From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.
On episode 376, NASA Johnson’s multimedia team leads discuss what it takes to capture and share the story of space exploration and how methods have evolved since the Apollo era. This episode was recorded February 19, 2025.
Transcript
Joseph Zakrzewski (Host)
Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center. Episode 376, I Want My NASA TV. I’m Joseph Zakrzewski, and I’ll be your host for this episode. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, production designers, communicators and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human space flight and more. For decades, NASA TV, and now NASA+, has been the gateway for the world to witness historic space flight moments from the Apollo moon landings to the shuttle era and today’s exciting programs. But how does it all come together? What does it take to capture and share the story of exploration with audiences across the globe? Today, we’ll be talking with the experts who make it happen, NASA’s live television producers and longtime team members who have shaped the evolution of NASA’s television productions. In this episode, we’re honored to speak with NASA’s External Relations Office multimedia supervisor John Stoll and NASA’s live television producer team lead, Sarah Volkman, who have been key colleagues in bringing NASA’s story to life. Enjoy.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Hello, John. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on Houston, We Have a Podcast today. Well, to start, tell us about yourselves and what are your backgrounds. What brought you to NASA, John, we’ll start with you.
John Stoll
Sounds good. Thank you so much for having me. This is exciting about myself, my background, so obviously, my name is John Stoll. I’ve come from audio production. I was a musician as a kid, and I learned that you could do audio for a career. And so I went to I got a degree in audio, and then I found a job out here for Lockheed Martin, not an audio but soldering communications panels and various test chambers they have on site at Johnson Space Center. And so I just dove in. I love soldering, so I’ll come here and I’ll do that. And then a friend of mine, I’d only been there a few months, friend of mine said, Hey, over in building two, there’s they there have audio people at NASA. I said, they don’t have audio people at NASA. That’s not possible. That’d be the coolest thing in the world. It turns out they do, and they had an opening for an audio person. So I made myself, I made myself in building two, and just bothered them until they just like, just fine, just come over here and start working. Because I love space exploration. Always have, and I love audio production. And so that’s how I got here, and I was in the audio control room. We supported, in those times, space shuttle missions, primarily, and then the space station started being built, and so we supported both of those things. And that’s, yeah, that’s my background and how I got here.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Sarah, how’d you get here? When did you start?
Sarah Volkman
All right, well, thank you for having us on. It’s really fun to be on the this side of the microphone long time, first time. So I was definitely a Film TV, just, you know, nerd growing up. And I was also a daughter of a military family. So we moved all over, but by way of a lot of places, wound up in Texas as our last stop. And yeah, so I decided to stay here for school. Went to school in East Texas, Stephen F Austin State University. They have a awesome film program there, and decided, you know, when I was wrapping up high school, that’s what I wanted to pursue. And through that experience, learned a lot about myself, learned a lot about other schools I had, and decided once I got out to, you know, get into the industry any way I could. I didn’t quite have the stomach for, like, a lot of my classmates, you know, live on a couch and do a like, like, probably like a Stoll here, I did something a little more steady. You know, for my I knew that about myself, my mental health, so I found a job at a news station because I loved film, but I also loved TV. And I learned a lot there, and that definitely opened me up to getting this, this job here. So our last stop when we were moving was Houston. My parents live in Houston, so that’s where I was looking to move to after working a little bit of news in East Texas. And I mean, really, just the stars aligned. And I really, really, just got really lucky that, like, like, same thing happened to John. They had this opportunity again. People are like, what do you do? What do you do? The film degree? And I love to now tell them, Well, I just work at NASA, so ended up here. Got really lucky. Um, and thanks, John.
John Stoll
You’re welcome.
Joseph Zakrzewski
It’s always fun to see when people’s eyes light, you know, light up when you tell them that you work at NASA and what you get to do, and when you get to be a part of and, and especially this, this group here with NASA TV now NASA plus production and everything that goes behind it, you see a lot of, you know, talks of. Celebrities and engagement on online and through other podcasts that they talk about, the team, behind the team, and what it takes to make a production, what it takes to make a film, what it takes to make a TV show, audio recordings for music. I mean, the list goes on and on, and you always hear them give thanks at award shows. This team is just like that team, if not bigger, and really dives into it. And John, we’ll start back with you. How big is the NASA TV multimedia team, the production team, and what part of that do you help facilitate?
John Stoll
Yeah, so as as supervisor of the team, it, I mean, it’s the ultimate service to the team, is to is to lead it, and I do my best at that every day. But the team is, it’s a large team, and it’s a it’s a diverse team in terms of skill sets, there’s video producers, video editors, live television producers, audio engineers, which, unlike a lot of TV outfits out there, there’s a dedicated audio department that does specific functions, which is fortunate for me, because that’s how I got here. And then social media and new media and even communications coordinators that fill in gaps that are specific to what we do here, specific with communication, with the flight control team, interfacing that very specific mission operation to what we do in communications and multimedia. So there’s there’s the team is is as big as it is, because there’s unique roles. And then there’s the, predictable producer, editor, script writer role that anybody can identify with and know what they do. But yeah, so it splits into live broadcast and then post production, two sides of the house, and then social media that straddles it, and we work on the various platforms in social media. Yeah, that’s what we cover. And of course, we’ve also got, you know, one person, only, one that keeps the entire system running all the time, uptime. You know, 24/7, 365, with, with few exceptions, who we are all indebted to. I’ll say his name, John Thayer is a, he’s a very, very brilliant digital systems engineer, and we’re all, we’re all indebted to him every day.
Joseph Zakrzewski
How big is your team?
