I almost got canceled for being anti-war, and I’m asking you to do the same.

A little story time for the scientists and engineers in the room.

About a decade ago, at a space agency, I was put on a project contracted to the DoD to help surveil the Niger River Basin for “national security.” This was a community that West-backed Shell had devastated through an oil spill, damaging the livelihoods of thousands, and the US government wanted to link this devastation and colonial, ecological disaster-making to “terrorism.” I was horrified.

Notably, this program had given us a special talk on following personal ethics; to leave jobs at companies — e.g., companies that build spacecraft as well as weapons — if they violate your ethics. Emboldened by this, I told the PI that I was leaving the project for ethical reasons.

Lockheed Martin has contributed to numerous missions over the years — MAVEN, Juno, OSIRIS-REx, InSight, Mars Odyssey, Phoenix lander — and also supplies the IOF with military aircraft: the F-16 Fighting Falcon, F-35 Lightning II, C-130 Hercules, and KC-130 Hercules.

Sources: NASA, Lockheed Martin

She called me in for a meeting. Then she locked us in a storage closet.

She spent a long time lecturing me about my duty as an American, and pressuring me not to leave. I insisted I had to. Afterwards, in retaliation, the program left me completely on my own, without a project.

Later that summer, after multiple networking events in aerospace, where I further realized the close and intimate ties between my science — studying the landscapes on other planets and moons — and the war industry, I wrote a personal blog post on the emotional toll of this reality, particularly as coming from forced diaspora.

It was deeply emotional — how could my friends help to bomb people who look like my family? How do I separate planetary science from that? Is it even possible?

BAE Systems has contributed to ESA’s JUICE mission and recently purchased Ball Aerospace, a NASA contractor (Kepler, Hubble, JWST, WISE, Spitzer, CloudSat, Spirit/Opportunity rovers) to develop hypersonic warfare capabilities.

Sources: PSC, The Telegraph (Aug. 2023)

This post, which was on my personal website, was escalated by third parties to my program managers, who ordered me to a meeting. They spent a long hour threatening to fire and blacklist me from the agency. They also intimidated me and implied, in more ways than one, that it was only through magnanimity that they weren’t reporting me to the government. They continued to surveil my socials for months — well after the end of the program.

I was 20.

Almost a decade later, I am watching the dedicated silence of this community, including from those who insist that they care about diversity and justice. I’m hearing that people very senior to me are afraid about job security from their positions of tenure. I am watching quiet censorship ripple across the field, impacting early-career researchers of color.

But none of our fears is a drop in the bucket of genocide. We don’t know what real fear is. Ten thousand people are dead, half of them children. 2 million people are waiting to starve to death or die under rubble. Palestinian scientists are being detained in the West Bank, while Israel has bombed all universities in Gaza — using weapons we and our friends made. Our colleagues in the Palestinian diaspora stand alone.

Do not succumb to manufactured helplessness. Let’s talk about our complicity. Speak out. Interrupt genocide.

“I don’t want a single aspect of my career to be built from blood…I am tired of the reincarnation of genocide in my lineage.”

Me, “On Stealing Stars” (2015)

This post borrows text from this piece and resource list on my website.