Who inherits the stars? The world of space ethics about what we don’t talk about

In October, at a technology conference in Italy, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, predicted that millions of people will be living in space “in the next two decades,” and “mostly, because they want to,” because robots will be more cost-effective than humans to do the actual work in space.

No doubt that’s why my ears perked up when, at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco weeks later, I found an on-stage prediction from Will Broy, founder of space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries, so startling. Instead of robots doing the work as Bezos envisioned, Broy said that in 15 to 20 years, sending a “working-class human” into orbit for a month would be cheaper than developing better machines.

At that moment, few in the high-tech crowd seemed surprised by what many would consider a provocative statement about cost savings. But this raised questions for me – and certainly for others – about who exactly would work among the stars, and under what circumstances.

To explore these questions, I spoke this week with Mary Jane Rubinstein, dean of social sciences and professor of studies of religion, science, and technology at Wesleyan University. Rubinstein is the author of the book Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the MultiverseWhich director Daniel Kwan used as research for his award-winning 2022 film Everything Everywhere at Once. More recently, she has studied the ethics of space expansion.

Rubinstein’s response to Broy’s predictions comes down to a fundamental issue – the imbalance of power. “Workers are already having a hard enough time on the ground paying their bills and staying safe…and being insured,” she told me. “And this dependence on our employers only increases dramatically when a person depends on their employer, not just for a salary and sometimes for health care, but also for basics, food and water – and also air.”

Her assessment of the space as a workplace was very straightforward. While it’s easy to romanticize space as an escape into a pure frontier where people float weightlessly among the stars, it’s worth noting that there are no oceans, mountains, or frisky birds in space. “It’s not nice out there,” Rubinstein said. “It’s not nice at all.”

But worker protection is not Rubinstein’s only concern. There’s also the increasingly controversial question of who owns what in space — a legal gray area that’s becoming more problematic as commercial space operations accelerate.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty stipulates that no nation may claim sovereignty over celestial bodies. The Moon, Mars, and asteroids are supposed to belong to all of humanity. But in 2015, the US passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which states that while you can’t own the moon, you can own everything you extract from it. Silicon Valley became glamorous almost immediately; The law opened the door to commercial exploitation of space resources, even as the rest of the world watched with concern.

Rubinstein offers an analogy: It’s like saying you can’t own a house, but you can own everything inside it. In fact, she corrects herself, saying it’s worse than that. “It’s like saying you can’t have the house, but you can have the floorboards and the beams. Because the stuff in the moon is the moon. There’s no difference between the stuff the moon has and the moon itself.”

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Companies have been positioning themselves to exploit this framework for some time. AstroForge seeks to mine asteroids. Interlune wants to extract helium-3 from the moon. The problem is that these are not renewable resources. “Once you take the U.S [the Helium-3]“China can’t get it,” Rubinstein says. “Once China takes it, the United States can’t get it.”

The international reaction to this act in 2015 was rapid. At a 2016 meeting of the United Nations Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), Russia described the law as a unilateral violation of international law. Belgium warned of global economic imbalances.

In response, in 2020 the United States established the Artemis Accords — bilateral agreements with allied nations that formalized the American interpretation of space law, especially regarding resource extraction. Countries concerned about being excluded from the new space economy signed the agreement. The number of signatory countries now stands at 60, although Russia and China are not among them.

However, there are rumblings in the background. “This is one example of the United States setting the rules and then asking others to join in or to exclude them,” Rubinstein says. The agreements do not explicitly state that resource extraction is legal – but they do not constitute “national appropriation” prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty. It’s a careful dance around a fraught issue.

The solution it proposes to address this problem is clear and straightforward, if extremely unlikely: return control to the United Nations and the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Absent that, it proposes repealing the Wolf Amendment, a 2011 law that essentially prohibits NASA and other federal agencies from using federal funds to work with China or Chinese-owned companies without explicit FBI certification and congressional approval.

When people tell Rubinstein that cooperation with China is impossible, she has a ready response: “We’re talking about an industry that says things like: ‘It would be perfectly possible to house thousands of people in a space hotel,’ or ‘It would be possible in 10 years to send a million people to Mars, where there is no air and where radioactivity will give you cancer in a second and where your blood will boil and your face will fall off.’ “If it is possible to imagine doing these things, I think it is possible to imagine the United States talking to China.”

Rubinstein’s broader interest is in what we choose to do with space. She sees the current approach — turning the moon into what she calls a “cosmic gas station,” mining asteroids, and creating in-orbit warfare capabilities — as largely misguided.

She points out that science fiction has given us different models for imagining space. She divides this type into three broad categories. First, there is the “conquest” genre, or stories written “in the service of the expansion of the nation-state or the expansion of capital,” treating space as the next frontier to be conquered, just as European explorers once looked to new continents.

Then there is dystopian science fiction, meant to warn against destructive paths. But here’s where something strange happens: “Some tech companies seem to kind of miss the joke in this dystopian genre and kind of recognize the warning whatever it is,” she says.

The third strand uses space to imagine alternative societies with different ideas about justice and care – what Rubinstein calls “speculative fiction” in High-Tech Key, meaning it uses future technological settings as its framework.

When it first became clear which template was dominating the actual development of space (in the whole Invasion category), she became depressed. “It seemed to me that this was a real missed opportunity to expand the values ​​and priorities that we have in this world into those areas that we had previously reserved for thinking in different ways.”

Rubinstein doesn’t expect radical policy shifts any time soon, but she does see some realistic paths forward. The first is to tighten ecosystems for space actors; As you may have noted, we are only beginning to understand how rocket emissions and debris reentry affect the ozone layer that we have spent decades repairing.

However, there is a more promising opportunity: space debris. With more than 40,000 trackable objects 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 any future launches. “Nobody wants that,” she says. “The United States government doesn’t want that. China doesn’t want that. Industry doesn’t want that.” It’s rare to find an issue where the interests of all stakeholders are perfectly aligned, but “space garbage is bad for everyone,” she points out.

She is now working on a proposal to hold an annual conference that will bring together academics, NASA representatives and industry figures to discuss how to approach space “consciously, ethically and collaboratively”.

Whether anyone will listen is another question. There certainly does not seem to be much motivation to come together on this issue. In fact, in July of last year, Congress introduced legislation to make the Wolf Amendment permanent, which would solidify rather than loosen restrictions on cooperation with China.

In the background, startup founders predict big changes in space within five to ten years, companies prepare for asteroid and moon exploration, and Broy’s predictions about blue-collar workers in orbit remain hanging in the air unanswered.