Hello, JustSpace readers and subscribers, and welcome to 2025! We’ll be making some changes to our newsletter this year, increasing our posting rate from once a quarter to every other month. We’re also going to try out some new formats, including Q&As with people working in various careers involving space and ethics.

For this edition, we chatted with Damien Patrick Williams, a philosophy professor who has been a JustSpace board member since 2020. The interview below has been edited for clarity and length.

Q&A with Damien Patrick Williams

Can you tell me about your current position?

I'm currently an assistant professor of philosophy and assistant professor of data science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. So I spend about 75% of my time in philosophy and 25% of my time in data science, technically. It was envisioned as an interdisciplinary kind of position. The goal is to show incoming students at the undergrad and the grad level how to think about the really deep implications of the social aspects of technology— not just how to build a better database or how to code properly, but to think about what it actually means when they put this stuff out in the world.

I did my first master's degree in philosophy and religious studies, and then I did my PhD in science technology studies or science technology and society (however you want to break down the “STS” acronym). I was always interdisciplinary in the work that I was doing. So getting the opportunity to work directly with groups of people who were thinking in that same kind of interdisciplinary way and who wanted to focus on questions like, “How do the humanities the social sciences and the so-called hard sciences all relate to each other when they talk to each other?”, “How do they inform each other?”, rather than just slapping ethics in as an afterthought? It was really encouraging to see that.

How has your work intersected with space?

I started thinking about the question of: “Where does space flight and human spaceflight aspirations come from?” In my PhD studies, I started to think even more about aspects of marginalization and technology, particularly through a lens of disability studies and disability justice. The conception of human biotechnologies and biotechnological interventions was always part of the work that I was doing even before that. But now I'm thinking about it in terms of, “Okay, so where does disability intersect with this? Where does this question of marginalized lived experience show up in how the technologies that we are making get made?” And one of the avenues that you quickly find as an area of overlap is this notion of the “cyborg” that we have in popular culture, this idea of a human being with biotechnological components to them. The word comes from people who were thinking about how to adapt human bodies to the hostile environment of space, and who were literally trying to say, “How can human beings survive in space?”

But those people, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, were also psychiatrists, and they were also working on the development of antidepressants. So they were thinking about biochemical regulation when they build this idea. And so realizing that, learning about something that has shown up in my research before but now thinking about it from this other lens of of disability, led me to think about, “Okay, so where else does disability show up in the history of space?” And that led me to learning about the Gallaudet 11, that much of what we know about human physiology in weightless environments was first developed throughout the 1960s out of various types of testing done on congenitally deaf men whose vestibular systems made them immune to motion sickness. And so all of the adjustments that we make for space travelers to be able to function in weightlessness comes from deaf men's experiences being turned into data and then applied to hearing men.

And in fact, deaf people have not gone to space yet!

Exactly. To this day, we still have not a deaf astronaut. We just took what we needed from that community, we extracted it from their experience, we turned it into data, we turned that data into technological applications to fit the experiences of hearing individuals, and then we applied it there rather than cutting out all of those intermediary steps and just sending deaf people to space. So that process of revelation and erasure is something that continually showed up as I was studying this. And I started to think about all of that in the history of spaceflight, and what that does for the way that people think about who space is for, who's meant to go to space, who's fit to go to space, and this notion of “the right stuff” that is part of the cultural mythos about spaceflight. All of that depends on erasing the contributions of the disabled and chronically ill people who made space possible, who helped provide that data.

And so I examine what that means for our conceptions of who gets to engage in space exploration, the implications that it has for who we think has to be excluded because they're not “fit” for doing so, even though they're actually the most fit, in some cases, to do so. They would be the most able to adapt to the environment. And a lot of my work then becomes about highlighting that as the central case of how one of the overarching, animating myths of technology, especially in the American context, depends upon the erasure of disabled people. And then using that to show how it happens over and over again in other contexts as well. You see it in other kinds of fundamental technologies across the board.

So do you have any recommendations for people who could be reading this, who are working in various aspects of space science or the space industry, about incorporating these considerations in their work?

Fundamentally, the main thing that has become increasingly apparent as I've done this work is that oftentimes, we think we are paying attention to or heeding perspectives of disabled people and otherwise marginalized individuals, but really all we are doing is extracting their experience and applying it after the fact. To do this work in a meaningfully different way, it has to be done from the ground up. You have to bring the experiences of disabled people in as experts from the beginning and then all the way through the process.

