“Dead On Arrival” ought to be the title of Andrew Thomas’sВ Law & Order styled 10-minute homemade film which premiered at the NASA leadership retreat last month. Thomas, a NASA astronaut who participated in several Mir Space Station flights through the late 1990s, wanted to show his co-workers at the agency that, despite policy changes after the 2003 Columbia disaster, barriers to innovation and inclusion still dominate the culture at NASA.
A hybrid ofВ The Office and a live-action Dilbert cartoon,В the film features a young engineer’s demoralizing experience as she tangles with an impersonal bureaucracy intent on following administrative protocols. We follow her along as her ideas and enthusiasm for her work are killed off in a slow death of defeating encounters with managers and directors obsessed with process and conformity.
“The point about the video is it’s not fiction,” Thomas toldВ SPACE.com. “I think it is something that does need to be addressed because we don’t want to have another accident,” said Thomas, whose last spaceflight was NASA’s first shuttle flight following the Columbia tragedy. “And in our business, that’s what happens when you have that kind of culture.”
NASA’s response to the video was surprisingly broadminded. “I found it extraordinarily funny and not at all funny,” NASA’s former shuttle program manager Wayne Hale wrote in a NASA blog entry last week. Hale posted the video to his YouTube account where it’s caught the attention of viewers well outside the NASA culture.
The video, which was first posted on Jan. 27 (the day after the extraordinary Aquarian annular solar eclipse) has been seen over 30,000 times.
“It has really been resonating with people,” Thomas said. “I’m enormously surprised.”