2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering leaders grapple with ethical quandaries at all stages of their career: depending on their level of authority and responsibility, they may be willing to engage differently with ethical concepts and the implications of ethical decision-making. In April 2023, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) hosted the Artemis and Ethics workshop at NASA headquarters, inviting 55 participants from a wide range of scholarly disciplines to participate in a dialogue on ethical considerations for Artemis and the Moon to Mars initiative. At this event, participants identified a set of challenges in engaging the ethical and social implications of these missions.
This paper seeks to further explore those concepts from the workshop report and provide insights on how to discuss the design implications of engineering leadership decisions and to elicit meaningful engagement on these topics. The first element that this paper seeks to explore is the variety of interpretations when engineering professionals encounter the concepts outlined in the report. For instance, engineering ethics may be a standard course requirement for engineering students in 2023, but generational diversity in the engineering workforce means that many engineering professionals may not have been recently – if ever – exposed to these concepts. In addition, ethics for government employees tend to be closely associated conceptually with legal constraints, such as conflicts of interest or procurement, and employees are expected to participate in these topics by means of compliance rather than dialogue. The second element is to demonstrate how engineering ethics can be aligned to organizational values to support engagement. At NASA, values are readily present and reinforced across all levels of the workforce. To connect these concepts, we will describe how concepts of care can be applied to support engagement with engineering professionals. While ethics are often treated as matters of concern, elevating ethical concepts to matters of care reinforces the human dimension and human implications of engineering decisions. Lessons on these concepts have been learned and relearned through tragedy, but they can also be reinforced by identifying design elements that support the engineer’s role as caretaker instead of purely as creator. This analysis should inform future research and educational approaches and help ethics and social science researchers to engage NASA engineering and project leaders in constructive dialogue.