Off-Nominal - Let’s Make Space Better.

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

Here at Off-Nominal, we've been following the demonstrations against racial inequality and police violence in the United States, Canada, and around the world with concern. These events have highlighted deep problems with how we treat each other in many domains, and space exploration is not exempt.While we have been processing this in real-time, it has become obvious that we must do our part and use our platform to speak up against these inequalities and take action to stop them. We have been engaging with our Discord community this past week to come up with a plan.Many of these initiatives were developed not just by Jake and Anthony, but in partnership with the Patrons and listeners of our three podcasts. We’re proud that this is a community-led effort.Together, we're putting on a fundraiser to support Black organizations whose missions we believe in.Both Jake and Anthony will be matching contributions our community makes to both of these organizations through July 10 up to the total of this month’s revenue from Patreon (WeMartians, MECO).Donate directly to the organizations below, then email us your donation receipt to [e-mail] so we can match it.Thank you for helping us work together to make space better.Black Girls CodeBGC empowers girls of colour ages 7 to 17 to become innovators in STEM fields, leaders in their communities, and builders of their own futures through exposure to computer science and technology. Code plays such an integral role in both aerospace engineering and science that it’s hard to overestimate how important organizations like BGC is.Donate to Black Girls Code →Banneker InstituteBanneker provides ten week summer research and study experiences to undergraduate students of colour to prepare them for graduate programs in astronomy. As one of the least diverse of the sciences, anything we can do to give underrepresented peoples an edge will pay off.Donate to Banneker Institute →

Hey, everybody. Just like all of you, Anthony and I have been watching the events unfold in the United States, in Canada, across the world. It's been a tough couple of weeks for a lot of reasons, and we're all trying to figure it out in real time here. Anthony, you're, you know, in the United States. You're much closer to the epicenter of this movement. How you doing? Are you doing okay? We've had quite a week here in Philly. We've had a ton of marches, a lot of mayhem, a lot of peaceful stuff. a lot of not peaceful stuff. And this past weekend, especially, we've had nice weather, we've had, I don't know if you saw any of the photos and videos from like the Ben Franklin Parkway, which is our stretch that leads up to the rocky stairs,

if you probably know them from the movies and things like that. Just thousands of people keeping good distance, wearing masks, so there was that in action, and pretty incredible photos, seeing the whole city kind of come together, at least the ones that are able to go outside and be part of this kind of thing. and especially, you know, the last couple years, we've, two or three years ago, we put up a statue of Octavius Cato, who was a prominent black figure in the 1800s here in Philadelphia, pushing for equality.

Spent a lot of time, the block that I'm sitting on now, there's an institute that we'll talk about more that happened on my block that he was a part of. He actually was pushing the right for voting rights back in the day, in the 1800s. and got assassinated as part of that one block from where I live. So it was definitely a lot of local stuff going on here as their memorials kind of centered around his statue over by City Hall, which was really cool to see because it was like a very recent change that we've got that in the city now. So to have a moment like this where people recognize the importance of that guy being there

immortalized in a statue and coming together around that while we took down a statue of really terrible human. from the past century here in Philadelphia. We've had a lot of things in motion in the city. So I feel like we are on the upswing. And we have, as has been talked about in the media a lot this week, right across the river from us, Camden, New Jersey, has been one of the crown jewels when it comes to criminal justice reform

over the past decade or two. So it's cool to have, you know, right across the river there, we've got that lesson to learn from. and I think that's encouraging that we can, you know, we have people there that know how to do this right. And if we can learn from them, I think we've got a good shot here in Philly. Yeah. Yeah, you know, and it's not just an issue that's faced by the United States, you know, here in Canada. As much as we love to pretend like we have none of the problems that you do, we have it too.

