Science in Society: The Need for a Policy and Ethics Approach to Space Science

Abstract:

As space science progresses to include the inevitability of the private sector influencing future crewed and non-crewed missions, both in and beyond low Earth orbit, as well as the growth and change occurring within academia as a result of the current global societal landscape, it is especially crucial that the science community strengthens, agrees upon, and adopts the appropriate ethical and political framework, beginning with establishment of norms. This framework includes but is not limited to: prioritizing ethical exploration practices and namely international collaboration and transparency, changing language away from “colonization” and colonialism, focusing on retention of underrepresented students, bystander intervention and mentorship training, ensuring planetary protection and bioethics are incorporated at the beginning of a mission timeline, and creating the necessary policies to uphold these principles. These norms ultimately shape international law, and the custom of early and regular collaboration with ethicists and planetary protection specialists (and other social scientists) is absolutely critical for not only mission safety, but mission and science integrity, as well as the well-being of those contributing to the mission. The most critical of these norms is establishing within the science mission traceability matrix planetary protection, ethics, safety, and anti-imperialism, which must fall shortly after mission conception. Creating a safe, responsible, and ethical space for peaceful purposes cannot wait for the international space community to create these practices de jure, but must be started at the individual level and regarded as custom for integration into international law, de facto, and require an uncomfortable self-assessment in the true goals of space science, as well as the ways that the academic structure has failed certain groups of students. In order to achieve a new ethical scientific foundation, scientists must seek out and receive proper communications, ethics, and policy training, including policy language, so as to ensure our science also works to serve our communities and actively pave the way for these practices to be considered standard. By creating a new framework that prioritizes ethics, only then can we responsibly go into the unknown.