How did you decide to write about this topic?
In our paper “One giant leap for capitalistkind: Private enterprise in outer space,” we were interested in trying to understand what the sudden explosion of interest and investments in outer space meant, structurally and theoretically, with regard to contemporary capitalism. One significant event for us was the much-publicized launch of SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018. It represented a combination of new technological advances in rocket design and space technology, the ascendancy of the private enterprise model of space exploration, and a neoliberal ideology in response to the question of humans as space-traveling beings.
Our working hypothesis has been that outer space represents the next logical step for capital’s expansion. We can think of capital as a machine that wants to blanket the world. There is no end to what capital would like to profit from, no limit to which realms of life it wants to insinuate itself into. Capital is by its very nature voracious. It has a limitless appetite. The problem, of course, is that Earth is finite and fixed. Logically, then, capital must try to push beyond Earth’s frontiers into a limitless domain, namely the universe as such, which mirrors capital’s own boundless ambitions. Capital is like a virus, and outer space represents an infinite selection of fresh hosts awaiting infection.
Why do you think NewSpace companies are allowed to portray themselves as libertarian and independent when they rely on the government?
It fits with our contemporary zeitgeist. The ultimate neoliberal fantasy is the idea that there exists such a thing as a domain free from entanglements with the state called the market. But the idea of a self-sustaining, sovereign market is largely a phantasmagorical construct. Investigate further and even the most Ayn Rand-like of corporations or capitalists are likely to be deeply embedded in the state: They invariably owe their very existence, in some way or other, to the fiscal expenditures, technologies, or infrastructure of the state.
The Norwegian hotel billionaire Petter Stordalen brings out this point nicely in one of his books when he writes appreciatively of the Norwegian welfare state and the idea of social democracy (or democratic socialism, as Bernie Sanders would call it): Without free public schools, childcare facilities, healthcare, roads, lighting, and so on, his hotel workers wouldn’t be able to come into work every day and help sustain his business empire. In other words, even a so-called “self-made” billionaire recognizes how deeply indebted he is to the state.
The state organizes our hearts and minds, the very fabric of our reality, whether we like it or not, through such things as infrastructure, R&D investments, regulatory agencies, legislation, and the institutions and policies of the welfare state. In a sense, there is no beyond to the state.
Unfortunately, this fact has been largely obscured today by the very political forces that have successfully turned the state into an instrument of corporations against the public at large. The market is a mystical construct. But this misrecognition, as Bourdieu might say, of the state’s real and significant role has been hugely successful in insinuating itself into people’s hearts and minds.
NewSpace corporations exploit the widespread belief in the myth of the market. They exploit the cultural cachet that the (supposedly) ruggedly individualistic, self-sustaining, lift-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps entrepreneur enjoys today. The myth of a self-reliant market actors, independent from the state, is itself a profitable idea. There’s money to be made off the idea of a lean, mean market actor that stands in opposition to supposedly sluggish, lagging, traditionalist, overly bureaucratized state actors: Never mind that most of the rockets currently being used were built using Cold War dollars and roubles, and that NASA’s 1967 Saturn V launch vehicle is more powerful than anything the NewSpace gang have come up with!
The media, political establishment, and many consumers are so often in awe of a figure like Elon Musk, but few people realize that his business remains intricately interwoven with the state. As Musk’s own biographer shows (but doesn’t properly emphasize - you have to know it’s important to really notice it), at one point Musk’s SpaceX was one week away from bankruptcy until NASA bailed them out. Taxpayer dollars often sustain these mythically self-made entrepreneurs. The state is NewSpace’s biggest customer. Take a look at SpaceX’s launch schedule and you’ll see that a significant proportion of their customers are government-linked or themselves derive significant revenues from government, with significant contributions from NASA and the U.S. Air Force. United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, recently received a $1.2 billion defense contract from the U.S. Air Force to launch spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. Follow the money and the know-how and you’ll almost invariably come up against a government source.
But culturally speaking, it’s more palatable to talk about “disruption” or “innovation” or “lean startups” - all part of the vapid lexicon of what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron called the “California ideology,” now exported by Silicon Valley around the world in a few brief decades with astonishing success. Even Stanford, Silicon Valley’s premier university, derives 80 percent of its external research funding from the U.S. federal government.
One reason why space capitalism needs the state is that risk of failure is relatively high, and when things go wrong in space, they tend to go wrong in a catastrophic, expensive way. There is some evidence to suggest that insurance companies are shying away from space enterprise these days. SpaceNews.com recently ran a story about how insurance rates are increasing after a series of expensive failures, including a $415 million claim after the United Arab Emirates’ Falcon Eye-1 imaging satellite experienced a launch failure and a $183 million claim after an imaging satellite experienced an orbital failure back in January 2019. Insurance is the precondition of successful capital investment: Finance is not a supplement to manufacturing but a necessary part of productive capitalism. The history of capitalism suggests a very intimate bond between Wall Street and Main Street. But space breaks the mould, precisely because the risks involved in, say, launching costly payloads packed with expensive tech into space are so great. The role of the U.S. Air Force and NASA is largely that of the state shouldering many of these risks. Until spaceflight has matured beyond a relatively high failure rate, it will remain the domain of the state.
Why do you think they’re able to get away with talking about how their work is for the good of humanity when that’s not actually their main aim?
Many NewSpace companies and their owners probably do think that they are working for the good of humanity. And to be fair, they are contributing new technologies that do advance our space-traveling capabilities. SpaceX’s ability to land launch vehicles on autonomous drone barges makes for an impressive media spectacle. The problem is, of course, that these space companies are forced to develop commercial strategies with all sorts of other aims - generating profit for their owners being the most structurally significant.
