Welcome back, JustSpace Alliance readers! It’s been an exciting month for human space travel, as the Artemis II crew made headlines for their fantastically successful flyby of the Moon and safe return to Earth. But these headlines— along with the astronauts’ photos of our beautiful Moon and their video messages of curiosity, wonder, and love— appeared on our screens next to the latest news of war, cruelty, violence, oppression, and injustice here on Earth. This juxtaposition prompts those of us who spend our time thinking about space to ask how we can simultaneously work to improve the lives and circumstances of our fellow humans.

This month’s Q&A illustrates one example of this kind of work. We chatted with Dr. Christina Richey, a director at the SETI Institute, who recognized early in their career that they wanted to dedicate their time to helping other members of the space science community through proposal writing training, program management, and combating toxicity and harassment in the field.

See below for a transcript of our conversation with Dr. Richey, which should be valuable for all of our readers who want to create safe and healthy space communities, even those of you working outside of science and research.​ This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Q&A with Christina Richey

What is your current or most recent position?

Right now, I am the Director of Partnerships and Business Development at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. I look at the overall research institute, and I understand the business model we’re utilizing, and I work to optimize that wherever possible across the strategic objective for SETI. That’s a lot of very wishy-washy language there, and basically what I mean is that I take a look at how we operate and try to improve that for our research community. For an easy example: I work with our grants team to increase our competitiveness for federal grant opportunities, because we want to continue to shine there, and that’s how we support a lot of the research that we do at the SETI Institute. I also work to understand our current partnerships with other institutions or companies, and to strengthen those while looking for opportunities to create new partnerships.

All of this goes back, of course, to the science that we do [at the SETI Institute], which is understanding the origins and prevalence of life and intelligence in the universe.

I’m also the PI [Principal Investigator] of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA’s Proposal Writing Workshops, where I teach the greater scientific community how to propose for federal funding opportunities, particularly NASA. I give them lots of tips and tricks for success, and I teach folks how to write scientifically compelling stories to attach with those proposals. I also really strive to teach our community how to be resilient while going through arduous processes like proposal writing and rejection.

Can you tell me about your career path?

I’m just going to go all the way back and note that I’m a first-generation [to attend college] Appalachian, from Ohio. As a first-gen college student, I didn’t really have a great grasp on the expectations for what college would be like. I chose a really heavy major (physics), and I was also a dual athlete, cross-country and track and field, which helped pay for college. I came from lower-middle-class Appalachia, so I constantly had a job in order to pay for college, and I have other student loans. So for me, college was an extreme sport. Imagine having a full-time job while majoring in physics, while being a dual-sport athlete!

Somehow I managed to get through all of that, and it wasn’t until my junior year, going into my senior year, that I discovered research as a pathway that I really got into the space science field. Before that, I was intending to use a physics degree to go work at either a water treatment plant or a power plant, something like that, which is very Ohio River Valley Appalachian. Those are the types of jobs you would go for.

I was introduced to research through the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. There was a professor there named Dr. Perry Gerakines, who was working in laboratory astrophysics, understanding ice chemistry and how that impacts both the ice in our outer solar system, and also in the interstellar medium and the birthplace of stars and planetary systems.

I got to spend an entire summer doing work in his lab and really rocked my REU. I ended up winning their REU poster session for the entire REU program. That’s when I discovered that graduate school was a thing that I could do, that this research in space science was actually an opportunity that could be something for me.

My grandfather would jokingly say he always knew I was going to end up at a place like NASA, that I was never going to be a high school teacher or a water treatment plant worker. He was like, “No, that was never going to be you, you just didn’t see it.” But it took me getting an opportunity like an REU in order to really see that I could do something like that and start to shine.

I finished my REU, got my undergrad degrees in physics. Then I was applying to graduate school, and I was still having this mentality of: “There’s only small spaces for you.” Luckily for me, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) also has a fantastic Ph.D. program in physics, so I continued to work with Perry. I just rolled straight into graduate school.

I went to UAB for 7 years for a Ph.D., and then I ended up using all of the tools, the resources that I learned there to create a career in not just lab astrophysics, but in review processes and program management and all of the other stuff that I now do for a living. I went from UAB to a NASA postdoctoral program at Goddard Space Flight Center, working with Stephen Rinehart and doing some really cool dust grain research, looking at the grains [of dust] underneath the ice. And while I was doing all that, I realized I actually really liked being a resource for our community, and I liked trying to help others. Look, I was a great lab astrophysicist. I was the best glorified mechanic you could find. I am the daughter of a mechanic, so you can put me in steel-toed boots and holey t-shirts, and I could do that all day long. But where I was really shining was understanding that there was this larger need for more systematic processes for how we fund our researchers, and how we see our science and the scope of the field, and providing resources and support to making sure we get that done.

So I went from Goddard to [NASA] Headquarters. That was wild, going from postdoc to program officer. Like, “Oh, let me just skip 20 years of my career.” By the way, program officers do not need to be tenured professors before they become program officers. If anything, I think that’s a waste of skills for a really good program officer at NASA Headquarters, because our job is to effectively manage and support the research community. I don’t understand why a tenured professor would be the person we would think would be a professional at that. If anything, they have learned how to try to get their own money in the pursuit of their research goals. Those aren’t traditionally the people that are really good at managing other people and projects. Those aren’t necessarily the ones that I would hand that job to, versus somebody who’s a really good manager, who’s very detail-oriented, who’s very time-oriented and processes-oriented, and [skilled at] actually editing things and getting them out the door, and “getting shit done.” Those types of folks are ones that you want as program officers and program managers.

That’s an interesting observation, because there seem to be so many jobs that tenured professors end up doing that they were never trained in. I mean, they are often barely trained in pedagogy, let alone project management.

Exactly! This is something that I’ve never understood about academia, that we have this system where the merits of it are really about bringing in money and business to the research community. And [professors’] performance evaluations, many times, don’t incorporate how they teach their classes, or survey whether or not their students are actually learning. And that, to me, is a travesty in the academic process. That is the number one thing we should be training within our pipelines. Actually, as the Proposal Writing Workshop PI now, I’ve taken some of that burden off of our community.

After NASA headquarters, I went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where I was for 8 years. (I just recently left there and got to SETI.) I ran research and technology development at JPL, among other things. And between those two jobs, at NASA Headquarters and JPL, I saw that there were really two [issues] within our community. One was that the expectation levels in our entire field were really an extreme sport that were, many times, unfair, particularly to the most disadvantaged within our communities, or to the most vulnerable populations, like our postdocs and our graduate students. And two: actual merit and intellect, many times, meant crap compared to knowing who and how to interact with people and who to get funding from for your work. And that, to me, was really, really wrong.

Then I found out that there was a Proposal Writing Workshop at NASA Headquarters, run by Michael New and Curt Niebur, who had themselves gone from being program officers at Headquarters to very high-level administrators. They themselves no longer had time to do the workshops. One of the reasons I asked to take them over was that I wanted to get the information out to our community about what it takes to get yourself funding in federal processes, and to broaden what I meant by “our community.” Not just the planetary scientists that go to LPSC [the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, where the workshops were held], but: let’s have a conversation about the fact that there are lots of members of our community space science that are not necessarily at LPSC or AAS [American Astronomical Society] or AGU [American Geophysical Union]. There are so many other opportunities to distribute this working knowledge of how to get federal funding and how to understand the grant processes. That, to me, should be fundamental to all programs out there, not just the privileged select few who happen to be in the room.

It’s interesting to me how many academics I know who, during grad school or their first postdoc, discovered an interest in something else, like science communication, or program management, or the kind of work you’re doing for the science community. Do you have any advice for younger people in the academic process who might be interested in moving into these non-research ways to support space science?

Number one: It is 100% okay and valid if “tenured professor” is not your goal. I never wanted to be a professor. I taught in graduate school, and was great at it, just like lab astrophysics. I could do those jobs. But they weren’t my passion. They weren’t the thing that woke me up each morning, and I would rather gouge my eyeballs out than have to balance the workload of what it takes to become a tenured professor within our field, especially if it’s in one little niche research topic.

I can’t help but think very broadly of the science we do and the scope, and when I started to realize that that’s who I was within our field, I was very fortunate that I had a Ph.D. advisor who saw this and said, “I want you to go talk to a couple of friends of mine.” In that case, he introduced me to Melissa McGrath, who was a researcher at that time at Marshall Space Flight Center, and she was the Chair of the Federal Relations Subcommittee for the Division of Planetary Sciences. They were all about doing advocacy for planetary science, at the federal agency levels and to Congress. And this started to open the door for me to understand that there was this entire part of space science that had nothing to do with laboratory astrophysics and photochemical processes of the outer solar system. Yes, that was a very cool thing, but there were [other] ways to go and to have a job that meant that you were advocating for others, advocating for strategic prioritization of all of science. And that really compelled me to wake up each morning. That really motivated me to finish my Ph.D., and motivated me to go into my postdoc, and it motivated me for where my career went.