Sarah Volkman
Yeah, so I’m just a subset of you know the team John described. We have a small group of producers. You wouldn’t really believe how much we and it’s grown over the years. I know we have a topic later, like, how has this changed? It’s grown over the years, but you wouldn’t believe how much we cover, because we do cover everything that goes out to the public, and some stuff that doesn’t go out to the public for, you know, like institutional stuff for all of JSC, and the things Johnson Space Center and the things that JSC, the programs that it’s home to. So, you know, astronaut, anything to do with the astronauts, anything to do with the space station, the Artemis mission. Now, you know that’s run out of Johnson, and then, you know, we’re going to get into it, but all the commercial programs, so yeah, we’re it kind of sound like a lot of positions, but it’s really, it’s not a lot of people for what we pull off. And yeah, another shout out to John Thayer. You know, he worked at a news station, like a lot of us have. It’s a whole group of engineers and and that, you know, running that daily operation, and we only have one here. But, yeah, like John mentioned, we’re a very versatile team, and it’s kind of crazy. What we make happen.
John Stoll
It’s interesting, kind of the the just to kind of riff off of that, how the team looks like it looks now, is driven by what we’ve done in the past, and so what, what space shuttle, space shuttle TV production drove us to do, and how we supported that. Remnants of that still inform how our team is shaped, in what we do. For example, in Sarah’s group with the live television producers, there’s generally one person running the entire show over there. And we don’t have an audio follow, video switcher, which people in TV would be very familiar with. We have a audio control that manually does audio those, those functions have been in place here for decades, and so kind of the way that we do things here, and the way the process by which we make TV is driven by that history always looking forward, of course, but a lot of that still remains, and it’s just it’s the nature of being close to human space flight, and being close to a sustained human space flight too. If we did, if we just supported launches and went home, such as they do at Kennedy Space Center, our team would look a lot different. And the team at Kennedy does look a lot different for that reason. But it’s the sustained, it’s the marathon nature that kind of informs things here.
Sarah Volkman
That’s good, good thing that you mentioned, if someone’s listening and they are familiar with, like a TV studio, or some regular TV studio or a new studio, you’ll, you know, you’ll picture like a TD, graphics operator all that well, we have those roles, you know, we have graphic designer and whatnot, but in the control room, it’s one person, our producers are our TDs, our graphics ops, our playbacks and. And so, yeah, I mean, it’s never a dull moment, a lot of fun, and
Joseph Zakrzewski
coming from industry too, like, I mean, it’s probably safe to say that it’s a tight knit group of people that wear multiple hats, something that a lot of people can probably relate to in any multimedia field, whether it’s entertainment or NASA TV production. And certainly that’s the team behind the team. And John, you kind of took me right into my my first point you and Sarah was was from your experiences when you first arrived to NASA. What was the state of NASA TV like now again, of course, NASA plus on the streaming platforms. How has it changed since then and and, of course, this production system, this style, has been on the forefront of all live events, pre produced events and such. You know, people listening right now have seen a NASA production, probably without ever knowing it was a NASA production, whether it was a clip of it on the news or a live production that you yourselves put together, but from the time you arrived to how we’ve grown now and some of the challenges along the way, how have you seen that progression?
John Stoll
Yeah, that’s a great question. So when I arrived, was early 1998 and it was Space Shuttle Program, only, eyes towards the space station would begin. First element launched late 1998 so I worked, I think, the last three or four missions before we started doing space station flights and the way we did TV. At that time, we had a single analog satellite that carried a signal, only one signal, there was another satellite used to move video back and forth between NASA centers, and it was a public satellite, but that was not the one that the single satellite, transponder nine, if anybody remembers, was the one that the that you could watch and tune in on your local cable channel, and you could see, you know, NASA TV, and it was analog. Nothing was digital, of course. The interesting thing was transponder nine and the other the other ones, transponder five, those were tied to a lot of processes in the space shuttle program where they were used for specific things. So we had directives on how we switch TV. So when I got here we, for example, a rule was, if we had downlink TV coming from Space Shuttle the TD in Sara’s area was duty bound to place that downlink TV out onto NASA TV so the public could see it without lower thirds or fonts. That was the rule, and we couldn’t break the rule. And so a lot of what we did was directed, was more programmatically directed, which had was, had come from the past, but we had a document for those super interested. It’s NSTS 08240, the Space Shuttle television plan, which I memorized because I had to memorize it. And we lived by that document. And so that was, that was when I first arrived. And Space Station changed all of that, because instead of having people in space for, you know, 9,12,14,17 days, however long, and then not again, for a few months, we had people in space all the time. And so the 24/7 mode of support that we had in our in our audio control room, production control room, those modes only worked for a very short time before everybody realized that’s not going to work. As people in space 24/7 is a different animal. And so we were able to start changing how we broadcast, slowly changing how we broadcast, to start more directly targeting the public and to get people watching for reasons of like, oh, this broadcast is a little more interesting. It’s got more elements to it. It’s got more graphics to it. It’s got lower thirds. We don’t have to leave downlink, a downlink video channel from the space station on NASA TV when we have one, because we always have it. So we had to change a lot of those things change just by nature of the technical setup, of what we have available. But yeah,
Sarah Volkman
agreed.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Well, you came in the middle of all this. So John, you know, I’ll say John was a part of that first transition of, you know, shuttle flights into, I’ll call it round the clock coverage, almost. And then you come in as a part of that team, that expansive group, to, you know, you got people coming and going from the space station. So you have to cover that. You have people on the space station. So that involves a whole other set of directives. So for you, you kind of came in, like trying to catch up to him, to John and his knowledge, and then implementing what you’ve learned through news. And how do I make this relatable to the public? Where, you know, John mentioned, it was just that solo clean feed with no graphics, no production value, and then you try to spice it up a little bit and add some of that insight of, you know, when a guest looks at what they’re seeing, they understand it as well.
