline needs a variety of professions in order to succeed. Where we stand today is everyone can be apart of the science industry, just like we’ve always stood. Showcase your talent, and see how far across the universe it will take you.

Special Courtesy to the Chasing the Moon Twitter for images they’ve collected that contributed to this piece.