All NASA data is made fully public, at latest, a year after it’s collected. Nowadays, you can get it online, but it’s been a mandate for them from the beginning. They probably had a policy of sending it to everyone who sent them a letter. And education and public outreach has also been a NASA mandate right from the start, so two birds with one rocket, there.
I have a cousin who became a state trooper for that reason. He’s never in his life used any mode of transportation at less than its maximum possible speed. He was also a tanker in Iraq and Afghanistan, and reports that the official maximum speed of the Abrams is just what the governor is limited to, and if you disable the governor, you can go much faster.
Myself, I was already telling people that I wanted to be a scientist by about age 4, refined down to physicist by 6, and to astrophysicist by age 9 when I read A Wrinkle in Time. And I did indeed get my MS in relativity (the closest real analogue to the father in that book). But I’m now a math teacher, which I suppose isn’t too far removed from that. Also kind of the family business, as my mother was a teacher, too (though she was 2nd or 3rd grade).