Richard Branson’s Virgin rocket failure was a case study for sanitized enterprise messaging
Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit team looked like masters of understatement as they dubbed the failed launch of the Cornwall orbital satellite an “anomaly” on Monday night.
The incident resulted in the loss of nine satellites aboard a rocket that was flying over the Earth at over 11,000 miles per hour. The rocket is gone. The satellites are gone. And the company isn’t sure what went wrong.
Businesses always want to put a positive spin on everything and minimize the damage when something goes wrong. The executives behind Virgin Orbit are very smooth communicators, but the messages surrounding this particular “Oops” incident are priceless.
It all started well as the Boeing 747 carrying the rocket successfully launched it to the planned altitude. The first firing of the rocket engine went well and burned as it should.
This got Irish fishermen to safety in the area south of Cork as the missile fired at over 11,000mph and flew out and up over Portugal.
A trigger-happy tweeter within the company prematurely tweeted that it had reached orbit. This was not the case as then something went wrong and there was bye rocket and nine satellites.
The launch was particularly important to the UK’s space aspirations as it would have been the first satellite launch from Europe.
Alice Bunn, president of trade body UK Space, said the failure was a disappointment. But she seemed to strike the wrong note when she went on to say Britain had taken a very commercial approach to space capability development that would allow quicker retry decisions than some European competitors. (A note on Brexit and the rapid delivery of the Covid vaccine here).
Quick decision-making at 11,000 mph rockets isn’t necessarily the best trait.
The Virgin Orbit website goes above and beyond for smooth easy communication. Sometimes things can be oversimplified. After all, they’re actually talking about rocket science.
Quick decision-making at 11,000 mph rockets isn’t necessarily the best trait
If you wish to contact the company, an email query screen will appear for your name and the purpose of your request.
Prompts include “Start my satellite” and “Just say hello”.
Branson’s company, Virgin Orbit, is publicly traded in the US, which at least means it publishes its accounts. The stock price had a small anomaly of its own when the market opened on Tuesday, with the stock falling 21 percent in the first five minutes of trading.
In fairness, Virgin Orbit had a 100 percent track record prior to Monday night’s anomaly, having successfully launched seven satellites for the American government in July, following a string of other successful launches.
Monday’s payload carried equipment for seven customers, including a joint US-British military research mission, Oman’s first orbital Earth observation spacecraft and two other British satellites, including one to track maritime activity.
Virgin Orbit’s financial results show that the company has made just over $30 million in revenue to date and reported a net loss of $43 million in the third quarter of 2022.
Prior to the UK backfire, it had a committed backlog of $165 million and another committed backlog of $419 million. The question is how much of it will it keep now.
In its earnings presentation, it said it had revenue per launch of $12 million in 2022 and “near-term” projected revenue per launch of between $6 million and $12 million.
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Richard Branson has his eye on space
It’s eyeing the market share of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The number of satellite launches worldwide will increase dramatically. The past year has been the busiest ever for space launches. There have been 186 orbital launch attempts worldwide, of which 179 have been successful.
That is more than twice as much as five years ago. SpaceX has gone from 18 launches in 2017 to 64 in 2022. Unlike Virgin Orbit, SpaceX does not announce financial performance, but the average launch price is estimated by the industry to be around $60 million.
The failure of Virgin Orbit’s mission is a blow, but the next 12 months will determine just how big the setback is.
It has already signed spaceport deals for launches in Australia and Luxembourg, as well as a letter of intent with South Korea. It was also in talks with Oman, so the fact that the country’s first satellite went the way of George Clooney in the film Gravity won’t make this conversation any easier.
With so much at stake, you’d think they’d be direct but measured in their communications.
Tweeting that they reached orbit when they didn’t does not show great judgment. The word anomaly is a commonly used term for something technically unexpected, but it doesn’t quite describe it.
It ties into the notion of companies obsessed with communication. Corporate language that doesn’t fully reflect the reality of what happened is now completely ubiquitous.
There are arguments for avoiding business jargon
Here are some examples of phrases that have been sanitized beyond their actual meaning: “The company has undergone a reorganization in the last 12 months” actually means “we have fundamental problems that we have been trying to solve”.
“There has been a sale in the last 12 months” means “we had to correct an error”.
“We are restructuring and optimizing the capital location” sounds better than “We are firing people”.
There’s an argument for avoiding business jargon because it’s dead, technical, and incredibly boring to listen to after a while. There is also a case for keeping communication simple, but not too simple.
In the case of satellites that don’t get where they’re supposed to and never come back, you can’t sanitize a multi-million dollar cock-up.
Richard Branson’s ability to excel in both disruption and marketing is highlighted in a section on Virgin Orbit’s website.
It states: “For too long, launch vehicles have treated small satellite customers like second-class citizens. With Virgin Orbit you get first-class service at a fair price, giving you complete control of your satellite’s journey into space.”
Well someone has to do it.
https://www.independent.ie/business/world/richard-bransons-virgin-rocket-failure-was-a-case-study-in-sanitised-corporate-messaging-42280281.html Richard Branson’s Virgin rocket failure was a case study for sanitized enterprise messaging
