Black Lives Matter: Showing our support for those fighting with inequality

We are straying slightly off topic here because we feel compelled to also add our voice in solidarity with those standing up against systemic racism and outright discrimination. Recently we witnessed a young black man having his life taken away from him by a number of police officers in America. This caused widespread outrage across the globe.

We feel it is the duty of all organisations to voice their support for equality and for the elimination of any type of discrimination based on creed, colour or gender.

We have reached a time in history when this sort of behaviour should have been left well and truly in the past, never to be repeated again.

The aerospace industry has not escaped its own issues. We continue to see company boards full of pale, male and stale men in suits. This is particularly the case across USA. The UK is in the early days of its new space industry so we are well positioned to address that here.

The US Aerospace giant, Lockheed Martin, who were awarded the bulk of the spaceport contract for the UK, have themselves faced huge fines for failing to deal with a culture of discrimination, forking out $2.5m in a racial harassment lawsuit just over 12 years ago. At the time this was the highest ever payout achieved by the EEOC for a race discrimination case.

https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/lockheed-martin-pay-25-million-settle-racial-harassment-lawsuit

So we understand that where such behaviour may exist in USA, it is crucially important that when these companies operate on UK soil that they do so on the understanding that we do not tolerate anything of this kind and that equality and fairness are built into our culture.