John F Kennedy once called space-faring “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which Man has ever embarked”. We go to space because, he said – like George Mallory said of his reason to conquer Everest – “it is there.”
While it is truer to say that the race for space between Washington and Moscow was driven as much by cold war competition as by humanity’s pioneering spirit and the imperatives of scientific exploration, billions of ordinary people around the world recognized as much at the time and still were able to marvel at our species’ accomplishments in the heavens regardless of the flag under which they were achieved, from Sputnik to the moon landing.
And today, many more billions remain transfixed by the idea of the final frontier: they watch, spellbound, the live online footage from SpaceX’s reusable-rocket launches that are set to revolutionise space travel; pictures sent home by Martian-rover robot geologists; and black-and-white imagery from a spacecraft landing on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, an object roughly 500m kilometres away and hurtling through space about 40 times faster than a speeding bullet – perhaps the hardest manoeuvre ever attempted by humanity.
There is, however, also a cynical, “anti-space” ideology emerging, especially on some parts of the left. These space-critical partisans view the endeavour as a dangerous fantasy that distracts from the need to fix this world while delivering yet another source of carbon pollution and “extractivism”.
They think that space-faring is an illusion that imagines we are free to trash this planet so long as there are other planets we can head off to. Off-world colonisation and space mining come in for especial opprobrium and are now cast as “neocolonial” (even if it is dead rocks that would be occupied this time, rather than the territories and bodies of other living humans). The geography professor Deondre Smiles is typical of this new critique, writing in a recent article that “a scientific venture such as space exploration does not exist in a vacuum, but instead draws from settler colonialism.” The Cambridge political scientist Alina Utrata meanwhile tells us that space-faring is imperialist and extractivist, finding “root in the exact colonial logics that have justified settler genocide for centuries”.
And even as thousands of people cheer on SpaceX reusable-rocket trials – which aim to slash the eye-wateringly expensive cost per kilo (or pound) of going to space, many others, also in their thousands, sneer at how “every rocket he launches explodes”. Part of this is an understandable, if simplistic, reaction to Elon Musk’s far-right posting habits.
Whatever subject the billionaire is excited about, too many progressives – often just as extremely online as Musk – can respond only with mocking scorn, regardless of the subject’s merits. (The snark also just wildly misunderstands what the purpose of these test launches is. When we push at the boundaries of what is currently technologically possible, and development of cheap access to space is very much at that frontier, we fail often – and by design. The aim of these failures is to find the weak points, learn what went wrong, and then improve. SpaceX in particular uses a fast iteration model – build, test, fail, fix, refine, repeat.)
However, beneath the social-media clout-chasing cynicism and careerist academic-niche building, there is a more serious critique from many progressives that underlies it, often tied to environmental and social concerns. Space-faring is a Peter Pan fantasy that imagines we can escape the human condition, these figures say, a colossally expensive distraction from terrestrial injustices. We should stop polluting our planet before we head off to pollute another one. Why spend billions to send a handful of people to the moon while billions of other people still don’t have clean drinking water?
Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the world’s best-selling science fiction authors, insists his novels about the failures of colonies on Mars and the moon and of interstellar “generation starships” heading out beyond the solar system, are in fact all “climate fiction” or “cli-fi”, aiming to teach the reader the lesson that space will never be anything other than viciously inhospitable, and that the verdant Earth can be, must be, the only home we will ever have.
In 2021, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of Amazon and private space firm Blue Origin, offered the 90-year-old actor William Shatner a trip into space. Upon his return to Earth, the star of Star Trek said: “Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.” He had thought humanity heading out into space was “the next beautiful step for our species”, but instead, “there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold … all I saw was death.”
Even Captain Kirk is telling us we must abandon our dreams of the final frontier.
But for all its purported sobriety in the face of Musk fanboys and Jetsonian techno-utopianism, anti-space ideology amounts to a critique that unwittingly embraces a politics of neoliberal austerity while ironically undermining our ability to deal with the manifold ecological and social crises we face.
There is in fact a left case for space. A fortiori, space-faring is much more likely to succeed under the economics of the left than that of the right.
Space as crisis response
First, space science is Earth science. The climatologist James Hansen’s congressional testimony in the late 1980s about global heating was perhaps what first catalysed public and political opinion on the subject, but it was his research into Venus and its runaway greenhouse effect that inspired his investigations into climate change on Earth.
Nasa’s Landsat program that uses satellites to remotely sense the Earth allows researchers to monitor deforestation, desertification, glacier and icecap melt, agricultural water use, and the spread of oil spills; to track greenhouse gas emissions, to forecast droughts and to test the accuracy of climate models. We would not be able to combat global heating, biodiversity loss, pollution and so many other environmental challenges without space-faring. Going to space is in fact taking care of problems on Earth first.
Put another way, improving our ability to get to space will improve our ability to perform such Earth systems monitoring – and thus to deal with climate change and other environmental crises.
And Landsat and other historic remote sensing efforts are only the beginning of what space-based monitoring will be able to contribute to solving the many ecological crises we face. Perhaps the single biggest contributor to biodiversity loss is not hunting, overfishing, climate change or even pollution, but agriculture, both in terms of its gargantuan land footprint and the inputs it uses.
But the miniaturisation of satellites and the sharp drop in payload costs is already enabling the next generation of farming, “precision agriculture”, to radically reduce this sector’s outsized contribution to species extinction. The transformation comes from how remote-sensing can identify the threat of pests and crop defects much earlier and, crucially, at fine-grained intra-field level, thus reducing the volume of pesticide, fertiliser and water required, while boosting yields.
