Thousands shared astronaut’s space station experience through Twitter and Facebook

Space isn't the final frontier for today's NASA. Twitter is.

Astronaut and Army Col. Doug Wheelock spent the last six months of 2010 aboard the International Space Station, where he performed the longest spacewalk in history, monitored experiments involving bioengineering and a hoped-for cure for cancer and drank his own purified urine.

Along the way, he posted amazing photographs to social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. "Tweeting from space is interesting," said Wheelock, who met Tuesday with the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial board.

For NASA, engaging the world's residents through social media is the logical next step, said Stephanie Schierholz, the space agency's social media manager.

And while a Twitter account might not represent one giant leap for mankind, engaging 800,000 followers on Twitter and garnering 300,000 Facebook "Likes" are not small steps for NASA.

With only three missions left before the space shuttle program ends this summer, the agency's future is still bright. There are 55 active spacecraft to monitor, the International Space Station is nearing completion after 10 years and scientific research continues.

The thought of tweeting about such things didn't capture Wheelock's imagination at first. "I wanted my life, my experience, to go a little deeper" than 140 characters," he said.

Ultimately, he realized astronauts and the space program are not "real" to young people. By engaging society through social networks, Wheelock said his objective was to become a real person.

"I really wanted to project what I was seeing, feeling and understanding about space and our planet," he said.

Though he didn't want to live life as a sound bite, it didn't take long for Wheelock to figure out that news on the Internet travels faster than a ship in space.

"When I first began tweeting from space, within minutes my initial thoughts went viral," he said. "I didn't have time to read all the responses, but there was an amazing depth of discussion."

Because neither NASA nor the U.S. Army likes astronauts or soldiers to take political sides, Wheelock worried about inadvertently tweeting the wrong thing when he posted a photograph that depicted a clear night over the Middle East.

"You could see why we're fighting. There was this beauty of landscape, this mosaic of light," he said when he wrote about "a peaceful evening over the Middle East." That simple, seemingly innocuous observation sparked 90,000 hits and a deep discussion.

He also shared photos through Twitter that depicted the effects of deforestation in Madagascar. With his lens focused on mud-choked rivers, Wheelock wrote "where progress and nature collide."

Wheelock acknowledged the space program is expensive, but he thinks the public gets a valuable return on every dollar invested.

"We want to get the word out," he said. "We're here to serve the public."