Insight Editions · No. 42
Astrotopia
The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race
Mary-Jane Rubenstein
Mary-Jane Rubenstein examines how corporate spaceflight rhetoric draws on religious salvation, colonial expansion, frontier mythology, and competing visions of humanity's future beyond Earth.
A study guide to Astrotopia by Mary-Jane Rubenstein. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- Space talk is religious. The secular billionaires preach salvation, chosen peoples and promised lands.
- Two prophets. Musk wants to save the species on Mars; Bezos wants to save Earth by moving industry to O'Neill colonies. Both depend on endless growth.
- Old roots. Lynn White's thesis: the Genesis dominion ethic, with paganism defeated, made nature into raw material.
- Discovery doctrine. Papal bulls, Columbus and the "empty land" idea of terra nullius licensed conquest, now aimed at "empty" space.
- America as Israel. Puritan covenant, Manifest Destiny and the frontier pass straight into Space Age rhetoric.
- The frontier repeats itself. Commerce, then empire, then favours to commerce: the Virginia Company model again.
- Law for the strong. The OST's commons dissolves into "freedom"; the US killed the Moon Treaty and declared space no commons.
- Rocks may matter. Antimineralism, terraforming as "cosmic vandalism," the Moon as a possible person.
- Other spacetimes. Longtermism as pie in the sky; Afrofuturist and Indigenous stories make other worlds here.
- Pantheism as practice. "God is all the stuff that makes the world"; we bring Earth with us wherever we go.
Argument map: from the myths of NewSpace to an ethic of kinship.
| Ch | Title | Core point |
|---|---|---|
| Pref | Something weirdly religious about space | NewSpace renews imperial Christianity in secular form |
| Intro | We hold this myth to be potential | Space as open possibility or frontier; what children learn |
| 1 | Our infinite future in infinite space | Musk's Mars salvation and Bezos's growth-without-limits |
| 2 | Creation and conquest | Dominion, the defeat of paganism, nature as raw material |
| 3 | The American promised land | Puritan covenant, Manifest Destiny, the chosen nation |
| 4 | The final frontier | Flags, names and claims; commerce and empire |
| 5 | Whose space is it? | Space law hollowed out; the growth circle; orbital debris |
| 6 | The rights of rocks | Antimineralism, mining, terraforming, Moon rights, kinship |
| 7 | Other spacetimes | Longtermism versus Le Guin, Jemisin, Sun Ra, Butler |
| Concl | Revolt of the pantheists | We cannot leave Earth behind; listen and belong |
How the book is built
The book moves from diagnosis to genealogy to ethics to imagination. The preface, introduction and Chapter 1 show the religious shape of NewSpace through its two leading prophets. Chapters 2 to 4 trace that shape back through Genesis, the Doctrine of Discovery, Puritan America and the frontier. Chapter 5 shows these myths written into law and markets, and Chapter 6 asks whether anything in space deserves protection for its own sake. Chapter 7 and the conclusion turn to fiction, music and Indigenous knowledge for alternatives. Rubenstein writes in a lively first person full of jokes, and she repeatedly says beliefs matter less than behaviour. A useful habit is to ask whether each point is a historical claim (testable), an ethical claim (arguable) or a provocation (meant to unsettle).
Something Weirdly Religious About Space
Rubenstein's thesis in one chain: NewSpace repeats old religious and colonial scripts.
The plot sounds like bad science fiction: Earth becomes unlivable, so a wealthy few escape to a mall-like colony run by the corporation that wrecked the planet, where cramped quarters and oligarchic control of air and water amplify every crisis. Yet we are "buying it wholesale" from a few charismatic CEOs working with, and against, national space agencies.
The Christianity at issue is not that of Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, the Berrigans or Pope Francis, but Christendom: the imperial alliance with capitalism and expansion. She draws "an eerily straight line" from the doctrine of discovery (which "gave" Africa to Portugal and the New World to Spain), through manifest destiny, to NewSpace claims on the solar system. In each, destroying land and exploiting human and nonhuman "resources" are sacrifices toward a sacred end: the wealth of a destructive few.
The myths hide inside assumptions that feel secular: that intelligence is the universe's highest value, that humans have the most of it, that minerals matter only as resources, and that land can be owned. These, she argues, descend from Western monotheism and Greek philosophy, whose gods still name our rockets; "Western science, economics, and politics are most indebted to religion where religion is least obvious." Other traditions favour kinship over competition, knowledge over profit and sustaining over stockpiling, and are shaping "a new scientific method" that respects Indigenous knowledge, nonhuman life and the integrity of land, "however lifeless it may seem."
Why a religion scholar on rockets
Readers who want only thruster specs will bounce; her wager is that thruster programs run on myths. The preface stakes the claim that biblical remnant language, Puritan errands and frontier sermons still shape payload manifests and hearing rooms. "frontier" and "for all mankind" into a concrete statute, budget or launch site, then asking who was not in the room when the phrase hardened.
Preface wager: myths steer hardware
We Hold This Myth to Be Potential
Preparing to tell astronomers to study religion, she offers a working definition: "Religion tells us where we've come from, where we're going, and how to live in the meantime. It connects this world to other worlds. It provokes awe at the order of things and horror at the disorder of things." By that measure science and religion overlap. Her four-year-old Elijah's room is all space gear, chosen by the adults; to him astronauts, Ganesh and the Hulk are equally mythic: "not quite real and superreal."
The astrotopian drama
One story, retold: the frontier myth Rubenstein traces
Musk's mission is to make humanity "multiplanetary" before an asteroid, war, robots or a virus ends us. When Bernie Sanders called billionaire wealth immoral, Musk replied: "I am accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary and extend the light of consciousness to the stars." Fans shout that he "inspires the shit out of us!" Few call themselves religious, but they have bought a classic disaster-and-salvation myth with a self-appointed saviour: "This world is coming to an end... trust in me and I'll bring you to a new world." Starlink's terms call Mars "a free planet" where "no Earth-based government has authority"; the plan is caves, robots and indentured labour, then terraforming by "Nuke Mars," sold as a T-shirt.
She is tempted to give up on space, then thinks of astronomers' monkish wonder (and their awkward utilitarian defences, as if knowledge only matters if it "cures Covid"), of Sun Ra, Janelle Monáe and Indigenous and feminist science fiction, and of her sons.
The book's route: the current situation (Chapter 1); backward to the biblical stories and doctrines behind colonialism, US expansion and the Space Race (Chapters 2-4); the resulting crises of militarization, resource races and orbital debris (Chapter 5); then Indigenous, more-than-human, religious-ecological and Afrofuturist alternatives (Chapters 6-7). "If we want to get right with space, we're going to have to get right with religion": stories about how we might belong to the universe rather than how it might belong to us.
Route map and the temptation to quit
The parent in her wants to yell "cut it out"; the ecologist fears ransacking other worlds after trashing one; the humanist wants the fortunes spent on water access, biodiversity, education, reparations and reforestation. She nearly gives up on space, then remembers astronomers' monkish wonder, their awkward utilitarian defences of research ("as if knowledge is only important if it cures Covid"), Janelle Monáe, feminist and Indigenous futurists, and her sons as possible astronomers or "futurist jazz pianists." The garbage halo makes that a hard sell.
Book route: diagnose, excavate, encode, counter
Decolonizing space, as she frames the activists' program, is not only representation. It centres Black and Indigenous voices on labour and territory; refuses the romance of "hard work" and the "empty frontier"; bars polluting other worlds and commodifying land; and subjects SpaceX and Blue Origin to strict regulation. Only then might space escape "the final frontier" and become a site of "genuinely new beginnings." The book's method follows: diagnose NewSpace (Ch 1), excavate biblical and colonial roots (Chs 2-4), watch law and markets encode the myths (Ch 5), ask whether places deserve protection (Ch 6), then turn to other stories (Ch 7). "Stories that tell us not how the universe might belong to us but how we might belong to the universe."
Our Infinite Future in Infinite Space
The hare and the tortoise
In January 2018 SpaceX's Falcon Heavy sent a $100,000 red Tesla Roadster into orbit around the Sun, driven by the mannequin "Starman" (after Bowie's alien messiah), with "Space Oddity" on loop and Asimov's Foundation in the glovebox: "immense bravado, extraordinary waste, and literally cosmic presumptuousness." Musk is a showman (he once parked a Falcon 1 outside FAA headquarters); Bezos bought over 300,000 acres of West Texas through shell companies named after explorers (Cabot, Cook, Clark) and told staff in 2004: "Be the tortoise... and not the hare." Blue Origin's motto is Gradatim ferociter, "step by step, ferociously," under a crest of turtles on a globe, "as if a fifteenth-century cosmography walked into a Harry Potter fanzine." Musk channels Star Wars; Bezos channels Star Trek (Amazon was nearly "MakeItSo.com," and in 2021 he flew 90-year-old William Shatner). "Every time you buy shoes," Bezos said, "you're helping Blue Origin."
