Friday essay: space was once a place of wonder – now it’s being bought and sold by powerful men

I spent most of my twenties driving around remote Australia in a self-built tiny home, researching from the road while attempting to live a life connected to the natural world. I loved this for many reasons: one reason was that life looks very different whether you are 50 kilometres, 500 kilometres or even 5,000 kilometres down the road. Everyone’s normal is different. I was also struck by how different my experience of space from the middle of the outback was.

As a political scientist with no more sophisticated a stargazing tool than my own eyes, I couldn’t believe it the first time I truly saw the Milky Way. I must have been in my mid-twenties, some five hours from the closest town – Alice Springs – on the edge of the Western Desert, tucked up in a swag, listening to wild dingoes in the distance and watching the branches of mulga trees around me dance, backlit against the majesty of the sky. I kept wishing the pale white clouds above me would clear so I could see the stars properly.

It was only the next day that the professor I was camped with commented on the clarity of the Milky Way the night before – so bright it resembled clouds.

What I’d experienced was partly naivety, but also partly the reality that even growing up in the relatively unpolluted western outskirts of Brisbane, Australia, I did not see the stars as some others do, my viewing curtailed by light pollution. While I still feel a mix of magic and fear when looking up into that inky darkness speckled with stars, I also recognise that, despite space being a global commons capable of generating wonder, we’d be wrong to assume humanity’s shared experience is the same experience.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for humans to connect with space as they have in the past – well beyond light pollution, some humans, more than others, are altering our relationship with the stars.

Come the mid-2020s and we arrive at a sector increasingly dictated by a global hegemon spinning out of orbit, spurred on by a “broligarchy” of techno-capitalist billionaires (and trillionaires?), hurtling towards military destruction and capitalist exploit, and largely staffed by representatives of less than half the population.

You don’t have to look far to see recent examples of how this is playing out, such as the US confirming it has deployed space control weapons or one of Trump’s top military advisors imploring the military to be “prepared to fight, endure and win […] from the seabed to cislunar space” – the space between the Earth and Moon, including Moon’s orbit.

This is all despite the Outer Space Treaty to which the US is a signatory designating such celestial objects such as the Moon be used “exclusively for peaceful purposes”.

If space is a final frontier – the absolute limit of human knowledge, understanding and exploration, the last great opportunity for humanity to do things differently – how and why have we ended up here?

The long answer is a complex stratagem of wealth, power, desire and opportunity. The short answer is men.

Men, specifically the mostly straight, often white kind, dominate most parts of the space sector at the most senior levels. When critical space technology is developed, men are the assumed users. A handful of nations and companies make a lion’s share of decisions – often more unilaterally than they should – and are almost exclusively led by men.

You might think you don’t have a role to play in the decisions being made about whether to mine the Moon or colonise Mars. You might not feel you know enough about the kinds of tech we need to invest in, and for what purposes, when it comes to the future of scientific development. And perhaps you don’t care about what countries and even companies can or cannot do in space.

But whether or not you think, know or care about these things, a small group of humans do feel they have the answers, and they are making calls on all the above and more. And I can tell you: they largely do not look like the more than 50% of the population who are women. They do not represent the full spread of nationalities or ethnic groups in the world. And they may not always have the best interests of human and planetary flourishing in mind when they make such decisions.

This is no coincidence. It’s an example of the patriarchy at work – more specifically, the space patriarchy. Within the aerospace sector, we see the replication of gender-based power structures and patriarchal ideologies.

If space is a frontier to do things differently and yet we are so far replicating the same patterns of commerce and control, then the problem isn’t just abstract: it has real, earthly roots and ramifications.

You see, space has been undergoing a few changes in recent years. Not all are good, and not all of us know what is happening.

Promise

It wasn’t always like this. The quest to explore space was once underpinned by the rhetoric of developing a truly global community. Government-sponsored spaceflights were mission-led and contributed towards international scientific goals and national interests, including “technological leadership, improving national security, creating high-quality jobs, or advancements in research”.

Before the space race inaugurated by the Cold War, the beginning of the Space Age and the first quests for spaceflight in the 1920s and 1930s were squarely focused on the idea of space as part of the global commons.

It was a movement both highly transnational and collaborative in nature, with space seen as a “peaceful domain for all humankind”. Space represented many things to many people, but a core tenet was its promise.

The promise of exploring new worlds and new life forms. The promise of exceeding our earthly limits. The promise of testing our human ingenuity and potential, of creating better futures for all based on our new learnings and space technologies that could become part of everyday life. Maybe you have even dreamt of one day being one of the first humans to see a day dawning on a different planet.

But that was a gentler time, at least in planetary terms. Now, we’re going through an existential crisis on Earth – not in the sense that philosophy students use the term while reading Sartre, but in its most literal sense: we are in a contest for our own survival.

Catastrophic climate change, the degradation of established political systems and the global rules-based order and technological development rapidly outpacing our ability to understand it have all converged to create a profound sense of uncertainty about humanity’s future.

Sure, some of the same benign rhetoric of the past around peace, prosperity and human potential is still being used when it comes to space, but the difference is that the incentives today are amplified. Space doesn’t only represent the opportunity for humans to become a multiplanetary species – for Mars to become a backup drive for humanity, as SpaceX founder Elon Musk puts it. It also represents the ultimate commercial payload.

