“Contrary to what the private space industry (and national space agencies, for that matter) wants us to believe, the exploration and colonization of outer space is a very terrestrial undertaking.” These notions have served Euro-American empires for centuries as justification for brutally claiming new territories and racially hierarchizing their population.īut what’s the harm, one might ask, in rehashing these concepts in context of the exploration of outer space? With no Indigenous population (that we know of) that can be removed, no pre-colonial civilization in the way of Earth’s future colonies on Moon and Mars, isn’t space colonialism something truly new, completely divorced from the history of terrestrial colonialism? Branson, Musk and Bezos would most certainly agree. The billionaires’ space race is no exception to that rule: the quote that marked Branson’s entry into sub-orbital height – “Today space is Virgin territory“ – is not just a clever pun on the company’s name, but also revealingly invokes the misogynist and colonial notions of “untouched“ land and people that are ready for the taking. Yet in spite of allegedly pointing the way into a better, more just, and more sustainable future for humanity, most of these imaginaries tend to wrap their visions into the rather stale and very earthly language of discovery and exploration, of new frontiers, terra nullius (“nobody’s land“), and of colonization – imageries and terms which have and continue to justify removal, extraction, exploitation and genocide. What has changed is that in the latest version of that popular narrative, the only path leading towards utopia goes through a privatized space industry. The idea that entering and colonizing outer space provides a unifying experience for humanity has been popularized by science-fiction for quite a while now – a tune that many planetary scientists, by the way, have happily sung along with. Virgin Galactic lauded the perfectly orchestrated performance as following the path of the Apollo missions, while also heralding a new and invigorated phase of space exploration – this time with commercial flights and space tourism leading the way.īranson and the other so-called New Space Entrepreneurs, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, might be competitors in their private race to space, yet all of them are deeply invested in surrounding their private enterprises with a shared narrative of a utopian future for humanity in outer space, and even as much as humanity‘s survival in face of climate change on Earth, by way of becoming a multiplanetary species.įor the most part that story isn’t new, of course. On July 11 th 2021, Virgin Galactic founder, billionaire and self-declared new space tourism pioneer Richard Branson staged the first commercial flight of his company’s supersonic space-plane Unity – with Branson aboard himself and thus upstaging Amazon founder Jeff Bezos‘ own flight by just a few days.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |