CONTACTING the European Space Agency can be tricky. Try calling its press office in Washington DC on the number listed on the ESA website and you find yourself connected to a payphone in one of the city’s metro stations.
Picking this example to demonstrate how ESA handles the press is perhaps unfair, and no doubt ESA will now update the number it publishes on the web. But it points to a real problem: ESA is hard to penetrate and slow to release information. And when it does, the details can be sparse.
In my view, this is a terrible shame. ESA does world-class research in the most challenging of environments. I want to know more than it seems willing to share – not just because I am a science journalist but because I am excited by scientific discovery. Why can’t ESA do a better job of publicising its work?
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Its shortcomings are perfectly illustrated by the contrast between the American and European approaches to their missions to Mars over the past year. The two American rovers that successfully landed on the Red Planet have beamed back stunning images of the Martian landscape that appeared in newspapers and magazines and on TV and websites all over the world.
At the same time, the public was getting increasingly gloomy news about the British-built Beagle 2 probe, which failed to make contact with Earth and was eventually declared lost. At this point, ESA missed a perfect chance to shine. Beagle had been carried to the Red Planet by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, an orbiter equipped with a powerful camera and instruments for studying the planet and its atmosphere. Mars Express had been in orbit since 25 December 2003, taking spectacular pictures of its own. But ESA sat on them.
Thorsten Dambeck, a freelance space journalist based in Berlin, pointed out the absurdity of the situation in an article for the German news website Spiegel Online headlined “Europe’s PR crash on Mars”. Nobody in the ESA public relations department had permission to release the images, he says. After the story was published, Dambeck was contacted by some members of ESA’s staff who told him they shared his frustration.
“If you try sending out a joint press release, it can take a fortnight to work out whose logo goes first”
ESA has since published its pictures, which are astonishing, but they have been overshadowed by the sheer volume of images and commentary that NASA has released almost every day. Doc Mirelson, chief of news at NASA’s Washington DC headquarters, says nothing is kept on the shelf.
So why doesn’t ESA follow suit? One reason is that NASA has around 350 public relations staff, while ESA has only 20. “I envy the fact that they have many more people than we do,” says Franco Bonacina, head of ESA’s media relations. And when ESA wants to make an announcement to the press it has to be translated into at least three languages before it can be released. No wonder, then, that Colin Pillinger, who led the team that built Beagle 2, organised his own publicity. “If you try sending out joint press releases it can take a fortnight for the organisations to decide whose logo is first,” he says.
In their defence, ESA officials point out that they operate on a far smaller budget than their US counterparts. “ESA could spend more money on communications to generate more interest,” says David Southwood, ESA’s director of science. “Whether we should is not clear. After all, in a fixed budget something would have to be reduced.”
Perhaps it’s all down to the fact that NASA has more pressing reasons than ESA to ensure it gets a good press. NASA’s budget is reviewed by the US Congress every year. Strong news coverage advertises its activities to taxpayers and the members of Congress who ultimately hold the purse strings.
ESA isn’t under such immediate pressure. It gets its funding from a number of national governments, and this money is committed years in advance. The link to the taxpayer is more distant. ESA also has commitments to industry and the military that are beyond NASA’s remit of space science and exploration. Promoting only the inspirational missions could give a false sense of what ESA really does, Southwood says.
But ESA can and should do more – and will soon have an opportunity to do so. Since NASA’s Cassini probe entered orbit around Saturn at the end of June, it has been sending back gorgeous pictures, bringing glory to the US space agency. What has so far largely escaped public attention is that Cassini is carrying a European lander called Huygens, which on 14 January will plunge into the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, hopefully to beam back pictures of its surface and data on its composition. There is no question that if Huygens works, it will be a huge scientific achievement. It is up to ESA to make it a PR success too.
The signs are promising. ESA is gearing up to handle the large numbers of journalists expected at its operational control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, to report the event in real time. Huygens could at last signal a turning point in the way ESA releases its findings to the public. It does fascinating work, and it should shout about it, for ultimately people want to be inspired. But if that doesn’t cut any ice with ESA, there is a more powerful reason to change. The agency is funded by taxpayers, and we have a right to know.