Reviews: Spaceflight skepticsby Jeff Foust
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| “The big argument of this book is that the intensifying ‘NewSpace race’ is as much of a mythological project as it is a political, economic, or scientific one,” Rubenstein writes. |
If you were among those 11,000-plus who spent the week immersed in space (if occasionally frustrated with navigating the labyrinthine convention hall), you might think many others share that enthusiasm, especially during a week that also saw the latest Starship test flight and the launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. Of course, many don’t, thinking little or nothing about the topic. There are those, though, who not only don’t have that interest in space but are actively opposed to at least certain aspects of spaceflight, like human missions or commercial activity.
Those are the arguments in a couple of recent books that attempt to take a critical look at spaceflight. The message of Astrotopia by Mary-Jane Rubenstein is clear in its subtitle. “The big argument of this book is that the intensifying ‘NewSpace race’ is as much of a mythological project as it is a political, economic, or scientific one,” she writes in the preface. “It’s mythology, in fact, that holds all of these other efforts together, giving them an aura of duty, grandeur, and benevolence.”
This is an interesting argument to make. Anyone who has followed the space advocacy community over the decades knows can see echoes of religion in it. There are prophets and proselytizers, and visions of a promised land, be it a city on Mars or a space colony at L5. Believing in those visions requires faith given the slow progress towards them. As she puts it, “there’s something weirdly religious about space.”
That would be a fascinating line of inquiry to pursue, but she doesn’t follow it. Instead, she offers a clumsier criticism of commercial expansion into space as well as its growing militarization. Both trends “towards militarization and appropriation became clear the minute Armstrong and Aldrin planted that flag on the Moon,” she writes (never mind that the act of planting the flag by a civil government mission was not an act of appropriation that is prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty.) Both bring terrestrial conflict into space much as the European expansion five centuries ago expanded strife across the globe. The “weirdly religious” aspect of space is its echoes of “imperial Christianity of that earlier era,” she argues.
It's tough for her book to be persuasive when it is riddled with factual errors, though. She claims “it was Barack Obama’s 2011 NASA budget that enabled the explosion of NewSpace by canceling the space shuttle program and passing the baton to the private sector.” Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget proposal did start the commercial crew program, albeit with stiff congressional opposition, but the decision to retire the shuttle was made years earlier and too late to stop by the time the White House released that budget proposal, less than six months before STS-135.
| Mandel concludes it’s time to halt human spaceflight to focus on problems on Earth, likening the desire to leave the planet to a “bad, crumbling, expensive relationship” that is time to end. |
Elsewhere she claimed that in 2017, “prospectors funneled nearly $4 billion into commercial space ventures, a number that amounted to nearly half of all private investment in all industries over the proceeding five years.” That statement requires the reader to believe that from 2012 to 2016 “all industries” raised a combined $8 billion or so, which makes no sense. A check of the reference she footnoted in that passage shows that it was referring to investment solely in commercial space, not “in all industries.” Space remains a tiny part of the overall economy, boosterism of a “trillion-dollar economy” by some space advocates aside. Also, despite the author’s use of “prospectors,” very little of that money went into space mining ventures.
While Rubenstein injects some elements of her life and family in her book, Savannah Mandel does much more in Ground Control. The book is closer to a memoir of someone who was fascinated with space as a child and found an unconventional avenue to pursue that interest through space anthropology. She conducted fieldwork at Spaceport America in New Mexico and interned with the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group for many NewSpace companies, but in that process became disillusioned with human spaceflight in particular.
She concludes it’s time to halt human spaceflight to focus on problems on Earth, likening the desire to leave the planet to a “bad, crumbling, expensive relationship” that is time to end. The book traces out her thought process that led her to that conclusion, from wondering during her anthropological fieldwork why people were so interested in leaving the planet to what she calls the “Elysium Effect,” her concern that utilizing space resources will only exacerbate existing inequalities between rich and poor nations.
With her background in the space industry, Mandel offers a bit of an insider’s perspective, taking in the field with an anthropological eye. That includes observations of Congressional hearings and the processes behind then, although that is something hardly unique to the space industry. (She also writes that there is something of an unwritten rule against using laptops while attending hearings; I have used them at dozens of House and Senate hearings over the years without incident.)
The book also lacks the egregious factual flaws of Astrotopia, although it is not perfect. She argues that ESA’s efforts to determine if a physically disabled astronaut can fly in space are something of a waste since “feasibility of disabled astronauts has long since been proven by AstroAccess, which sends individuals with disabilities on parabolic flights on a regular basis.” While AstroAccess is a great program, it only examines the ability to work in microgravity for up to 30 seconds at a time. The ESA study—as John McFall, the ESA reserve astronaut with a prosthetic leg, told me in an interview last week at IAC—examined the entire flight experience, including operations on the International Space Station and the Crew Dragon spacecraft and addressing issues like modifying the Crew Dragon footrests to better accommodate his prosthetic. (That study, he added, found no showstoppers for an ISS flight, and he remains hopeful he will get a chance to go in the next few years.)
| ven with recent advances, it may still be decades before any sizable population is actually living in space. And those who do are less likely to go because they want to “escape” Earth, as critics like these authors often argue. |
Despite the book’s subtitle, Ground Control is less a general argument against human spaceflight than one person’s account of how her views on the topic have changed over the years through her experience with the industry and the broader world. The closest to a specific argument in the book is what she calls the “Caretaker’s Demand”: that money spent on human spaceflight should be better spent improving life on Earth. Specifically, “before we settle outer space, planet Earth and its global population much reach a point of stability with no tipping point in sight.” But there is no clear definition of when that point of stability is reached, nor any consideration of scenarios where the post-scarcity economics she seeks requires the presence of humans in space to access the energy and material resources that could make those economics viable. Given the relatively modest amount of money spent on human spaceflight, it seems like giving that up alone won’t be sufficient to meet that Caretaker’s Demand.
Rubenstein, late in her book, appears to object to any attempt to access space resources, even rocks on the Moon or asteroids devoid of life, going so far as state that valuing rocks that have been removed from their original places and used as resources more than rocks that remain in their natural location is “antimineralism.” Like Mandel, she is open to space exploration, if it can be done “without doing further damage to its ecology” and without deepening divisions on Earth. “Should we try to live there? I’m honestly not sure,” Rubenstein concludes.
Even with recent advances, it may still be decades before any sizable population is actually living in space. And those who do are less likely to go because they want to “escape” Earth, as critics like these authors often argue, but because they see new adventure and opportunity beyond the planet (including, yes, making money.) Those who are interested in going, like those who crowded the halls of IAC last week, are unlikely to change their minds after reading these two books, but being aware of their arguments can help them refine their own cases for humanity’s future in space.
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