You’ve probably tried to submit an idea to a government agency before. You filled out the form, hit submit, and watched the page break. Then you gave up.
Now imagine that agency is the European Space Agency. And they’re asking for autonomous software experiments to fly on a mission to an asteroid called Hera. The ambition is breathtaking. The UX is a punchline.
The top comment on the call for ideas? “My idea is to make this esa site mobile responsive.”
That’s not trolling. That’s a mirror. ESA is asking for cutting-edge AI that can navigate a spacecraft around a binary asteroid system — but their own outreach platform can’t even scale to a phone screen. The disconnect is so absurd it’s almost endearing. Almost.
This isn’t just a web design failure. It’s a symptom of a deeper bottleneck: the gap between what space agencies dream of and what their own infrastructure can actually support.
Think about it. The Hera mission is a bold step toward autonomous deep-space operations. The agency wants to crowdsource ideas from the best minds in AI, robotics, and software. But if the invitation itself is broken — if the website refuses to load on mobile, if the form is a relic from dial-up — then who actually gets to respond?
The answer is people with enough patience, privilege, and desktop computers to fight through the friction. That’s a self-selecting filter. It biases the entire pool of ideas toward the already-resourced. And it’s a quiet tragedy, because the best ideas for autonomous spaceflight might be sitting in a smartphone in a developing country, never submitted.
Here’s the provocative truth: the most meaningful autonomous experiment ESA could run right now isn’t on a spacecraft. It’s on their own website.
Imagine if the platform could detect when a user is struggling — slow load, layout break, form error — and autonomously adapt. That’s a real-world autonomy problem, and solving it would prove the exact same principles ESA wants to test in space. It would also make the entire process more inclusive, which is arguably the point of a public call for ideas in the first place.
I’m not saying ESA should abandon the Hera mission. I’m saying the institutional muscles needed to build a modern, responsive, inclusive platform are the same muscles needed to build trust with the global community that space exploration claims to serve. You can’t ask the world for the future of spaceflight while your website looks like 2003.
The irony is that someone at ESA probably already knows this. The top comment is a joke, but it’s also a signal. It’s a canary in the coal mine of bureaucratic inertia. And the question is: will ESA hear it, or will they keep looking at the stars while their own infrastructure crumbles under the weight of a phone call?
The next time ESA asks for ideas, maybe they should start by fixing their own.
FAQ
Q: Is ESA's website really that bad?
A: According to multiple users and the top comment on the call itself, yes. The ideas.esa.int platform is not mobile-responsive, making it difficult or impossible to submit ideas from a phone or tablet. This is a well-known pain point in the space community.
Q: What's the practical implication for ESA's call for ideas?
A: A broken submission platform filters out a huge number of potential contributors — especially younger innovators, people in developing countries, and anyone who primarily uses a mobile device. This biases the entire idea pool toward those with desktop access and patience, which undermines the goal of open innovation.
Q: Isn't this just a minor technical issue?
A: It's a canary in the coal mine. If a space agency can't modernize its own outreach infrastructure, it signals a deeper institutional resistance to change. That same resistance will eventually slow down the adoption of the autonomous technologies they're trying to source. The technical fix is easy; the cultural fix is hard.