Two astrotopias with one premise: the future lies off Earth
Musk: life on Mars
In his 2016 manifesto Musk, following Robert Zubrin, treats Earth as a ticking bomb (asteroid, nuclear war, rogue AI) and Venus as hell, so Mars it is, then other star systems before the Sun swells. "I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually... there will be some doomsday event." His dates keep slipping (2020, 2025, then about 2030), aiming at a million people by 2050. A $10 billion ticket should fall to $200,000, "the median cost of a house," with cargo every 26 months on an interplanetary railroad.
Musk's Mars logic as Rubenstein reconstructs it: disaster drives the exit.
Asked why not fix Earth, Musk has said "Fuck Earth." Given SpaceX's damage to coastal habitats and his own AI investments, Rubenstein likens him to Nietzsche's priest, who "heals his flock by making them sick in the first place." Musk grew up wealthy and white under apartheid, then left for the mythic new beginnings of North America; Mars repeats the move. His is "utopianism without the utopia": unlike Plato, More or Marx, he offers no social blueprint, only freedom from Earth, regulation, gravity and, for the species, death. Utopia means "no place," and vagueness keeps it perfect.
Bezos: sitting in a tin can
Bezos thinks Mars is awful: "Earth is the best one"; live in Antarctica for three years first, "a garden paradise compared to Mars." Where Musk corrects Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot" ("This is false. Mars."), Bezos reveres it, naming Blue Origin for Earth. His crisis is energy: a growing, modernizing population will hit planetary limits within a century. Efficiency cannot fix finitude; rationing and population control are "totally at odds with a free society," and sustainability would be "dull. I want my great-great-grandchildren to be using more energy per capita than I do."
Bezos's O'Neill-inspired plan: move heavy industry off Earth into orbiting colonies.
Rubenstein sees Fredric Jameson's line confirmed: "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Publics trust these firms because their products work: one survey found more confidence in Amazon than in almost any US institution, including the military. Meanwhile Starlink crowds low orbit (even into Amazon Kuiper's allotment), debris travels at 18,000 mph, and the best clean-up idea so far is "a harpoon."
Private space
| Year | Step toward commercial space |
|---|---|
| 2003 | SpaceX trucks a Falcon 1 to Washington to get noticed |
| 2008 | SpaceX holds $1.6 billion in federal contracts |
| 2010 | Obama cancels Constellation and hands launch to industry to "accelerate the pace of innovations" |
| 2015 | Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act: US citizens (including corporations) may own and sell resources they "recover" from asteroids and other bodies |
| 2019 | Pence: back to the Moon "by any means necessary"; commercial rockets if NASA cannot "step up" |
| 2020 | Trump calls space America's "Manifest Destiny" |
Geek aesthetics and rival magicians
Musk's Roadster carried more than Starman. The glovebox held Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Asimov's Foundation; the soundtrack looped Bowie. Rubenstein reads the package as nostalgia for a teenage future: rockets, glam rock and free-market infinity. In the early 2000s, while Musk filed antitrust suits against NASA, the Air Force, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, Bezos quietly assembled West Texas ranches under shell companies named for explorers (Cabot, Cook, Clark), over 300,000 acres. Park rangers at Mother Neff State Park near Waco warn visitors that something sounding like the end of the world is probably SpaceX.
Rival magician brands: Musk vs Bezos as Rubenstein pairs them.
Bezos's crest shows turtles on a globe under a cruciform sun and a winged hourglass with the sand run out. He demands full-paragraph memos, cites Tolkien, Verne, Ian M. Banks, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson and, rarely among the astropreneurial canon, A Wrinkle in Time. He nearly named Amazon MakeItSo.com after Picard; his dog is Kamala (after a Star Trek empath); one Texas shell was Zefram LLC, after the warp-drive inventor who contacted the Vulcans. In 2021 he flew William Shatner, then 90. Musk actualizes Star Wars; Bezos cultivates the Enterprise.
In 2014 the Explorers Club honoured both men at the same Waldorf dinner, over a "danger-menu" of goat penis and alligator. Bezos joked about checking for cockroach in his teeth. Rubenstein's gloss: "classical sci-fi fan meets gamer meets Rockefeller meets Indiana Jones."
Doomsday math and Club Med Mars
Musk's Venus dismissal is concrete: about 850 °F (455 °C) with sulfuric-acid "rain." His ticket math moves from $10 billion round-trip on conventional tech to $200,000 once Starship is fully reusable, "the median cost of a house," every 26 months on an "interplanetary railroad." The grim pitch ("good chance you'll die") coexists with the fun pitch: a 100-person "Big Fucking Rocket," zero-g games, movies, lecture halls, cabins and a restaurant. Who staffs it? He once suggested those who cannot pay could work it off: indenture as the custodial class.
Musk ticket math as the book reconstructs it
Terraforming rivals Musk's nukes: Zubrin favours halocarbon "greenhousing" or engineered bacteria; Michio Kaku suggests importing methane from Titan. Lucianne Walkowicz notes a nuked Mars would stay too dry for rain and turn toxic; Roscosmos put the missile count above 10,000. Musk's reply on Twitter: "No problem." Walkowicz's deeper cut: we cannot reliably manage the biosystems of the oxygenated planet we already have, so promising to "warm up" Mars is theatre.
Asked why not fix Earth, Musk has laughed "Fuck Earth." Rubenstein links the line to SpaceX habitat damage and to his own AI investments, then to Nietzsche's priest who heals by first making the flock sick. The apartheid childhood (rich, white, then Canada and America as mythic new beginnings) is offered as pattern, not proof: Mars as another escape from a racially divided past. Classic utopians (Plato, Thomas More, Marx) sketched classes, money and law; Musk offers "utopianism without the utopia," only freedom from Earth, regulation, gravity and species death. U-topia means "no place"; vagueness preserves perfection.
Bezos's energy gospel and O'Neill's pods
Bezos's limit is energy, not asteroids. Efficiency cannot beat finitude; rationing and population control are "totally at odds with a free society"; sustainability would be "dull." He wants great-great-grandchildren using more energy per capita. Rubenstein cites the early-nineties Marxist adage (via Jameson): easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Rather than redistribute or redesign, Bezos exports the system: Moon bases with solar panels, lunar water split into fuel, asteroid metals, then miles-long rotating cylinders at Lagrange points, "Maui on its best day," no storms, no mosquitoes (O'Neill's promise). Earth becomes a "planetary park." A trillion people means "a thousand Mozarts... Einsteins" and, she adds, a thousand Hitlers. He builds New Shepard, New Glenn and Blue Moon so future "astro-Zuckerbergs" can invent; she notes he stops his infrastructure list at internet, banks and post, forgetting the custodial and food labour that also made Facebook and Amazon possible.
Public trust tracks product reliability: a college paper calls Tesla "saving the planet by being awesome"; Foer reports greater confidence in Amazon than in nearly any US institution, including the military. Meanwhile Starlink crowds altitudes reserved for Amazon's Kuiper, debris hits 18,000 mph, and clean-up hopes rest on "a harpoon."
Neoliberal space and the Old Book
Privatization, she says, is neoliberal deregulation. Two turns matter: Obama's Tax Day 2010 Kennedy Space Center speech cancelling Constellation and shifting launch to industry to "accelerate the pace of innovations," and the bipartisan 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act letting US "citizens" (including corporations) own recovered space resources. SpaceX already held $1.6 billion in contracts by end-2008. Pence's 2019 "by any means necessary" and "step up" speech, followed by a Washington Post jab that he was "boldly sending America back to where man has gone before," wraps the privatisation in Psalm 139 and "the Old Book," a phrase she finds only among nineteenth-century revivalists. Trump's "Manifest Destiny" names the doctrine openly. Even unbelieving engineers, she concludes, work inside a claim the Old Book still underwrites: the universe is ours.
Policy turns that privatised the heavens
Creation and Conquest
Her family's Passover Seder interrupts itself (for Palestine, refugees and Black lives), and her grandfather asked why anyone should care about ancient wanderers who "decided to make up a god." Her answer: following the biblical scholar Michael Prior, "colonizers invariably seek out some ideological principle to justify their actions," and the more violent the project, the loftier the ideal. Musk's "light of consciousness" fits the pattern. We cannot understand Western politics, ethics or science, she claims, without the Bible.
The sacred roots of secular culture
Nietzsche argued that Christianity made us nihilists: through the doctrine of sin, it taught us to deny this world while waiting for one that does not exist (she hears an echo in Musk's Mars). Science, he insisted, is not religion's antagonist but its heir: monkish lab hours, belief in one eternal truth "out there," a priesthood with its own language, and new origin myths. Musk: "Physics is simply the search for truth. Nothing is more rigorous." Rubenstein's claim is narrower than Nietzsche's: the institutional sciences that serve military and financial goals have taken on imperial Christianity's world-denying ideology, "an ideology that insists it's not an ideology but just the truth."
