At a technology conference in Italy in October, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos predicted that millions of people will be living in space “within the next few decades,” but said that “mostly” because they want to do it, and because robots are more cost-effective than humans when it comes to doing the actual work in space.
That’s no doubt why my ears perked up a few weeks later at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco when I found an on-stage prediction by Will Bruey, founder of space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries, so shocking. Rather than having robots do the jobs Bezos envisioned, Bluey said that within 15 to 20 years it will be cheaper to send a “working-class human” into orbit for a month than to develop a better machine.
For now, few in the tech-positive audience were surprised by what many might view as provocative statements about cost-cutting. But it raised questions for me – and it certainly raised questions for others too – about exactly who would work among the stars and in what conditions.
To explore these questions, this week I spoke with Mary Jane Rubenstein, chair of social sciences and professor of religion and science and technology studies at Wesleyan University. Rubenstein is the author of the book “Endless Worlds: Many Lives in the Multiverse,” which director Daniel Kwan used as research for his award-winning 2022 film “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Recently, I have been researching the ethics of space expansion.
Rubenstein’s response to Breuy’s prophecy cuts to the fundamental issue of power imbalance. “Workers are already struggling enough on this planet to pay their bills, keep themselves safe, … and protect their insurance,” she told me. “And when you depend on your employer not only for your salary and sometimes health care, but also for basic access to food and water and even air, your dependence on your employer only increases dramatically.”
Her assessment of the space as a workplace was very direct. While it’s easy for people to romanticize space as an escape to a primordial frontier, floating weightlessly among the stars, it’s worth remembering that there are no oceans, mountains, or singing birds in space. “It’s not very good there,” Rubenstein said. “It’s not good at all.”
But Rubenstein’s concerns aren’t just about protecting workers. There’s also the increasingly contentious question of who owns what in space. This legal gray area has become even more problematic as commercial space operations accelerate.
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The 1967 Outer Space Treaty established that no nation could claim sovereignty over celestial bodies. The moon, Mars, asteroids – these are considered to belong to all of humanity. But in 2015, the United States passed the Commercial Space Launch Competition Act, which says that while you can’t own the moon, you can own anything taken from it. Silicon Valley quickly took notice. This law opened the door to commercial exploitation of space resources, even as the rest of the world watched with concern.
Rubenstein likens it to saying, “You can’t own your house, but you can own everything in it.” In reality, it’s worse, she corrects herself. “It’s like saying you can’t own a house, but you can own the floorboards and 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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Businesses have been poised to leverage this framework for some time. AstroForge is promoting 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 over, [the Helium-3]”China can’t get it. Once China gets it, the United States can’t get it either,” Rubenstein says.
International reaction to the 2015 law was swift. At the 2016 UN Commission on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), Russia criticized the law as a unilateral violation of international law. Belgium warned of global economic imbalances.
In response, the United States created the Artemis Accords in 2020. This is a bilateral agreement with allies that formalizes the United States’ interpretation of space law, particularly regarding resource extraction. It was signed by countries concerned about being left out of the new space economy. Currently, 60 countries have signed the agreement, but Russia and China are notable exceptions.
However, there are complaints in the background. “This is one of those cases where the U.S. sets the rules and then asks other people to participate or exclude,” Rubenstein says. The agreement does not explicitly state that resource extraction is legal. The only difference is that it does not fall under the category of “national expropriation,” which is prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty. It’s a careful dance around thorny issues.
The solution she proposed to address this is simple, if highly unlikely. It is about returning control to the United Nations and COPUOS. Absent that, she proposes repealing the Wolf Amendment, a 2011 law that essentially prohibits NASA and other federal agencies from using federal funds to collaborate with China or Chinese-owned companies without explicit FBI certification and Congressional approval.
“We’re talking about an industry that says things like, ‘It’s perfectly possible to put thousands of people in a space hotel,’ or ‘It’s going to be possible to transport a million people to Mars within 10 years.’ There’s no air there, and the radiation will give you cancer in an instant, and your blood will boil and your face will peel off. If you can imagine doing that, I think you can imagine the United States talking to China.”
Rubenstein’s broader concern is what we choose to do in the universe. She believes the current approach of turning the moon into what she calls a “space gas station,” mining asteroids and establishing combat capabilities in orbit is deeply flawed.
She points out that science fiction has given us different templates for imagining spaces. She divides genres into three broad categories. First, there is the “conquest” genre, stories written “for the expansion of nation-states and the expansion of capital,” treating space as the next frontier to be conquered, much as European explorers once viewed the New World.
Then there’s dystopian science fiction that aims to warn us about destructive paths. But something strange happens here. “Some tech companies seem to have missed the joke on this dystopian genre, and whatever the warnings are coming true,” she says.
The third strand uses space to imagine alternative societies with different ideas about justice and care. This is what Rubenstein calls “speculative fiction” in a “high-tech key”, meaning it uses a futuristic technological setting as a framework.
When it first became clear which template governs actual space exploration (belonging entirely to the conquest category), she was depressed. “This seemed like a really missed opportunity to extend the values and priorities that we have in this world into areas that had previously been reserved for thinking in different ways.”
Rubenstein doesn’t expect dramatic policy changes anytime soon, but he sees several realistic paths forward. One is the tightening of environmental regulations for those involved in space. As she points out, we are only beginning to understand how rocket ejections and re-entering debris affect the ozone layer, which we have spent decades repairing.
But a more promising opportunity is space debris. With more than 40,000 trackable objects currently orbiting Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, we are approaching the Kessler effect, a runaway collision scenario that could render the orbit unusable for future launches. “No one wants that,” she says. “The U.S. government doesn’t want it. China doesn’t want it. Industry doesn’t want it.” It’s rare to find an issue where the interests of all stakeholders are perfectly aligned, but “space junk is bad for everyone,” she points out.
She is currently working on a proposal for an annual conference that would bring together academics, NASA representatives, and industry members to discuss how to approach space “mindfully, ethically, and collaboratively.”
Whether anyone will listen is another matter. Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be much desire to come together on this issue. In fact, last July, Congress introduced legislation that would make the Wolf Amendment permanent, increasing rather than relaxing restrictions on Chinese cooperation.
That’s because startup founders predict big changes in space within five to 10 years, companies are gearing up to mine asteroids and the moon, and Bluey’s predictions about blue-collar workers in orbit remain up in the air.
