'Everyday Astronaut' Tim Dodd turns learning to rocket fuel on YouTube

It’s an unusual and sometimes even odd dream, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

In 2014, Dodd was a successful, full-time photographer. He had traveled to 16 states and three countries, working 150 weddings.

And then he laid hands on a space suit.

The shock of orange, white and gray gave him an idea for a quirky photo series: construct everyday scenes with an astronaut added to the mix. He’d be that “everyday astronaut.”

Dodd, 36, composed each scene for the series to include Easter eggs — veiled visual references to flights and history that space aficionados might decipher.

“The whole thing, I was doing it as a sort of joke,” he recalled.

If so, the joke was on Dodd: “Everyday Astronaut” became his career.

“To create the Easter eggs, I had to do my research,” Dodd explained. “The more I researched, the more obsessed I became, because this stuff is so cool.”

As a sideline, Dodd made videos that shared his research. He posted those videos on his YouTube channel, Everyday Astronaut. People — a lot of people — liked them. They liked them a lot.

“What started out as an art project that I thought would be fun and silly became so much bigger,” he said. “I was genuinely excited, and other people were excited about it, too. It grew from there. I really was this everyday person who was somehow getting all sorts of people excited about space education.”

By 2016, Dodd’s YouTube subscribers hit 100,000. He shuttered his traditional photography business and embraced the reality that he is the Everyday Astronaut.

Home base is Cedar Falls. He also built a studio in South Padre, Texas, near the SpaceX rocket launch site and its nearly 4,000 employees.

Dodd’s YouTube following has swelled 1.15 million subscribers and counting.

Everyday Astronaut is not YouTube’s norm. Instead, the program-length videos balance education with the “wow” factor of rocket launches.

The videos are undeniably popular; even those that exceed a one-hour runtime have more than 2 million views. By early September, users had already spent a total of 29 million actual hours watching Dodd’s videos.

One of the most popular is a 49-minute Everyday Astronaut video titled, “Is SpaceX’s Raptor Engine the King of Rocket Engines?” It has 4.3 million viewers to date.

In 2018, Dodd hit a YouTube milestone that provided free company marketing. He had already demonstrated rare success in a key area: subscriber retention of more than 50%.

“The YouTube rep said she’d never seen anything like it, especially for the type of content I offered,” said Dodd.

After all, Everyday Astronaut emerged amid continued decreases in public funding for space innovation. It’s also a period when space exploration is stereotyped as the pursuit of the unfathomably wealthy. There was no reason to believe “Everyday Astronaut” would be remotely popular, let alone an unparalleled success.

So if executives from YouTube – the platform that popularized the short pets-behaving-badly videos – were shocked by Everyday Astronaut numbers, Dodd was stupefied.

“Kids as well as adults nationwide enjoy learning about space travel and exploration,” explained 20 Under 40 nominator Denny Mills. “His Everyday Astronaut … gets followers hooked in a fun way to learn.”

Dodd, a 2003 graduate of Cedar Falls High School, remains humbled and awed by it all.

“I have so many kids tell me science and math were their worst subjects until they found Everyday Astronaut,” he said. “They’ll tell me they went from hating those subjects to thinking about working in aeronautics, aviation, engineering, mathematics. That’s amazing — so much more than I ever hoped for.”

That’s a big motivation to keep content “everyday.”

“People might ask, ‘Why are we wasting money on space?’ Well, it’s not like someone is strapping $200 million to a pallet and launching it into space. That money is spent on Earth,” Dodd explained.

“There are also space assets that are integral to our everyday life. For example, we rely so heavily on satellites for GPS in a variety of industries that it has completely changed business in ways we would not want to defund or reverse.”

Another space industry innovation of note to Iowans, said Dodd, is the imminent introduction of inexpensive, faster, more reliable Internet access for people in even the most rural and remote areas. This could mean download and upload speeds of up to 200 megabytes per second for less than $100 per month.

Dodd has already earned respect from top space industry professionals who are thrilled to talk to him.

“There’s the expression, ‘It’s not rocket science,’ because we view rocket science as this incredibly difficult thing. That’s the general perception – space education is one of the toughest things to understand,” Dodd said. “But what if we approach it differently – what if we find ways to help more people understand it?”

Industry’s heavy hitters allow Dodd unprecedented access. This year, Richtopia honored him among the “100 Most Influential Leaders in Space Exploration.” He’s No. 5, with SpaceX founder Elon Musk (No. 1) and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (No. 2).

SpaceX employees — actual rocket scientists — share his videos with family and friends.

“Some will tell me, ‘My parents finally understand what I do,’” said Dodd.

Each year, Dodd confers “Astro Awards” to industry notables during a web show. As the success of Everyday Astronaut continues, he hopes to make this an in-person event, hosted in the Cedar Valley.