When an organization gets big enough, it can become difficult to grasp exactly how one person’s job fits into the larger picture. And when that organization is literally trying to launch people into space, it’s both easy to understand how that would happen and super important that it doesn’t.
It’s for this reason that NASA has a Space Flight Awareness division, whose mission is to make every employee of NASA aware of how important their role is in keeping astronauts safe and ensuring successful missions.
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There are probably some boring aspects to space flight awareness, but one of them certainly isn’t the part where they design promotional posters for each flight to the space station.
No, those are wonderful…in a way.
At first, the ISS flight posters were fairly normal.
This one looks OK and it’s a nice picture of these astronauts smiling, but that’s kind of all it is.
Here are the astronauts, here’s where they’re going. Yay.
By Expedition 15, whoever was in charge of poster design tried to make them look more dynamic, but something was missing.
Sure, we had the earth looming in the background in an imposing way, but it’s still just a photo of astronauts standing there and looking vaguely uncomfortable.
Also, that font choice definitely had to go. However, they were finally onto something with their next one.
By Expedition 16, their posters benefited a lot from a vacation to the desert of the real.
Yup, these astronauts were about to enter The Matrix . Since both astronauts and hacker rebels from Zion can be described as nerds doing a physically demanding job, it seemed like a perfect fit.
From there, NASA decided to turn their flight posters into movie posters and never looked back.
And hey, even the awkwardness kind of works when they re-imagined the posters this way. Before, they just looked camera shy, but now they seem gravely concerned about the alien threats that they definitely won’t meet.
Yeah, I’m sure it came to nobody’s surprise that they’d eventually get to a Star Trek-themed one.
If the captain on this mission didn’t make everybody address them by their title in the most dramatic way possible, they’re more mature than I am.
I can’t blame Frank there for looking nervous, though. Nobody wants to be a red shirt.
It’s hard to say if this is what they did, but this would be the perfect flight to mirror the show ’24.’
I could be stretching on this one, but I’m pretty sure that whenever Chloe told Jack Bauer about a person of interest, they’d pop up on her screen like this. That’s not just me, right?
I’m not exactly sure what the connection between NASA and the Beatles is, but somebody obviously had fun doing this.
Even though we’ve gone from the Fab Four to the fab six here, the fact that one of them remembered to do this barefoot was a nice touch.
Shout-out to that NASA truck in the background too.
Either NASA doesn’t let anyone leave earth without a slick bomber jacket or they were going full “Top Gun” with this one.
Let’s be honest, would anyone else be extremely disappointed if none of these astronauts ever took off to “Highway To The Danger Zone?”
I’m not sure if this one is referencing anything specific, but it makes me really happy.
Their poses seem vaguely Superman-like, but no poster ever let him look like he was enjoying flying through space very much.
These guys are definitely having a lot more fun with it.
I like how this poster implies that if their rocket takes a wrong turn, it ends up in the world of Tron.
I guess it’s just a good thing that one of them figured out they can take their patches off and throw them like futuristic laser discuses.
It’s hard to tell what’s goofier about this: The pirate costumes or the pun they went with.
Although I’ll certainly take this in all of its dad-jokey glory over the idea of launching Captain Jack Sparrow into space.
Not only would that end terribly for everyone involved, but the last thing we need is another Pirates sequel.
By Expedition 31, it seems like our friendly astronauts became a lot more comfortable in front of the camera.
Maybe in this case, they realized that taking a Transformers -themed photo could never hope to be as embarrassing as that part where Bumblebee peed on John Turturro.
Again, not sure what this is referencing, but I like how it’s more sinister than anything that actually happened during their mission.
Who knows, maybe they were just looking forward to being far enough away from the world that they could look like they were holding it.
For Expedition 36, the flight crew dressed up like the Fantastic Four…only with three extra people.
Eh, the fantastic seven doesn’t really have that bad of a ring to it, either. Plus, they were probably just happy to make it home without one of them turning into a giant orange rock monster.
The surprise here isn’t that our astronauts became Jedi knights, but rather that it took NASA until Expedition 45 to think of it.
It’s also nice to see that somebody brought Samuel L. Jackson’s purple lightsaber out of retirement. They may not be wild on the “fiction” part of science fiction here, but at least the science continues.
And of course, a crew of astronauts aren’t truly ready to make fun of themselves until they tackle “Armageddon.”
Whoever designs these posters probably noticed that one of these folks looked a little like Bruce Willis and knew what they had to do.
It turns out it was easier to teach astronauts to be oil drillers all along.