There's a lot of, you know, violence against the black community in Canada, especially in some of the bigger cities like in Toronto, Montreal. We have tons of problems with our indigenous communities. And, you know, we're seeing those demonstrations as well. My wife went down to the one here in Vancouver. Yeah, Friday, I think it was. So we had 20,000 people downtown Vancouver. Same thing, masks, social distancing, all the bizarre incantations of these demonstrations

that exist today. But it was good to see that there was a lot of solidarity for it. there. So, you know, it's interesting we talk about this at such a local level. This, because, you know, this is such an issue that spans hierarchies, but local feels like a really important thing. I know you've done some reading on it. Yeah, President Obama had a really great post on medium. Not too long either, so I definitely recommend reading through it. And he's talking a lot about the fact that these issues in particular, when we're talking about police reform, things like that, are not solved at the federal level. And the biggest decisions get made at the local level and the

state level. So those things really matter too. And in our very globalized media sphere these days, I feel like it's easy to overlook that. But just this week coming up, I think it's Wednesday or Thursday of the week that we're in currently, Philadelphia is having their public hearing about the budget for this year. So this is the time when everyone's going to go pack that, hopefully distanced room when they talk about the budget and give some feedback on that. And, you know, you have somebody who played such a prominent role for a couple of years here at the federal level in the U.S. saying don't overlook your local communities. I think that's a huge thing to really internalize, especially when we're talking here across country borders and everyone that's listening,

we've got people all around the world. So I do think there's a huge local component that I know we've talked about what we're doing locally in our communities. But I also think that means because of the digital world we live in, we have a local community that spans the globe, and it's local to an industry. And I do think if everyone can make their corner of the world better, we can be a better place overall. And that does mean at an industrial level, because people are moving all around the globe. There's people moving across state lines, country borders, and things like that.

So I do think, you know, that stuff matters, too. Is where you are is not just geographic anymore. It also matters about who you're working with, who you're keeping. communicating with and the things that you're working on together. Yeah. And that's a real good, maybe long-winded way to say, you know, we're talking about the space community, right? And it's the space industry at large, the science industry at large, but also this community

of listeners that, you know, we've built up as a group, all of these, all of you, you know, the listeners that we've come together to, to enjoy space the way we have. So that's kind of that thought is what really got us thinking about this little mini show you're listening to you right here. We opened up some discussions in our community discord to talk about how can we as anomalies as listeners of Off Nominal and We Martians and Managing Cut Off, how can we as a community participate some sort of collective action and give back help with what's going on right now?

And so that's kind of what we're here to talk about today. So we put together some ideas and we wanted to share them with you today. We will be putting together, do you call it a fundraiser? I'm not sure what we're going to call this, but we're trying to get some money towards a couple of really good organizations that we want to tell you about today. The first one is Black Girls Code. And Black Girls Code is a group that helps young women of color in the kind of 11 to 17 age range, I think is what they put on their site. Learn how to use technology specifically around code to solve problems. And that's, that one is really, it really strikes as something that's important.

important to me for our community because code is, you know, obviously engineering has a ton of code. You know, SpaceX would not be able to put a drag and autonomously docking to the space station without some really nice looking code somewhere along the line there. Yeah, and I don't know if you've been watching the webcast recently, but boy, are they hiring software engineers at this point? They are hiring a ton of software engineers right now. And, you know, I would hate for that pipeline to already be at a disadvantage for SpaceX, right? So, you know, if they have all the great hiring practices in the world, if the pipeline is not sending them applicants, they're not going to be able to to solve these problems. And so this one's really important to me. And it's also in the

science community, right? I mean, a lot of sciences, planetary science, astronomy, a lot of that stuff is just big data. And you need to know how to code to handle these things. So this is an organization I think that's really applicable, applicable to what we're doing today. The other one is something that you're really in touch with. Yeah, well, in various incarnations of it. So I mentioned Octavius Cato, who was from Philadelphia, during his time here in Philly, which was most of his life, he actually spent a ton of time at the Benjamin Bannaker Institute. This is the original organization, not the one that we're going to be talking about today, but it is connected by name. And the original Benjamin Bannaker Institute was founded literally