Lynn White's chain: from the defeat of animism to ecological crisis
Fill the Earth and subdue it
Human supremacy is everywhere: dogs and chimps flew before people, mice test our drugs, elk have no say at zoning hearings and meadows no legal standing. Individuals may love nature, but nearly all modern institutions assume the world is ours to use.
Lynn White's argument: a dominion reading of Genesis cleared the way for exploitation.
| Text | What it establishes |
|---|---|
| Genesis 1:26-28 | Humans alone bear God's "image"; "fill the earth and subdue it... have dominion" over all creatures |
| Genesis 2 | A separate, older story: God sculpts the human from dust, plants a garden for him, has him name the animals, and makes woman from his rib and "for" him |
| 1 Corinthians 11 | Paul: man is "the image and reflection of God," woman "the reflection of man" |
| Combined hierarchy | God over humans, men over women, humans over nature; then the covenant adds God's people over other nations |
The Canaan complex
Hearing Pence's Psalm, she fumed that America has "a Canaan complex": "an infinite Canaan. Everything we see is ours." (Her sister could not remember what Canaan was.) God promises Abram descendants like the stars and land "from the river of Egypt to... the Euphrates," listing ten peoples already living there: "up and out," stars and land together.
The Canaan complex: a promised-land story that casts natives as obstacles.
Archaeology finds no evidence of the conquest; the story was written during or after the Babylonian exile (about 597-539 BCE) as a defeated people's fantasy. But the Osage scholar Robert Allen Warrior calls it a "narrative problem": it went on to justify expelling Indigenous peoples in North America, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, Eastern Europe and Palestine. "The Lord your God is with you wherever you go" (Joshua 1:9) is comforting alone but terrifying before a massacre, and it is the lineage of Pence's "His right hand will hold us fast." Declaring a divine mandate to land "has historically been enough to make it so."
Inheritance at the Seder table
The chapter opens in family ritual. When her great-grandmother could no longer host Passover, the Haggadahs passed to Rubenstein's father Joshua, a cheerful agnostic who runs the Seder with "irreverence, gratitude, and critical interjections." Siblings interrupt "Next year... may the whole house of Israel be free" with Palestine, Tibet, Venezuela, refugees and "may the police stop killing Black people." A family story has her grandfather teaching four-year-old Joshua the wrong Four Questions text; the boy rose and recited "Religion is the opiate of the people. You have nothing to lose but your chains." The same grandfather later grumbled why anyone should care "where a bunch of people wandered thousands of years ago when they decided to make up a god," then came anyway for the politics and Serena Williams. The answer she builds for him, and for the space reader: colonizers "invariably seek out some ideological principle," and loftier ideals license harsher violence. Michael Prior is her biblical-studies guide; Musk's "light of consciousness" is the current instance.
From family Seder interruptions to colonial method
Francis of Assisi as White's alternative
White did not stop at blame. He proposed Francis of Assisi as a "patron saint for ecologists," a Christian who spoke to Brother Sun and Sister Moon as kin rather than inventory. Rubenstein notes that churches now echo Francis (Laudato Si', Bartholomew, joint 2021 statements) while lacking the power they once had to set the axioms of science and property. The doctrines of human supremacy and dead land have become "universal" common sense for agencies and firms that will not consult an encyclical before the next Boca Chica launch. The Canaan complex then supplies the land theology: Abram promised stars and a stretch "from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates," with ten peoples already listed as living there. Conquest refrains in Numbers, Deuteronomy and Joshua weld people-killing to shrine-smashing. Archaeology finds no conquest layer; the tale is an exilic fantasy that nonetheless became, for Robert Allen Warrior, a "narrative problem" reused from Ireland to Palestine. Comfort verses ("The Lord your God is with you wherever you go") turn terrifying beside massacre, and that is the lineage she hears in Pence's "right hand will hold us fast."
White's fork: dominion reading vs Franciscan kinship
The American Promised Land
Sacred symbols of a secular nation
In the musical 1776, Franklin calls the eagle "a scavenger, a thief, and a coward" and the turkey "a truly noble bird." The eagle won and the turkey became Thanksgiving dinner: "the sacred and the sacrificed." To call something sacred is to set it apart and protect it. For the Great Seal, Adams proposed Hercules choosing Virtue, but Franklin and Jefferson both chose Exodus: Franklin, Pharaoh's army drowning in the Red Sea under a pillar of fire, with the motto "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God"; Jefferson, the Israelites led through the wilderness by cloud and fire.
The American analogy: casting the colonies as God's New Israel
Washington was Moses, Joshua or both; America would be "a light to the nations." A 1557 letter to Philip II called America "the Land of Promise, possessed by idolaters, the Amorite, Amalekite, Moabite, Canaanite," to be put "to the knife." Yale's president Ezra Stiles (1783) held that Native Americans literally descended from Canaanites who fled Joshua on Phoenician ships. Christian overlays added "heathen," "slaves of the devil" and Revelation's New Jerusalem, plus a third option between expulsion and destruction, conversion, though a Spanish jurist asked in 1544 how to convert "barbarians" without first conquering them.
This land is whose land?
The Doctrine of Discovery: how planting a cross or flag became a legal claim.
| Document | Claim |
|---|---|
| Romanus Pontifex (1455) | Gives Portugal African lands and trade, and licenses reducing Africans "to perpetual slavery" |
| Inter caetera (1493) | Alexander VI grants Spain all lands "found and to be found" west and south, "out of the fullness of our apostolic power" as Christ's vicar; the peaceful, naked inhabitants seem ready for conversion, and the land holds "gold, spices"... "Wherefore" bring them under your sway |
| Requerimiento (1513) | Read in Latin from ship or shore: God made all humans; God entrusted the world to Peter and the popes; the pope gave this land to Spain; submit and convert, or face war, slavery and "all the mischief and damage that [we] can" |
Rubenstein asks students to imagine an alien landing at the end of their street and shouting such claims in an unknown language. "I think they'd probably say no. And maybe that the alien was nuts." The Cenú people concluded that "the pope must have been drunk." Note how the inclusive opening, all humans as children of one God, forces Natives into the conquerors' story and rules out their own account of whom the land belongs to.
The power of nothing
The conquest texts' obsessive repetition betrays ethical anxiety, and so do the landing rituals. Mircea Eliade read proclamations and planted crosses or flags as re-creations of the world: reciting the creation story makes conquest look like cosmic order and resistance futile, while a vertical marker ties horizontal expansion to heaven's authority ("if you want to seem powerful, put a tall thing in the ground"). Conquerors imitated God, making a world out of a "wilderness" they defined as nothing.
Destiny made manifest
In 1763 the Paxton Boys murdered twenty Susquehannock people at Conestoga, calling them "red Canaanites." Franklin was appalled that they justified it "with the Scriptures in their Hands and Mouths"; Paine denied the Bible could be read literally by anyone with moral sense; Jefferson cut his own Bible down to Jesus' ethics. Yet all three fed the New Israel idea, and Paine's secularized chosenness anticipated manifest destiny.
Manifest destiny: providence language turned westward expansion into fate.
Unlike Abraham's covenant, this election is "manifest," visible, earned by government, geography and "beneficence"
Andrew Jackson: "a few thousand savages"; William Henry Harrison: "the haunt of a few wretched savages"
Settlers claim Natives "let their resources go to waste," failing to "till the earth"; reservations shrink whenever their land proves valuable
1854: Duwamish leader Chief Seattle: "Your God is not our God. Your God loves your people and hates mine... Our people are ebbing away"
2020: Trump revives "manifest destiny in the stars"
Seattle's words show not the power of God but the power of God-language. What matters is not what conquerors believed but what their myths did: "God's New Israel" enslaved and displaced its way across a continent while proclaiming its kindness, then aimed at the heavens.
Great Seal, turkey and the New Israel chart
Franklin preferred the turkey to the eagle ("a scavenger, a thief, and a coward"); the eagle became the Seal and the turkey Thanksgiving dinner: "the sacred and the sacrificed." Adams wanted Hercules choosing Virtue; Franklin and Jefferson both sketched Exodus scenes for the reverse of the Seal, with Franklin's motto "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God." The analogy table hardens: England as Egypt, Charles I as Pharaoh, the Atlantic as Red Sea, North America as Canaan, Indigenous nations as Canaanites. A 1557 letter to Philip II already called America "the Land of Promise, possessed by idolaters." Yale's Ezra Stiles (1783) held that Native Americans literally descended from Canaanites who fled Joshua on Phoenician ships. Conversion joined expulsion and destruction as a third option; a Spanish jurist in 1544 asked how to convert "barbarians" without first conquering them.
