nuclear-news

Space: the billionaires’ playground

private space companies have relied on government contracts, and particularly military funding, to make themselves both rich and indispensable to state powers. Most recently, private interests have been lining up to slake themselves at a long-dormant tap that they hope will provide a new stream of wealth: the Moon.

According to Musk, humans moving to Mars isn’t just a possibility; it’s a moral imperative. But a closer look suggests Mars is really a distraction meant to dazzle us while Musk accrues ever more money and power here on Earth.

8 July 2026, Lucian Walkowicz, https://newint.org/science-and-technology/2026/space-billionaires-playground?utm_source=ni-email-whatcounts%20&utm_medium=1%20NI%20Main%20List1%20-%20enews%20-%20International%20AND%20North%20America&utm_campaign=YYYY-MM-DD%20enews%20-%207%20August%20enews

As tycoons like Elon Musk attempt to seize space for profit, the Earth is being trashed, writes astronomer Lucian Walkowicz.

For years, the wealthy have been telling us that our salvation lies in space.

‘There is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multiplanetary’, billionaire Elon Musk has said, claiming that getting to Mars will prevent human extinction, and is therefore as crucial as tackling poverty. 

Meanwhile, his company’s launches from its ‘Starbase’ have trashed surrounding wildlife areas and displaced longtime residents, while the boss harps on about using its heavy-lift rockets as a high-speed, heavily polluting replacement for commercial air travel, and putting factories on the Moon.

Fellow tycoon Jeff Bezos – founder of Amazon, equally notorious for its own ‘humanitarian’ approach – has enthused about housing populations in orbital cylinders and protecting the Earth by taking polluting industries off planet. Meanwhile emissions from his companies’ own deliveries have soared.

These supposedly futuristic visions for space have been weaponized to justify a wide array of activities (both on our planet and beyond it), including expanding state surveillance and violence, dispossessing people of their homelands, cluttering low Earth orbit with garbage, plundering the Moon and polluting both our environment and the night sky.

While outwardly the likes of Musk and Bezos might advocate for our future in the stars, in reality they are greedily gorging themselves at the trough of profit while simultaneously creating the conditions that may bind humanity to Earth forever.

Bait and switch

Musk in particular has an outsized influence that exemplifies how space narratives have been wielded to justify a vast array of projects on Earth. 

Before SpaceX had their rapid rate of rocket launches, before they were sending rafts of Starlink satellites into orbit, their main source of press coverage was Elon Musk’s mouth. Born to a wealthy white family in apartheid South Africa, this tycoon substitutes provocation for charisma by making exaggerated assertions and brushing aside details. Drawing on a long history of colonial rhetoric around space, he has managed to harness public attention with his futuristic plans to populate Mars with human settlements.

According to Musk, humans moving to Mars isn’t just a possibility; it’s a moral imperative. But a closer look suggests Mars is really a distraction meant to dazzle us while Musk accrues ever more money and power here on Earth.

Musk has conjured a litany of planet-killing bogeymen to justify his Mars ambitions – from rogue asteroids to the expansion of the sun several billion years from now – in order to argue that migration to Mars is a must.

As for what happens if people get to this radiation-­baked, arid, oxidized hellscape? No problem, Musk will simply nuke the polar ice caps and melt them. No matter that most scientists and engineers cock an eyebrow at these supposed easy fixes, nor even that anyone with common sense knows that nuclear weapons do not make planets more hospitable.

Leveraging this allegedly visionary perspective, SpaceX has been able to harness not only the imaginations of the wider public, but of its workforce as well. The company offers a seductive opportunity for people who want to see a science fiction future come to reality. But few in the sector seem to think carefully about which of the many futures depicted in science fiction are actually on offer. Despite numerous reports over the years of gruelling and dangerous working conditions, as well as rampant racist and sexist harassment, SpaceX continues to attract workers with a glimmer of Mars in their eyes.

Meanwhile, by manufacturing urgency around this goal, Musk has also been able to justify the expansion of SpaceX’s business at breakneck speed. The ‘move fast and break things’ ethos infuses much of the tech industry, but paired with Musk’s pose as global saviour, SpaceX has been able to gain damaging momentum, outpacing regulatory structures around launches, orbital traffic and environmental protections. This drive has allowed Musk to tap a deep vein of wealth via military contracts, stuffing his coffers and elevating him to quasi-statesman status.

Greater good or greater greed

Take the Starlink satellite megaconstellation. Like Musk’s plans for Mars, Starlink – which first entered commercial service in 2021 – was framed as a necessary project, whose merit only the most selfish person could deny. Its purported goal was to provide internet to so-called ‘underserved’ communities.

But as Starlink began pumping hundreds of reflective satellites into orbit, astronomers promptly raised the alarm that they had begun to mar the night sky. Some also pointed out that Starlink’s service was both unneeded and priced out of reach for the places it was supposedly meant to help, pointing out the twisting of the word ‘underserved’ from its usual meaning of underresourced to ‘a place that does not have enough free market choices’.

