Cultivating and Communicating Robust Knowledge Through Collaboration

Spacesuits, human mobility tools, and rovers are some of the essential hardware that Artemis III astronauts will use during the Moon landing scheduled for 2026. To keep astronauts safe from the hazards of space, they will need knowledge to properly manage lunar dust, plumbing issues, liquids in space, decompression sickness, and much more. The Spacesuit Knowledge Capture (SKC) and Strategic Communications (Strat Comm) team is skilled in capturing applicable space-related knowledge and sharing it with NASA scientists, technicians, engineers, new employees, vendors building hardware, and the public. These knowledge captures include educational outreach, recorded lectures, workshops, interviews, and vignettes that contain essential knowledge from subject-matter experts. They also include still and video imagery of hardware, facilities, analogue studies, and laboratory testing. The team skillfully produces recorded imagery to help illustrate and adequately communicate the complex story of past, present, and future human space exploration to those inside and outside the realm of space science. The SKC and Strat Comm team evolved from the U.S. SKC Program, and after the first decade, the program has managed to double its annual capture rate. This knowledge is archived, organized, and disseminated, as appropriate, with the team’s customers and stakeholders. Being integrated within the technical community, the SKC and Strat Comm team collaborates with internal and external entities to identify, capture, and transfer timely and applicable lessons learned, including safety lessons. These lessons span from the early existence of space travel including the Apollo 1 fire to the more recent water-in-the-helmet incidents. As the SKC and Strat Comm team continues to evolve and cultivate ideas to capture and share knowledge, it has become a main artery for knowledge sharing within the Johnson Space Center. This paper describes the team’s tenets, skills, collaborations, accomplishments, and future initiates.