Proposed Great Seal cast list
Requerimiento pedagogy and Eliade's vertical marker
She asks students to imagine an alien alien landing on their street and reading ownership claims in an unknown tongue. The Cenú said the pope "must have been drunk." The inclusive opening (all humans as children of one God) is the trap: it forces Natives into the conquerors' cosmology and erases their own land stories. Mircea Eliade reads planted crosses and flags as re-creation rites: recite creation, and conquest looks like cosmic order; plant a tall thing, and horizontal seizure borrows heaven's vertical authority. Conquerors imitate God, making "world" out of a "wilderness" they defined as nothing. The Paxton Boys (1763) murdered twenty Susquehannock as "red Canaanites" with "Scriptures in their Hands"; Franklin was appalled; Paine and Jefferson cut or moralised the text; yet all three still fed New Israel rhetoric that manifest destiny later secularised into visible, earned election.
Claim ritual: speech, marker, heaven's warrant
The Final Frontier
A widely retold story: while NASA tested the lunar module on Navajo land, a Navajo singer recorded a message for "the moon people." Translated, it said: "watch you guys carefully, because you might screw things up on the moon the way you have on Earth." There are no moon people, but the joke works as mournful satire of a strategy already being replayed. Even in the 17th century, writers defended the idea of Moon voyages by citing Columbus.
Luna Americana
Sputnik (October 1957; then Laika) shocked a sky that had held only natural objects for billions of years. Hannah Arendt: "If I were the moon, I would take offense." Lyndon Johnson: Rome had roads, Britain ships, America planes; "Now the Communists have established a foothold in outer space." He sought "the position of total control over Earth." Kennedy set the deadline ("before this decade is out") and argued "If the Soviets control space they can control earth."
Finding Tomorrowland
Disney, building his Anaheim park in 1954 (Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, and an empty Tomorrowland), found his answer in Collier's space issue, whose lead article was "Crossing the Last Frontier" by Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi brought over by Operation Paperclip. Von Braun had become a born-again Christian who saw spreading the Gospel to "the heavens themselves" as America's duty, a vertical manifest destiny.
How von Braun and Disney sold spaceflight to Cold War America.
This space is our space
Conquest rituals then and now: text, marker, claim
On Christmas Eve 1968 the crew of Apollo 8 (Anders, Borman, Lovell), told to "say something appropriate," read Genesis 1 from lunar orbit. Why Genesis? Soviet propaganda had Gagarin saying "I see no God up here!" and credited atheism for Soviet space success; reading the creation story, with humans given dominion, announced a "Judeo-Christian" victory and a claim: "This space... is our space." Apollo 11's flag, ordered by Congress, had a rod sewn in so it would appear to wave (it bent, which looked even better), while Collins circled in the command module Columbia. Six flags were planted in all. The Outer Space Treaty bars national appropriation, so Congress called the flag symbolic.
Missions of mass distraction
Bezos's July 2021 flight came amid wildfires, floods and the Delta variant. His defence was "We have to build a road to space... so that our kids and their kids can build a future," echoing God's "throughout your generations forever" to Abraham and every frontier promise since. "When the ideology hits this hard, it's probably concealing something sinister": exploited labour, climate damage, tax avoidance. O'Neill's The High Frontier (1976) opens with a middle-class couple's letter praising shopping on a Hawaiian-climate cylinder; Zubrin warns that the West will decay without a new frontier. Bezos and Musk are just the first rich enough to try, helped by Obama's turn to commercial providers. Taxpayers still fund the contracts: NASA's $2.89 billion lunar lander award to SpaceX prompted Bezos to lobby for a second ($10 billion was proposed via the "Endless Frontier Act") while pandemic relief cheques were $600. Space tourism is odious, but it is "just the tip of an even more threatening spaceberg."
Rubenstein's sequence for space power: commerce, then empire, then favours to commerce.
| Report | Rationale for space |
|---|---|
| Eisenhower Science Advisory Committee, Introduction to Outer Space (1958) | Four factors: exploration (to "go where no one has gone before"), defence, national prestige, science, all resting on long-range rocketry and military spending |
| Reagan's National Commission on Space, Pioneering the Space Frontier (1986) | Adds settlement beyond Earth and a free-market space economy; opens with Columbus and "virgin lands," omitting enslaved and Indigenous Americans |
| Senator Ted Cruz (2018) | "I predict the first trillionaire will be made in space... as vast and as promising a frontier as the New World" |
Commerce then empire then favours to commerce: the Virginia Company and East India Company model, with resources and, historically, built on enslaved labour.
The infinite front
Early 2020: Washington National Cathedral blesses its official King James Bible, praying for the president "who looked to the heavens"; complaints from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and the ADL
May 2020: recruitment video "Purpose": "Maybe your purpose on this planet isn't on this planet"; one day earlier, Netflix's satire Space Force (Steve Carell) dropped its trailer
Late 2020: second video "Origins": explosions, "enemies," space "absolutely critical to the modern way of war," fighting with "no up or down... nowhere to hide"
2020: doctrine Spacepower: Guardians are "warfighters"; "it is the art of space warfare that gives science its relevance"
Satire, she notes, works more as liberal catharsis than as change; the real force grew meaner after the parody. All this sits awkwardly with the 1967 treaty's "peaceful purposes," which sets up the next chapter.
Screwing up the Moon and the new New World
In the late 1960s NASA leased Navajo land to test the lunar module. Versions multiply into legend; the gist is that a Navajo singer asked an official to carry a recorded message to the people of the Moon. When pressed for a translation, the chief stalled, then said: tell them to watch you carefully, "because you might screw things up on the moon the way you have on Earth." If the line lands as a joke, Rubenstein says, it is because Apollo seemed to prove there are no "moon people" to infect, enslave or displace. The singer's message to "the Indians of outer space" is mournful satire: the imperial game restarted the moment America aimed skyward.
Navajo warning and the frontier reopen.
Chapter 3 traced America-as-Canaan. In 1890 the Census Bureau declared the continental frontier "closed." Half a century later, politicians and rocket scientists proclaimed it "open" again. The Cold War did not invent the planetary analogy: seventeenth-century popularisers already compared the Moon and planets to the Americas after Galileo, brandishing Columbus against anyone who thought travel to Mars ridiculous. Outer space became a new New World of adventure, danger, freedom, opportunity and "endless promise," with the same sacred overlay that had baptised the first New World.
Eisenhower's four factors and Reagan's pioneers
Months after Sputnik, Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee issued "Introduction to Outer Space." It listed four factors of "importance, urgency, and inevitability":
Eisenhower 1958 four factors, military at the root
- Exploration ("the compelling urge... to go where no one has gone before," later Roddenberry fodder)
- Defense
- National prestige
- Science
The authors admit the bundle is military at root: "the quest for ultra long-range rockets" funded modern space science. Three decades later Reagan's National Commission on Space, with Gerard O'Neill and Neil Armstrong among its members, added settlements and a free-market space economy and titled the report Pioneering the Space Frontier. The preface homages Columbus as "prelude," celebrates "virgin lands" and "freedom," and erases forced Black arrivals and Indigenous presence. Wealthy white America having "exhausted" those lands, the committee demanded another frontier "to breathe" and "to make money." Hence: "we must stimulate individual initiative and free enterprise in space." Territory and capital loop: economic development builds settlements that develop the economy.
Kennedy's "new frontier" speech (1960) and Johnson's "Manifest Destiny in the stars" (1964) keep the sacred-secular braid. Johnson warned that whoever controls "that space" could "control the Earth." The Space Force, Rubenstein concludes, is less a rupture than the military factor made explicit after decades of soft language.
Tomorrowland's opposite and the infinite front
Disney's Tomorrowland sits across from Frontierland for a reason: the promised future is sold as a cleaned-up western. Cruz's "trillionaire" quip, the "infinite front" of endless expansion, and the claim that space is "ours" all recycle the empty-land logic. Mass distraction is part of the package: spectacle launches and celebrity flights keep public eyes on the fireworks while contracts, Accords and Force budgets harden the extractive frame. The frontier, she insists, was never just geography. It was a story that made taking look like destiny.
Luna Americana, Tomorrowland and mass distraction
Luna Americana names the Cold War reboot: after the 1890 "closed" frontier, Sputnik reopened destiny talk. Seventeenth-century writers had already cast planets as new Americas; mid-century presidents made the analogy policy. Disney's Tomorrowland faces Frontierland so the future can be sold as a scrubbed western. "This space is our space" and Johnson's control-the-Earth warning supply the sovereignty tone the Space Force later institutionalises.
Spectacle loop that protects first movers
Missions of mass distraction are not side effects. Celebrity flights, livestreamed static fires and "trillionaire" jokes keep attention on spectacle while Accords, launch contracts and Force budgets lock the extractive frame. The infinite front is the promise that expansion never ends, so Earth justice can wait. Rubenstein's counter: an infinite front with finite debris belts and finite political attention is a story that protects first movers, not "all mankind."
