No matter what billionaires think, space should be public, not private

Nick Buchanan
6 min readJul 12, 2021
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Internal_view_of_the_Stanford_torus.jpg

Recently, I wrote up a little thought experiment to better understand how the billionaires’ space-race this summer among Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk could turn space into a place with the most unequal distribution of wealth “in the world.” Summary: in space in Summer 2021, 99.9996% of the wealth is controlled by the richest 15% of the people, and the bottom half of the population controls only 0.0002%. In fact, space is so unequal that it makes the gaping pit between the rich and poor on Earth look, in comparison, like just an average pit.

But tongue-in-cheek, problematic, back-of-the-napkin calculations aside, the billionaires’ space race of Summer 2021 and its insane political economy highlight something urgent for our collective future: the growing private sector presence in space and the associated shrinking public one. Disillusioned eye-rolling and resigned sighs of “Well, I saw that coming” not withstanding, it forces us to confront two very different visions of how human society in space might be organized.

We can turn to science fiction to find illustrations for both.

The first of these futures is Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, in its innumerable variations. An unabashedly Utopian place, the United Federation of Planets is for the most part a beacon of multi-cultural, multi-species, and universalist ideals. While facing seemingly unending external threats that fuel the plots of seemingly unending new installments in the saga, the Federation routinely triumphs or at least manages a draw.

Internal strife and home-grown trouble-makers are rare; when they do pop up, they are a) more often than not actually external threats disguised in Star Fleet uniforms, or b) seriously misguided individuals, and the exception proves the rule. Or, as with the Federation and the Maquis (who have a real, legitimate gripe, to be sure), nothing turns internal enemies into buddies like being flung together into the Delta Quadrant, where foes ultimately unite in the service of a common goal, even if it’s just getting home.

Holding this society together across space is an omnipresent but benevolent government, both in form of the Federation itself but more visibly in Star Fleet. (If you ever find yourself at a Trekkie party, by the way, and you want to stir things up a bit, go ahead and announce the following: given how little we ever hear about the civilian Federation government, I am absolutely positive that the Federation is actually a military dictatorship run by a junta in Star Fleet High Command — but I digress.) Nearly all aspects of life, from transportation to research and culture to employment, are in some ways aspects of government.

Governing this Utopian society would be impossible, however, were it not for a single, all-important technology provided by the Federation/Star Fleet: no, not the transporter (which we all know is actually a murder machine), but the replicator — a machine that creates, from undifferentiated matter and energy, any substance or object in its computerized repertoire. (Before you start protesting the fine print details, I know there are limits to what it can do, which is why I included the qualifier “in its computerized repertoire.”)

Why? Because replicators, which seem to be public property or at least easily accessed by the public even if they need to pay a few credits, eliminate scarcity and disparity. When everyone has access to everything they could ever need or want, then the accumulation of wealth, competition, and the very idea of an economy itself, let alone capitalist competition, just ceases to exist as if transported into oblivion. It is arguably the endless supplies of food, water, breathable air, and crisply pressed uniforms the replicator provides that drive this flourishing and equitable society in space.

In stark contrast, society in space in the dystopian world of The Expanse — created by authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, writing collectively as James S A Corey — is defined by scarcity and disparity. The closest thing to a Star Trek replicator in The Expanse is the protomolecule, which in theory kind of does the same thing but with an agenda all its own and with a terrifyingly broad and proactive definition of “undifferentiated matter and energy.” Let’s just say that, although it could certainly manage it, it would be unadvisable to try to use it to produce a cup of “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” Anyway . . . not having a replicator means that water, food, and most importantly breathable air, are always in short supply for those living in ships, space stations or asteroid colonies in “the Belt.” In The Expanse, people in space live under the harsh reality that society is inescapably organized by scarcity, and that people are entirely dependent on those who control the supply of scarce, life-sustaining stuff. (Scarcity also figures centrally in other plot elements, not least of which is competition for the rare protomolecule, but this essay is already long, so let’s stick to air.)

The inescapable calculus of scarce air creates a perverted hyper-capitalism wherein competition to get air is one and the same as competition to maintain life against death. And thus, air has a price, and it is the price of life itself, and that price is high. Those in space who need air — i.e., everyone, by virtue of being alive — become locked by their very existence into servitude to those who have it and sell it. Those who control air, in turn, control individuals and at times whole populations. Again and again in The Expanse, different groups use the scarcity of air as a means to bring whole populations, enemy ships, or individuals to heal.

Meanwhile, while the fractured governments of Earth, Mars, and the Belt are preoccupied with the continual threat of all-out war in space, private capital in the form of mega-corporations, small cargo haulers, smugglers, organized and petty criminals, mercenaries, and salvage crews fill social voids left by distracted governments. But they do so with a market logic such that public needs are only met if they enrich private concerns.

As fictional worlds, Star Trek and The Expanse are extremes, and they envision the future of human society in space as all but exclusively underpinned either by benevolent government and equal distribution of essentially “unlimited wealth” (which is really a contradiction in terms because wealth depends on value, and value in its traditional microeconomic sense is meaningless in the face of unlimited supply), on the one hand, or private capital, scarcity, and disparity, on the other. The reality will surely be more complicated. But while the billionaires’ space-race and the privatization of space it represents do not set us firmly on one path or the other, they could “set a course” away from the Star Trek scenario towards The Expanse.

Certainly, we shouldn’t pretend that the era of government in space was always nifty — far from it. Governments, especially of the United States and former Soviet Union, have undeniably treated space in militarized ways and not in the enlightenment spirit of the Federation. But there is nonetheless an important similarity in the underlying compact: space was recognized as a public, not a private, domain, driven by public, not market logics. In contrast to this, government today is retreating and the private sector advancing. And since we can’t count on a replicator to conquer the persistent problem of scarcity and render capitalism obsolete, we may have to rely on government to do the next best thing: to draw a sharp line delineating a public-doman/private-capital no-touching-zone in space.

No matter how overblown or hyped the weekend getaways of Bezos, Branson, and Musk may seem, we can’t forget that these jaunts are but proofs-of-concept; for Bezos and Musk, at least, the ultimate goal is establishing extra-terrestrial colonies. If these societies in space are based on the same logics with which they built their fortunes on Earth, it does not take creative talent on the level of Roddenberry, Abraham, or Franck to imagine the kind of futures that may be authored there. And remember, the space “society” they (kind of) made as they raced each other into every scarcer air in Summer 2021 was characterized by massive wealth and unfathomable disparities, so we are already 0 for 1.

As far-fetched as it sounds, it might be a good time to start writing your Congressional Representative about a government-guaranteed human right to air in space. Government moves slowly and seems to be headed in the wrong direction already, so we need all the time we can get to turn them around and catch them up.

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Nick Buchanan

“… some miserable intellectual who balks at technical progress.” — J. Ellul, The Technological Society