The Field Historian: Editorial Voice for Orrery Programs

The anchor for how every /programs/{id} editorial is written. PRD-029 defines the structure (the spine, the roster, the images); this guide defines the voice that fills it. Read this before authoring or regenerating any program prose. v1.0 · July 2026

Every program page is written by the same person: a modern field historian with the craft of a Wired feature writer. Not eleven voices, one. If two programs read like they were written by different people, one of them is wrong — fix it against this guide.

Preamble: rigor of a historian, craft of a Wired feature

A program page has a hard job. It has to be neutral — Orrery is not a cheerleader for NASA, Roscosmos, CNSA, ESA, or anyone — and it has to be gripping, because a neutral page nobody finishes is worthless. Those pull in opposite directions, and the resolution is a specific person:

The field historian supplies the substance. Knows the subject cold. Names motivations plainly, including the ones an agency's own PR would leave out. Reports intent and outcome and refuses to crown winners. Every number carries its unit; every claim could be sourced. When the record is thin or contested, says so.
The Wired writer supplies the delivery. Opens with a hook that earns the next sentence. Trusts short declarative punches. Finds the one telling detail — the beeping sphere, the doorbell-grade computer, the 400,000 strangers — and lets it carry the paragraph. Modern idiom, confident, occasionally speaks straight to the reader. Never hype, never purple.

Substance without craft is a textbook. Craft without substance is marketing. The whole voice is the tension held taut between them. Everything below is in service of that one balance.

1. Who is speaking

An even-handed field historian, writing for a smart, busy, modern reader. The register of the best long-form science journalism — a Wired feature, a New Yorker science piece, the sharpest museum wall text — applied to material that is reported like history, not sold like a campaign.

They respect the reader's intelligence (no over-explaining, no throat-clearing). They tell the whole true story, including the uncomfortable parts, without flinching and without moralizing. They are never the judge of whether a program "succeeded" — they lay out what it was for and what it did, and let the reader weigh it.

2. The seven principles

Neutral — never a cheerleader, never a cynic. Name motivations plainly (Cold War domination and real science). Report intent and outcome; don't declare a winner. Soviet firsts get their due; American achievements aren't inflated. Same global-representation bar as the rest of Orrery: celebrate every agency, default to none.
Facts carry the weight; adjectives don't. A concrete number, date, or name beats any superlative. "111 metres tall, ~3,000 tonnes at liftoff" beats "gigantic." Every number gets its unit. Every factual claim could be sourced to the program's links[] or /library.
Plain, load-bearing sentences with momentum. One idea per sentence. Subordinate clauses only when they carry information. Vary the length — a short punch after two longer sentences is the Wired heartbeat. No throat-clearing ("It is important to note that…").
Say the uncomfortable thing without flinching — and without moralizing. The fire killed three men. The program stopped at its technical peak. The motive was prestige. State it flatly; don't sermonize about it, don't soften it.
A human scale. Anchor the abstract in people and objects — Gary Flandro running the math at JPL, a guidance computer weaker than a modern doorbell, 400,000 strangers aligned by one sentence. The detail must be real and checkable, never invented for color.
A hook, then momentum. The first sentence of a section earns the second. Open on the telling image or the sharp fact, not on a summary. Then keep the reader moving — every paragraph should make them want the next one.
Modulate by section, not by mood. The voice is constant; its job changes per spine section (§5). The land sets a scene; Goals and Outcome are crisp and factual; Narrative is the one place a light arc is allowed; Legacy advocates for the material payoff while staying sourced; What we can learn extracts one transferable lesson, grounded and un-preachy.

3. Sentence-level craft

Open sections on a scene or a fact with teeth. "For ninety minutes at a stretch, in the autumn of 1957, a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball crossed the sky over the United States — and it was beeping."
Use the em-dash and the colon for a beat of emphasis or a reveal. Modern punctuation, used on purpose.
Let a short sentence land after long ones. "No human has returned since."
Reach for the modern, exact phrase over the stock one. "a syllogism it couldn't unhear" over "a worrying development."
Name people. A program is 400,000 people; put a few of them on the page.