Sarah Volkman
Yeah, I definitely came in right as that big shift was probably taking place. But even, you know, eight years ago I’ve seen such a big shift, even in those eight years. So I think just kind of general summary of of what John said to me we’ve shifted more from being a complete media resource, you know, complete documentation type resource, creating a little bit more of something that stands alone as its own production, that someone can learn from and be entertained by. And also, but more importantly, yeah, learn from be educated about what NASA is doing and producing that ourselves, rather than being a complete Media Resource. But we straddle the line. We definitely still have the requirements and the desire to make sure everyone who wants to use the content can and understands how and you know what it is, and gets get that that knowledge and interest out there. And then, and even just, you know, day to day, the it’s exploded, but we do, you know, downlink interviews with the International Space Station as, like, one thing we’re doing daily. And then we have our more, you know, more, bigger, higher profile events, agency events that were cross collaborating with, and they used to be maybe one of those a year. And now it’s because interest has grown like, I think, you know, all the work that people put in over the decades is paid off. And so, yeah, there’s a lot more. You know, a handful of those big, high profile cross agency events a year, naturally, that just exploded. I mean, the second year I was here, we went from just having space station ops coverage to commercial crew. We were starting lunar stuff, and ASCAN graduate ASCAN classes got a lot more coverage. All happened, like the next year. So yeah, definitely saw a taste of how it used to be, and then the rapid explosion that we’re experiencing now.
Joseph Zakrzewski
And that’s a great point you make too about the I mean, the production value, I’ll call it, that has grown significantly in the footprint, has grown so much, because we’re talking a lot about, you know, downlinks from the International Space Station, from the from the Space Shuttle. But there’s a lot here on the ground that has to be covered. You talk about the astronaut graduation and the production value that has to go behind that, in terms of a live event, whether it’s, you know, building renaming ceremonies, or things that aren’t even shown live, but are pre recorded for other production values. There’s a whole system. I mean, so dare I say, you know, the live downlinks from Space Station is, you know, maybe the tip of the iceberg, if you will, of the production that has to go in to what you do, both from space and on the ground. And that leads me to another great point you brought up about how it’s exploded. Well, let’s expand that footprint even more before NASA plus arrives. Still, NASA TV, the digital era comes flying in and lets us know that 24/7 streaming options are available. So you not only have to put it over a cable signal, but you have social media channels, you have website channels, you have direct feeds to, you know, VPN dial ins for media access. So it continues to branch off in many different ways. How have those technological advancements improved your production and helped it grow even more.
John Stoll
Yeah they, I mean, they their challenges. At first, any technological advancement, it’s a, I don’t know, they’ve improved it because they’ve pushed us, and they’ve pushed us to learn. They’ve pushed us to to look at process, to say, like, how do we make what we make to where it resonates on some new platform? For example, Facebook Live was not always around it’s weird to think now, but like that was live streaming is not always around back. I don’t know if you remember, we live streamed an EVA back in the early days when nobody was live streaming and we had to work with Facebook directly to get them to extend the length of the live stream longer than, I think it was like, four hour limit or something
Sarah Volkman
It used to be a huge deal, yeah. And then if someone was gonna stream live on Facebook, it was like, yeah, huge deal
John Stoll
NASA had worked directly to Facebook to, like, make this happen. And people loved it. They could sit on a train in whatever city they’re going to they’re commuting home, and, you know, any city around the world, and they have the view from an astronauts helmet in their phone in their hand, and it’s the coolest thing in the world. It’s like, oh, this is amazing. And those experiences pointed us at like, like, there’s a there’s an amazing story to tell every day. Like, we don’t even have to change anything we do production wise. All we have to do is figure out how to get what we do on these platforms in the way that they’re they’re reaching people so that, so that doesn’t change your production method. We still, you know, the live television producers sit there and they they switch a good show that tells a nice story. But the the platforms do command you to kind of to figure out your process and to figure out to get there, and on the on the on the post production side of the house as well. It changes you for a while because sometimes, sometimes various platforms prioritize different kinds of videos, and so maybe you want to hit something in the first one to two seconds of a video before you get into the longer story. But I think, I think the thing we’ve probably learned over the years is that, is that platforms come and go, they change. Member vine things, things come and go, they change. What doesn’t change is the human desire to understand a story. And I think podcasting funny is a great example of that their audience is like. Me who love long form story. And so the short stuff is out there, you know, the shorts and the reels and all that that’s out there. But there’s also long form stuff. People want to dig into the long story. And so I think ultimately, what, and this is a very long way to say this, but the technological advances of the time, ultimately, they mature you to understand, like, there’s, there’s multiple prongs to the approach. You can’t just do one and not do the others. You have to figure out how to do them all, because they’re all important. And at the end of the day, there’s an amazing story to be told. There’s people living in space right now that are that are currently writing a story, and it’s to tell that story every day in all the ways. That’s really the that’s the challenge,
Sarah Volkman
right? And it’s a good, you know, having these platforms, it’s a good thing. I mean, there’s more platforms. You might be like, Ah, another one, but you know, it’s that’s just means that someone else has an easier way to, you know, consumer content. So you should, you know, it’s good to try to meet them where they’re at. And then, you know, the physical parameters of stuff you have to be expanded to, like, we start shooting things in nine by six instead of or nine by 16, and that sort of thing, you know, you you make all the practical changes to to meet people where they’re at because, yes, these stories need to be told, and it’s awesome to have more ways to do that.
John Stoll
And from a historical perspective, too, I think, I think the thing I’ve learned over the years is, and it’s funny, because we have this going on right now. We have somebody who’s here that was here during Space Shuttle and understood how all that worked. And then we have someone who’s here that wasn’t here during Space Shuttle, and who does not have first hand experience of knowing how that works, but understands it better now. And I guess, what I’ve found is that having a team that has all of that, like an equal mix of those kind of people that understand all the perspectives, I think that’s where the strength really is. If you just have everybody who was hired yesterday, then there’s none of that historical context. Or if you don’t have anybody that’s you know, not been hired recently, then you have none of the modern context. And so I think you need, I think you need all those pieces.
