Was it Robert Heinlein, author of Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, who said that “everything was theoretically possible till it was done”? Whoever it was, thinkers and doers in the space sector seem to have taken that to heart. Every day, we learn of some clever new creation, some device or contrivance that can, say, shape light from a laser beam, or track invisible gases, or predict where a wildfire will start.
So it is rather puzzling that space has such a problem communicating its value to the world. In fact it is ironic, given space is the only reason that you, reader, can share last year’s memes with your friends halfway round the planet. We encountered our most recent example of this last month, when the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said the Space Development Agency (SDA) had yet to prove its on-orbit laser communications system was up to scratch. The GAO complained in its report that the SDA had said next to nothing of its progress and failed over and again to explain why it was taking so long. Unsurprisingly, the GAO lost confidence.
But this problem is not the preserve of governments and agencies. It is far more common in the private sector, where founders, however brilliant, are quite often unable to get that brilliance across. In point of fact, when founders talk about their work, it is more often than not woefully unclear what exactly is being built, why we should care and who on Earth it is for. They are fluent in engineer or physicist, but their human is — well, rusty.
Two questions spring from this. First, so what? Well, because trust is the basis of every deal and every investment, and trust flows not just from competence but familiarity. In plain English, people are more likely to buy from you or back you if they “get” you, and if they believe in the future you are shaping. And to all you investors — this is not a one-way thing. Specialised companies want to know that you have more to offer than the contents of your wallet. A deep-tech founder needs you to show that you have the expertise to provide guidance to him or her.
The second question pertains to why this problem occurs in the first place. There are a number of reasons. One is that space operators think communication is about being correct, rather than comprehensible or memorable. They prize precision over persuasion, and information over imagination. But it is simplicity and storytelling that stir the heart and make the facts stick. When Congress cut funding to the Hubble telescope, astronomers across the United States embarked on a campaign to persuade the politicians of its value. They did not talk about wavefront optics or adaptive mirrors, but the dawn of time and humanity’s place in the universe.
The space sector today seems to be afflicted with what Stephen Pinker calls “the curse of knowledge”: space operators know their world so well that they have forgotten that others do not. Once you know something, it is difficult to remember what it was like not to know it. The effect is intensified when we spend too much time with people just like ourselves: sharing the same assumptions, the same vocab, the same frame of reference. As Wittgenstein puts it somewhere, a picture held us captive; and a picture holds space professionals captive. In respect of language and communication, they are locked inside a particular conceptual framework. The upshot, for people working in space, is often to speak and write in a way that, to the ordinary man on the street, confuses rather than clarifies.
Ah, yes, and the jargon. It is bad enough to keep having to read and hear “leverage,” “lean in” and other crimes blithely carried out against the language of Wilde, Waugh and Woolf (to say nothing of Byron, Burgess and Brontë). There is really no need to say “optical payload solution” when what you mean is “camera”. Space operators would do well to heed Orwell’s wise and timeless advice: that “one should never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday equivalent.” Jargon sounds clever only in the mind of the speaker.
And do not underestimate the power of simplicity, reader. It is the keynote of all true elegance, as Coco Chanel put it. And it isn’t the same as ease. (Per Johann Cruyff: “I play football simply, but it is very, very hard to play football simply.”) It can be helpful from time to time to assume that the person whom you are addressing is lazy, stupid and mean — too lazy to do his own research, too stupid to understand anything but simple language and too mean to give you the benefit of the doubt. It has a way of focusing the mind.
At the risk of making wild generalizations (why stop now?) European space operators in particular should take note of all this. Europe has other, more pressing issues, which chiefly have to do with funding its startups and driving defense innovation. But it does need to think about how it speaks to the world. Our friends across the pond have a far more richly developed communication culture, and by and large will think about how to get their message out there from the word go. It is admirable, in a way, that Europeans are so reluctant to talk about their work; we would all like to live in a world in which reputation follows character and competence. But the internet has condemned us all to live in an attention economy, and quietly getting on with the job won’t always do.
Space operators are doing hugely valuable and genuinely captivating things — increasing food security, reducing harm caused by wildfires and floods, bringing education and healthcare to remote, impoverished communities and allowing us to sleep soundly in our beds by protecting us from our enemies all the way from orbit. It seems a crying shame that this isn’t more widely known or understood.
Harry Readhead is co-founder and creative director of Sonder London, a communications agency that works with senior figures in space, defense and equity investment. Readhead is also a best-selling ghostwriter and journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The FT and The Times, among many other titles worldwide.
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