| If you were anywhere near the internet last Thursday night, you probably saw the video of Blue Origin's big new rocket erupting into a fireball on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral. Thankfully nobody was hurt, but the rocket was gone, the launchpad got wrecked, and the missions the rocket was intended to support are going to be significantly delayed. Simply put, the entire thing was a very spectacular and very expensive failure.
I watched the clip a few times, the way you do. And then I made the mistake of scrolling into the comments, where everyone had already landed on the same three words people always land on when a rocket blows up: space is hard.
To be fair, that’s true. Space is genuinely and almost absurdly hard. But the more I think about that phrase, the more it bugs me. Sure, "space is hard" sounds like wisdom. It's humble, knowing, and properly respectful of how difficult the work is. Yet, if you actually look at how the phrase operates, it isn't doing what we think it's doing. In fact, it’s doing almost the opposite.
A Cliché That Stops the Questions
The problem with "space is hard” is that it's a category-level explanation for an instance-level event. In this case, the rocket didn't explode because space, as a general category of human endeavor, is difficult. It exploded for a specific reason. Some particular system during a particular test failed, and the interesting question isn't whether space is hard. We know space is hard. The interesting question is what, precisely, went wrong.
I bring this up because the people who are actually responsible for the failure aren’t the ones saying “space is hard.” Bezos (owner of Blue Origin, in case you didn’t know) said it was too early to know the root cause, but that his team is already working to find it. That's not a man reaching for a comforting generality, which is a good reminder that clichés usually point in the opposite direction of the real work.
"Space is hard" doesn't explain anything. What it does is give us permission to stop thinking about it. It allows observers like us to take a specific failure with specific, learnable causes and dissolve it into a general truth about a category. The moment we’ve done that, we’ve excused ourselves from the harder and more useful work of figuring out what actually happened.
In other words, the phrase feels like the conclusion of an inquiry, when it’s actually a way of never starting one. Which, in Blue Origin’s case, is fine for people who aren’t building rockets. But the problem goes beyond rocket launches.
The Clichés We Use on Ourselves
I expect most of you reading this — myself included — turn to the phrase “space is hard” when we hear about what happened to Blue Origin because we’re not in a position to take any other type of action. The problem, however, is when similar phrases show up during the many types of non-rocket-related failures we actually encounter in our lives.
Dating is hard.
Starting a business is hard.
Losing weight is hard.
Parenting is hard.
Every one of those statements is true. And every one of them is almost completely useless as an explanation for why a specific thing went wrong for you on a specific Tuesday.
For example, when a date goes badly, sighing and saying "dating is hard" lets you avoid asking what actually went wrong during dinner.
When your business stalls, saying "startups are hard" lets you skip the uncomfortable questions about your own shortcomings as an entrepreneur.
When you get on the scale and you’ve gotten heavier, saying “losing weight is hard” becomes the crutch that lets you justify eating another pint of Ben & Jerry’s.
In other words, clichés tend to arrive at exactly the moment you'd otherwise have to look closely at something difficult, and they offer a tempting exit. They let you feel like you've processed the failure when really you've just categorized it and walked away.
The people who get good at solving genuinely hard problems don’t do that. They refuse to let "it's hard" be the end of the sentence. For them, "space is hard" is where the inquiry begins, not where it ends.
So when something blows up in your life — and it will, because the best things in life are always hard — you’ll be tempted to say the equivalent of "space is hard" and move on.
Resist that temptation. Instead, start trying to figure out what specifically went wrong so you can fix the problem and take the next major step forward. |