Don't

Don't hype. Ban breathtaking, iconic, revolutionary, awe-inspiring, groundbreaking, game-changing, epic, unprecedented (unless it is literally, verifiably the first — then say first, with the date).
Don't editorialize the morality. Report the Cold War motive; don't tut about it. Report the cost in lives; don't eulogize.
Don't go purple. Color serves a fact. If a sentence is beautiful but says nothing, cut it.
Don't hedge into mush. "Arguably one of the most significant…" is a non-claim. Make the claim or drop it.
Don't lecture. The reader is as smart as you are.

4. Person & address

Third person by default. The page is a written exhibit, not a spoken tour — the second-person "you" register belongs to the audio guides (PRD-016), which are heard, not read.

Occasional, deliberate "you"/"we" is allowed — the way a Wired feature uses it: once in a while, for a single beat of directness that pulls the reader in, never as a conversational habit. "…a warhead onto any city you care to name." One per section is plenty; zero is fine.

Exception — "What we can learn" may address the reader's own world directly, because the whole section is a transferable lesson. Even there, keep it a note between equals, not a sermon.

5. Per-section register

The voice is one; the assignment shifts.

Section	Its job	Register notes
Tagline	One line that frames the whole program with a point of view.	Sharp, honest, a little bit of edge. "The Cold-War sprint that put twelve people on the Moon — and then stopped."
The land	Where the world and the technology stood when it began — the why it happened at all.	Most scene-setting. Open on the moment. Say the real reason out loud (prestige, a frontier, a bet, a nation's first reach).
Goals	What the program was actually trying to do, in its own priority order.	Crisp, factual, honest about what sat behind what.
Outcome	What happened — met, missed, and at what cost.	Factual and unflinching. Name the deaths, the cancellations, the price. Don't declare success; state the result and the yardstick.
Narrative	The story that ties the roster together — the arc and its turning points.	The one section that may run as light narrative. Still not a textbook.
Legacy	What it gave back — economy, technology, science, soft power, inspiration.	The one place the historian advocates for why the work mattered materially — still neutral, still sourced, unafraid to name the payoff and the costs.
What we can learn	One transferable lesson on doing hard things.	Leadership / team-playbook / human-inspiration. Grounded in this program, not preachy. May address the reader. Exactly one lesson, pulled hard.

6. The dispatch — missions + hardware

Programs don't live in isolation — a program's roster links the missions that carried it out and the hardware that made it possible. When a program touches a mission or a fleet asset, that entry earns a dispatch: one editorial paragraph, in this exact voice, at the top of its OVERVIEW tab. It's the bridge that makes the program↔mission↔hardware handoff feel like one publication.

Its job — the why, not a second set of facts. Every mission carries a factual description (durations, masses, instruments, dates); every fleet entry carries specs. The dispatch is not that. The angle depends on what it's attached to:

Missions → why it mattered. The mission's compressed version of a program's Narrative beat: the turning point it was, the risk it ran, the door it opened.
Hardware → innovation + purpose. What made this asset a first, why it had to exist, the problem it solved, the engineering choice that defined it. Not "how big is it" — "what did it do that nothing before it could, and why."

Either way: think the standfirst paragraph under a magazine headline. If it reads like the description/specs with better adjectives, it's wrong — rewrite until it earns its place.

Shape. One substantial paragraph, ~3–6 sentences: a hook, the stakes, why it still matters. Same seven principles, same banned words, same occasional-deliberate-"you". It adds framing, never new claims the mission page can't already source.

Where it lives + renders.

Source (missions): i18n-src/en-US/missions/{dest}/{id}.json → a dispatch field, alongside first / description.
Source (fleet): i18n-src/en-US/fleet/{category}/{id}.json → a dispatch field, alongside tagline / description.
The base records stay in static/data/…; the dispatch is translatable editorial, so it's an overlay field.
Render: top of the OVERVIEW tab, above the specs/description, set apart typographically as a lead — heavier, wider measure — so it reads as editorial, not body copy (identical treatment in MissionPanel + FleetEntryPanel).
/earth propagation (launch-sites only): a dispatch on a fleet/launch-site/* entry is carried through by earth-launch-site-adapter.ts into the SurfaceScene pad panel and rendered as the same lead above the coordinate grid — automatic, no extra authoring. One dispatch shows on /fleet, the program roster, and /earth.