So my advice to other students who have that kind of moment where they’re realizing that “tenured professor” is not for them, that’s totally cool and okay. Most people who get advanced degrees in our fields do not become tenured professors in our fields. There’s actually not enough positions open and available for you to do that. But there is a huge world out there where you can utilize those basic critical thinking skills that you are developing and honing and fine-tuning within your graduate degree programs, that you get to take with you. I’m talking CEOs, I’m talking administrative-level positions, I’m talking federal relations positions. Folks like Casey Dreier, and what he’s doing for the Planetary Society. Or look at Emily Lakdawalla and what she does for our planetary science community in general. And she’s an artist in her spare time, she makes jewelry. It’s fantastic, right?

There’s so many success stories out there for pathways that are outside of tenured faculty, and I just hope people embrace that, and that they embrace that it’s okay to take those roles.

My other advice to students is to remember that not everything has to be done in your first two years post-Ph.D. Please don’t [try to] go solve all of the world’s problems. You are going to have a very long (hopefully) career span. It is okay to not get everything done in the first five, ten, even fifteen years after your Ph.D. I took on the challenge within five to seven years of my Ph.D. of taking on #MeToo in astronomy, as a leader. And it led to massive amounts of burnout, it led to many years of therapy, and it almost destroyed parts of my career by doing that. I was so grateful to be a resource for our community, but it’s also okay to expect the rest of your community to step up and be a part of that, too, and to know that it’s not just you.

While we’re talking about students and career paths, I understand you’ll be at AbSciCon next month? Could you talk a little about what that is, and how people can participate?

AbSciCon, the Astrobiology Science Conference, is a conference that is run once every two years, taking place this year on May 17-22. It’s the entire field of astrobiology coming together to discuss all of the amazing results from the research being done. It hosts workshops for students and professionals to provide development and guidance. It’s also a way to discuss the state of the profession.

Right now, I am the focus area lead for understanding workforce and early career support for something called DARES 2, the NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy Task Force 2. DARES 2 is creating this roadmap for NASA to study the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe, and I am the person who’s running the group on understanding our workforce, our state of the profession, and our early career support systems. We just had a series of community webinars where people could come in and give input. There were some really great discussions. We are continuing as a group to meet and operate, and we will be reporting out the draft summary of where we are and where we’re heading with the document-building at AbSciCon.

We’re all coming together in Madison, Wisconsin, although I will note that AbSciCon is also virtual, for folks who cannot make it to Madison. I’ll be leading up parts of that [DARES] discussion. There’ll be a NASA update on it, and I’ll be at the NASA booth several times in order to have discussions with the community. I’ll also be doing a small, one-hour version of the Proposal Writing Workshop at AbSciCon. We got that slipped in there in the middle of the week. And in case that wasn’t enough, I’ll also be doing two different talks, one on Thursday and one on Friday, on understanding the state of our profession as a whole within astrobiology, and another one on understanding how we discuss the state of the profession within decadal surveys.

Decadal surveys are these huge, ten-year strategy documents that are made by our community and submitted to federal agencies. So NASA, USGS, NSF, those are the customers of decadals. They’re literally being told by the community: “Here’s the things we want you to focus on in the next ten years.” And then whenever Congress gives funding to the federal agencies, if they have any questions for the federal agencies, they bring them in for congressional testimony, and they always say, “How does this compare to your decadal survey?” So if you want to know the importance of decadal surveys, it’s the thing that our federal agencies need to answer to Congress for. The state of the profession has really ramped up in discussions across decadal surveys in the last 20 years or so, and I have a presentation [at AbSciCon] on how we do that.

I also have a presentation on understanding how we do workplace culture surveys, and how we understand workplace dynamics within the fields of astrophysics and planetary science, but then how we apply that back to astrobiology, which is this really cool cross-divisional field that has to encompass all of the guidelines and policies of all of these different divisions that are folding into it.

So it will be a very, very busy week. For those who are part of our field, I heavily recommend attending AbSciCon. If you’re not in the field, but you are in the Madison, Wisconsin area, there is a public lecture on Thursday from Dr. Sarah Rugheimer from the University of Edinburgh. But really, if you’re able to participate as a scientist, do it.

What advice do you have for people within space science who want to improve their field and their community? There’s not always obvious ways to fix things.

There’s not, and as one of the people who was one of the leaders in the efforts to try to improve our community during several of the #MeToo scandals in astronomy, I can tell you that it was extremely discouraging.