Sarah Volkman
That’s important. You probably, you probably know Joseph the like, you know, well, in the Shuttle, this is how we did it comes up. I mean, I don’t know, three times a day, so that’s important. We know, we have people who know what that means.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Well on a production side, too. I mean, I remember as growing up, like, how big of a deal it was when, you know, it was four by three watching on a tube TV, and you mentioned going to 16:9. Well, then you mix in digital media. Like, 16:9 is then all of a sudden vertical, and then I’m watching everything from a vertical perspective. And you mentioned vine, like, How can I tell a story in three seconds? Well, now I got a minute and story. And then, like, so you’re trying to, like, find the right story, and at the same time meet the audience where they’re at. Like, you gave that a great example of people on the go watching streaming of an EVA, but at the same time too, how can you tell your story to fit the windows on the platforms that people best see fit? And I mean, with that too, I guess you kind of already touched upon it. But I really would love to dive in further is, how has the rise of digital streaming overall changed the way that NASA approaches production? Like I said, you got all these different formats, all these different ways. Do you try and take one major production and splinter it off into different fractions of what they can live on? I guess you could say in terms of platforms and streaming availability. Or do you try and make exclusive events and elements and live streams and produce exciting content for each individual channel? I guess, if that’s a fair way of phrasing that,
John Stoll
yeah, for sure. I mean, I think ideally, I think, generally speaking, we all want to do a lot more than we have time to do. I would love to produce, for example, post production, video, a version of it that is is specifically targeted to, like an Instagram reel that’s like sub three minutes or sub 90 seconds that in the vertical format, like produce that way. But the longer story is a regular, you know, a frame 16:9 that lives on. You know, NASA plus one leads the other easily other. There’s frequently not enough time to do that. There’s always the desire. But so what we do is we try to be as efficient as possible at targeting like where we know based on metrics, because we look at metrics across all these platforms, where we know people are, how long their view time is, all that stuff to try, like you say, to meet them where they are. That’s, that’s really the goal. So we focus on that, so where we’re just using our resources just as efficiently as possible. But that’s, that’s from my perspective, that’s that’s kind of how we hit it. And then the other thing to realize is as to remember, because we get used to it here, I can walk up to the audio control room here at JSC, and I frequently take people up there, and I point at the screen. I was like, Look, that’s a camera view from space. And people are amazed, like, you can come up here anytime and just look at a camera that’s in space, and I forget, because I’ve been doing it for so many years, and so it’s important to remember that too. It’s like sometimes, sometimes simple is best, like, just show, just show the view.
Sarah Volkman
I was gonna mention that. One of the most popular things I ever hear about is the H Dev, the high the HD Earth view camera payload that was. Literally just shooting the Earth. It’s a slow thing. It was a lot of, like, I think there was, like, Lo Fi music. People would just have it on all night. I would hear from from people, and then that came from here and that, yeah, so sometimes it’s constantly changing. We know what works best, long form, short form. But there are some things that you know just are universal. You know, people tend to really love to see their planet. That’s a very cool thing for them. And they love to relax. So yeah, that is one of our most popular things that comes from not this building technically, but JSC well, and
Joseph Zakrzewski
I’m and I’m right there. And for listeners that are tuned in like you can still experience that, whether it’s through NASA plus or I go on the NASA YouTube channel all the time just to watch 10 seconds of, you know, you need to have a calm, peaceful moment. And you know, the ISS has, you know, video and audio signal coming down, so you can just watch the earth fly by in the most beautiful and most simplest of forms. And I still think that’s a great core part of this production, because it’s the team that we’re talking to here that makes that happen for people that can really experience that and get that wonderment as they get to watch the earth fly by, quite literally. Well, before we get into our next topic, I want to kind of keep on this of this growing and exceeding, and, you know, meeting the challenges and exceeding the challenges with that to NASA production, NASA TV, NASA+, has been able to win a lot of exciting awards. And these awards have come because of the production values that you guys have added to every platform and every channel and everything that people get to participate in, whether it’s pre produced content, documentary style, or if it’s live produce production. And this goes all the way back. Some people don’t know that NASA won an Emmy for live production for the Apollo 11 lunar landing, and it all started from there, because that was the NASA driven initiative to have a camera do a live production down to earth, produce the TV streams, and then off you go. On the awards come. How rewarding is it you as a team to see that recognition of your work and know that you know from from where you started, of cable television to now streaming platforms and now expanding it to multiple different surfaces and formats, to see that the audience and the entertainment industry, and then just the people overall, are really appreciating it so much so that you have some trophies to show for it.
John Stoll
Right, right there, just for me, speaking personally as a supervisor, there is nothing, there’s nothing that brings me more joy than seeing someone that I work with, like, like Sarah here get an award like it’s the greatest thing ever. Nothing brings me more joy than seeing seeing my friends succeed, but knowing that that award also brings a person joy and well deserved recognition, but knowing what those awards mean to people who maybe don’t work here or maybe don’t know a lot about NASA TV production, and what goes on behind the scenes is important too, to have folks have an increased awareness of the fact that there’s a lot of hard work going on. And it’s, it’s not just, you know, the person receiving the award is always, that’s just the person with the name. There’s always other people involved. There’s always other people involved in infrastructure, which we don’t, we don’t do in building to but there’s, you know, Mission infrastructure that, you know, KU, band antennas and TDRS satellites and all the stuff that’s put up there by other people, which is how we get video down from Space Station. All those people are involved too. They don’t get the award, and they’re not even TV people. But without them, we, you know, we can’t do what we do.
Sarah Volkman
So it’s a different it’s just a different world. Of course, it’s nice to get an award, like, I’m not gonna pretend it’s not a nice for someone to recognize you, but it’s always a little bittersweet, because, you know, their thing on the production team, when here at NASA, any mission, anything, anything that you do is in the astronauts will say this up and down, you’re standing on the shoulders of 1000s of people. And so yes, you know, it is bittersweet, because every time we’ve done production, it’s taken three, other four, other five, other departments to get that on the air and and they’re often not included in those recognitions. So yeah, but it is very rewarding, because we do, you know the space doesn’t follow any sort of timeline. You know, any sort of 40 hour week, any sort of, you know this, you do nine hour cover to start two in the morning, like when you’re in the thick of a mission, it’s, it’s, it’s a lot and really grueling, but really rewarding. So it is nice, obviously, to be recognized. But I just really like that people are watching our stuff. You know, if you win something, it means someone watched it. And that’s the whole point we need. These stories are really important, the things the astronauts are working on, the things that space station is working on, all the other programs, their life saving, life, changing planet, changing, or really important things. So it’s really nice that people are watching that’s to have proof
John Stoll
That’s the thing, and not to get to, you know, academic or anything else, not to be dramatic, but Right, right? But that’s the thing is, like, that’s, we don’t know. History is being made today, like and and documenting this stuff and making productions and increasing awareness about it is is so important and so critical, because we may look but there may be science on station now that 30 years from now, yields something that no one could have ever expected. And we were here, and we pointed cameras at it, you know, and it was, it’s like, it’s cool to be part of that. It’s a part of the greater story.