This means that less land will be required for the same output. A 2023 World Economic Forum analysis estimated that satellite-assisted irrigation improvement alone, including better, faster spotting of leaks, could reduce water use by 5-10%. When one considers that agriculture uses almost two-thirds of global freshwater withdrawals, one realises these are not small numbers.
Space-based remote sensing also is not limited to protecting ecosystems. Urban development planning, tracking the consequences of government policies, distributions of wealth, and dozens of other more directly socio-economic phenomena have strong spatial dimensions that make space-based remote sensing indispensable. Our current, more advanced ability to understand mosquito distribution, the prevalence of tick-borne diseases, and likelihood of helminth (parasitic worm) infections – widespread in many parts of Africa and Asia, and of many other infectious (and non-infectious) diseases likewise would be unimaginable without these eyes in the sky. Space science isn’t just Earth science, it’s also epidemiology. It’s a powerful weapon against the next major pandemic and against the smaller-scale pandemics we currently struggle with.
Opposing space-faring thus unwittingly inhibits all this crucial activity.
Moreover, for all of Musk’s cheerleading of the free market, much if not most of this work has historically been publicly funded and shepherded by public space agencies – and necessarily so, as such efforts would have been far too risky for profit-seeking enterprises, which need to be confident that there will be a healthy return on investment.
SpaceX has been showered with billions in government grants, tax credits, subsidized loans and procurement contracts. It wasn’t really Musk who was the entrepreneur, but the state. Private satellite firms such as Planet Labs that sell their remote sensing services to farmers, municipalities, ports, architects, engineering firms and others who use such imagery and data to engage in real-time monitoring and long-term planning, would not be able to do what they do without the pioneering work of government space programs blazing a path to demonstrate the viability of space-faring without need to ensure profitability.
And to this day, private space firms can only provide such services as are profitable. Yet there is far more that society needs to know from space than merely the information that can make money.
This means we need leftwing space policy, not leftwing anti-space ideology.
Satellite pollution
We can see best what leftwing space policy would mean concretely when we consider the irony of how getting to space more easily has also made the study of space harder, specifically from the problem of “satellite pollution”.
Satellites were once the size of a small car, but with miniaturisation, the instrumentation can now be packed into a device the size of a “Beanie Baby box”, according to those engineers who pioneered the size reduction. Meanwhile, the cost of launch to low Earth orbit (LEO) has plummeted. Nasa’s Space Shuttle ferried its payloads to low Earth orbit (LEO) at cost of $54,000 per kilo but by 2018, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy had brought that price tag down just $1,500/kg. Citigroup projects that this figure will plunge to about $100/kg by 2040. We are only a few years away from space access being cheap and abundant.
But well before then, astronomers are already complaining that light reflection from the huge increase in the number of satellites threatens their ability to do their job. Ensuring that satellites receive an anti-reflective coating only reduces the problem but doesn’t eliminate it, as the inevitable increase in collisions also increases the number of fragments of debris, which still reflect light back to Earth. As a result, astronomers are calling for regulations to introduce a cap on satellite pollution: any new satellite launches must be compensated by reduction in light pollution elsewhere. This ensures that the enormous benefit to humanity and our environment that is likely to come from cheap and abundant space access can continue to be pursued without endangering ground-based astronomy.
A public-sector space agency or government has no interest in the proliferation of space junk or light pollution, and so for them, such a cap on satellite pollution would simply be incorporated into the overall mission or legislation. But a private-sector firm must ensure continued profitability, and if such a cap is likely to threaten such profits, then the firm has an incentive to try to prevent its introduction. And, as with cases we are familiar with from every other industry, from tobacco to oil to pharma, these firms will lobby, engage in regulatory capture and even, as in the case of Volkswagen’s dieselgate scandal – engage in criminal activity to avoid this threat.
We are thus faced with Hobson’s choice of the free-market fundamentalist case for space that ignores these negative externalities, and a cynical, technophobic leftwing case against space that ignores potential benefits. Regardless which side wins, humanity loses.
What is absent from the discourse is the Neil Armstrong critique of the commercialization of space. This does not argue against private space contractors per se; there have always been private firms servicing public agencies such as General Dynamics, Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas. A public school doesn’t print its own notebooks or manufacture its own chalkboards. What it does say is that space-faring must remain primarily a public-sector-led endeavor, in service of all humanity, not private profit.
However, surely at least the argument that we should first fix our ailing bridges and crumbling roads makes sense, let alone solve the housing and healthcare crises? This seems unarguable, but only up to a point. Not only does this forget that space exploration plays a crucial role in solving those very problems, such argumentation suffers from an odd acceptance of an austerity mentality in implicitly accepting that there is not enough cash to engage in both space faring and solving these problems at the same time.
Of course at any one moment, even under a muscular, adequately funded social democracy, there would still be limited economic capacity, and democratic society is right to place greater emphasis on our most pressing concerns. Figuring out how the west can actually get high-speed rail lines built on time and on budget – or even just built – is plainly a more immediate worry than sending people back to the moon. But the European Space Agency’s 2024 budget is a record €7.8bn (the largest proportion of which, €2.4bn, is allocated for Earth observation), a pittance compared with the €240bn that EU states spent in 2022 on defense. Nasa’s budget this year was $25bn, while the US Department of Defense in 2024 has more than $2tn in budgetary resources, or about 15% of the federal budget.
The world can afford a few more spacecraft as well as a few more hospitals, schools and sewage systems at the same time, if only it gave up a few of its bombs.
And even at the limit of what social democracy could tax and borrow, we still want wonder, beauty and inspiration, not just bare life. If we cannot have space exploration until every last child on Earth is free from starvation, then neither can we have music or cinema or sport.