Anything we’ve done is far from perfect, but in the mid-2015 time period, we were really starting to look at our own workplace environments in planetary science and astronomy. Anecdotally, several individuals were coming up to me and saying that there’s a lot of harassment, both sexual and bullying. There’s a lot of toxic workplaces and cultures. I was seeing it from almost every person that I knew within my community, and I said, “What is one of the ways that we can try to help these folks?” And time and time again, when you would go to leaders with these concerns, they would just say, “Oh, everything is so anecdotal. We don’t have numbers, it’s just the one bad apple.”

So we decided to do a survey, an actual workplace climate survey of the planetary science and astrophysics communities. We surveyed multiple hundreds of members of our community, and lo and behold, the amount of harassment that we saw within the community was pervasive. And it really forced us to have a reckoning, that we needed to make changes. And so, folks like the American Astronomical Society and the American Geophysical Union both really stepped up their policies for third-party reporting, for tolerance of harassment within their conferences (meaning there is no tolerance for it), and for developing codes of conduct for proper behavior of the research community. Those led to pathways for folks like our federal agencies to require codes of conduct to be a part of the research that they fund.

So I’m really proud of those efforts, but I appreciate the fact that we’re still being forced to have these discussions. If you are somebody who’s in our field now, and you are asking, who do I go to, if I have this problem going on? Then my first question is: Why don’t you know the correct pathways, and why don’t you have those structures in place already around you? That’s on your leaders, that’s not on you.

To me, it goes back to: advocacy for your research community is a leadership skill. It is a leadership trait. If you don’t have advocacy for your community and creating safe spaces, you’re being exploited. And that’s not okay.

Thank you for that. I think this perspective is really valuable for all of our readers, because while some of our readers work in space science, plenty of them are in other research fields, or in industry, or even in activist communities, and harassment and toxic cultures can happen anywhere.

When we had the explosion of events that occurred [in astronomy] in 2015– For the readers, just for context, there was a news article that came out around 2015, naming a prominent astrophysicist in some very horrible allegations, which lead to the discovery that this was actually a larger issue that was impacting tons of communities.

When that all happened, I actually was the chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) at that time. We had to go into crisis communications mode. We had to make sure the committee survived, we had to think about the American Astronomical Society and its wellbeing during all of that, and we fought that fight. But one of the more heartbreaking moments for me was just how many people from outside of our field, when they discovered that [the CSWA] existed as a support system for astronomers, started to come to me to ask for advice within their own fields, because they had had no system for support. And that was heartbreaking to see. I mean, we’re talking neuroscientists, financial advisors, open-heart surgeons. They have now developed their own tools to be able to help, which is great, but this is more pervasive than any one field.

Much of our message at the JustSpace Alliance includes the importance of interdisciplinary communication about general space ethics topics, and I think this is a perfect example. You don’t have to reinvent the (ethical) wheel in every separate field and industry, you can communicate about what works and what doesn’t.

And that is true for space ethics in general, too. When we look at how we do space science, I’ve always seen it as: Let’s do it for the benefit of humankind. I am not somebody who cares about whose flag goes down first onto a new place. That is not the point of basic science. The point of exploring and trying to get a return on investment is so we can develop new technologies and new tools, and do new science so that we can actually better humanity. That’s the reason why I wake up in the morning.

Going all the way back to what I said earlier about my career, and what was the thing that made me want to move forward in this field? It’s when I realized I could create a career based off helping the other people in our field. It’s all about helping people!

What about those people who just want to do the science, who do want to be tenured professors, or to build rockets at a rocket company, but who recognize that these space ethics issues and questions exist, and want to know how to do their work ethically. Are there resources for them?

Yeah, there are some fantastic resources. Number one, you can actually have these space ethics conversations within your own regular research groups. There are also fantastic groups who do advocacy of space science: I’m thinking folks like the Planetary Society, or professional societies like the American Astronomical Society, American Geophysical Union. These groups are really helping to advocate towards federal agencies, towards Congress, towards others, for doing science for the greater good.

Easy example: a huge part of the American Geophysical Union’s advocacy is about climate change and understanding how we can utilize science to help us mitigate the impacts of global weirdening and global warming. The American Astronomical Society has done some advocacy efforts on understanding how Starlink and other LEO [low-Earth orbit] satellites can impact near-Earth observations.

Don’t be afraid to have these conversations. This is my biggest thing. And recognize, too, that we can’t pretend that the politics and nature of building a space economy aren’t impacting us. We can’t just stick our heads in the sand and try to ignore it. I would say, instead, to have an open conversation about it.

I was actually in a room with a whole group of folks [recently] who were looking at different space architectures and how to design for LEO, and I talked a little bit about how our launch patterns are being impacted by how many satellites are going into LEO. And they are having those conversations, too, and I think they need to recognize a bit more how important those conversations are, how impactful they are to larger communities. Because then it forces them to take [these potential risks] into consideration with the work they’re doing while building that space economy, while building those space architecture platforms.

I’ve grown a little bit weary of hearing people say, “Leave politics to the politicians!” I would say instead: I would really like to embrace having difficult conversations so that you can try to improve for the better, while you can, as a community and as a society.

What’s your ideal vision of humanity’s future relationship with space?

It’s hard, because my vision for space right now is really complicated. I had these pure, joyful moments of amazingness watching what happened with Artemis II and getting back to the Moon in the last few days. And that absolutely filled my heart. Christina Koch and I overlapped very little at Goddard Space Flight Center, but to see another Christina going off and being a total badass is just… ugh, my heart soars. But all of that got shattered a little bit by the debut of the President’s budget request, which occurred this past Friday, and seeing the [science funding] levels for Fiscal Year 27 being very similar to those proposed for Fiscal Year 26, and hearing folks say, “That’ll be enough for science.” When in reality, it’s actually a massive destruction of the capabilities that we have within science, and within the amazing work that we want to do.

I am one of the people who left the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a result of all of the science cuts that are occurring. There has been a deprioritization of science within the agendas that we’re seeing politically, and that is very harmful to the scientific community, and I refuse to pretend like it’s not happening.

My vision for science is embracing something like NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. There has been a significant return on investment from NASA. I think the Fiscal Year 23 numbers were something like $75 billion in economic output, and 300,000 jobs NASA-wide, but there are studies that show that there’s a return on investment of something like: for every dollar that’s put into NASA, we get back, as an American public, $3 to $7.

It’s a huge number, right? And it’s driven by those technology spin-offs, those research and industry contracts. And one of the shining examples I’ve seen through all of this is the NASA Science Mission Directorate. I look at the missions that have been done there, things like the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, Cassini, OSIRIS-REx, Dawn, New Horizons, GRACE Follow-On, Parker Solar Probe, Clipper, I could keep going. We could have literally another hour of me just listing missions of excellence from the NASA Science Mission Directorate. And the people that have been employed there, and the types of amazing things they’ve done, I wish we would amplify that, strengthen that, and see that the amazingness that we get from those missions has helped the American people and the American public and our world so much.

My vision is that we continue to be able to explore in a way that is scientifically fantastic. Not exploitive, but really trying to ask those questions that we’ve never gotten to ask before, and get technology developed from asking those really, really hard questions, because those technologies are the very things that end up going back into our economy. Twenty-second LASIK surgery came from, I believe, the laser systems that were developed to measure the mirrors on the James Webb Space Telescopes. There are so many things that we talk about in terms of technologies and advancements that have happened behind the scenes that most people don’t even realize were NASA.

Are there any particular stories (sci-fi or otherwise) that have influenced your work?

It’s interesting, because I was an athlete through college, and spent almost all of my youth running and training, so I don’t have a lot of movies and TV that I could say that was highly influential from that age. But there is one exception to that: I am a proud member of the generation of the Scully Effect. I grew up watching The X-Files, and Dr. Dana Scully (played by Gillian Anderson) is still my hero.

My grandparents, when I was a kid, had a Commodore 64, and my brothers and sisters would put me up in the chair so that I could code for Pong, and then they would knock me out of the way so they could play Pong. My grandparents also had a subscription to National Geographic magazine. They lived maybe three-quarters of a mile from my house, so during summer training sessions, I would run to my grandparents’ house, where they would have ice cream and lemonade waiting for me, and National Geographic magazines that I would sit there and flip through and read. So National Geographic magazine and The X-Files were the two largest influences for me. My grandfather also got a telescope when I was a kid, and I remember seeing Saturn through a telescope one time, and that was mind-blowing.

I do want to note, too: When I went to college, I really started to open myself up to other types of literature that were out there, things like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, a short story and a book that had massive influences on me on understanding mental health issues in women, and how we as a society typically live in this lens of the majorities’ wants and wishes, and how that can be really harmful to our society as a whole.

Those two pieces have nothing to do with astrophysics at all, and yet I have gone back and reread “The Yellow Wallpaper” and An Unquiet Mind multiple times, as I’ve helped to really understand our own workforce, and many of the cultural issues that are occurring within astrophysics and astronomy every day.

Take Action

The Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon) will take place online and in Madison, Wisconsin on May 17-22.

The JustSpace Alliance will be at Massachusetts Space Week next week, including their Space Careers Fair at the MIT Kavli Institute on April 22.

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