Joseph Zakrzewski
And it has just that greater impact on an audience member, even myself, when I see videos of a tropical storm moving across the ocean and just like that, live feed of like that, that, again, I say, that wonderment of just what these this vantage point, this advantage, can have. Because, you know, seeing is believing in a lot of ways, and hearing is believing in a lot of ways. So it’s amazing to hear like again, the beautiful story of the team behind the team. What you’ve done moving into a digital age, you get awards and recognition for it, which comes with it, with that growth, that expansion of NASA TV production. Well, now I’ll say it. NASA has set the standard of what it comes to human space flight and television production. You know, they were there from day one, and here they are now. Now you get commercial partners involved. Now you get commercial crew the CLPS programs, other programs that are outside of NASA that are seeking your help and advice on how to get their productions up to that level. What has it been like working with, you know, a commercial crew program, or a Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or any other organization that has partnered with NASA in any capacity to try and help them tell their story?
John Stoll
Yeah, that’s, that’s a really good question. I’ll touch on it if you want to, because you’ve been real close to it. From my perspective. You know, the Commercial Crew Program, program and the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, I think I got that right, the CLPS effort. You know, Commercial Crew is, is, is the partnership, and it’s been interesting to partner with their TV teams and to figure out how to do broadcasts that are integrated from multiple locations. And that was, that was the big challenge, was the technical integration, and then the messaging, of course, which is handled by the Public Affairs Office here at JSC, that’s also an interesting challenge for that side of the house. On the TV side of the house, it’s been, it’s been fascinating to figure out how to switch a program where you know NASA’s NASA’s voice, and then SpaceX or Boeing their voices, is where it needs to be, and all the technical pieces connect even down to something very I guess granular such as the communications the air ground communications, that where the ground talks to the crew. Those prior to commercial crew, generally speaking, were hubbed out of Houston, occasionally at a Marshall, some of the old science flights or the ISS ops, but mostly out of Houston, the hub was across the, you know, across the center from us here in building two. Well, now a SpaceX, the hub is Hawthorne, so the technical hub of communications is different. And so how to interface with that, how to follow the rules of when you do and don’t, you know, have those things enabled, was a whole new thing. So it pushed, it, pushed us into a lot of learning. And I think for everybody on the commercial side of the house, you know the vendor, and you know our side of the house too, for CLPS, CLIPS is a different thing altogether, because CLPS depending on the provider. Now this is the provider. I heard it best described as FedX for the moon for anybody that doesn’t know what clip says it’s. The interesting thing is, these are, these are private companies that are in a sole, discrete location where they need to broadcast an event from. They’re not, there’s no connections to JSC, unlike the, you know, the commercial partners, SpaceX and Boeing, so they’re a totally different challenge. And it’s been, it’s been fascinating working with them, and it’s also fascinating working with these, these companies. I went to, to one of them and talk to their their comm group, and it was interesting because it’s their first lunar mission, and there’s a lot of startup culture when you’re there, and it’s this very, group of extremely excited people with their and rightfully so. And so it’s fascinating to see people who are brand new to human space flight like, or space flight at all. They’re brand new to it, and they’re super excited for it, working 18 hour days and going crazy. And to come in with like, the marathon that I mentioned earlier of human space flight like, and figure out how to fit in, fit in the whole approach to make the broadcast work. But Sarah, I’ll toss to you for the CCP
Sarah Volkman
Ageed. I think you could think of it like, like, moving in with somebody, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re combining two lives. You’re going to these companies who have, some of them have their own, you know, history of webcasts or their own productions that they’ve put on and or they don’t, they don’t, but they have their own branding and their own, you know, mission statements and so if you have to combine together into a cohesive, you know, broadcast that. A, you know, production that their audience can enjoy and take something away from their existing audience, and that ours can and you know, that just works for everybody, putting away all the legal stuff aside that you have to abide by and figure out it’s like moving in, like, what do you keep from your apartment? What do the person keep from theirs? What works to tell this joint story for all parties involved. And so it’s a lot more than we thought it was going to be. And so, you know, someone like SpaceX has a established webcast, so it’s just working with them to figure out what parts, you know, even visually, what parts can we kind of merge to put on this new platform and this new production that we’re introducing people to this partnership, yeah, what you know? What do we want from their house? More house. So all the technical stuff is complicated, like, literally, the physical systems, trying to figure out, you know, how the lines run from Hawthorne to JSC, what we can put on them, how many run back, that sort of thing, keeping track of all that. But it’s cool. I mean it, it means that we’ve really, you know, have started something new and and special. It’s fun to figure these things out. A lot of my coworkers will listen to this and be like, You’re crazy.
Joseph Zakrzewski
not at all at the beginning, like what informs your future is what you’ve learned from your past. And I think when you work with a lot of these companies, what they have seen, what they want, what they’re aspire to, is they want that Neil Armstrong shot on the moon, stepping down. They want that lot beautiful launch, capture. Close.
Sarah Volkman
The goals are always the same. Show we’re doing. Let’s make it look cool. Make it look let’s show how cool it is. Unless, yeah, do it better than the last time.
Joseph Zakrzewski
speaking of growing and doing something better than last time, making it above and beyond in terms of production. Sarah, you were the producer for Artemis one, if I am understanding that correctly
Sarah Volkman
for most of the JSC, again.
