NASA's Science Mission Directorate, through its Community of Practice for Education (SCoPE), partnered with Arizona State University's Facility for Open Research in a Compressed Environment (FORCE) Summer School in Summer 2026 to train seven undergraduate research interns in science communication. The program is part of the broader NASA Science Activation (SciAct) portfolio, supported by cooperative agreement award number 80NSSC21M0006. FORCE operates a world-class high-pressure laboratory that recreates conditions found deep within Earth and other planetary bodies. The interns conduct real research there — this isn't a PR exercise bolted onto a curriculum. SCoPE facilitated two hands-on workshops on June 25 and 26, followed by office hours the next week, focused on translating technical research into stories non-experts can follow. Training covered identifying central themes, developing clear messages, planning visitor interactions, and logistics of public engagement. The training culminated in two events. The FORCE Open House welcomed approximately 50 members of the general public for facility tours, meetings with the research team, and interaction with interns at themed outreach stations. A separate poster session for ASU faculty, staff, and students gave interns a chance to present findings to academic peers and receive feedback. The structural logic here is worth noting. Most science communication training happens late — postdoc stage, if at all — when researchers have already internalized the habit of writing only for specialists. SCoPE intervenes at the undergraduate level, when communication habits are still forming. Seven interns is tiny. But the mechanism — embedding comms training inside a research experience rather than offering it as a separate elective — is the part that scales. The extraction profile is essentially zero. NASA funds the training infrastructure; ASU provides the lab and interns; the public gets access to real science through the Open House. No one is extracting value from anyone else. The costs are borne by the institutions that benefit from a better-trained research workforce, and the public gets a modest but real return through direct engagement with active researchers. The efficiency question is fair to raise. Two workshop days plus office hours for seven interns is labor-intensive per capita. But the friction is front-loaded and intentional — the alternative (researchers who can't communicate their work) has far higher long-term costs in public trust, funding justification, and talent pipeline health. If this pattern continues for 20 years — embedding communication training into research internships across NASA-funded labs — the result is a generation of planetary scientists who treat public engagement as a professional skill rather than an afterthought. That's a genuine resilience play for an agency whose budget depends on public support.