on the block that I'm sitting in right now, recording this. Benjamin Bannaker was a extremely famous one of those guys from the centuries gone by that did everything and you're like, how did you have time for all of this? Maybe there wasn't Twitter or podcast or something like that. He was an astronomer. He had almanacs for the states in my area. He was part of the team that did the original survey for the District of Columbia, the old diamond shape that has now been chopped off a little bit. He was very famous for his discussions with Thomas Jefferson in once he was sent down to the DC area to do the survey, after finishing there, he started writing some letters to Thomas Jefferson about equality. And this was late 1700s, early 1800s.

So, and then those letters were published through various print shops here in Philadelphia was one of the first ones that distributed widely. And Thomas Jefferson wrote back with him. So they were kind of having this, like, it was almost the first blogosphere where they were kind of writing these letters back and forth through various print shops. So he died in the early 1800s. And then, he died in the early 1800s. this institute was created in his memory. And Harvard has recently, it was a couple years ago at this point, but they've created the thing that they call the Bannocker Institute at Harvard. And this is a really cool program as well. This is a 10-week summer research and study program for undergraduate students, people of color primarily, that are interested in graduate programs in astronomy. So they

do this very intensive course to prepare them for that time, as many of the people that we talk to, know graduate school, specifically in astronomy, is intensive because of the type of work that you're doing. It's very solitary. And you really need a good foundation to go into that. So they've got this kind of feeder program for people that are interested to up their skills and get ready for the graduate course. And out of that comes all of the discoveries that we talk about when we're talking about scientific breakthroughs in astronomy. So it's later in the cycle. of, you know, we're talking about Black Girl's Code being younger, getting them into engineering and things like that, and then the astronomy and kind of research side, it pairs really

nicely together to have, because you really can't write code for spaceships that don't have anything to do or research in space. So you kind of do need both parts here. I think that's why we like both things. And then, you know, on the coding side as well, we know how many people in the community here of listeners are software engineers by day. It's kind of a shocking amount of people. The two of us included. Yes, exactly. So it's pretty relevant. Neither of us are smart enough to do astronomy graduate research. So anyone that's getting into the Bannocker Institute, I'm just mind-blown at what you do every day. Yeah. And calling it out too, engineering, geosciences, and astronomy are three fields that are in desperate need of diversity problems being fixed. There's

some of the least diverse fields in the sort of realm that you and I play in. Yeah, you've got quite a list. I don't know if you want to run through any of that. Well, yeah, if you want to learn some of the stats, I'll have some information up on the blog, but I won't pour you with numbers on a podcast. But it's not good. I mean, let's talk about that. One thing I do want to say on that note,

you know, we came off of this week that there was a lot of debate among the space world about the achievements of DM2, this SpaceX crewed mission that just went up to the ISS, at a time of crazy civil unrest and people focusing on issues that are down here on Earth. a lot of people tying back to the 60s. That's problematic in some ways because some of the things don't really map quite well on the space side especially.

But there is something in that that I think, and I wrote a post about this over on the blog for Main Engine Cutoff, there were some incredible moments there. That was watched by millions of people online and then all of the major TV audience. And that, you know, while the achievement of DM2 is not something that can be connected,

with by us regular people down here on Earth. There is that platform that NASA and SpaceX, you know, they have a gigantic platform because of that visibility. So you have people like Lauren Lyons of SpaceX and Layland Melvin of NASA, he's the astronaut that you probably know because of his rad photo with his two dogs.