Joseph Zakrzewski
So you take, you take everything that you know, you know humans. Goal is to return to the moon with the Artemis program, and to bring that back to the forefront, and to have the technological capabilities that we did not have in 1969 when we went the first time, to have everything, all these tools, all these toys, if you want to say at your display of cameras and operations and platforms and technology, what was that like to produce a broadcast that you knew that the world was watching America’s return or NASA’s return? I should say to to the moon.
Sarah Volkman
I’m not even sure where to begin. I am so happy. I am so I was the lead producer for the Artemis one mission for the Johnson Well, the mission is run out of JSC, so for the bulk of the mission. Again, when it launches, it’s launching from Florida. We’re working in collaboration with the Kennedy Space Center. Those are big productions. When it’s splashing down again, collaboration, it’s not splashing down and right outside of Houston. So big collaborations there, but the bulk of the mission, yes, it’s run out of here, and we did do a lot of the coverage, so, or all the coverage for the however many days it was, 20 something days, and I was really honored to lead that it was so, like you said, we’ve done it before, technically, you know, Apollo did go to the moon. There was footage from there, but it’s just all it’s totally different ball game. And I’m sure, you know, whoever was doing that coverage back in the day, you know, they’d be like, Whoa. Things I could have done with with what you have now, but it still was kind of like starting over. From infrastructure standpoint, everything was different, you know, the way they were going was different, the way everything’s, you know, wired JSC is different. So we had to figure out, you know, how are we gonna get this covered, this signal from Orion, you know, we this is kind of an overarching point, but, and you know this from working the Communications Office, but we’re a little bit secondary. We’re telling the story of what’s happening. They’re not totally, and this is kind of changing, but they’re not totally, you know, if it was up to us, if flight directors came in and FOD came in and was like, What do you want on the Orion? We’d be like, 70,000 cameras, like, of like 12k resolution, please. That doesn’t happen. So we work with what we’ve got to tell the best story. So we had to figure out what is going to be on this Orion. So we can figure out, how do we get the footage down here? So we figured out, you know, what lines are gonna be coming down. How do we work with building 30 Mission Control? How do we work with building 8, who’s handles all of the imagery signals for the center and and also works with signals for the agency you know, across the country? How do we. Get those things because, again, they’re not really made for broadcast all the time. So what resolution is it going to be? And what do we need to do to air? What do we do when we don’t have signal, but we’re still on the air, because we need to be on the air 24/7, during this, you know, ops. So let’s get we have to get an animation. We and so that was another person, part of our team who worked with the flight operations directorate, who made a, you know, a telemetry driven animation, and they use it too, which is very cool. They rely on a lot of our stuff too. Sometimes, for, you know, what, they watched Mission Control, when they want to keep up to date on certain things, a lot of times they’re watching our, like, mixed feed, or the astronauts are watching it too. Yeah. So, like, what do we do when we don’t have signals? Let’s make an animation. There’s a lot of innovating for something that you know, technically has been done already. It was all innovation, and it was really rewarding. I don’t know if we’re gonna have a chance to talk about just like, general events that you know were the most memorable for us, but like I was crying at splashdown, I was crying because it was such a long, hard mission. In between all the live coverage, we were also producing content for the Internet, in case someone wasn’t watching live again, meeting people where they’re at recapping what happened, because it was important enough, if you weren’t going to watch it live, you should still know what happened if you were at all interested. And so all that was being produced. Meanwhile, we were having news conferences almost every other day after every major ops, and that was all just us. And so I was crying at the mission because it was a lot of work, but it was so rewarding. And I personally have not I mean, I see the Soyuz we’ve done Soyuz landings, and we’ve done Crew Dragon landings. I’ve seen spacecraft come back, but there was something really special about seeing one come back from the moon. My, for my first time, we just knowing that everyone was seeing this, everyone who you know recognized that it was a historic event. Was watching it because of us. Yeah, I mean, there’s a picture. Maybe you could post it that was crying in the control room, and also be, just as a side note, huge relief to make point, just like a little fun behind the scenes, as we can really even the tracking cameras on the ship, which we were coordinating with the ship that was out in the, you know, in the water, waiting to get this footage of the capsule coming through. They couldn’t find it at first, the we could hear, you know, from the loops, that it was coming down, and that producer was panicking first, we were in contact with on the ship, panicking that we weren’t gonna see and we once it finally broke to the clouds, they were able to locate it on the camera. And it was very stressful to think, you know, weeks, years of planning for this moment, and we might not have actually have seen it. That’s a little bit of the pressure we live with, because we are the only ones at that moment capturing this, this moment. But we found it so it was glorious. So for all the reasons, I was an emotional wreck,
Joseph Zakrzewski
but your passion, and I think that’s my big takeaway, is we all I can hear your passion for it, and I think that’s what’s inspiring. And John, you’ve seen it in many progressions with you know, it’s one thing to see a photo of something, but it’s another thing to see it live. And I think for the Artemis generation, as we say, to have that, you know, firsthand knowledge, that that this is real. This is not a movie, this is not a TV show. It’s not produced and planned. This is real coming to you. And if you’re lucky enough to live in these areas where you might see a launch or see a landing or anything like that, you know even better. But I think especially in this generation where you know, you have so many outlets to consume content and to really witness NASA production, the fact that it’s it’s real, and there’s a team that is 24/7 round the clock coverage that has been planning for years and years and years to get you the video that you are seeing now that you are so emotional to to have a reaction to, and I think that’s, that’s probably, I don’t know that it’s got to be one of the heart of the whole program. I almost feel
Sarah Volkman
it’s so cool. We’re so lucky with so much pressure.
John Stoll
Yeah, it is, well, and you know, it’s it, what you said, Sarah, is right when you’re when you when you didn’t see the video of it at first. Like, what that means, if that doesn’t, if something went wrong and like, what that means is, like, it means it’s a big thing, because there’s so much that went behind it.
