To answer that question I have to start at the beginning. As a teenager I was fascinated with the advances in technology that humankind have made and in particular, flight. By realising the magic of birds we have managed to see the world from new perspectives, to open up all places on the planet and even to escape it. I couldn’t think of anything more fulfilling than to advance our technological capabilities to allow us to explore further into our universe to help answer the fundamental questions of who we are and how we came to be. So whilst all my classmates were designing bits of furniture for their Design and Technology A-Level final year projects I designed and built a glider. I went on to study aeronautical engineering at university and have spent over decade designing some of the most advanced aircraft structures that exist and in recent years working on novel rocket propulsion technologies and was a candidate on the BBC show ‘Astronauts: Do You Have What It Takes?’
It’s only when we look back do we construct a narrative to our lives. That is the narrative of my professional life. There is another narrative that I could construct though that is equally as important. This one starts even before I was born: My parents came to the UK from Kenya whose own parents (my grandparents) came from India. Three generations, born in three different continents, the route of the British empire. My identity split between these continents I felt like a citizen of the world. So it is unsurprising that I’ve found myself curious about the world and dedicated so much of my time and energy exploring it. I have spent cumulatively over three years travelling or on expedition. In doing so I have learnt to climb, mountaineer and became an expedition guide. I encountered polar bears and dived in some of the most pristine waters on the planet. I have been to some of the coldest places on Earth and the hottest. I have seen desolate landscapes and the most populous. Overall, over the two decades that I have been travelling to these distant environments I have seen first hand how the world is warming, how habitats are shrinking and life, both human and animal, are suffering. That is another narrative of my life.
But I still remain a romantic. I still look at the stars and wonder what’s out there and wonder where we have come from and to answer those questions we need to push to the stars. To be part of that journey, to contribute to that endeavour however small is still fulfilling - Imagine designing the first human spacecraft to land on Mars, or even being on that spacecraft yourself. Imagine taking the first Mars-walk, stepping foot onto that red dusty land and feel the distant heat of our sun tinted through red skies. And imagine how incredible it would be to find a fossilised plant, a flower possibly, upending all our strongest held beliefs. My heart still skips a beat in that thought.
But the more I learn about the structures and the fully sustainable systems we will have to create in order to survive off of this planet the more I realise what an amazing life support system planet Earth is. On Mars, no matter what technologies we create, we will never feel the wind through our hair or breathe the Martian air, nor will we do that on the Moon or any other planets within our solar system. It is crazy to think that habitats created on these cruel rocks could replicate anything like we have on Earth or that life would be equally rewarding. The more I learn about Space, the more in awe I am of our planet. I still want to go to Space, but not for the same reasons as my teenage self, where I wanted to go to look out at the stars and stare at the universe unfiltered. If I were to go now I would go to peer back at the Earth, at the most spectacular place in the known universe, and you know what would be the best part? Returning to Earth.
But we’re destroying it. We’re corrupting this perfect life support system to the point that it may no longer even be able to support us. In doing so, we’re destroying entire ecosystems and countless species, many before they even have been discovered. How can we possibly get excited by a long dead fossil on a distant, lifeless planet, when we have so much abundance of life on this planet that we are taking for granted? Why travel a quarter of a billion kilometres to look for fossils that might not exist when you can discover new life in the depths of pristine rainforest right here on Earth? Now imagine if instead of finding the fossilized remains of life on Mars we find a live functioning ecosystem - life outside of our planet. We would do everything we could to protect it, to not interfere, and study it in awe, no matter how simple it might be. Here on Earth we choose to destroy it. What’s even crazier is that we know that our climate projections are showing a world that will push our societies and technologies to the limit and not even in some distant future, but in only a few short years.
I still want those big questions answered - who we are? Where have we come from? And to answer those we need to continue sending missions further into Space. For that to continue to happen we need to maintain a highly technological society that has surplus effort to spare on these curiosities - and not one locked in a death spiral of its own making. In short the greatest threat to the continuation of our explorations of Space (and everything we care about) is the survival of our societies here on Earth and that means tackling the climate emergency and sixth mass extinction in earnest.
That is why as an aerospace engineer/rocket scientist the number one priority is tackling climate change.