Whose Space Is It?
Leaping for the species
Armstrong insisted he said "one small step for a man"; without the "a," it is a small step for man and a giant leap for man. NASA's Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing aimed for "an historic step forward for all mankind that has been accomplished by the United States of America"; it considered a UN flag, chose Old Glory, and Congress then banned non-US flags on US-funded missions. Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon" The same pattern holds now: taxpayers fund contracts for astropreneurs who avoid taxes, and Bezos's roughly $1.5 billion a year on Blue Origin could fix Flint's water.
Common space
The UN created COPUOS (Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space) in 1959, with scientific-technical and legal subcommittees. Knowing how frontier rules (terra nullius) had enriched colonizers, it tried to make space a res communis (common thing), not a res nullius (empty thing).
Two legal readings of space: shared by all, or open to whoever takes it.
| Instrument | Key terms | Weakness |
|---|---|---|
| Outer Space Treaty (1967) | Space is "the province of all mankind," used "for the benefit of all peoples"; "not subject to national appropriation" (Art. 2); no nuclear weapons or bases on celestial bodies (Art. 4) | Space is "free for exploration and use by all States," when in 1967 only the USSR, US and France had satellites, so freedom undercuts equality; silent on individuals and corporations (Dennis Hope's loophole); military personnel allowed for "peaceful purposes"; weapons not banned in orbit |
| Moon Agreement (1979) | Moon and resources are "the common heritage of mankind" (Arvid Pardo's phrase from the law of the sea); equitable sharing, especially with developing states; an international regime once mining becomes feasible | In force in 1984 with only nine parties, none spacefaring; the US signed but the Senate never ratified |
| US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (2015) | US citizens, including corporations, own resources they extract | Unilateral; a mining CEO likened it to the Homestead Act |
| Executive Order 13914 (April 2020) | "the United States does not view [outer space] as a commons" | Says openly what US policy had long implied |
The Space Force exploits Article 4's gap and cites self-defence (UN Charter Art. 51) against Russian and Chinese anti-satellite programs, arguing that only force can secure "unfettered access" for peaceful commerce: the letter of the treaty, perhaps, but not its spirit.
The circle game
The circle game: why go to space?
The 2020 US Space Policy begins with "stimulate economic growth" and ends with "advance economic freedom"; the 2018 Space Force report's first mission is to "protect our economy." Eisenhower's four reasons (exploration, defence, prestige, science) have gained a fifth "to rule them all": money. NASA's Artemis (to land "the first woman and first person of color on the Moon," an outpost by 2028, Mars in the late 2030s) never says why, only that it keeps "America... at the forefront." The circular answer: we establish a presence to get resources that sustain the presence.
Bounded in a nutshell: the garbage ring
For 4.5 billion years Earth had one satellite. Sixty-five years after Sputnik: over 7,000 satellites, more than half dead, at 18,000 mph, plus lost tools, urine, rocket stages and Gene Roddenberry's ashes. Apollo left 96 bags of human waste on the Moon to offset the weight of rocks.
Kessler syndrome: debris collisions make more debris until orbits close.
Musk presents Starlink as salvation for rural and Indigenous communities, as pesticide makers once said they fed the world. Beta service cost $99 a month plus $499 for "Dishy McFlatface"; satellite internet stays dearer than ground networks; African agencies prefer their own satellites. Jah: Indigenous peoples with dark skies use them for the seasons, "Their skies are now changed forever. And nobody asked them." Disaster means stars (astra) out of place. Since debris threatens everyone, including the Space Force, might the garbage prove space is a commons after all?
Uncommon space and the Moon Treaty's teeth
Militarisation and appropriation were visible the moment Armstrong and Aldrin planted the flag. COPUOS spent the 1970s drafting the Moon Treaty (Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies) to fill OST gaps. It opens by seeking "to prevent the Moon from becoming an area of international conflict," repeats peaceful-use and non-nuclear rules, then defines "for the benefit of all."
Moon Treaty Article 11 versus Accords practice.
Article 11 declares the Moon and its resources "the common heritage of mankind," a phrase coined by Maltese ambassador Arvid Pardo (1967) for the deep seabed during Law of the Sea talks: share retrieval so the scramble does not make "the strong stronger, the rich richer." The Moon Treaty bars appropriation of bodies, parts, or "natural resources in place"; extracted materials face "equitable sharing," especially with developing states; and an international regime must form "as soon as such exploitation is about to become feasible." To Rubenstein this sounds like keeping the "for all mankind" promise. Spacefaring states, led by the US, refused: no major power ratified it. The US later argued that non-parties need not treat lunar resources as common heritage, clearing a path for the 2015 Competitiveness Act and the Accords' "safety zones."
Bounded in a nutshell and the garbage ring
Bezos's answer to finitude is cylinders "bounded in a nutshell" yet infinite in ambition: O'Neill habitats as Club Med for a trillion. Rubenstein's counter is the garbage ring. Kessler's cascade (1978) is not metaphor; collisions at 18,000 mph multiply fragments that threaten every altitude band Starlink and Kuiper want. Clean-up concepts (nets, lasers, harpoons) remain unproven at constellation scale. The commons problem is physical: whoever fills LEO first imposes risk on everyone else, including the astronomers whose "monkish wonder" she wants to protect. Wall-E's trash-Earth is the soft cultural twin of the same warning.
The Accords' safety zones, she argues, function as de facto appropriation without saying "sovereignty." Combined with Space Force budgets and commercial ownership of recovered resources, "uncommon space" replaces the common heritage the Moon Treaty tried to lock in. COPUOS's 2026 consolidated draft on space resources is the next arena for that fight; without an enforcement body, soft law still favours first movers.
Soft law versus hard refusal
The Accords' safety zones avoid the word sovereignty while creating keep-out practicalities around first movers' ops. Combined with the 2015 US statute on recovered resources and Space Force budgets, they operationalise what the Moon Treaty tried to block. Rubenstein's diagnostic: when major powers refuse common-heritage teeth, "for the benefit of all countries" shrinks to press language. Watch COPUOS resource talks for whether equitable sharing returns as binding text or stays hortatory.
How uncommon space replaced common heritage
The Rights of Rocks
Inhuman resources
In spring 1985 Bezos, a devotee of Gerard O'Neill and head of Princeton's Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), told about thirty students how to turn an asteroid into a habitat: melt its core with solar mirrors, insert a "massive tungsten tube," flood it, and let the steam inflate it "like a balloon." A woman stood up, shouted, and walked out. Bezos: "Did she really just defend the inalienable rights of barren rocks?" In reporter Christian Davenport's telling Bezos gets the last word, and a rock is just a rock: a resource, raw material until processed and sold.
Sacred spaces and antimineralism
| Uluru (Northern Territory) | St. John the Divine (New York) | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Ancestral beings at creation (Anangu: Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara) | Human hands: granite and limestone, neo-Gothic |
| Visitor behaviour | Decades of climbing, graffiti, golf from the summit, stones taken home; climbing chain removed only in 2019 | Velvet ropes respected, hushed tones, no climbing or souvenirs |
| Why the difference | Familiarity with Christianity; plain racism toward non-imperial peoples; and antimineralism, valuing rocks that humans and markets have shaped over rocks left where geology and ancestors placed them | |
The gift shop's twin bumper stickers ("I climbed Uluru!" / "I didn't climb Uluru!") show the clash of virtues. Following Lynn White (Chapter 2), the "victory over paganism" erased the many local views in which rivers are persons and mountains ancestors: "the only way you can take everything you want from Earth is by insisting Earth has no wants of its own." Today many Christians (Standing Rock, Line 3, Extinction Rebellion, Pope Francis against creatures as "mere objects... a source of profit") object, while atheist billionaires now hold the old "dominion" line. Rubenstein reads the Princeton student's anger sympathetically: a space enthusiast, a woman in 1980s male science, on Lenni-Lenape land, unwilling to export Earth's mine shafts to an unspoiled solar system.
Cosmic gold rush
The Von Braun Paradigm (shuttle, station, Moon base, Mars) has guided US policy since his 1950s Collier's essays; he called space "the endless frontier," with minerals mined "on the moon, in the asteroid belt... in the next century." Frontier "fresh beginnings" always cost someone: his V-2 works drew some 60,000 concentration-camp prisoners, about 20,000 of whom died. Wendell Berry on O'Neill: what is remarkable is "not its novelty... but its conventionality," the old "idea of Progress" with "its compulsive salesmanship."
The space-mining pitch and the earthly problems it repeats.