Sarah Volkman
That’s another thing. We just not seen it because our eyes are not seeing it and we’re just not getting on camera, or did it? Does it not exist anymore? You never really know.
John Stoll
Well, and you take that moment, yeah, when you finally see it, and you see it hanging there underneath the beautiful parachutes, it should It’s the moment of like, not just everything went right and everything went well with with what we’re doing, TV wise, but also the mission and what everybody who we know put all the flight controls that put so much into it, the engineers who built the engineers who built the systems and all of that stuff, like that moment where you see it is the success moment for them too. So you’re kind of carrying their emotions on your back as well. I mean, for me personally, kind of a related, different story. I was here for one that didn’t come back for Columbia. I. In 2003 and working that was a very humbling situation. In a way, I was glad I was here for it, to have the experience and it is informed literally everything that I’ve done since then, as far as team preparation, personal preparation, emotional resiliency, all that stuff. And just the appreciation in the moment that when you see a moment in space flight that’s going well, it looks different once you’ve seen one that didn’t go well. It just every, every moment is cool from then on forward that goes well. And things that are challenging in space, like Luca Parmitano getting the water, you know, in the spacesuit, that whole situation like that, in in the moment that is now different. You know, once you’ve once you’ve seen something that doesn’t go well,
Joseph Zakrzewski
and with that, NASA continues. I mean, we wow, like to keep building upon a foundation that you continue to expand upon and grow from. Now, what does the future of NASA production? NASA TV, of course, now NASA, plus, you know, migrated over to a streaming platform here in recent history. What is, what does the future look like in in your eyes? I know there’s a lot of upgrades happening. There’s a lot of future Artemis missions coming down the pipeline. Commercial programs continue to ramp up. It’s almost a daily occurrence in terms of your planning and preparation, and somebody pinging you with an email saying, Hey, we have a launch coming up in 12 months. What can we do for it? And how do we do it? What? What does the future look like for you?
John Stoll
The future is, it’s fascinating to me, because my experience here has has been low earth orbit, with the exception of Artemis one. And so the future is, is exploration, the Exploration Program, Artemis deep space network assets being used to do things with Orion and Gateway one day. But the fascinating thing is, low Earth orbit continues while the the lunar stuff fires up. And so those two things can happen at the same time. So from a production perspective, how do we position ourselves to be able to do both things? Because we can have a crew on Orion, you know, out going around the moon, who wants to do a downlink with a media organization on the same day and time as the low Earth orbit crew and ISS wants to do a downlink. So we can have the two things happening at same time, which has never been we’ve never had that before, like in space shuttle, like the space shuttle dock to station, and so when they did an event, they all just floated together and did an event together low Earth orbit. Now we’ve got the two things
Sarah Volkman
Yeah and talk to each other. Yeah, very far apart, talk to each other.
John Stoll
So that’s like, from a big picture. That’s kind of where I have my eyes, like it’s a very it’s something we’ve never had before, had deal with before from a production standpoint. I think for me, the focus is still on story. It’s still in the human story of people who are doing amazing things, and these amazing people astronauts that get inside these vehicles and just and go forth and do the most amazing things. And, you know, and every single day, I’m just like, wow, I got to come to work at NASA today. It’s, it’s as cool now as it was 28 years ago. Like, it just never stops. It’s just the coolest thing. Yeah,
Sarah Volkman
Yeah, I mean, we’re all, I mean, most of us, I think we’re all on this team, a lot of them art backgrounds, you know, we’re all storytellers at the heart of it, and John’s musician, also, you know, filmmaker at this point. And we’re all just really into telling the best cool story that we can personally, personally passionate about that. So having more ways to do that, practical, like having better resolution to do do that, that’s very cool for us. Yeah, having more ways to do that make a inspiring, higher production value production is exciting. So, yeah, all the upgrades work towards that. There are some things, you know, not everything. There’s some, you know, kind of not quite legacy equipment, but you know, everything will be UHD all the time. You know, it’s a long process, but what we can upgrade, it’s going to be very cool. It’s very exciting.
Joseph Zakrzewski
And you touched upon. What I want to ask next is, what’s a preview for what people can look forward to seeing on their on their TV sets and streaming device? Streaming devices and mobile devices at home is NASA as the production grows, as technology grows, as does NASA TV, UHD, you mentioned Ultra High Definition, 4k video. I mean we, when we started this conversation, we were talking about four by three screens on most likely tube televisions, and here we are talking about UHD and 4k what excites you about the advancements in technology and having these resources for you from a production standpoint and creativity.
John Stoll
Oh yeah, yeah. Just, I mean, NASA’s got cameras where, you know, it’s a unique place that NASA has cameras up in, up in orbit, in space, and those cameras are amazing. And getting that the quality of the view, and this is just me come I’m being a gear. Your head, my whole life, and I always will be for for audio and video production gear, seeing that quality, like being able to deliver that quality to the end user, and for them to experience something closer to what actual human eyeballs can see from space. That’s cool. That is, that is, that’s it for me right there. That’s why I like some of the time lapse stuff that some of the astronauts do and we post on social media ISS account, because that time lapse stuff, the images are 4k and so the actual time lapse is in is in higher resolution than an HD stream. But having a UHD stream, once we get to the point where you’ve got UHD source video coming from space that we can, you know, that we can get to the end user, that that excites me, just because just the quality is, it’s, it’s exciting
Sarah Volkman
Yeah, I mean, like I mentioned, you have to kind of fight for bandwidth with these new spacecraft. So what, you know, they have to send down so much data, so much imagery, for their own teams to do their work and do their science and do their their engineering, that, if you’re like, wondering why it hasn’t happened yet or anything, you know, there’s a limited amount of bandwidth they can work with. And so, like I said, you know, increasing that will be very cool for everyone, and also will increase the amount of data they can get back for their own, you know, for our own purposes, for them, the data, the science,
John Stoll
Yeah because you can see, like, I’m thinking of the the icon for everybody. Oh yeah, I’m thinking of the iconic shot. Now, I do forget what mission it’s from, but it’s Bruce McCandless. Was the astronaut, and you’ve probably seen the shot of him floating like he’s in a safe room, just floating like, literally over the earth. And the shot’s amazing. But what if that was in UHD, like? What if you were able to see that on a big, huge TV in your house, and that was in UHD, the shot alone is incredible, and probably causes most people to stop and think, like, of their own place in the universe. But what if you saw that in UHD like, it would, it would literally cause you to stop and just just think about things for a minute like, This is amazing. I’m so small, like those guys. You know, those kinds of you
Sarah Volkman
haven’t seen the image. I mean, even as it is incredible. I mean, first time someone was just floating. I don’t know if it was the first time. Don’t quote me on that farthest, yeah, just untethered through space. Yeah.
