During the anxious final countdown before the four Artemis II astronauts were blasted into space last week, something unsettling happened.
“Hold requested,” said a member of the launch team. “I have a LCC violation.”
As the world listened, it heard the team member say that “transponder one had a demodulated SNR estimate that went down to 2dBm when it should have been between 10 and 13”.
If you were watching this on Sky News television in the UK, you would have seen the presenter turn quickly to the network’s guest expert, a European Space Agency reserve astronaut named Meganne Christian, to ask what the heck was going on. But even Christian was slightly nonplussed.
“There were a lot of three-letter acronyms that even I don’t necessarily understand,” she said, before explaining that it basically just meant there were more checks to do before the launch.
I would have scoffed at this unfortunate example of workplace jargon if it were not for the base hypocrisy.
Acronyms and shorthand that baffle outsiders help insiders pass on complex information quickly in industries everywhere, including mine.
My inbox is stuffed with messages from colleagues saying things such as “suggested head and standfirst”, “can I get a person tag” and “the BR is currently 1,466w with a main image and 2.5-column chart”.
Gibberish to outsiders but an invaluable timesaver to senders, or at least that is the hope.
It is no different inside Nasa except that, unlike the rest of us, its engineers’ conversations can be broadcast around the world.
At its best, specialised vocabulary can fall into what academics such as US professor Russel Hirst have called good jargon: terms that are precise, economical and more or less universal.
Hirst understood, of course, that the very idea of worthy jargon is hard to stomach. We have a long and justified dislike of pretentious, misleading, exclusionary drivel.
The word itself is said to be derived from Old French terms such as jargon, jargoun and gargon that were used to refer to bird warbles and other unintelligible prattling.
But there is a place for the judicious use of technical or scientific terms if they genuinely make work faster, safer or better, and are used with the right people on the right occasions.
As the Artemis II voyage proceeded, however, I was reminded of how hard it is even for the smartest, most well-intentioned humans to avoid the inevitable pitfalls that jargon opens up.
Much of this was due to the astronauts’ toilet. Sorry, the Universal Waste Management System, as the loo on board the camper van-sized Orion spacecraft is known.
As you may know from gleeful newspaper headlines (“Houston wee have a problem”; “A giant leak for mankind”), the contraption went on the blink soon after take-off.
It was fixed by one of the astronauts, Christina Koch, who declared with admirable clarity that this made her the “space plumber”. Alas, not all her earthbound Nasa colleagues followed this lead.
One told the crew that although the toilet was working, it would be best to wait a bit “before donating fluid”, words I read several times before realising what they meant.
Then came a Nasa news conference where a reporter who had asked if the toilet situation was “a number one priority or a number two” was told the loo’s pump had needed more water from what a Nasa official called “the PWD”. This meant “potable water dispenser”, the official added, raising the question of why the acronym needed to be uttered in the first place.
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A few days later, as the lavatory system continued to misbehave, Nasa chiefs faced yet more questions at another news conference. “The engineering team is going to go through a full fault tree to identify all of the potential causes of the blockage,” said one.
Fault tree analysis of potential system failures is widely used in lots of industries. It makes sense to engineers and technicians. But once again, there was no need to speak of it at a news conference being broadcast to the world.
The same goes for PWDs, “fluid donation”, and the countless other phrases that have littered this mission and will undoubtedly do so again.
The appeal of jargon is strong, but ultimately, it is so fiendishly hard to use well that it is best to do what the finest speakers manage without thinking and do your best to avoid it completely. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
