Space barons like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk don’t seem religious. But their quest to colonize outer space is.
NASA revealed on Monday the names of the four astronauts who will travel around the moon as part of the Artemis II program. The crew includes two historic firsts: the first woman, Christina Koch, and the first person of color, Victor Glover, to go on a lunar mission. Hailed by NASA spokespeople as “pioneers” and “explorers,” they were greeted with fanfare befitting “humanity’s crew.”
But behind the Artemis II program are much more corporate goals. It’s not just that private industry helped build the program’s spacecraft. Space mining companies competing for government contracts want to turn the moon into a cosmic gas station. The vision is to mine the lunar surface for rocket fuel that can then propel us all the way to Mars — and beyond, as humanity takes its self-appointed place in the stars.
Mary-Jane Rubinstein told me that vision makes her want to throw up. A Wesleyan professor of religion and science in society, she’s the author of the new book Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race.
What’s “religion” doing in that title, and why is a religion professor writing a book about the space program? Rubinstein argues that today’s corporate space race — helmed by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and others who propose to “save” humanity from a dying planet — is actually rehashing old Christian themes that go all the way back to the 15th century, when European Christians colonized the Americas. Remember how Donald Trump described the Artemis mission and eventual settlement of the moon and Mars? He called it “America’s manifest destiny in the stars.”
But as Rubinstein points out, not everyone thinks it’s the moon’s destiny to be strip-mined, or Mars’s destiny to be settled by human colonists. In fact, some believe these celestial bodies should have fundamental rights of their own.
I talked to Rubinstein about the fear of screwing up space like we’ve screwed up Earth: Is that really a fear of trampling on space’s own intrinsic value, or is it more a fear about human nature? A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Sigal Samuel
When you see news about space exploration, like the announcement about who will be going to the moon next year, is your dominant feeling … excitement? Dread?
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
It’s a little bit of dread. Because I worry that all this is getting going before the public really understands what’s happening.
One thing I’m worried about is that some of the astronauts will be tokenized to make it clear that Artemis is a feminist and anti-racist movement. But if we’re looking to make space exploration a liberationist project, just putting representatives of different identity groups there isn’t going to be enough. I worry that it’ll look like the job is somehow done because there is a woman and a person of color on this mission.
The mission itself needs to be analyzed from a feminist and anti-racist perspective first. Then you figure out how to do it well, and then you figure out who’s going to be on it.
Sigal Samuel
There are two words you use to refer to the corporate space race in your book, and the rationale for using those words might not be obvious to readers. You talk about it as “religion” and as “colonial.” Why?
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
What I’m arguing is that the new corporate space race is an extension and intensification of the initial space race of the late ’50s and into the early ’70s. And that that space race is an extension and intensification of the colonial project that settled the Americas.
The journey that Europeans made across the seas to conquer the Americas and then the journey that white-descended Americans made across the North American continent through what’s known as Manifest Destiny gets extended in the mid-20th century as a new frontier is proclaimed to be open, the frontier of outer space. The space race is a new chapter in European-style colonialism — a vertical extension of that colonial project — as an effort to get more land and more resources for an imperial nation.
The colonial project that settled the Americas was underwritten at every major turn by religious language, religious authorities, religious doctrines. Perhaps most profoundly, the reason Spain was able to conquer the New World was that Pope Alexander VI declared that the New World was his to give — and he gave it to Spain. The conquistadors were underwritten by the head of the Roman Catholic Church; therefore God was endorsing the Spanish conquest of the New World.
This language gets taken up in different ways later. You find a claim to land and resources and a justification for destroying indigenous communities, all authorized by biblical claims. North America is understood very early on to be what early preachers will call God’s New Israel. Just as God gave the Land of Canaan to the Israelites on the proviso that they make it a holy land, God was now giving Europeans a new Canaan. The idea is: Go in there, cleanse it of all unholiness and devotion to any other gods, and establish a new kingdom dedicated to the glory of God.
By the way, there are 20 towns in the US that are named New Canaan.
Sigal Samuel
So if America is understanding itself to be God’s new Israel, it’s like saying Americans are God’s new chosen people. How do those religious themes underwrite the modern corporate space race?
