The Space Diversity Initiative is building momentum through new leadership and a National Space Day focused on K-12

The growing effort to attract more women and people of color to the space industry shared some of its first findings and a new occasion to rally around: National Space DayMay 3, when thousands of students learn that they not only can do space things, but they must start now.

Space workforce 2030 It’s a joint effort by the Space Foundation and the aerospace company, which is essentially a promise that they — and all 29 of their company partners as of now — will provide transparent reporting on their workplace demographics, recruiting, and hiring, and work together to identify ways to bring in an audience. More diversified to the homogeneous space industry.

The effort also now has an executive director in Melanie Stricklan, formerly of Slingshot Space (and the Air Force), who now leads the organization full-time.

In Monday’s announcement, Stricklan and his colleagues from Aerospace, the Space Foundation and Airbus US showed off some of the key statistics they hope to raise: not just endpoints like a diverse workforce, but a comprehensive work pipeline that anyone interested in the industry can participate in.

Stricklan and others have presented a united front that this isn’t a surface-level DEI-type thing — the airline industry could face a labor crisis in the coming years as one generation retires and another generation doesn’t really take their place.

“When we think about our country’s intellectual property and its leadership globally, it’s synonymous with leadership in space,” Stricklan told me in an interview before the event. “We need the best workforce, and we are looking to build the best talent base in the world. This is not based on quotas; the best space workforce in the world comes from a meritocracy.

In other words, they strongly support the view that diversity on the supply side of the labor funnel leads to a stronger workforce on the other end.

To that end, Space Workforce 2030 started with the basics: collecting and understanding data in order to create a baseline. They relied on Aerospace’s research analysis prowess to crunch data from dozens of companies participating in the initiative, standardize it, and produce results that could be reliably compared year to year. It must be said that this in itself is an achievement – these are not companies known for their openness and transparency. But as the Airbus representative pointed out, they see workforce collapse as a serious long-term threat that needs serious, long-term solutions.

The preliminary numbers show modest increases and some troubling failures — about what you’d expect from this organization’s first real year in business. From 2022 to 2023, the percentage of female technical employees increased from 18.5% to 19.4%, while the percentage of people of color in that category increased from 32.7% to 34.1%. Training requests It went up by a factor of ten!

On the other hand, the number of women actually training in industry has remained steady, while the number of women transitioning from trainee to employee has fallen by a whopping 4.5%. You can read the rest of the key statistics in the report itself.

So the question is why? Were these small gains meaningful and the result of the efforts these companies put in? What explains the decrease in the number of female trainees and the increase in the number of applications?

There is no really solid answer, because the reality is that this data is only just beginning to be collected and investigated. A big part of the commitment is simply making these numbers available so everyone can be honest and collaborative about where improvements need to be made. Only if multiple companies and organizations share this data publicly can a group say: Hey, this company has been steadily improving intern conversions for a few years now – what are they doing right? It is hoped this will arm other companies with actionable intelligence.

A big part of the challenge of bringing people into the space is letting people know it’s just an option, and Stricklan and her colleagues firmly believe this includes the K-12 segment, not just college students and job seekers. So they organized a National Space Day A curriculum containing videos, information for teachers and a range of other materials aimed at showing children of all ages and backgrounds that they can build satellites, rockets, lunar landers, and maybe even go into space themselves.

It’s May 3, and they’ve enlisted the help of former TechCrunch collaborator Emily Calandrelli (who’s awesome) to create and promote content for the occasion. Stricklan told me that thousands of teachers have signed in and expect to see a lot of participation next month.

Amazingly, Congress rallied long enough to propose a resolution to honor National Space Day. Hopefully they will agree that this is not something that should be derailed by partisan bickering.

All Space Workforce 2030 leaders and partners emphasized that this is a long-term effort that is just getting started — hence the focus on children who will not be eligible for internships for a decade or more. This also means that they have not yet used a lot of tools to improve their results and add more data to the pile.

“One thing I would like to do is expand it to include government organizations as well as non-profit affiliates. They have different touchpoints to reach those who don’t understand that there could be a future for them in a STEM-related career,” Stricklan told me. Budget (which has a lot of data), NOAA and EPA (a lot of interesting functions), and many others that you are in talks with or looking to engage with.

It’s good to see a clear acknowledgment that we may be facing a talent crunch in space and adjacent industries, and a willingness to acknowledge that there is a lot of work to do. You can learn more about Space Workforce 2030 efforts here.