Today there are nearly 9,500 Starlink satellites in space, meaning that this single project by a US company is now responsible for 65 per cent of satellites in low Earth orbit, a sea-change that has taken less than seven years. The massive increase in overall numbers has raised widespread alarm over the possibility of extremely high speed collisions and the potential for an escalating cascade of further collisions, known as the ‘Kessler syndrome’. The resulting ballistic debris would ultimately make entire regions of space around earth unusable.

Every time we take the extension of capitalism beyond Earth as a foregone conclusion, we disregard the myriad ways all Earth life has related to our skies.

Of course, there are also the impacts here on Earth: before Starlink satellites create light pollution in the night sky, the launches that put them there create pollution in our immediate environment. A single launch of one of SpaceX’s rockets, the Falcon 9, releases an amount of carbon into the atmosphere equivalent to driving a typical car 70 times around the world.

The satellites themselves also have a limited lifespan of a few years, after which they deorbit into our atmosphere, spreading metal pollution (including mercury) across the planet. Meanwhile, organizers in the Rio Grande Valley have raised the alarm for years about the environmental damage and gentrification driven by SpaceX’s presence in the area of its ‘Starbase’. 

Regulatory frameworks have struggled to keep up with SpaceX’s impact: while there are US regulations around launches and their environmental impacts, few were really developed with space in mind, and none were equipped to deal with SpaceX’s high volume of launches. Under the most recent Trump administration, already inadequate regulation has become even looser. In February 2026 the FCC fast-tracked a proposal for SpaceX to launch a million new satellites as part of its plan to create orbital data centres to support an  expansion of AI. Meanwhile other countries get no say in this company filling the skies.

We’d do well to question whether the profusion of AI into every aspect of human existence is making things better or simply drowning us in brain-rotting slop. 

No matter, though: the people best positioned to profit from cramming a million new satellites into space claim orbital data centres will preserve our planet by eliminating their demands on its land, energy and water resources. However, that argument relies on people thinking of space as a realm that is separate from Earth, when it is Earth’s resources and environment that bear the consequences of this huge profusion in the number of launches required to transport satellites off the planet, as well as the vapourized metals from them reentering its atmosphere.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what Starlink’s intended purpose is, or whether anyone can afford it, because individual internet users aren’t SpaceX’s target customer – the military is. Because of wide adoption of the more secure, military-grade version of Starlink, called Starshield, militaries around the world now treat Musk as a de facto statesman who has the capacity to determine which conflicts have access to the internet at which time. For example, in April 2025, SpaceX was awarded $6 billion dollars by the US military for 28 launches that year. This was just one contract.

On top of that, SpaceX is working with the US’s National Reconnaissance Office on the development of ‘Ground Moving Target Indicator’ technology, a space-based panopticon designed to better track people’s movements on Earth. 

Even more recently, some have commented that SpaceX’s relatively low launch costs open the possibility of permanent weapons installations in space. ‘Imagine a strike package of thousands of 200-pound bombs, on electric grid sites, government buildings, railway crossings, border stations and road intersections – without putting planes or military personnel at risk’, gushed writer on geopolitics Michael Hochberg in the Wall Street Journal this April.

The ideological capital gained by SpaceX via Musk’s plans ‘for Mars’ has allowed him to hoard massive wealth. Meanwhile these projects pose a grave threat to human futures both in space and on Earth by enabling state surveillance and acts of war, crowding low Earth orbit with potential debris that could one day bar our access to space entirely, and raining pollution into our atmosphere, land and water.

Space is a place

There is a tendency for people to believe that space, in all its wild expansiveness, is beyond the realm of humankind. However, we are literally in and of space. There is no crisp boundary between where Earth’s atmosphere stops and space begins, and like all borders, the ‘boundary’ of space – formally called the von Kármán line – is a collective fiction that has practical utility but not material reality.

While the few humans who have crossed the von Kármán line (whether professional astronauts or celebrities who can afford a ticket) garner the most attention, their number is miniscule compared with people whose lives are enmeshed with space while remaining on Earth. Some of these people are professionals at government agencies or private companies, but most are not space workers at all.

They include anyone who uses tools that rely on space infrastructure, like GPS, but also those who are acutely impacted due to living in the vicinity of launch sites. After all, SpaceX is merely continuing a colonial legacy: near the equator, where the rotation of the Earth provides a slightly bigger boost to launching rockets, launch sites like Brazil’s Alcântara Space Center and the European Space Agency’s Guiana Space Centre, in French Guiana, have dispossessed communities from their lands and battered the surrounding ecosystems since the 1980s and 1960s, respectively.

Moreover, the money lives on Earth. The question of how to squeeze an actual profit out of space, independent of the state, has stymied many a thirsty capitalist. 

The rash of asteroid mining ventures that cropped up 15 years ago have now largely shuttered or gone dormant, as no one yet knows how to lasso and plunder an asteroid without the cost outstripping the benefit. Instead, private space companies have relied on government contracts, and particularly military funding, to make themselves both rich and indispensable to state powers. Most recently, private interests have been lining up to slake themselves at a long-dormant tap that they hope will provide a new stream of wealth: the Moon.

