As Caroline DePalma highlighted last week, Our human mind has propelled space travel for generations. Space inspires us to be amazed like few things. Only 12 people have ever walked the moon, and fewer than 600 have been in space. From “The Martian” (2015) to “war of stars“Our fascination shows in pop culture. We keep imagining what the vast universe contains and what it would be like to leave the only home we have ever known.
NASAs next manned space program The Artemis program belongs to the moon, named after the Greek moon goddess who is also the sister of the sun god Apollo. This Program will endeavor To get the first woman to the moon by 2024 and finally to send a manned mission to Mars based on the knowledge gained on the moon. This mission has been a long time coming, considering that the last time an astronaut left Earth orbit was the last lunar landing mission in 1972. Now, almost 50 years later, we are trying again to travel beyond our home planet.
However, the Artemis program is a revival of the old order in a changing landscape of space exploration. After the end of the space race in the 1970s, waning political support resulted in a dramatic event reduction of the NASA budget. NASA’s research is invaluable as it influenced our ideas about the universe and led to inventions like the CAT scan and baby food – but it did is not necessarily profitable.
In recent years, space travel and exploration has been increasingly privatized with the rise of companies like SpaceX by Elon Musk and Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos. NASA has worked with private contractors like aerospace giants Lockheed Martin and Boeing to build spacecraft for years. During these projects, however, NASA continued to be actively involved and ultimately retained ownership of the spacecraft. Last summer, SpaceX made history when it launched the first manned mission into space on a private spaceship, the Crew Dragon. What does this mean for the future of space travel? Private companies have more capital and often more ambitious ideas. One of SpaceX’s current projects is Starship, a massive reusable spaceship that Musk has claimed to aid human colonization on Mars – a much more ambitious goal than NASA’s Artemis program.
With private companies at the forefront, space travel costs are drastically reduced, which means space tourism may be within reach soon. Even if competition and privatization cut costs, space travel is still very expensive. This means that the indescribable view of the curvature of the earth will only be open among the richest of the rich. Andy Weir, known for his fact-based science fiction, imagines a lunar colony shaped by tourism in his novel “Artemis” (2017). According to Weir, a two-week stay can cost $ 70,000 in a few decades. In the past, space was only accessible to the bravest and most determined who were willing to risk their lives to advance humanity’s journey to the planets and stars. If only the rich can ascend into space, have we tarnished the empty slab of space with the same inequalities that plague the earth?
This is just one of the possible inequalities that will arise as we continue to move beyond our blue planet in new and different ways. Both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have expressed their intention to use their respective companies to advance human colonization of the solar system. This popular idea in the scientific community was explored in Episode 2 of Cosmos: Possible Worlds (2020) to save humanity if climate change makes the earth uninhabitable. or even as a way to survive our sun’s death, if we survive that long.
An important question that arises, however, is how this agreement will come about. The 1967 Space Treaty prevents countries from claiming a moon or planet as their territory, but this was decided before the rise of private companies in space exploration. The monopoly potential is clear as private companies expand their reach in space. What would a corporate settlement on the Moon or Mars look like where everything the settlers need to survive is owned and controlled by a corporation? The goal of the business is profit, and without a governing body to protect the settlers, deep inequalities are likely to occur between those who controlled the means of production and those who did the work, as occurred during the rise of industrialization in the 19th century. Century was the case.
And what if we stumble upon life in the polar ice caps of Mars or in the subterranean seas of Saturn’s moon Europa? Would it be ethical to invade their environment and potentially damage their fragile ecosystems? We have already irreparably damaged the ecosystem of our own planet and caused the extinction of many species. Would we become the worst kind of colonizers – moving through the universe, consuming resources from world to world and making them dry? While the idea of human settlements in space is exciting, these and other ethical questions need to be at the center of the discussion as we approach these possible futures.
The work of brilliant scientists in private corporations and government organizations reassures us that humanity has an incredible future in space exploration and travel. We will discover extraordinary things and get closer and closer to understanding the universe in which we live. However, we must avoid repeating the injustices and injustices that have permeated our relationships with one another, with other species, and with our planet – and be careful to maintain the wonder and human excellence that our previous explorations have driven away from our little blue planet .