So for example, think about people who live their lives in a way where they are often pushing off surfaces in what could be considered non-standard directions, or who are using different modes of mobility than most people who walk around. Think about people who deal with variables in vision. Think about the interventions and the techniques that they could bring into thinking about the kinds of variations in vision that can happen when people are in a zero-gravity environment, or when they are in space in differently pressurized environments. The kinds of vision problems that can come up in those scenarios are increasingly considered, but there are people who live here on Earth who have direct lived knowledge of what that is like. Again, don't extract that from them and then apply it to other people. Actually include them in the process and then think about what it would mean for sending people who already have this knowledge through the process of becoming an astronaut and then out into that real scenario. You build differently from that perspective.

This is one of those topics in space ethics that just seems like an obvious win-win to me. Even if you literally don't care about the ethics, it's still, practically, a better way to design. Where's the downside?

Exactly. At the end of the day, you get better outcomes, you get more efficient outcomes, you get more widely applicable outcomes. You get outcomes that actually work for a broader range of people if you center disabled people from the beginning. And that's as true in spaceflight as it is in most other areas of technological development and design. And it's a thing that when people realize it, as you say, it’s like this light bulb moment of, “Wow, that's so clear and it seems so obvious!” But it's like every industry and every sector has to realize it again on their own.

Do you have any advice for students and people early in their career?

Read widely. Not everybody is going to be interdisciplinary in their main mode of operation. But have that willingness to ask what other disciplines might be able to inform your field of study, in ways that might be surprising to you. Be willing to ask how questions from the social sciences impact the development of the potential development of space sciences. We have a lot of discussion about the building of space colonies, of extractive operations for asteroids to mine or otherwise capture minerals and materials. But there's no direct discussion about what that does to social psychology, to the sociology of people, to the economics of a culture that is engaged in that process. Those questions need to be asked at the beginning and then all the way through.

Maybe it's not the exact scenario, but other people have thought about these kinds of questions from ways that are not present within STEM fields primarily. So be willing to engage across disciplines in a very, real broad way, and ask those questions to get kinds of insights that you might otherwise not have access to.

I’ve noticed that for STEM tech people in particular, their first instinct is just to try to reinvent everything from first principles. And it's just such a waste of time. So much of this work is out there already.

It’s already there! Just go read something in a journal from sociology, put a couple of keywords that you think might fit into a sociological journal or repository, and you will find so many things that will be surprising to you, research and thought that has already been put into these problems. You do not have to reinvent from the ground up. You don't have to start fresh. You can bring in the people who have already been doing this for a while, and you'll probably have better conversations as a result of it. You bring those perspectives in, you bring those people in, and you're going to be able to think down different lines of questions. You're going to be able to ask and conceive of different questions, and you'll be able to frame your answers in different ways because of the way that they ask questions. You'll be able to think differently about approaching your area of expertise. Doing that in combination with or in dialogue with someone else, it opens things up in a way that is otherwise just not possible to do by yourself.

Is there anything you wish the public in general knew or was willing to learn about when it comes to these topics?

Just to reiterate that there are people who think at this intersection. There are a lot of people who are thinking about questions of the social implications of space, who are thinking about it from perspectives of disability, who are thinking about it from the perspectives of things like indigeneity. People who are thinking about questions of decoloniality, of trying to remove those extractive or militaristic values from the process of space exploration. And there's a good amount of work from people who are trying to think along these lines and get these different ways of engaging to be more well-known and more understood. And I would recommend just seeking them out. Seek out the people who who think in these terms specifically and then ask how you can include them and their work, their perspectives, in the work that we want to do from this point forward. How can we, when necessary, emulate it in other areas.

To Read

Since its foundation, the JustSpace Alliance’s mission statement has been “to advocate for a more inclusive and ethical future in space, and to harness visions of tomorrow for a more just and equitable world today.” We wanted to expand upon this statement to more clearly define our values and vision for the future, as well as our specific tactics for working towards these goals. You can now read our broader statement of mission, vision, values, and tactics on our website, at https://justspacealliance.org/vision.

The recent political turmoil in the U.S. is negatively affecting space workers and scientists (among many, many, many others). It’s hard to keep up with the rapidly changing legal situation in an infrequent newsletter like this one, but Katrina Miller and Roni Caryn Rabin’s February 9th New York Times article, “A Sweeping Ban on D.E.I. Language Roils the Sciences,” provides a good summary of the damage that the new White House Administration’s rejection of diversity, equity, and inclusion is causing for scientists in the U.S.

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