In their recent book, Marketing the Moon (MIT Press, 2014), Scott and Jurek trace the Apollo-era collaboration between private industy and NASA’s internal public affairs office. They contend that the massive campaigns launched then were some of the first deployments of what we’d call brand journalism and "real-time marketing" today. In fact, what Mars One is doing, with reality TV, brand partnerships, and an upcoming book called Mars One: The Human Factor, says Scott, is largely "the same as Apollo — but updated for today."

Lansdorp would be lucky to recreate that success: in July of 1969, 94 percent of American televisions were tuned to the Apollo 11’s moon landing. And such widespread enthusiasm for the event was the culmination of a decade-long campaign to educate the public. At NASA’s inception in 1958, the agency hired public affairs staff "not as pitchmen, but as reporters," according to the authors, a move largely at odds with the rise of a glamorous, oily advertising industry like the one portrayed in Mad Men.

NASA’s PR staff were broadcast- and print-media veterans, and they served up copy like a newsroom. The team grilled engineers for stories, churned out bylined articles, and sent press releases meant to be copied verbatim by news outlets. They produced pre-packaged broadcast segments that often made it straight to the airwaves. In the early days the office largely strove to introduce and explain complex technologies, tech that had previously been used mostly by soldiers and military men, to both the press and the public.

It was a task that, for over a decade, private companies involved in spaceflight were eager to augment. As a government agency coordinating with the military and Congress, NASA ultimately dealt in the release of information and facts. But private companies who earned NASA contracts often employed more glamorous tactics, including colorful press kits and advertisements for the watches astronauts wore, the Tang they slurped from packets, the cameras they used, and the companies like IBM that helped build their spaceships.

NASA did, however, enforce some restrictions. The agency’s photos were taxpayer-funded, so private companies could use them in advertisements without paying to license them — as long as NASA’s public affairs office approved how they were used. But NASA found itself blindsided by what would become its most in-demand asset: the astronauts themselves.

In an effort to maintain control over the astronauts' public profiles, the agency signed a deal with Life magazine, essentially granting the publication exclusive rights to the astronauts’ lives. Until the contract ended in 1962, the magazine ran cover stories featuring the astronauts and their families ("Making of a Brave Man," "Astronauts’ Wives") and spun off a handful of books as well, including a collection of first-person space tales. As Scott and Jurek write, "The astronauts and NASA worked with Life … to carefully craft the image of the astronauts, not as military men, but as middle-class average family men thrust into service for the good of their country."

Which sounds a little like a scaled-down version of Mars One’s most striking feature. Since the campaign’s inception, the reality TV hook has been central to Lansdorp’s plan to raise the billions he’ll need to colonize Mars; he’s fond of citing the Olympics, in particular, for raking in $1 billion of revenue per week in advertising. But his project has also drawn significant criticism, perhaps most brutally on Reddit, for employing such a raft of PR people and graphic designers. As one writer pointed out early in Mars One’s Kickstarter project, the nonprofit is essentially just a marketing company — "and a good one at that."

As Jurek tells it, NASA, as a civilian government agency, packaged and communicated the space program’s activities in their most easily digestible forms. The agency’s goal wasn’t to invent or manage the need for a product, the way most commercial projects do. Lansdorp’s venture has done a fantastic job at that management, largely by tapping into the more wistful emotions associated with NASA’s golden age. Screencaps of the moonwalk appear in many of Mars One’s YouTube videos, and the website compares the Mars One candidates with "the Vikings and famed explorers of Old World Europe." Which isn’t to mention the kind of real-time brand-building that would have been incomprehensible to anyone glued to the TV as Apollo 11 landed on the moon (#space #cake, anyone?)