In October, at a technology conference in Italy, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin Jeff Bezos predicted that millions of people will live in space “in the next couple of decades“and” usually, “he said, “because they want to,” because robots will be more cost-effective than humans to do real work in space.
No doubt, that’s why my ears perked up when, at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco the following week, I discovered it predictions on stage by Will Bruey, founder of space manufacturing start-up Varda Space Industries, it’s amazing. Instead of robots doing the work as Bezos envisioned, Bruey said that in 15 to 20 years, it will be cheaper to send a “working-class human” into orbit for a month than to develop better machines.
At the moment, some in the tech-forward audience seemed to be surprised whether many could consider a provocative statement about cost savings. But that raised the question for me – and certainly has raised the question for people – about who, exactly, will be able to be among the stars, and under what conditions.
To explore that question, I spoke this week with Mary-Jane Rubenstein, dean of social sciences and professor of religion and science and technology at Wesleyan University. Rubenstein is the author of the book Worlds Without End: Many Lives in the Multiversedirected by Daniel Kwan was used as research for the award-winning 2022 film “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” More recently, they have examined the ethics of space expansion.
Rubenstein’s response to Bruey’s prediction boils down to a fundamental problem – that of an imbalance of power. “And that dependence on employers only increases dramatically when we depend on employers not only for wages and sometimes for health care, but also for basic access, food and water – and even air.”
The evaluation of a place as a workplace is quite straightforward. While it’s easy to romanticize space as an escape to a pristine frontier where people will float weightlessly among the stars, remember that there are no seas or mountains or happy birds in space. It’s “not good there,” Rubenstein said. “This is not very good.”
But worker protection was not Rubenstein’s only concern. There’s also the increasingly contentious question of who owns what in space — a legal gray area that’s become a problem as commercial space operations accelerate.
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In 1967 Outer Space Treaty insisting that no nation can claim sovereignty over the celestial bodies. The moon, Mars, asteroids – these are supposed to be for all mankind. But in 2015, the US passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which says you can’t own the moon, you can own anything taken from it. Silicon Valley got starry-eyed almost immediately; The law opens the door to the commercial exploitation of space resources, even as the rest of the world watches with concern.
Rubenstein offers an analogy: It’s like saying you can’t own a house, but you can have everything inside. Actually, he corrected himself, saying it was worse than that. “It’s more like saying you can’t have a house, but you can have floors and beams. Because the stuff on the moon is the moon. There’s no difference between the stuff on the moon and the moon itself.”
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Companies have been positioning themselves to exploit this framework for some time. AstroForge they are working on asteroid mining. Interlune wanted to extract Helium-3 from the moon. The problem is that this is not a renewable resource. “Once the U.S. takes (Helium-3), China can’t get it,” Rubenstein said. “Once China takes it, the US can’t get it.”
The international reaction to the 2015 action was swift. At the 2016 UN Committee on the Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) meeting, Russia called the Act a unilateral violation of international law. Belgium warns of global economic imbalances.
In response, the US in 2020 created the Artemis Agreement – a bilateral agreement with allied countries that establishes America’s interpretation of space law, particularly regarding resource extraction. Countries are worried about being left out of the new space economy they signed up for. There are currently 60 signatories, although Russia and China are not among them.
There was grumbling in the background, though. “This is one example of the US setting rules and then asking others to join or be left alone,” Rubenstein said. The agreement does not say that resource extraction is expressly legal – it just excludes “national appropriations” which the Outer Space Treaty prohibits. It’s a careful dance around a fraught problem.
The proposed solution to deal with it is immediate if impossible: hand control back to the UN and COPUOS. If not, he recommends repealing the Wolf Amendment, a 2011 law that essentially prohibits NASA and other federal agencies from using federal funds to work with China or Chinese companies without FBI certification and Congressional approval.
When people tell Rubenstein that collaboration with China is impossible, he has a ready response: “We are talking about an industry that says something like, ‘It will be possible to accommodate thousands of people in a space hotel,’ or ‘It will be possible in 10 years to send a million people to Mars, which has no air and where radioactivity will cause your cancer to fall and if you can imagine that your blood will fall. that, I can imagine the US talking to China.
Rubenstein’s wider concern is with what we choose to do with space. He sees current approaches — turning the moon into what he calls a “cosmic gas station,” mining asteroids, creating warfighting capabilities in orbit — as misguided.
Science fiction has given us a different template for imagining space, he noted. He divides genres into three broad categories. First, there is the “conquest” genre, or stories written “for the expansion of the nation-state or the expansion of capital,” considering space as the next frontier to be conquered, just as European explorers once saw new continents.
Then there’s dystopian science fiction, which is meant to be a warning about a destructive path. But here’s where something weird happens: “Some tech companies don’t seem to understand the joke in this dystopian genre and just take whatever the risk is,” he says.
The third strand uses the space to imagine an alternative society with a different idea of justice and treatment – what Rubenstein calls “speculative fiction” in a “high-tech key,” meaning using a futuristic technological setting as a framework.
When it first became clear the template that dominated the development of real space (with the category of conquest), he was depressed. “This seems to be a missed opportunity to expand the values and priorities that exist in the world to a realm that has previously been reserved for thinking in different ways.”
Rubenstein doesn’t expect a dramatic change in policy, but he sees some real paths forward. One of them is the tightening of environmental regulations for space actors; as noted, we are only beginning to understand how rocket emissions and re-entering debris affect the ozone layer that has spent decades repairing it.
However, a more promising opportunity is space debris. With more than 40,000 trackable objects now orbiting the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, we are approaching the the Kessler effect – a collision scenario that could make the orbit unusable for any future launches. “No one wants that,” he said. “The US government doesn’t want it. China doesn’t want it. The industry doesn’t want it.” It’s rare to find an issue where the interests of every stakeholder are perfectly aligned, but “waste is bad for everybody,” he said.
He is currently working on a proposal for an annual conference that brings together academics, NASA representatives, and industry figures to discuss how to approach space “mindfully, ethically, collaboratively.”
Whether anyone will listen is another question. Of course there is no motivation to collect these issues. In fact, back in July last year, Congress introduce legislation to make the Wolf Amendment permanent, which will entrench restrictions on China’s cooperation instead of loosening.
In the background, the founders of the startup projecting major changes in space in five to ten years, companies that position themselves to mine asteroids and the moon, and Bruey’s prediction about blue-collar workers in orbit stuck in the air, unanswered.