Joseph Zakrzewski
And that was gonna be my kind of surprise impromptu question at the very tail end, and I was going to lead in with, I was lucky enough to be, you know, on commentary on console, working for an EVA recently. And one of the shots that the NASA production team put together was as one of the astronauts was working on, you know, the extra vehicle activity outside the space station. It was them working on their instrument, working on their planned project. You’re covering it, keeping an eye on it. But over their shoulder, you saw the sunrise, the sunrise come around the Earth, and it was in perfect HD. It was one of those moments where I remember I stopped mid sentence and just watched for a second and just complete awe and and wonder of what I was witnessing and what I get to witness in real time. And I was gonna ask you to is there a moment where that has happened for you, whether you’re on, on on the job as a as a producer, and in a live event, or even just something from your past that you’ve seen that continues to wow you, and maybe sometimes on a bad day, you need a little inspiration, and you go back to that clip or that image and look back again,
John Stoll
yeah. Oh, definitely, definitely. I mean, it’s, it’s pretty frequent, I guess probably a specific example I can think of. I don’t remember the mission, but it was a space shuttle mission. And in space shuttle missions, the crew used to be woken up. They would play music on air to ground on the uplink. They’d play music, and it would come out of little speakers in the space shuttle and wake the crew up. And the crew would choose their wake up music, or their family would choose it for them. But there’s this one morning in particular. It was probably 3am and I’m, I’m sitting there, I’ve been on shift for, you know, for 10 days, and I was looking at in the space shuttle, like it was the view of the camera was like, it was Space Shuttle pointed direction travel over the earth. And so it was a very nice view of the Earth. I was like, this is, this is amazing. Like, it’s 3am and I’m just, I’m just seeing this view on the on the screen. I worked in the audio control room, and the wake up song was somewhere over the rainbow. The IZ version, the ukulele version. And I had this moment where I was like, this is the most incredible day of my life. This is the most and my hands on the fader, and I’m making sure that levels just right. I’m sitting there writing it, you know. But as it’s even when you’re at the moment of just trying to do that job just perfectly, you’re still like, wow, this is, this is one for the memory books.
Sarah Volkman
Yeah, it happens a lot. It’s probably clear that the Artemis once flashed on was one of those moments. But even before I remember the first really memorable event, that means just like, literally took my breath away. Like John says, you first show up and you’re like, you see all the downlinks. You’re like, oh my god, this is so incredible. But the one once you get past that and you can just function normally and do your job and learn things, it was a Soyuz return. I think it was Peggy Whitson and Thomas Pesquet that was. First crew, I think, that I saw return, and that was just knowing that humans were in that spacecraft, barreling towards Earth, barreling towards the ground, hard ground, was incredible to see. And that, you know, we got to see the whole process of them, you know, undocking, closing the hatch undocking, and coming down. I I still think about that all the time. I mean, it was like almost a decade ago now, and I still think about that all the time. It was incredible to me. And he, they were barreling through space, and I remember Thomas was talking about how much you want to take a shower, like they’re just chilling and and, and I don’t blame him, but I can’t imagine, but, like, it’s the coolest thing I ever seen. And they’re just talking about showering, because, I mean, they did cool stuff all the time. I just don’t it. That was all was just a really surreal moment for lots of reasons. I’m blanking on how many cool things we get to do and witness so, like I said we, none of us, are like from science backgrounds, but you just, you’re just so moved by what you’re learning and seeing. And I mean, astronauts talk about it in space. When they look down, it changes them. And just seeing that change happen to people, it changes you, too. I mean, I barely made it through high school science and so passionate about it. So, yeah.
Joseph Zakrzewski
Well, the beautiful thing is, is all these examples, all these things we’ve talked about, there’s a platform where you can go next to our production team and team and see these elements and experience these elements yourself. So those listening, be sure to check them out. For sure. John, sir, I cannot thank you enough, Sarah, for joining us today, the team behind the team, and everyone a big thank you to them, also for all things. NASA TV production, there’s more than enough to check out, so be sure to visit all the appropriate channels to see how you can watch. But thank you for doing what you do, and and bringing a lot of joy and a lot of inspiration to meeting us where we are and and being able to experience NASA in that way. Thank you.
John Stoll
And thank you.
Sarah Volkman
Yeah no, thank you. Thank you, Joseph. Thank you to all your colleagues who work with us in the communications office. We appreciate it
Outro music
Joseph Zakrzewski
Thanks for sticking around. I hope you learned something new today. Check out nasa.gov for the latest information, and you can watch all the exciting NASA developments in human spaceflight on NASA+ or plus.nasa.gov and to check out the work of the JSC multimedia team, check out the NASA Johnson and NASA video YouTube pages. Our full collection of podcast episodes is on nasa.gov/podcasts you can also find many other wonderful podcasts we have across the agency on social media. We’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, X and Instagram. Use #askNASA on your favorite platform to submit your idea or ask a question. Just make sure to mention it’s for Houston We Have a Podcast. This discussion was recorded on February 19, 2025 thanks to Dane Turner, Will Flato, Daniel Tohill, Courtney Beasley and Dominique Crespo, and of course, thanks again to John Stoll and Sarah Volkman for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on, and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.
