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Rocket-Launching Billionaires Promise a New Pie in the Sky

Musk and Bezos are peddling new age-y religious drama of disaster and salvation, says author Mary-Jane Rubenstein.

By Kelly Hayes , TRUTHOUT August 17, 2023

hat we’re getting from both Musk and Bezos is this classically new age-y religious drama of disaster and salvation. They preach, they tell us that the end is near, the disaster is coming, that the world is going to end, but there is another world that everybody can build together, a new world and a place that they’ve never seen and a place that seems totally impossible,” says professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes and Rubenstein discuss the religiosity of “NewSpace,” and how activists can challenge the new “pie in the sky” ideology that billionaires like Musk and Bezos are crafting.

Transcript

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. MJR: So Musk and Bezos are probably the two best known actors in the contemporary corporate space race. As you probably know, Elon Musk wants us to move to Mars. He wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos has a different plan. He thinks Mars is too far away. He wants to build space colonies that are closer to home that are positioned between the moon and the Earth. It would be sort of like living in a mall, a space mall, like a rotating indoor shopping center where the climate is controlled and there’s no real outside. But presumably you’d be able to grow some plants and things like that, and you’d be able to get your food and it would be totally perfect weather all year round and things like that.

So anyway, they have different views about what our lives are going to look like in outer space. Again, Musk has this sort of homesteader ideal that we’re going to terraform Mars and make it habitable for human beings. Bezos wants to keep us a little closer to Earth in these rotating shopping malls. Both of them are convinced that in order for human beings to, well, survive for Elon Musk, or to thrive for Jeff Bezos, we have to leave the Earth. And each of them is using his massive economic status and power to channel ungodly amounts of money and resources into conquering the cosmos so that human beings can have a decent future.

“KH…………………………………………….Bezos’s company Blue Origin and Musk’s SpaceX spent $2 million and $2.4 million, respectively, lobbying for government contracts in 2021. But Musk’s talk of using his vast wealth to “extend the light of consciousness” also helps spin popular mythos around extreme inequality in our times — like a new variation of the Divine Right of Kings. Instead of being chosen by God, men like Musk and Bezos are chosen by the market, and rather than representing an injustice, their absurd wealth supposedly represents our best hope for the future…………………………..

……………………………………… MJR: The environmental damage that the contemporary space race is doing is one of the most under-discussed crises of our contemporary moment. 

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….. What I’m trying to say is I don’t think Elon Musk, a private entrepreneur, would have gotten NASA to offload to him so many of its contracts — I don’t think that he would’ve had the wherewithal to set up this massive Starlink Constellation without a big vision that presents itself as humanitarian, as future-oriented, as ideologically pristine, which is to say it’s a vision of the salvation of humanity that’s going to take place on Mars.

And again, once you sort of shake off the ideological patina here, you realize that Mars is terrible. It’s a terrible planet. If you get an invitation to go homestead Mars, probably don’t do it. It’s bad there. It’s really bad there. But I think he needs that vision in order to sell any of it.

KH: So, in Elon Musk, we have a man whose preposterous ideas are propped up by extreme wealth, a cult of personality, and one of the most absurd privatization gambits in U.S. history. But his current endeavors, like those of Jeff Bezos and other men who would like to rule space, are also propped up by some of the same ideas that have allowed the wealthy to loot and pillage the world we currently inhabit.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. MJR I think symbolically and politically and rhetorically, the creation of the Space Force says that we do not agree that space is supposed to be a theater of peace. Rather, it’s supposed to be a theater of war. ………………………

‘……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Capitalism relies on infinite growth. We can’t have infinite growth. We’re on a finite planet. So what we’re seeing right now [are] convulsions of late stage capitalism; it’s realizing it’s reaching limits and is therefore seeking out other planets and using this humanitarian claim as a justification for primarily economic ends. So we need to know that. This is just as much of an ideological ploy as the idea that Spain needed to conquer the Americas in order to save Indian souls or something like that. So I’m recommending some suspicion when it comes to these big grand narratives about the salvation of all of humanity……………………………………………………………  https://truthout.org/audio/rocket-launching-billionaires-promise-a-new-pie-in-the-sky/

August 31, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics