In October, at a technology conference in Italy, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos predicted that millions of people would live in space “in the next two decades” and “mainly,” he said, “because they want to,” because robots will be more cost-effective than humans to do the actual work in space.
That’s probably why my ears perked up when, a few weeks later, at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, I found an onstage prediction from Will Bruey, the founder of space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries, so striking. Rather than robots doing the work Bezos envisions, Bruey said that within 15 to 20 years, it will cost less to send a “working class human” into orbit for a month than to develop better machines.
For the moment, few among the forward-thinking audience seemed fazed by what many might consider a provocative statement about cost savings. But it raised questions for me – and it certainly raised questions for others – about who exactly among the stars will be working and under what conditions.
To explore these questions, I spoke this week with Mary-Jane Rubenstein, dean of social sciences and professor of religion and science and technology studies at Wesleyan University. Rubenstein is the author of the book Endless Worlds: The Many Lives of the Multiversewhich director Daniel Kwan used as research for the award-winning 2022 film “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” More recently, she has examined the ethics of space expansion.
Rubenstein’s response to Bruey’s prediction touches on a fundamental problem: the imbalance of power. “Workers have a hard enough time on Earth paying their bills and keeping themselves safe…and their insurance,” she told me. “And this dependence on our employers only increases dramatically when one depends on one’s employer not only for wages and sometimes for health care, but also for basic access to food and water – and also air.”
His assessment of the space as a workplace was quite blunt. While it’s easy to romanticize space as an escape to a pristine frontier where people will float weightlessly among the stars, it’s worth remembering that there are no oceans, mountains, or chirping birds in space. It’s “not nice up there,” Rubenstein said. “It’s not nice at all.”
But protecting workers isn’t Rubenstein’s only concern. There’s also the increasingly contentious question of who owns what in space — a legal gray area that’s becoming increasingly problematic as commercial space operations accelerate.
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The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 established that no nation could claim sovereignty over celestial bodies. The Moon, Mars, asteroids – they are supposed to belong to all humanity. But in 2015, the United States passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which states that while you can’t own the Moon, you can own anything you extract from it. Silicon Valley was starry-eyed almost immediately; the law opened the door to commercial exploitation of space resources, even as the rest of the world watched with concern.
Rubenstein offers an analogy: It’s like saying you can’t own a house, but you can own everything inside. In fact, she corrects herself by saying it’s worse than that. “It’s more like saying you can’t own the house, but you can have the floor and the beams. Because what’s in the moon is the moon. There’s no difference between what’s in the moon and the moon itself.”
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Companies have been positioning themselves to exploit this framework for some time. AstroForge continues asteroid mining. Interlune wants to extract Helium-3 from the Moon. The problem is that these are not renewable resources. “Once the United States takes (Helium-3), China will no longer be able to get it,” Rubenstein says. “Once China takes it, the United States can’t get it.”
The international reaction to this 2015 act was swift. At the 2016 meeting of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), Russia called the law a unilateral violation of international law. Belgium has warned of global economic imbalances.
In response, the United States in 2020 created the Artemis Accords – bilateral agreements with allied countries that formalized the U.S. interpretation of space law, particularly as it relates to resource extraction. Countries worried about being excluded from the new space economy have joined this initiative. There are now 60 signatories, but Russia and China are not among them.
There is some grunting in the background, however. “This is one of those cases where the United States makes rules and then asks other people to join in or be excluded,” Rubenstein says. The Accords do not say that resource extraction is explicitly legal – just that it does not constitute “national appropriation” prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty. It’s a careful dance around a delicate issue.
Her proposed solution to this problem is simple, if extremely unlikely: hand over control to the UN and COPUOS. Absent that, she suggests 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 explicit FBI certification and congressional approval.
When people tell Rubenstein that collaboration with China is impossible, she has an immediate response: “We’re talking about an industry that says things like, ‘It will be entirely possible to house thousands of people in a space hotel,’ or ‘It will be possible within 10 years to send a million people to Mars, where there is no air and the radioactivity will give you cancer in a second and your blood will boil and your face will fall off.’ It’s possible to imagine doing these things, I think it’s possible to imagine the United States talking to China.
Rubenstein’s broader concern is what we choose to do with space. She considers the current approach – turning the Moon into what she calls “a cosmic gas station,” mining asteroids and establishing warfare capabilities in orbit – as deeply flawed.
Science fiction has given us different models for imagining space, she notes. She divides the genre into three main categories. First, there is the genre of “conquest,” or stories written “in the service of nation-state expansion or the expansion of capital,” treating space as the next frontier to be conquered, much as European explorers once viewed new continents.
Then there is dystopian science fiction, intended as a warning of destructive paths. But here’s where something strange happens: “Some tech companies seem to kind of miss the joke in this dystopian genre and kind of actualize the warning,” she says.
The third strand uses space to imagine alternative societies with different ideas of justice and care – what Rubenstein calls “speculative fiction” in a “high-tech key,” meaning they use futuristic technological environments as their setting.
When it became clear which model dominated actual spatial development (entirely in the conquest category), she became depressed. “It seemed to me a real missed opportunity to expand the values and priorities that we have in this world into areas that we had previously reserved for different thinking.”
Rubenstein doesn’t expect dramatic policy changes in the near future, but she sees realistic paths forward. One is to strengthen environmental regulations for space players; as she points out, we are only beginning to understand how rocket emissions and debris entering the atmosphere affect the ozone layer that we have spent decades repairing.
Space debris, however, represents a more promising opportunity. With more than 40,000 trackable objects now orbiting Earth at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour, we are getting closer to the Kessler effect – a runaway collision scenario that could render the orbit unusable for any future launches. “Nobody wants that,” she said. “The U.S. government doesn’t want this. China doesn’t want it. The industry doesn’t want it.” It’s rare to find a topic in which the interests of each stakeholder align perfectly, but “space waste is bad for everyone,” she notes.
She is currently working on a proposal for an annual conference bringing together academics, NASA representatives and industry figures to discuss how to approach space “mindfully, ethically and collaboratively.”
Whether anyone is listening is another question. There certainly doesn’t seem to be much motivation to come together on this issue. In fact, in July of last year, Congress introduced legislation to make the Wolf Amendment permanent, which would strengthen restrictions on cooperation with China rather than easing them.
In the background, startup founders are projecting major changes in space within five to 10 years, companies are positioning themselves to mine asteroids and the moon, and Bruey’s prediction of blue-collar workers in orbit remains hanging in the air, unanswered.
Source | domain techcrunch.com