When it's mandatory. Every mission and fleet asset a program's roster links (ref: "mission" | "fleet" + linked_id) gets a dispatch, authored while that program is being built — its context is already loaded. Context-only entries the roster merely names (no linked_id) don't get one: we don't model them, so there's no page to carry it. This is a required step in the program-addition runbook, not optional polish.

Reference — Apollo 11. Its description is the facts (21 h 36 m on the surface, 21.55 kg of samples, the retroreflector still ranged today, ~600 million watching). Its dispatch is the why:

Apollo 11 was the flight the whole program was built to make — the one that had to work. For eight years and $25 billion, everything NASA did came down, in the end, to getting two people onto this particular patch of grey dust and back off it alive. When Armstrong called "the Eagle has landed," the Cold-War race that opened with a beeping sphere over American cities was effectively over. What's easy to forget now is how little margin there was: the crew came down with seconds of fuel to spare, past a boulder field the maps hadn't shown, riding a guidance computer that was throwing alarms the whole way. It worked anyway — and for one night, a fifth of the species watched the same thing at the same time.

7. A worked example

The Apollo "the land" opening, before and after — same facts, same neutrality, the voice switched on.

Before (competent, but flat — a well-informed encyclopedia):

In October 1957 the Soviet Union placed Sputnik 1 in orbit — a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball, beeping over American cities every ninety minutes. Four years later, on 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. To Washington, neither was read primarily as a scientific milestone. A country that could put a satellite — or a man — into orbit could drop a warhead anywhere on Earth. Spaceflight had become a proxy for the Cold War itself.

After (modern Wired field historian):

For ninety minutes at a stretch, in the autumn of 1957, a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball crossed the sky over the United States — and it was beeping. Sputnik 1 belonged to the Soviet Union, and there was nothing the most powerful country on Earth could do but listen. Less than four years later, on 12 April 1961, the Soviets put up a person too: Yuri Gagarin, the first human to leave the planet. Washington heard none of it as science. It heard a syllogism it couldn't unhear — a rocket that can lift a satellite into orbit can drop a warhead onto any city you care to name. Almost overnight, spaceflight stopped being exploration and became the leading edge of the Cold War.

Every date, number, and the honest Cold-War framing survive intact. What changed: a hook, momentum, one deliberate "you," a modern turn of phrase. That delta is the voice.

8. How to use this

Authoring a new program. Write every section against §5's register and the seven principles. Apollo (i18n-src/en-US/programs/apollo.json) is the calibrated reference — read it before you start. The full step-by-step lives in the program-addition runbook.
Mission dispatches (§6). Every mission a program links earns a dispatch, authored during that program's build. It's a mandatory runbook step, not optional polish — see the runbook.
Regenerating. When prose drifts (or predates this guide), regenerate section-by-section against §2–§5, preserving every fact, figure block, image, and caption credit. The voice changes; the record does not.
Reviewing. The test is single-author consistency: could this paragraph sit inside Apollo without a seam? If not, it's off-voice. The banned-word list in §3 is a fast first pass.
Translation. The i18n style guide (i18n-style-guide.md) governs terminology; this guide governs the English source register. Translators match meaning and neutrality, not the English idiom literally.

Orrery · Programs editorial voice · July 2026 — companion to PRD-029. Apollo is the reference implementation.

The Field Historian: Editorial Voice for Orrery Programs ​

Preamble: rigor of a historian, craft of a Wired feature ​

1. Who is speaking ​

2. The seven principles ​

3. Sentence-level craft ​

4. Person & address ​

5. Per-section register ​

6. The dispatch — missions + hardware ​

7. A worked example ​

8. How to use this ​