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
When Mike Pence spoke to space-industry professionals [in 2018], he quoted Psalm 139 and said that “even if we go up to the heavens, even there His hand will guide us.” Then in 2020, Trump used the language of Manifest Destiny in his last State of the Union address when he was declaring his priorities for a second term. This was in the [beginning] of the pandemic, people were dying, and his first priority was going to the moon — to embrace “America’s manifest destiny in the stars.”
That was a call-out to the old idea of Manifest Destiny, that God wants light-skinned people of European heritage to inhabit not only the Eastern seaboard but the entire continent. Now the idea that Trump set forth was, it’s not just the continent that God wants America to have, it’s the entire universe.
Sigal Samuel
And just to be clear, lest people think this is just a Trump thing, this is very much something that the Biden administration has decided to continue, right?
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
Absolutely. There’s absolutely no difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration when it comes to space.
Sigal Samuel
Some people object to using the word “colonialism” in this context. We think of colonialism as a hugely harmful thing mostly because European colonizers were coming to inhabited lands and destroying indigenous peoples. But if the moon or Mars or space beyond our solar system is uninhabited, how does “colonialism” apply?
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
The answer that seems compelling to you totally depends on your frame of reference. Perhaps the most difficult for secular, white Westerners to take on would be this. If you talk to indigenous people — I’m thinking particularly of Inuit cosmology, of Ojibwe cosmology, of Bawaka cosmology from Australia — they will tell you that outer space isn’t empty at all, that it actually is inhabited, that there are indigenous people there: their ancestors.
For the Bawaka People, when people die, they’re actually carried up into the Milky Way alongside the stars. So they’re really concerned that if we mine there, we’re actually doing damage to the habitation of the ancestors. And planetary bodies are often said to be sacred or to be divinities themselves. So, from different perspectives, it’s not just a foregone conclusion that there is nothing out there.
If that doesn’t do it for you, colonialism was also fairly destructive for the nations who were doing the colonizing! At the moment we do not have a robust international legal structure in space. If you’re able to set up, say, a mine there, you’re going to have to defend your mine. So the US Space Force is going to be stationed around the mine to make sure nobody else goes there. And suddenly you’ve got the same clamoring for land and resources that tore the nations apart in the late 19th century, and we had two world wars resulting from that. It seems like a bad idea to set ourselves up for that in space.
Also, the pursuit of wealth and explosion of profit tends to make those who are already wealthy much wealthier. We know that widening the gap between exceedingly rich people and exceedingly poor people is not good for most of the population.
Sigal Samuel
What about ways that an extractive approach to space could potentially do damage to land?
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
This approach means we’re going to get even more rocket launches than we currently have — Elon Musk sends 60 satellites up at a time — and more launch pads being created and those are usually created in spaces like wetlands. Boca Chica, Texas, for example, has been absolutely destroyed by the operations of SpaceX in that area. Ecologically it’s a disaster. And low-Earth orbit is already so crowded that it’s very hard to see the stars, even for astronomers.
The next thing to point out is that the colonial project has been destructive not only of communities, but of land itself. So then the question becomes whether the land of the moon or Mars has any value in itself, which is to say beyond its value to us.
Sigal Samuel
You write about a group of Australian scholars who argue that it’s not okay to damage the surface of the moon or pollute it, that the moon “possesses fundamental rights.” They’ve even issued a Declaration of the Rights of the Moon. This echoes the “rights of nature” movement, which has successfully won legal personhood rights for lakes and forests. Do you think it makes sense to apply that sort of thinking to an extraterrestrial body?
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
It’s such a hard question. On the one hand, I can understand that people might think there are severe limitations to applying human-derived rights language to natural formations. We might be concerned that modeling the rights of nature on the rights of humans only allows us to value something insofar as it seems human-ish. But my sense is that we’re working within a complicated and insufficient legal framework and that any strategy that works is worth trying.
Sigal Samuel
You cite the philosopher Holmes Rolston III who argues that natural entities have their own value independent of anything humans might want from them. That doesn’t mean we should never eat a carrot or dig up a weed, but it does mean we should spend time considering what we take from the world and how. Rolston offers criteria for how to know when we shouldn’t destroy something. For example, we should respect “places of historical value,” “extremes in natural projects,” “places of aesthetic value,” and “places of transformative value.”
But are these really about a place’s intrinsic moral worth? To me this sounds more like people grasping for language to talk about instrumental worth — what certain places do for us.
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
I think it’s very hard to measure the value of something in itself. We’re always going to slip into the language of human perspective; we’re always going sneak in our own aesthetic criteria. This project has really demolished anything like academic purism in me. I think we’re going to have to give up on purity, inviolable categories or absolute measurements.
But even if there were just some kind of attention to the landscape itself and to what’s important to us (taken broadly) about that landscape … even if we were just to approach the bodies of outer space in the ways that we approach national parks, where you carry out anything you bring in … we would be doing a lot better.
Sigal Samuel
I like this idea of human judgments as a floor or a minimum. Even if we just are thinking about how to protect a place vis-à-vis what is of instrumental worth to us humans, that’s already going to be some improvement.
I think a lot of people are painfully aware of how humanity has screwed up the Earth. And so maybe there’s this fear about screwing up space. But is that really more of a fear about human nature, as opposed to really being about space’s own intrinsic value?
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
I don’t think it’s so much a panic with respect to human nature as it is a panic with respect to capitalist nature. It’s not all of humanity that wants to conquer the stars; it’s a destructive subsection of humanity that claims to be speaking on behalf of all of humanity and telling us that either all of humanity is going to become extinct forever or we need to nuke Mars [to terraform it, per Musk’s ideas]. It’s a false zero-sum game.
Sigal Samuel
Right, everyone from Musk to Bezos to Branson says the corporate space race will be for the benefit of humanity. This goes back to Eisenhower, who said the US must develop a national space program “for the benefit of all mankind.” I’ve seen this in the AI race too — OpenAI, for example, says its mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence “benefits all of humanity.”
In your book you take issue with this language of saving all humanity from going extinct, and you write, “The operative fallacy here is known as longtermism.” Longtermism is a controversial spinoff of a social movement called effective altruism, but you say it’s actually a high-tech version of what Malcolm X called “pie in the sky and heaven in the hereafter.” He blamed America’s racist social system on the Christian teaching that those who suffer on Earth will be rewarded in the afterlife, which he said dissuaded Black Americans from overthrowing their oppressors. How does that map onto your worry about longtermism?
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
In the book I try to expose the clearly religious heritage of colonialism and the remnants of the kind of thinking we find in Pence and Trump when they say that God wants us to conquer the cosmos. But that’s not the most interesting place that religion is showing up at this point. The most interesting place is much more subtle: It’s in the proclamations that “the world is coming to an end.” They’re offering us a classic messianic logic of impending disaster on the one hand and eternal salvation on the other.
So the locus of religious operation has changed from the Church to these private messiahs. The private messiahs aren’t speaking in the name of any recognized religion — the logic claims to be totally secular. But it actually looks a lot like the Christian logic that says suffering on Earth is justified because there’s going to be redemption in another world.
Sigal Samuel
So is your worry that the longtermist doctrine prioritizes the existence of our species in the far future, so it risks propping up the current destructive systems and keeping us docile about them?
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
Absolutely. Longtermism gives us a recommended sacrifice of the poor, homeless, and hungry of the Earth, because they’re not the future. It’s actually worse than the Christian promise. The Christian promise is that you yourself may suffer for 80 years but you will be rewarded in the afterlife. Here, there’s no reward for the particular people who are suffering. They’re just going to be thrown by the wayside and die in conditions of poverty and misery. But the human species itself will triumph.
Sigal Samuel
The human species will see the Promised Land but the individuals of today will languish in the desert.
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
Exactly.
Sigal Samuel
Last question for you: If space exploration can be done in a way that doesn’t screw over people or animals or our planet or other planets, are you all for it?
Mary-Jane Rubinstein
I’m absolutely for it! And there are so many teachers who know how to do this better. They may not be astronomers and they’re probably not corporate leaders. But there are people who know how to live sustainably. If we can find a way to listen to their example, then great! But that would involve locating those people and probably trying this out on Earth first.