It's like his official astronaut photo. They were hosting a large part of that webcast together. And there was an adorable Twitter thread where there was a four-year-old name Ryan, who was thrilled to see someone who looks like her on screen. And I think that little Twitter thread, because then Lauren eventually responded to that, that really shows the importance of having role models

that you can look up to that are easy to find, that you can say, oh, hey, look, that's somebody that looks like me that's doing a thing that I'm interested in, and it gives you that boost to be, you know, maybe take the next step, whatever it is that gets you going. I think that kind of stuff really matters. And it's these things that the programs that we're talking about here, Black Girls Code and Bannocker Institute can really take somebody who's gotten

their imagination captured by somebody who looks like them and pushes them into the industry. Yeah. And, you know, it's not, this is not a kind of thing that we want to just do once. We recognize that this is a problem that doesn't just go away with some donations. We asked some of you in our Discord community for some ideas. They, to their credit, came up with some great, great ideas. So we're going to be working on. You're going to hear more about as we kind of build it, but putting together some good lists of social media follows for, you know, people of color in space industry. If you were looking to diversify your feed, which I know I've gone back to do a bit of

a self-audit, I think you have as well. And they're also looking to source together some black writers and the books that they've written to make sure that the content we're reading is also diverse. So that's something that you're going to see more come right out of the community. And if you want to help with that, you can absolutely reach out to us and we'll get you connected to that work. One other thing that we should mention is that we literally have no attachment to these organizations. You're going to be paying these organizations directly if you're going to, if you're interested in what we're saying here, we literally are getting nothing out of this. We have no involvement.

We are just telling you about it. They don't know this is happening. They don't even know. We haven't told anyone yet. We probably won't until all of a sudden they're like, what's happening here with this weird site that's linking to us? we're going to have links to both of them at donate.off nominal.spasasas. Again, they're literally just going to be links out to these organizations because we're doing this very quickly and we are not as expert as we should be about technological stacks.

Well, and they're already set up to take money, so I may as well just... And this is literally what they do. This is... They are pros of us. But, you know, as a community of listeners, anomalies, if you do want to contribute to these organizations, let us know, send us... a tweet or an email, tell us how much if you want. Let's do with an email to donate at at off nominal.

Email to donate at off nominal.spice. And we're going to be matching the contributions up to a whole month of Patreon. I think that's what we said. Yeah. We're going to run this until July 10th. It's Friday, four weeks from now. So you've got four weeks to hopefully you're not too far behind your podcast feed or you just saw a tweet about this and you actually are listening to this.

but we've got four weeks here. So yeah, email us the receipts and we'll be doing that. Yeah. So yeah, and that's kind of what we're hoping to do. So, you know, we're, Anthony and I are both processing this in real time, like I said. So we're probably going to make some mistakes on this. We're still learning some things that, you know, you can think you're as woke as you would like, but there's always gaps in the knowledge and ways to get better.

So if we do make a mistake, you know, we apologize for that and we're trying to get better. So hopefully you see more from us in the future on this. You know, we're taking a good look at ourselves as well. And, you know, who are we putting out in front of our episodes? And how can we make that more representative of the society around us? That's important to us. And we hope that we can, you know, a year from now, I hope that we're looking a lot better. So that's kind of, that's my parting thought on it.

I don't know what you think, Anthony, but. The best news about this timing is that we're going to run this through until July 10th. and then about a month later, my favorite astronaut, Victor Glover, is going to climb into a dragon capsule, fly up to the ISS, and he will be the first black astronaut to be assigned to an ISS expedition.

There have been other black astronauts on the space shuttle, going to ISS. He'll be the first one there for a long-duration expedition. And boy, if you are not in love with Victor Glover like I am, you need to go back and watch when he was announced as this crew assignment because he is infectiously happy.

And I shouldn't use infectiously, during a pandemic, but whatever. Wrong word. No, it's fine. He's just, it's fantastic. It's the second best astronaut photo since Leland Melvin with his dogs. So, yeah, so that's what we have for you. You know, we're still processing it, but we think that we didn't want to wait any longer

to say something and act because, you know, solving these problems depends on everyone speaking up, stepping forward and doing something. we hope that all of you will come along with that journey with us. We love this community and the things that we can do together are greater than the sum of our parts. And so I hope that everyone to stay safe out there and that we can keep working with you in the future.