The Twelve Words NASA Buried On The Slide

Bullets fly.

Radios crackle.

Dust blinds the field.

In the chaos of combat, clarity isn’t nice-to-have.

It’s the difference between life and death.

That’s why the army invented a writing technique with an easy-to-remember acronym BLUF.

Bottom Line Up Front.

Not because it sounded cool.

Because unclear communication kills more than bullets.

No one in the field flips through a 57-page document to find the key idea.

No one in a briefing sits through 49 slides just to learn what to do next.

You need the point fast.

Concise and sharp.

One sentence.

No fluff.

No room for doubt.

BLUF forces you to quickly answer in a sentence the five W’s: who, what, where, when, and why.

It distils the most important information for the reader.

It strips the fat. 

Your opening sentence in an email shouldn’t say “Just circling back to see if you had a chance to look at the Q4 numbers…” 

It should say “Decision needed on Q4 budget by Friday.” 

Your report shouldn’t make people dig to page 22. 

Start with “Customer churn jumped 18% this quarter and here’s why.” 

And your meeting invite isn’t “Catch-up call with team.”

It’s “15 minutes to finalise launch date.”

Even a text to a friend doesn’t need “What are you doing later tonight?” 

It needs “Pizza at mine 7pm?”

“In the military, a poorly formatted email may be the difference between mission accomplished and mission failure.” - Kabir Sehgal

Now fast forward from the battlefield to the boardroom.

NASA.

The top guys.

Rocket scientists.

Literally.

And yet, in 2003, they ignored the BLUF principle.

Here’s the backdrop.

The shuttle Columbia was due to land at 0916 on February 1st.

Minutes before, at 61,170 metres above Dallas, sensors on the left wing began failing.

Tyre pressures dropped.

Contact was lost.

At 0912, reports came in that the shuttle was breaking apart in the sky.

The investigation found a hole in the wing caused by foam insulation.

But the deeper cause was communication.

Not the foam.

Not the tile.

Communication.

Boeing engineers had warned NASA managers in a PowerPoint.

Except the message got buried.

Look at this very dense slide.

How many of yours bury the point the same way?

Yale’s Edward Tufte explains why the slide failed to communicate the imminent danger.

In short, it’s a typical PowerPoint slide.

Misleading headline.

It made the slide seem safe, even though it wasn’t.

Words at the top of the slide reassured managers that tests suggested the tile could withstand the foam strike.

It couldn’t.

That single line set the wrong frame and drowned out the alarm.

Overload of bullets.

Four different bullet points, no order, no explanation.

Readers had to guess what mattered.

Six levels of hierarchy.

Shifting fonts, indents, and sub-points created a mess of priorities.

Managers skimmed the big type and skipped the small type.

A huge amount of text.

More than 100 words or figures on a single slide.

Vague language.

Words like “significant” and “sufficient” are used without numbers.

How significant is significant?

Jargon like “SOFI” and “ramp” meaning the same thing: foam.

Ambiguity at every turn.

Critical info buried.

The one fact that mattered the most— “Volume of ramp is 1920cu in vs 3 cu in for test” — was in tiny text at the very bottom.

Twelve words.

In the smallest font.

Lost in a swamp of a hundred. 

NASA managers walked away with the wrong message.

The shuttle went ahead with re-entry.

The result was tragedy.

Actually, scratch that.

It killed someone.

Seven someones.

And in the aftermath, NASA said it themselves.

The failure wasn’t just the wing.

It was the words.

“The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.” 

That’s why BLUF matters.

It isn’t a writing hack.

It’s a survival tool.

The army learned it in combat.

NASA ignored it in space.

And the cost was fatal.

If the engineers had led with BLUF, the slide could have read in plain English:

“Foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.”

Impossible to miss.

Simple language, clear logic, and so concise you could shout it across a runway.

Maybe NASA would have listened.

And maybe seven astronauts would have come home.

So next time you write, remember Columbia.

Lead with the point.

Say it plain.

Make it stick.

If it isn’t, you don’t have a message.

You have a liability.

PS. If you don’t know jewellery, know your jeweller. That’s Buffett’s rule. It’s the same with messaging. Smart ideas die in boring words. If you don’t know the game, find a partner who does, because your reputation is on the line. I help thinkers, rebels, and disruptors say what they mean and make it stick.  Step up. Bring your message. I’ll bring the punch. You’ve got one shot to say it right. I’ll help you take it.