Space is inherently politicised and competitive: a domain in which vast sums of money can be and are being made, and power can be wielded in galactic proportions. And so at this present moment of crisis, those with the power and the opportunity are increasingly turning their eyes skyward, not to the heavens but beyond it, in the hope of making a buck or a trillion. Make no mistake: space today is big business.

Still a global commons?

In terms of underlying goals, today’s space sector in many ways isn’t that different from the 20th-century space sector – but the scope of what’s possible has changed.

Whereas once sending a rocket to Mars was the ultimate triumph of human ingenuity, now colonising our second-closest neighbour is not beyond imagination, with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the China National Space Administration (CNSA) planning missions to the Red Planet in the 2030s.

Musk, who is aiming to get there first, has called it a “fixer-upper of a planet”, as if we can whack in some heating and gain a strong return on our investment. (Perhaps heralding a new intergalactic age of climate change, SpaceX’s website says of Mars, “It is a little cold, but we can warm it up.”) He sees settlement of Mars as “life insurance” – an opportunity for humanity if we destroy the planet we’ve already got.

These are not new ideas. Space philosopher Frank White, who coined the term “the overview effect” – the paradigmatic shift in perspective and values that astronauts experience following spaceflight – argued back in 1987 that space “may be the key to human survival and evolution and perhaps even more than that”.

In 2008, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking declared that “our only hope for long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth”.

But the “move fast and break things” philosophy of Silicon Valley is coming to dominate as private companies vie for power and control when it comes to space – and it seems as though what was once a global commons could become more akin to a battle arena.

Even if Musk’s key rival, Jeff Bezos, founder of space technology company Blue Origin, is reported to criticise some of Musk’s visions as “unmotivating”, Silicon Valley techno-optimistic visions for space as a place to offshore heavy industry similarly “offer little to the flourishing of humans and the planet”, as sociology professor Richard Tutton notes.

Meanwhile, the US has also shifted its vision for space. While military entanglement in the US space sector has always been a feature, the Trump administration’s declarations of space as a “warfighting domain” is new. In establishing the US Space Force as the sixth branch of the US Armed Forces, Donald Trump declared, “It is not enough to have American presence in space. We must have American dominance.”

Despite the rhetoric that space is or has been about scientific discovery, realising the promise of humanity and the collaborative opportunity of a lifetime, space has always been about power, (para)militarism and privatisation – and this is only accelerating under Trump. If you noticed that most of the space leaders, scientists and authors I’ve quoted so far are men, then you’ll understand why: the notion of conquest in space is premised on patriarchy.

Where are the women?

Space has had a history of being weaponised on the whims of world leaders – from the nuclear brinkship of Kennedy and Khrushchev in the early 1960s to the anti-satellite and missile-defence programs pursued by the US and Soviet Union during the 1980s.

Yet the past few decades have firmly reinforced the geopolitical reality of space as a tool of military leverage, surveillance and superiority – at the same time as space has also fallen hostage to capitalist extraction, where various individuals and corporations with huge amounts of wealth and power seek to dictate the agenda.

And this is why this compounding crisis should matter to everyone on Earth – even if you don’t care about rockets and Moon rovers. Because what we do in space is about who gets to consolidate power and wealth on Earth.

A new space race is emerging at an international level as states and private individuals jostle for access to the most valuable orbits and lunar resource capture and it has implications for all humanity. It matters who sets the agenda, whose values dominate and who is excluded from what we do in space.

Importantly, we cannot assume that technological progress is matched by social and political progress in this critical technology sector. NASA’s recent Artemis program seeks to return humanity to the Moon for the first time in about 50 years through a series of crewed and uncrewed missions. Its crewed missions were originally pitched as achieving an important global first: “For the benefit of all humanity, NASA and its partners will land the first woman and first person of color on the surface of the Moon.”

Come 2026, and while Christina Koch made history as the first woman to “return to the Moon” via flyby as part of the Artemis II mission, women have been scrapped entirely from Artemis III, despite more than half of NASA’s newest astronauts being women.

If women aren’t part of the final selection for Artemis IV, which will actually land humans back on the Moon (hopefully in 2028), it will set humanity back decades. Even if women do make it as part of Artemis IV, it’s damning that this close out we’re still questioning whether this will occur. You’d be wrong to assume we’d moved past these basic questions of whether we will ever land a woman on the Moon. Are we still okay with only our sons and not our daughters getting such opportunities?

The history of space is a story about women’s exclusion and the long-term consequences of patriarchal domination. But hope exists and exciting opportunities also abound, with space exploration and technological development representing a practical opportunity to learn to do better, to not repeat our most egregious mistakes of the past.

We should be embracing women’s expertise in developing new technologies, ensuring diverse perspectives and creating visions of an intergalactic world – if that is what ours is to become – that involve all of humanity, from the elite to the most vulnerable.

We should ensure space doesn’t continue to be corrupted, co-opted and captured by patriarchal capital interests that exclude or place barriers against women and discourage diversity, leading to worsening outcomes for humanity.

This is an edited extract from Space XX: Gender, Power and the New Space Race by Dr Elise Stephenson (Monash University Publishing)