The diabolical 4-D puzzle of space mining
Terraformal dreaming
Mars averages around -80 F (-62 C), poles reach -220 F (-140 C), and its air is 95% CO2 at very low pressure. It has toxic fine dust, planet-wide dust storms and no magnetic field. Unprotected, Ross Andersen writes, "your blood would turn to steam, killing you within 30 seconds." Gwynne Shotwell calls it a "fixer-upper." Robert Zubrin proposes deliberately dumping fluorocarbon super-greenhouse gases; others suggest mirrors, soot, lichens or Musk's nukes. Christopher McKay estimates about 100 years to get to Alaskan spring; breathable air would need a planet of microbes (Margulis and Lovelock) and 10,000-100,000 years, living meanwhile in "domains the size of shopping malls."
Rolston's grounds for valuing lifeless places, set against terraforming.
Younger terraformers stress salvation: Musk's "light of consciousness"; geologist Martyn Fogg's flight to "a more benevolent locale." Yet known exoplanets are scorched, stripped by stellar winds or flare-blasted around red dwarfs; Sagan's pale blue dot remains the most benevolent place. Lucianne Walkowicz: if we can bend Mars, "we should be able to surmount the far easier task of preserving the habitability of the Earth." We already know the fixes for Earth. Gentler ecopoiesis would seed microbes, making Mars, said Margulis, "a global cesspool... smelling like sewer gas." Sagan: "Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes" (though David Grinspoon notes we might not recognize Martian life).
Cosmic vandalism
Sally Ride told Gloria Steinem in 1983 that industry would take over once it saw money in space; Steinem did not reply. Natalie Treviño notes even the OST "binds celestial bodies to exploitation." Holmes Rolston III turns the question round: not how "this astronomical world can belong to us" but "how we belong to it" and "whether it belongs to itself." Nature is neither subject nor object but projective: it makes projects, from microbes to comets.
Everyone's gone to the Moon
| Actor | Lunar plan (as of 2021) |
|---|---|
| NASA (Artemis) | Permanent outpost by 2028; water to rocket fuel; the Moon as launchpad |
| China | Far-side rover with a mini biosphere (cotton, potatoes, fruit flies, silkworms); base by 2030 |
| Russia, Japan, India, ESA | Colony by 2030; "Moon Valley"; landers; a "Moon Village" with China (the US is barred by the 2011 Wolf Amendment) |
| Companies | iSpace "new business opportunities"; Moon Express's "a gas station in the sky" |
The Moon Treaty requires preserving the Moon's "existing balance," but no spacefaring nation is a party. Planetary Protection rules put the Moon in Category I: "no protection... is warranted." The Artemis Accords (2020) do protect "outer space heritage," but only human and robotic landing sites and artifacts, not the Sea of Tranquility: Uluru versus the cathedral again. Marshall Savage: "We could wage unlimited nuclear warfare on the surface of the Moon" and hardly tell. Ceridwen Dovey replies that we can damage its fragile exosphere and surface.
Kinship
Rubenstein does not insist rocks have rights; asking the question shows some things may not be property. For the Bawaka people, "outer space" is Sky Country, home of ancestors reached along the River of Stars (the Milky Way); they object to debris that may block the ancestors' passage. Navajo Father Sky, Skidi Pawnee star parents, Zuni kin, Franciscan Sister Moon and pagan Artemis (TikTok "baby witches" who hexed the Moon in 2020 angered their elders) all point to celestial kinship. Inuit, told of Apollo, laughed: their shamans "go all the time... The issue is not whether we go to visit our relatives, but how we treat them." What would Artemis mine?
Rolston's grades and the kinship turn
Holmes Rolston III graded extraterrestrial value: lifeless sites may still deserve wonder; microbial life raises the moral bar; complex ecosystems would demand something closer to reverence. Rubenstein uses the ladder against "inhuman resources" talk that treats every ice pocket as propellant stock. J. Baird Callicott and Aldo Leopold supply the Earth-side analogy: a land ethic expands the community of moral considerability. Applied skyward, the ethic asks whether a crater, a plume or a cryptobiotic crust is only "stuff."
Rolston-style grades of extraterrestrial value
Gold rush rhetoric (platinum-group metals, Helium-3 fantasies, water ice as "the oil of the solar system") collapses sacred and commercial language. Terraforming is the extreme case: remake a world until it suits us, then call the result "home." The Moon section gathers Indigenous protocols (Navajo, Hopi and others) that treat celestial bodies as relatives rather than real estate. Kinship is not soft metaphor; it is a governance claim: you do not strip-mine a relative.
Sacred spaces and the museum of the sky
Western law encodes "sacred" mainly as human worship sites. Rubenstein presses for a thicker category: places that orient cultures, mark calendars, or simply exist as wonders prior to use-value. National parks and World Heritage sites are imperfect Earth analogues: they still serve visitors, yet they admit that some places should resist the market. A lunar park or "keep-out" science reserve would not end all activity; it would force the Accords' safety zones to answer to something other than first-come industry. The chapter's closing wager: if we cannot imagine the Moon as kin, we will treat every next world as a quarry, and the quarry story will circle back to justify more harm on Earth.
Uluru stickers and the two sacreds
At Uluru (Ayers Rock to colonial maps), Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara caretakers asked visitors to stay at the base, skip ritual photos and leave stones alone. Tourists climbed the chain, spray-painted names over ancient paintings, stripped on forbidden ground, drove golf balls from the summit and pocketed rocks. In 2019 the parks service removed the climb chain; the struggle continues. Rubenstein recalls gift-shop bumper stickers in two stacks: one reading that Uluru is a sacred site, the other "I climbed" it. The split foreshadows lunar tourism: wonder marketed beside conquest bragging rights.
Uluru as Rubenstein's earthly mirror for lunar tourism
Von Braun paradigm and the resource key
Wernher von Braun framed space as "the endless frontier," more exciting than the New World or the American West. His four-stage "Von Braun Paradigm" (early 1950s Collier's essays) still shadows US policy:
Von Braun paradigm: four stages still shadowing policy
- Reusable space shuttle
- Orbital space station
- Permanent Moon base
- Human presence on Mars
The key, he insisted, was capturing "endless resources": Moon, asteroid belt and nearby planets would supply in-situ bases and "orbiting colonies of hundreds of thousands," plus "fresh beginnings" for a new interplanetary society. Rubenstein's retort: frontier "fresh beginnings" always began for someone else as loss.
Mars as it is, and the 100-year warm-up
Mars averages about −80 °F (−62 °C); poles can hit −220 °F (−140 °C); summer highs near 70 °F (21 °C) in places. Atmosphere is about 95% CO₂, pressure too low for Earth life, soil toxic and fine, dust devils at 30–60 mph, no magnetosphere against radiation. Ross Andersen: without a suit, "your eyes and skin would peel away like sheets of burning paper, and your blood would turn to steam, killing you within 30 seconds."
Terraforming ladder Zubrin-style, with McKay's clock
Zubrin-style terraforming starts underground, then inflatable greenhouses, then "domains the size of shopping malls," while warming toward 32 °F (0 °C) via CFCs, orbital mirrors, soot, lichens, lasers or Musk's nukes. Christopher McKay estimates about 100 years to an Alaskan spring for temperature alone; a breathable mix needs the full prebiotic cocktail (H, C, O, N, P, S plus methane, ammonia and more). Rubenstein tags the leap as terraformal dreaming that treats a world as raw clay.
Ride, Pepsi Moon and Category I
Six months after her first Challenger flight, Sally Ride told Gloria Steinem (Ms.) that NASA would need private industry once firms saw money in weightless pharmaceuticals. Steinem did not push back on record. Decades later NASA buys lunar dust from corporations. A 2012 rumor that Pepsi would laser-advertise on the Moon was false, yet it clarified the stakes: is the Moon a billboard?
From Ride's prediction to Category I neglect.
UN Moon Treaty language would preserve the Moon's "existing balance," but no major spacefaring power is bound. Planetary Protection often slots the Moon in Category I: "not of direct interest" for chemical evolution or life's origin, so "no protection... is warranted." Australia, a rare Moon Treaty party with a new space agency, has even floated withdrawal. Against that, Bawaka people of Australia's Northern Territory call the beyond Sky Country, not empty "outer" space: ancestors travel the River of Stars (Milky Way) and still witness the living. Their objections to debris and disrespect reframe Fermi and mining alike as kinship breaches.
Other Spacetimes
Where is everybody?
With about a billion trillion stars, Fermi asked why no one has visited. Declassified "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAPs) only sharpen the riddle. Afrofuturist curator Ingrid LaFleur offered an answer in 2021: "Maybe they don't like the way we're behaving"; David Grinspoon called it maybe the best resolution he'd heard. Aliens might see our space plan as First Nations saw Europe's: advance missions, outposts, extraction, colonies, cannons. Set aliens aside: does the colonial approach help the beings who certainly exist, on Earth?
