Katie Atkinson is a key member of the communications team for one of the country’s most recognizable government agencies.

Want to know which one? Here is a hint: She hangs out regularly with astronauts.

Less than a decade removed from her days as a student at Union Grove High School, the Mercer University grad works daily to tell stories about what NASA does and how it affects the lives of every American. She is based in the Washington D.C. area at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which she called “NASA’s premier science center.”

Atkinson is the agency’s audio storytelling lead. “The goal of my job is to think about how to communicate NASA’s most interesting stories to an audience through audio products,” she said in an interview with the Times last week. “Anytime there is big news being made I think about how we can share this through audio.”

She created the “NASA’s Curious Universe” podcast, of which a typical episode is played some 20,000 times. Data from the podcast shows that those who start it up tend to listen 20 minutes or more, which is proof that audience members are engaged in what they are hearing.

The goal for Atkinson is to make what she produces palatable for all ages and especially appealing to those who are not all that familiar with NASA as it operates in 2021.

“When I create a new product I like to think of my target audience as a family on a road trip, so I would want the adults in the car to get a lot of understanding and information about what NASA is doing while also getting the kids engaged so that they hear a fun sound or learn a fun fact,” she said. “I want it to be a bonding experience for that group.”

There was a time when NASA was easily identifiable through Saturn V rockets, lunar modules and space shuttles. But it has been more than a decade since the shuttle program ended, and no one under the age of 50 has direct memory of the Apollo moon landings. This makes Atkinson’s job a bit more challenging at times.

“I remember when I first got the job, I had people say, ‘Oh, NASA is still around?’” she laughed. “A lot of people don’t have a great understanding of what NASA is doing now and how its work impacts their daily lives. It’s really my job to increase that understanding and awareness.”

There is plenty still going on. Just over a year ago the Perseverance rover wheeled onto the surface of Mars, and the James Webb Space Telescope was launched into space Christmas Day. Now in the works is the Artemis program, whose goal is to see astronauts return to the moon by 2024, and send them to Mars sometime after that.

“It’s a really exciting time to be working at NASA,” said Atkinson. “I want to connect with people who aren’t familiar with what NASA is doing and show them what is going on.”

People who do not see news footage of rockets launching on a regular basis might assume that the space agency has little practical use, perhaps not realizing that most of the space imagery they see on video and in print media was provided by NASA equipment such as the Hubble telescope. Of course, the agency has had a hand in most of the satellites which orbit above the planet, which have a definite impact on every American. Try using the GPS on your phone or playing your favorite Sirius XM channel in the car without those spacecraft operating overhead.

Raised in Henry County, Atkinson graduated from Union Grove in 2015 and started as a NASA intern on a ten-week program in 2018. She learned at the conclusion of the program that they wanted her as an employee.

“When I started there, they didn’t have an audio program so I just experimented with some things. I made three- or four-minute audio explainers with cool sound, and those performed really well,” she said. “People were really receptive to them.”

She actually continued producing audio products for NASA while finishing her undergraduate studies at Mercer’s Center for Collaborative Journalism. She moved to the nation’s capital in the spring of 2019.

“It has been a joy ever since,” she said. “It is so exciting to think that this is my first real job out of college.”