Lunar plunder

While many governments and companies around the world have set their sights on the Moon, the US is the driving force in radically reshaping common understandings of space that have been with humanity throughout its existence. Government contracts have been a reliable source of income for private space companies since the first military surveillance satellites. What’s new is the US’s accelerating demolition of publicly funded institutions in favour of private enterprise, enabling a modern crop of companies to act with greater autonomy.

This is particularly concerning in what it might mean for the Moon. Unlike Mars or asteroids, the Moon is essentially in Earth’s backyard: while having a sustained human presence there still presents difficult challenges, getting to its surface is a solved problem. In the past few years, the space agencies of India, China, Japan and the US have all successfully landed robotic spacecraft on the Moon, often with participation from private companies profiting off government contracts. US-based company Intuitive Machines also became the first private company to land there independently.

The combination of the Moon’s proximity and the US’s refusal to embrace international agreements, like the Moon Treaty, that provide stricter lunar protections, has opened up the possibility of private entities being able to independently plunder the Moon for ‘space resources’, ie anything that can be excavated and sold on Earth. 

The Moon is a source of helium, and particularly helium-3, an element with widespread industrial applications, of which there is a shortage. The Moon also has potential reserves of water ice, which could be used to create fuel for launching rockets from the lunar surface, or used to support a human presence.

In 2020 the United States and seven other signatories released the Artemis Accords, a set of US-driven international agreements created in anticipation of its own Artemis Program. The Accords circumvent existing international channels for space diplomacy, like the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), allowing the US to essentially bully other nations into accepting a US-centric framework for lunar exploitation.

The Artemis Accords, along with a more recent chaotic splatter of space-related Executive Orders by president Donald Trump claiming to ‘ensure American space superiority’, make explicit a shift away from viewing space as the common heritage of humanity. Rather, the Artemis programme is instead being used to paint a picture of the moon as not only a place humans can go, but one where we can extract and exploit. While until now private companies have mostly benefitted from lucrative contracts to go to space, future prospects have everyone from small space start-ups to Lockheed Martin drooling over the possibility of extended plunder and occupation of the Moon.

In the context of rising fascist tides around the globe, the US’s renewed focus on human spaceflight through Artemis functions as a kind of time machine back to a future that never was. 

One of fascism’s defining characteristics is a preoccupation with national decline, paired with a promise of rebirth that can only be actualized through removal of enemies. In the fascist cosmology of today, the Apollo moon landings were the beginning of a future that died on the vine, a future that projected colonial projects and control out into the infinite, with the power to consolidate social hierarchies In the first Trump administration, then-vice president and chair of the National Space Council, Mike Pence, repeatedly said that Artemis would put ‘the first woman and the next man’ on the Moon.

A woman alone on the Moon is unthinkable, so the next man is always mentioned. In this image, the Moon and Artemis astronauts are used as a stand-in for the Garden of Eden: Artemis is literally the virgin sister of Apollo, the Moon an unsullied landscape in which a man-woman pair can be placed to restore the US to a time before the imagined invasion of the administration’s internal and external enemies. 

NASA press around the Artemis programme similarly often mentions the diversity of its astronaut corps, but doubling down on American individualism cannot separate Artemis from its utility as propaganda. After all, a handful of people who are not white men leaving Earth’s atmosphere cannot conceivably be a sign of liberatory progress, at least not while squads of paramilitary police kidnap hundreds of thousands of people off the streets of US cities.

Reclaiming space

Space is and has been many things to many people: while the Moon may currently be the stage for US propaganda, it has also been a companion to all life on Earth since our planet’s earliest days. The Moon remains the most visible part of space in light-polluted cities, where most people now live. It has been at the heart of human cultures for our entire existence, not just as a practical tool and biological rhythm, but also a relative, a deity, a reminder and more.

Despite aligned campaigns of both state and capital to radically reshape and control the contours of how people imagine and relate to space, the way that space functions in the fascist imagination is not the only way. Every time we take the extension of capitalism beyond the realm of Earth as a foregone conclusion, we disregard the myriad ways that not only humans but all Earth life has related to our skies. Remember: fascism is relatively new; the cosmos has seen everything.

Space’s wealthy beneficiaries tell us that if we will all just stand aside and let them plunder the heavens, a glossy future awaits humankind. However, we need look no further than the physical realities of space industries to see these stories crack: natural sanctuaries littered with debris from launch sites, an orbit filled with trash and surveillance. The damage done to our own planet in the name of a rush to prospect beyond it is its own evidence that colonialism in space has never been anything but colonialism on Earth.

Whether it’s in the form of Mars colonies, asteroid mining, space tourism, or Moon bases, their visions are nothing but a bankrupt utopia that promises to line their pockets and leave Earth in ruins.

If the most fundamental requirement for liberation is the ability to imagine that the future contains an abundance of possibilities, we must recognize these attempts to seize space for profit and war as attempts to shrink the horizon of potential human flourishing. Can we act to reclaim space for futures that include us all? Only (space)time will tell.

August 11, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | space travel | Leave a comment