The trouble with "humanity" and longtermism
Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Mbembe, Charles Mills and Saidiya Hartman show "humanity" as an abstraction that historically placed non-Europeans under European rule; Christian universalism justified conquest to save souls, as astropreneurs justify damage to save the species.
Bostrom's simulation argument (2003, after The Matrix) adds a twist: economist Robin Hanson says that if we are simulated we should be bold and entertaining, with less reason to help "the poor in Ethiopia... there is no Ethiopia." Musk's answer to Fermi: probably a simulation, or "mold in a petri dish" in an alien lab. Either way wetlands do not matter (the simulators can make more), and quantity drives out any question of the quality of life.
Omelas and Um-Helat
Two utopias, two responses
Le Guin and Jemisin: two stories on what a good society owes its victims.
In Ursula Le Guin's Omelas, every joy depends on a child locked in a basement; Le Guin teases William James for assuming "us" would refuse the deal. Most of us accept sweatshop clothes and underpaid fruit-pickers; capitalism's happiness rests on many such children. N. K. Jemisin's "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" replies: in Um-Helat a father spreads, from transmissions from our world, the idea that "some people are less important than others"; social workers kill him, then one "crouches and takes the child's hand." "There are other options." Rubenstein's irony: the stayers make other worlds; the leavers preserve the old one. Astrotopians are deeply conservative: they leave Earth to keep the world as it is. Others feel Sun Ra's "a burning need for something else"; Jayna Brown: "jump into the break... into an entirely different paradigm."
Art, perhaps
Nietzsche hoped art could make up new ways of being (though artists are easily corrupted). Le Guin, accepting the 2014 National Book Foundation medal: "Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now." Most science fiction repeats "white male explorer... meets exotic, primitive, mysterious, threatening alien" (Diné critic Lou Cornum), but some turns it upside down.
| Work or tradition | Other spacetime it opens |
|---|---|
| Indigenous Futurism (Grace Dillon) | "the Native Apocalypse... has already taken place"; survivors make new ways of being from the wreckage |
| Silko, Ceremony | A healer bundles traditional herbs with trash from the dump |
| The 6th World (film) | On a Navajo-NASA Mars mission, GMO corn dies; smuggled ancestral corn pollen saves the crew |
| Afrofuturism (Kodwo Eshun) | "recovering the histories of counter-futures"; the slave trade as alien abduction |
| Sun Ra | Saturn-born, music as the ship ("Arkestra") |
| Butler, Parables | Earthseed's "God is Change" versus a Destiny "to take root among the stars" |
| Jemisin, "Cloud Dragon Skies" | Oppressors leave for an orbital Ring; those who stay vow "to live simply" |
Taking root among the stars
Space-as-ocean rhetoric sees from the ship's bow; Afrofuturists look from the hold. Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (written early 1990s, set in a collapsing 2024) follows Lauren Oya Olamina, who founds the commune Acorn and the faith Earthseed ("God / Is Change"). In Parable of the Talents, a "Christian America" movement enslaves Acorn and seizes children, including her daughter Larkin. Olamina survives, then directs Earthseed toward its "Destiny": "to take root among the stars."
Jemisin's "Cloud Dragon Skies" reverses Earthseed: after Humanicorps' collapse, most leave for "the Ring"; Nahautu's people stay, sages teach old ways, "We no longer change the world to suit ourselves; when the world changes, we change with it." Toxins turn the sky pink with dragon-like spirals; returning colonists fire a missile to "fix" it; the dragons strike back; Nahautu ends on the Ring: "But then I look up." Rubenstein's suggestion: hold Bezos and O'Neill to their word, and let those who want endless energy and same-day shipping go, while others learn Earth's quieter limits.
Listening
From conquest to listening: the 2020 decadal white paper
In autumn 2020 Rubenstein taught "Colonizing Space" on Zoom. Astrophysicists Lucianne Walkowicz, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Erika Nesvold and Parvathy Prem were already speaking out; then in October 2020 the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey's equity working group (Frank Tavares and co-authors) issued a white paper that caught journalists' attention. Its one modest ask: community input, then willingness to "adjust [their] practices and plans," perhaps not to frack the Moon. Tlingit anthropologist Kyle Wark: "we provide for it even as it provides for us." Robin Wall Kimmerer: humans are "the younger brothers of Creation... we must look to our teachers among the other species."
Where is everybody, and who counts as humanity
Fermi's question ("Where is everybody?") usually feeds Drake-equation optimism or Great Filter dread. Rubenstein flips it toward ethics: if we are alone, do we owe the cosmos care rather than conquest; if we are not, do expansionist myths prepare us to repeat colonial contact scripts? Longtermism answers by maximising future digital lives, often discounting present suffering as rounding error. She pairs that with Omelas (Le Guin) and Um-Helat (N. K. Jemisin): utopias that hide a tortured child, or that refuse the bargain and police cruelty at the gate. The longtermist who would flood the galaxy with descendants while underfunding Earth justice is, on her reading, building Omelas with better branding.
Art, stars, listening
Counter-stories come from artists and storytellers as much as from treaties. Janelle Monáe, feminist and Indigenous futurisms, and astronomers who practice "listening" rather than claiming offer scripts in which humans belong to the universe instead of owning it. SETI's literal listening becomes emblem: attend before you plant a flag. The chapter refuses a single replacement myth; it asks for many, locally accountable, non-extractive. The practical test is concrete: fund debris clean-up and Earth repair beside any Mars timetable; put Indigenous and Global South voices in COPUOS and Accords rooms with veto weight, not only consultation; treat "for all mankind" as a budget line, not a press caption.
Fermi's arithmetic and LaFleur's answer
Astrobiology's riddle starts from scale: about a billion trillion stars in the observable universe (10²¹), each with zero to many planets. Even tiny habitability fractions imply abundant, often older, technological life. Enrico Fermi asked: Where is everybody? Declassified UAP files intensify the puzzle if some craft are non-human. Afrofuturist curator Ingrid LaFleur, in a 2021 seminar with David Grinspoon and Rubenstein, offered a dry resolution: maybe they dislike how we behave; we leave "millions of pieces of junk" and disrespect the cosmos. Grinspoon called it the best Fermi answer he had heard.
Fermi stack and LaFleur's ethical resolution
Nietzsche's art-exit and Le Guin's medal speech
If conquest myths saturate science, law and markets, how invent another filter? Nietzsche, stuck inside Christian-descended nihilism, briefly bets on art to say "yes" to life, then frets that artists corrupt easily. Rubenstein holds the bet anyway: some art slips the status quo. Ursula K. Le Guin's 2014 National Book Foundation medal speech is her touchstone: writers can refuse capitalist realism and invent other arrangements of power, gender and belonging. Omelas and Jemisin's Um-Helat then become ethical stress tests for longtermist galaxy-filling.
Earthseed, holds and Cloud Dragon Skies
Afrofuturists invert the ocean-to-space analogy. Kodwo Eshun and others read the Middle Passage as alien abduction: unknown bipeds, unknown weapons, forced transport, study and assimilation. Survivors already know apocalypse and other worlds. Octavia Butler's Earthseed (early 1990s) opens in a midapocalyptic 2024 of climate breakdown, disease and inequality; walled enclaves face addicts of a pyromania drug; Lauren Oya Olamina seeds a faith whose destiny is "to take root among the stars," but only after hard earthly discipline, not as billionaire escape.
Two literary counters to billionaire exodus.
N. K. Jemisin's "Cloud Dragon Skies" stages Bezos's rejected "dull" alternative. Humanicorps profits as Earth poisons itself; a "great exodus" offers the corporate Ring (cars, cities, old conveniences) or "nothing" on ruined Earth. Character Nahautu stays. As capitalists leave, suppressed Buddhist, Jewish and Indigenous teachings return under one oath: live simply. Dragons in the poisoned sky become kin and warning. The story answers energy-gospel disdain for rationing with a chosen, plural, low-throughput civilization.
Sun Ra's ark and the chord against chord
Sun Ra's "We Travel the Spaceways" turns listening into propulsion: piano like a steam train, whistle harmonies, trumpets as arrivals, then "chord against chord, melody against melody, rhythm against rhythm" because "superior beings definitely speak in other harmonic ways." The Omniverse Arkestra is the ship; music is the ark out of a doomed world. Ra plays Moses and Noah at once. Rubenstein's close pairs that practice with the 2020 astronomy decadal white paper's call to listen before claiming: other spacetimes begin in attention, not in safety zones.
Listening as propulsion: Ra to the decadal white paper
Conclusion: Revolt of the Pantheists
"All the stuff that makes the world"
Driving in summer 2020, her three-year-old Elijah heard Madonna sing "Oh God" and asked who God was. Too tired to hedge, she said: "God is all the stuff that makes the world." ("I don't like God." "You don't have much of a choice!") Western philosophers tend to dismiss pantheism (the world itself as God) as juvenile, girly, primitive or incoherent; many non-Western traditions find nothing odd in it, and many ordinary Westerners quietly agree. Her version is plural: microbes, minerals, magnetisms, animals and plants, which make, unmake and remake the world together, neither a single great One nor isolated actors. As always, "it's the behavior that matters, not the belief."
