A former NASA administrator has revealed that Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise was responsible for the agency's site redesign in 2002.
During a recent panel discussion held at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, Sean O'Keefe, who worked in the space agency from 2001 to 2004, said that the "Mission Impossible" actor had approached him personally and spoke to him about how unimpressed he was of NASA's website.
"[Cruise] came in and visited the offices one day and he's a big space nut and the whole bit. He told me, 'You've got this great website with tons of information on it and it's perfectly designed for a lot of research faculty across the globe, I guess, that is going to be of interest to them,'" O'Keefe revealed, as reported in Space News.
However, Cruise apparently had a hard time navigating through the site's function and design, saying, "To the rest of us it's three clicks to oblivion and you go the next thing and you find yourself nowhere," added O'Keefe.
Next, the actor offered NASA the services and help of a team of "tech heads" who have been working on Cruise's movie trailers. O'Keefe couldn't say no.
"It changed the appearance of that website in a way that made it inviting, interesting, folks wanted to participate," continued O'Keefe, while showing the differences between the website before and after its redesign.
Barely a month ago, however, the NASA website underwent another redesign and published this message: "Based on extensive user feedback and testing, we've modernized NASA.gov to work across all devices and screen sizes, eliminate visual clutter, and put the focus on the continuous flow of news updates, images and videos we know you're looking for."
There is no word on whether or not Cruise and his team had something to do with the latest changes, but O'Keefe, who has been working at Syracuse University since his NASA stint, can only fondly look back at this odd moment with the Hollywood star.
"Every time I encounter situations like this on how do you make the information more available, I gotta thank Tom Cruise for his blinding flash of the obvious," he said.
You can watch the video of O'Keefe telling the story in the video below. The anecdote begins at the 1:23:17 mark:
