Yes to Space Exploration. No to Space Capitalism. – The Wire

Elon Musk. Photo: Reuters.

On May 30, SpaceX finally launched astronauts into space more than two years behind schedule. President Donald Trump was on hand for the launch. After pushing for the militarisation of space with the formation of the US Space Force, Trump fused his own vision with that of SpaceX founder Elon Musk, declaring, Well soon be landing on Mars and well soon have the greatest weapons ever imagined in history.

Early in Trumps presidency, Musk faced criticism for being part of the administrations advisory council and refusing to step down even as Trump signed his signature Muslim ban. It was believed Musk was hoping to benefit from greater public subsidies, on top of the billions NASA gave to SpaceX, and hes set to do so as part of Trumps plan to get astronauts back on the moon by 2024. More recently, the two have found themselves of the same mind on the pandemic as they shared misleading health information and Musk echoed Trumps calls to open the economy and give people their freedom back.

The May 30 launch symbolised both Trumps desire to project an image of revived American greatness and Musks need not only to bolster the myth that makes his wealth possible, but to set the foundations for a privatised space industry.

The space billionaires Musk and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos foremost among them have little stake in the wellbeing of the majority of the population. Their space visions are designed for wealthy people like themselves, with little mention of where the working class would fit in. Theyve built their wealth on exploitation, and their visions of the future are little more than an extension of their present actions.

A history of violence

The business practices of Musk and Bezos are increasingly well known and have been on clear display during the pandemic. Musk tried to claim Teslas Fremont, California factory was essential until authorities forced him to close it; then he reopened it in defiance of health orders. As Tesla CEO, Musk has a long history of opposing the unionisation of workers, presiding over a high rate of worker injuries (which the company tried to cover up), and even having a former worker hacked and harassed after he became a whistleblower.

Meanwhile, Bezos has a similar history of abusing Amazon workers. Amazons warehouses are known for having higher injury rates than the industry average, the company has fought unionisation, and the stories of the terrible conditions experienced by workers are legendary. During the pandemic, that has continued, with the company failing to enforce social distancing or provide adequate protective equipment until workers began walking out, refusing to be open about infection information, and firing workers who dared criticise the company, all while Bezoss wealth has increased by more than $30 billion.

But it goes beyond that, because the worldviews of these billionaires began to be formed long before they started the empires they currently lord over.

Musk did not have a regular childhood, but rather a wealthy upbringing in apartheid South Africa. His father was an engineer and owned part of an emerald mine in Zambia, telling Business Insider, We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldnt even close our safe. In Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance describes how Musk got money from his father when he was starting one of his original ventures. He also had a particular admiration for his grandfather, who moved to apartheid South Africa from Canada after rallying against government interference in the lives of individuals.

Bezos has a not-dissimilar story. His father was a well-off oil engineer in Cuba while Fulgencio Batista was in power. In Bit Tyrants, Rob Larson explains that Bezoss father left the island after the Cuban Revolution and passed his libertarian views down to his son. Bezoss parents invested nearly $250,000 in Amazon in 1995 as it was getting started.

These space barons made their billions through the exploitation of their workers and came from well-off backgrounds made possible from resource extraction. When digging into their visions for a future in space, its clear that they seek to extend these conditions into the cosmos, not challenge them in favour of space exploration for the benefit of all.

The future they want

Musk and Bezos are the leading drivers of the modern push to privatise and colonise space through their respective companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin. Their visions differ slightly, with Musk preferring to colonise Mars, while Bezos has more interest in building space colonies in orbit.

In 2016, Musk claimed he would begin sending rockets to Mars in 2018. That never happened, but it hasnt ended his obsession. Musk is determined to make humans a multi-planetary species, framing our choice as either space colonisation or the risk of extinction. Bezos says that Earth is the best planet in our solar system, but if we dont colonize space we doom ourselves to stasis and rationing.

These framings serve the interests of these billionaires, and make it seem like colonising space is an obvious and necessary choice when it isnt. It ignores their personal culpability and the role of the capitalist system they seek to reproduce in causing the problems they say we need to flee in the first place.

Billionaires have a much greater carbon footprint than ordinary people, with Musk flying his private jet all around the world as he claims to be an environmental champion. Amazon, meanwhile, is courting oil and gas companies with cloud services to make their business more efficient, and Tesla is selling a false vision of sustainability that purposely serves people like Musk, all while capitalism continues to drive the climate system toward the cliff edge. Colonising space will not save us from billionaire-fuelled climate dystopia.

But these billionaires do not hide who would be served by their futures. Musk has given many figures for the cost of a ticket to Mars, but theyre never cheap. He told Vance the tickets would cost $500,000 to $1 million, a price at which he thinks its highly likely that there will be a self-sustaining Martian colony. However, the workers for such a colony clearly wont be able to buy their own way. Rather, Musk tweeted a plan for Martian indentured servitude where workers would take on loans to pay for their tickets and pay them off later because There will be a lot of jobs on Mars!

Bezos is even more open about how the workforce will have to expand to serve his vision, but has little to say about what theyll be doing. His plan to maintain economic growth and dynamism requires the human population to grow to a trillion people. He claims this would create a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins who would live in space colonies that are supposed to house a million people each, with the surface of Earth being mainly for tourism. Meanwhile, industrial and mining work would move into orbit so as not to pollute the planet, and while he doesnt explicitly acknowledge it, its likely thats where youll find many of those trillion workers toiling for their space overlord and his descendants.

Space shouldnt serve capitalists

In 1978, Murray Bookchin skewered a certain brand of futurism that sought to extend the present into the future and desired multinational corporations to become multi-cosmic corporations. Much of this future thinking obsesses about possible changes to technology, but seeks to preserve the existing social and economic relations the present as it exists today, projected, one hundred years from now, as Bookchin put it. Thats at the core of the space billionaires vision for the future.

Space has been used by past US presidents to bolster American power and influence, but it was largely accepted that capitalism ended at the edge of the atmosphere. Thats no longer the case, and just as past capitalist expansions have come at the expense of poor and working people to enrich a small elite, so too will this one. Bezos and Trump may have a public feud, but that doesnt mean that their mutual interest isnt served by a renewed US push into space that funnels massive public funds into private pockets and seeks to open celestial bodies to capitalist resource extraction.

This is not to say that we need to halt space exploration. The collective interest of humanity is served by learning more about the solar system and the universe beyond, but the goal of such missions must be driven by gaining scientific knowledge and enhancing global cooperation, not nationalism and profit-making.

Yet thats exactly what the space billionaires and American authoritarians have found common cause in, with Trump declaring that a new age of American ambition has now begun at a NASA press briefing just hours before cities across the country were placed under curfew last week. Before space can be explored in a way that benefits all of humankind, existing social relations must be transformed, not extended into the stars as part of a new colonial project.

This article was first published on Jacobin. Read the originalhere.

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Yes to Space Exploration. No to Space Capitalism. - The Wire