Newton's Sleep
Rubenstein's closing contrast: a dead mechanical cosmos versus a living, related one.
We are about 90% bacteria (by cell count, a figure now revised down to roughly half), animals made of plants, minerals, sunlight and starstuff: not just on Earth but of it.
Her answers
| Question | Rubenstein's answer |
|---|---|
| Should we explore space? | Yes, if we can study it without further ecological damage or more violence, and rein in private interest so knowledge beats profit and cooperation beats competition |
| Should we live there? | "I'm honestly not sure" |
| Will escape solve our problems? | No: we bring them with us |
| What might help? | Agencies and companies listening to the "pantheistic mysticism" of Indigenous, Afrofuturist, feminist and environmental communities |
The rich cannot leave everyone else to weather the apocalypse, because the rest return "to disrupt their pristine space malls with our dragon clouds, companion species, angry gods, and sacred rocks," the things that might carry us through. "All the stuff that makes the world."
Pantheism, Newton's sleep and three answers
Rubenstein's constructive close leans toward a tempered pantheism: value distributed through nature rather than parked in a sky-god who underwrites conquest. She borrows Blake's warning about "Newton's sleep," the single vision that measures and masters until wonder dies. The point is not anti-science; it is anti the sleep that makes science serve only extraction.
Three exits from Astrotopia
She returns three clustered answers to "what should we do":
- Repair first. Water, biodiversity, education, reparations and reforestation are not the opposite of space; they are the credibility test for any "for all mankind" claim.
- Regulate the commons. Revive Moon Treaty logic or build a binding resource regime before safety zones harden into property. Cap megaconstellations against astronomy and debris risk.
- Change the story. Drop Manifest Destiny, Canaan and empty-frontier talk. Teach kinship, shared heritage and plural futures in schools, agencies and boardrooms.
Astrotopia, in her coinage, is the dream of a perfect elsewhere that excuses an unjust here. The exit is not a ban on telescopes or probes. It is refusing to let the dream set the law.
Main Points
- NewSpace is a religion in secular dress. Saviours, chosen peoples, promised lands and apocalypse all reappear in billionaire rhetoric.
- Musk saves the species; Bezos saves growth. Mars as lifeboat, O'Neill colonies as the escape from "stasis and rationing."
- Both rely on endless expansion. Space is valued as infinite resources for an economy that must keep growing.
- "For all mankind" hides "by and for the few." From the Apollo flag to tax-funded contracts, benefits flow to the already powerful.
- Dominion made nature raw material. Lynn White's thesis: Christianity's defeat of paganism stripped the world of spirit.
- Discovery doctrine travels. Papal bulls and terra nullius licensed seizing "empty" lands; "empty" space invites the same logic.
- America cast itself as the New Israel. Covenant, Manifest Destiny and Canaanites to be displaced shape Space Age speeches.
- The frontier is a ritual. Flags, names, plaques and Bibles claim places symbolically before they are claimed legally.
- Commerce and empire move together. The Virginia Company model returns as public-private space partnerships.
- The OST promised a commons but granted freedom to the strong. Equality loses to whoever can get there.
- The Moon Treaty's "common heritage" was killed. The US 2015 law and 2020 order declared space resources ownable and space no commons.
- Militarization uses the treaty's loopholes. The Space Force calls space a "war-fighting domain" while claiming to defend peaceful use.
- The growth circle explains the plan. We mine space to live there, and live there to mine it.
- Orbit is finite. Debris, Kessler cascades and megaconstellations threaten science, safety and dark skies, and nobody asked Indigenous sky-watchers.
- Antimineralism values only shaped rock. Uluru versus the cathedral; Artemis Accords protect flags, not craters.
- Rare earths are not rare. Scarcity talk follows politics (China's 2010 embargo), not geology.
- Terraforming is theology. Zubrin's "dominion over nature... to bring dead worlds to life"; Rolston's tests call it "cosmic vandalism."
- The Moon may have memory and agency. Gorman's case for lunar personhood, and the flag that fell over.
- Longtermism is pie in the sky. Hypothetical trillions outweigh actual billions; stories of staying and fighting offer other options.
- We bring ourselves with us. Le Guin's SPES: the excluded, the animals and the rocks return; better to listen and belong.
Key numbers to remember
| Quantity | Value | Chapter |
|---|---|---|
| Spacefaring states when the OST was signed (1967) | 3 with satellites (USSR, US, France) | 5 |
| Moon Agreement parties at entry into force (1984) | 9, none spacefaring | 5 |
| Private space investment, 2017 | about $4 billion | 5 |
| Space industry value, then and projected | $350 billion; $1 trillion by 2040 | 5 |
| Debris over 10 cm (ESA, 2021) | 34,000 objects | 5 |
| Apollo waste bags left on the Moon | 96 | 5 |
| China's share of rare earths, 2010 | 97% | 6 |
| Dysprosium price jump, 2010 | about 2,000% | 6 |
| V-2 forced labourers / deaths | about 60,000 / 20,000 | 6 |
| Biosphere 2 oxygen fall | 21% to 14% in 1.4 years | 6 |
| Time to breathable Mars (microbes) | 10,000-100,000 years | 6 |
| Longtermist future people | 10^23 in the Virgo Supercluster | 7 |
Five questions to argue about
| Name | What it is | Use |
|---|---|---|
| NewSpace | The privatized, billionaire-led space era | The book's main target |
| Terra nullius / res nullius | "No one's land / empty thing," open to seizure | Colonial logic applied to space |
| Res communis / common heritage | A shared thing, with benefits shared | The OST and Moon Treaty ideals |
| Doctrine of Discovery | Papal and legal licence to claim non-Christian lands | Root of frontier law |
| Manifest Destiny | America's divine right to expand west | Echoed in "final frontier" rhetoric |
| Kessler syndrome | Cascading debris collisions | Why orbit is finite |
| Antimineralism | Valuing only rocks humans have shaped | Explains Uluru and the Artemis Accords |
| Terraforming / ecopoiesis | Remaking a planet like Earth / seeding microbes | Ch 6's ethical test case |
| Projective nature | Rolston: nature makes its own projects | Basis for respect beyond use |
| Longtermism | Far-future people outweigh present ones | Silicon Valley's ethic, critiqued in Ch 7 |
| Afrofuturism / Indigenous Futurism | Stories recovering counter-futures | Sources of "other spacetimes" |
| Pantheism | The world itself as divine | The conclusion's practical ethic |
Depth map: myths, laws, counters
Read as one arc: NewSpace celebrities (Ch 1) inherit biblical election and colonial land theology (Chs 2-3), reboot them as frontier and Force (Ch 4), encode them in soft law and markets (Ch 5), meet resistance from environmental ethics and Indigenous kinship (Ch 6), and face alternative futures in art and listening (Ch 7). The conclusion's pantheism is a philosophical brake, not a church.
Four dates to keep beside four names
For exam or brief use, hold four numbers and four names: 1967 OST, 1979 Moon Treaty (mostly unratified), 2015 US resource act, 2020+ Artemis Accords; Pardo (common heritage), White (ecologic crisis roots), Warrior (Canaan problem), Rolston (graded extraterrestrial value). Then ask Rubenstein's question against any new mission patch: does this story make us belong to the universe, or make the universe belong to us?
| Person | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Elon Musk / Jeff Bezos | The two prophets: Mars lifeboat; O'Neill colonies and endless growth |
| Wernher von Braun | Architect of the Space Age paradigm; V-2 forced labour |
| Gerard O'Neill | Space-colony visionary who taught Bezos |
| Robert Zubrin | Mars advocate; frontier theology; "Wokeists" critic |
| Lynn White Jr. | Dominion and ecological crisis thesis |
| Frederick Jackson Turner | Frontier thesis behind Zubrin's urgency |
| Scott Pace | Helped defeat the Moon Treaty; "not a global commons" |
| Moriba Jah | Debris tracker; "nobody asked them" |
| Holmes Rolston III / Robert Sparrow | Six tests of respect; "cosmic vandals" |
| Alice Gorman | Space archaeologist; lunar memory and agency |
| Gil Scott-Heron | "Whitey on the Moon" |
| Sun Ra | Afrofuturist; music as the ark |
| Le Guin / Jemisin / Butler | Omelas and SPES; Um-Helat and dragon skies; Earthseed |
| Robin Wall Kimmerer / Kyle Wark | Indigenous knowledge of kinship and listening |
About this book
Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race by Mary-Jane Rubenstein, 2022. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions