A few years ago, a friend who runs a nonprofit helping refugees escorted a young refugee boy to DC on a Senator’s invitation to attend the State of the Union address. As part of the visit, the boy was taken to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, one of my favourite places in the world, for a fun outing. Except he ended up in tears stepping inside. The military aircraft displayed reminded him of the ones that had killed his parents and destroyed his city. Although I have loved attending air shows and visiting aviation museums since I was a small child myself, since I read that story, I cannot get the image of that little boy out of my head and can no longer go to these places without bursting into tears myself. 

I grew up next to an airbase and airport in Saudi Arabia and inspired by movies and TV shows (including as I’d later find out, some paid for by the military), wanted to grow up to be a fighter pilot for the Pakistani Air Force. The one and only time I have been glad for sexism stopping me in my life has been that the Pakistani Air Force did not take women at the time I was graduating high school and I decided to become an aerospace engineer instead. “Design ‘em if you can’t fly ‘em” 

Fortunately, my family moved to Canada around this time and I was blessed to be attending college at campus with active anti-war groups and when the Iraq war started in 2003, the mass protests and vivid images of destruction on TV, opened my eyes to the true reality of what fighter aircraft did and I decided to no longer work on those in my career.

In my senior year, I attended a space conference sponsored by a program to get students interested in space and fell in love with the industry’s work in space exploration and how that pushed the boundaries of science and technology in a constructive way. Unfortunately, later years would shatter my early impressions. 

As I moved to the US to attend graduate school and later started a career here, I found myself with difficulties finding jobs due to ITAR restrictions. I finally found my first job at a civilian aircraft lab working on air traffic projects but part of a subsidiary of a large aerospace company. I didn’t know details but did know the larger company did military work as well. I justified it to myself as I had limited choices and my lab generated its own income but I felt uncomfortable at the idea of making money for the larger company when they also did destructive things. But I avoided looking too closely for my own peace of mind. Years later, I found the larger company is one of the top 10 companies in the US working on military work and I’m bothered to this day that I contributed to helping them. 

Since my first job, I started to be more conscious of work that various companies did before applying. That severely restricted where I could apply for jobs even after becoming a permanent resident opened up more opportunities. One job I’ve held at a university I felt good about as it somehow felt different than being in a company even though other parts of the university got funding from the military. At that job, a space science project I worked on collaborated with an Air Force funded lab and a company that also did military work. For this project I sometimes had to attend meetings at an Air Force restricted facility where I was extremely conscious of being in a space where a significant amount of work focused on technologies that were used against communities like mine across the world. Attending these meetings and the amount of the collaboration that was involved made me extremely uncomfortable and I was unhappy that working on an otherwise exciting space science mission was getting ruined by also helping destructive organizations. 

My most recent aerospace job was at a NASA lab for a planetary science mission. I’d originally applied both because of their interesting projects but also my impression about NASA labs not being involved in military work. Unfortunately I was provided a job offer as a contractor through a staffing agency type contract instead of a direct hire without advance notice and given a few days to respond. I decided to accept the offer without looking too closely at the other work the contractor did and justified it to myself as I had been unemployed for a few months and experiencing financial strain. At the lab, I found that there was classified work done in one section and the contractor company did supply personnel to military contracts as well and while I really liked the project I was working on, it also made me feel guilty for trying to do work I enjoy while contributing to organizations also doing destructive work. 

Not wanting to be a contractor long term, I had been trying to apply to other jobs while working on that project and since leaving that position and this time I tried to be thorough in vetting companies for ethics concerns before applying. It was extremely difficult to find companies that don’t do military work in the aerospace industry even though most jobs I looked at were space science focused. I’d estimate 90% or more engineering jobs in space sciences are at organizations that directly work on military projects. At one point I thought to relax my stance and apply to companies that are doing non-weapons military work but asking to be silo’d from that work. Since companies don’t always advertise their repertoire, this led to very uncomfortable conversations during interviews where I asked about the company’s involvement with military work and the hiring process halted due to me bringing up this concern even in cases I’d been initially assured this was ok but at later interview stages, this became an issue for the company. Eventually, especially with companies doing space science work halting hiring due to the pandemic, it became impossible to stay in the field without continuing to compromise on ethics. 

Over the years I’ve fallen more & more in love with astronomy & planetary science. I’ve felt learning about space to be a spiritual experience for me. After the journey it took for a young girl growing up in Saudi to work on a Mars mission at JPL, the prospect of leaving was extremely heartbreaking and demoralizing. The rhetoric the industry uses of talking about not seeing borders in space and having a larger perspective on humanity and the earth does not line up with the industry’s involvement in destruction across the globe. In my case it hits particularly hard as many of the people who are victims of the US military industrial complex are people of my racial and religious background. When Lockheed bombs drop hours away from where my grandmother lives killing ppl who look like me, it’s chilling thinking about the number of space science and now human space exploration projects they’re involved in. And also chilling that I’d been working in an industry where my peers seem fine with this. 

However, seeing so many people speak up about ethical concerns at various organizations during this pandemic gave me the final push I needed for having the courage to live my values & making a positive contribution to the world. Though friends, family & colleagues in progressive spaces have long heard me speak against the military industrial complex, it was during the pandemic that I started sharing my antiwar in STEM stances in professional spaces.

I’ve since left aerospace and now work on autonomous vehicles which I think will become an important accessibility technology in the future. My current company does not do military work. However, I recently learned of our parent company celebrating winning DoD contracts despite opposition from employees with ethical concerns. This makes me deeply uncomfortable & I am not sure what lies ahead for me. Currently, as my health allows, I’m planning to ramp up my efforts to speak against the military industrial complex poisoning STEM workplaces. 

I should add that the purpose of sharing the details of my story isn’t to excuse the choices I made to work at destructive companies & be complicit in harm against my own communities. It’s to pay forward the huge favour the antiwar activists at my undergrad did for me. I spent a long time being optimistic & trying to find more ethical ways to work on things I love but failed. I’m hoping others can learn from my experience & help push for change. 

It truly saddens me that the awe & wonder I feel when I learn about the universe is tainted with complicity in death and destruction in the pursuit of that knowledge. I hope we can fix that so the dreams of folks interested in space science in the future aren’t crushed under ethical dilemmas like mine were.