Capitalists in general, not just the ones working to exploit outer space, like to frame their activities in prosocial terms. Now, it has to be said that capitalism can generate incidental benefits to humankind. No critical social movement could deny this. But the question is if this is capitalism’s primary effect--which it probably isn’t--or at least a more commonly occurring side-effect than capitalism’s tendency to produce negative consequences for workers, the environment, cultural values, and so on. This question is perhaps the preeminent problem in our current political situation.
Adam Smith famously said that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” On Smith’s view, social benefits are coincidental to the pursuit of rational egoism. Problems begin to arise, of course, when this self-interested productive activity ends up wrecking the atmosphere, harming or underpaying workers, and poisoning their “dinner,” so to speak.
There are untold riches—scientific, material and, why not, spiritual—awaiting our discovery in outer space. The tragedy of allowing capitalism to appropriate outer space is that these entrepreneurs will co-opt the limitless possibilities on offer: Rather than become a site of the free play of the human imagination, outer space will be reduced to a kind of cheap Starbucks sentimentalism; rather than allow the resources available on asteroids, the Moon, and Mars to benefit all of mankind, they will benefit a narrow slice of share owners.
Why do you think commercial space politics tend to have this libertarian bent?
The captains of NewSpace industry like to portray themselves as if they’re libertarians. This mindset is shared with most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. To explain why these entrepreneurs so often portray themselves as these libertarian, Ayn Rand-esque heroic figures would require explaining how the culture of American capitalism, and perhaps more specifically Californian capitalism, came about in the first place. All of it is part of a general degradation of the idea of competent governments in the post-Reagan, post-Thatcher world - that the state could ever be a force for good, and an efficient provider of equitable services. As one report on Capitalism in Space typically observes, “The private companies know best how to build their own products to maximize performance while lowering cost.”
The problem with this mentality is that it is a tremendous fiction. The revenues are largely sourced from government sources, primarily NASA and the military, in the case of the United States. The technology is largely developed and the relevant manpower is largely trained in universities like Berkeley and Stanford, which derive a huge proportion of their research funding from the government.
The libertarian vision of outer space is consistent with the dominant neoliberal ideology of our times: If you believe healthcare, higher education, and incarceration should be taken care of by private enterprise, then why would you all of a sudden believe that the government should build spaceships and launch satellites into Near-Earth Orbit? The zeitgeist of our times is libertarian. The paradox, of course, is that even under Thatcher, the British state did not become a “slim state” at all, but in fact grew. There is no way to get to outer space without the state.
If you could change the way the space enterprise works, how would it look?
Our advice would be to respect the intent of the Outer Space Treaty from 1967. The Outer Space Treaty says that all resources harvested and exploited in outer space should benefit all of humankind. If we do manage to reach the potential resources found in outer space, they should benefit all of humanity. Profits should be shared equitably between all signatory nations. As we write in our paper, Donald Trump’s administration has essentially stated that this treaty is null and void. According to Scott Pace, the Executive Director of the National Space Council, outer space is precisely not “the ‘common heritage of mankind’, not ‘res communis’, nor is it a public good.” Well, that’s it for the Outer Space Treaty, then, which proposed a kind of Cold War-era proto-communism in space, with all profits to be shared equitably between all people back on Earth. Trump’s people hate this mindset of course, because they think profit-making is the only motivator of human action, a very neoliberal notion that makes a mockery of altruism and selfless curiosity that guide and drive a thousand acts of interpersonal kindness and scientific inquiry each and every day.
The notion that the Outer Space Treaty should still apply seems quite common-sensical to us. As Norwegian scholars, coming from a Nordic, social-democratic context, we’ve witnessed first-hand the many benefits of a strong welfare state, with high levels of taxation on “ground rent” resources like hydroelectric dams and oil or natural gas fields. Profits from space enterprise should benefit all of humankind.
Nation-states are under pressure from international corporations with their own agendas. The most advanced of these corporations are developing Internet technologies with tremendous ramifications, giving rise to a type of economic system that some call “platform capitalism” (Nick Srnicek) or “surveillance capitalism” (Shoshana Zuboff). The new space enterprises could be seen to be doing something similar. It is no coincidence that these NewSpace enterprises are deeply connected to Internet companies (PayPal in Musk’s case, Amazon in the case of Jeff Bezos), and that offering communication services was both the birth of the commercial space sector - the first satellite companies - and the future, as the commercial competition over satellite-based Internet services increase. Who will control SpaceX’s planned planetary-level Internet satellite system, Starlink? With potentially thousands of satellites in orbit, won’t this single corporation have a powerful chokehold on Earth’s Internet traffic? As the Internet’s infrastructure becomes increasingly space-bound, regulation must be put into place to ensure that corporations do not run amok with this power.
In addition, the environmental impact of this new commercial space race has not been sufficiently addressed.
All in all, international cooperations and regulations need to be upheld and developed further with regard to NewSpace enterprises.
Can you explain more, for a layperson, what you mean when you say that space is an outlet for surplus capital?
Karl Marx had the idea that one of the distinctive problems with capitalism is not so much scarcity and lack but excess and overabundance: too many workers (which he called the “industrial reserve army” or “surplus populations,”, i.e. people without a positive function in the marketplace), too many commodities (causing all kinds of adverse ecological effects today with overproduction of too much stuff), and too much capital - investable assets with nowhere to go. If investors can’t find a “meaningful”—meaning profitable—outlet to invest their capital in, then what will they do with this capital? If they leave it in a bank vault or a zero-interest bank account, then inflation will simply eat away at it, year after year, and investors will miss out possible profit-generating opportunities: what economists call an opportunity cost. So capitalism is fundamentally about trying to find ever more and ever newer profitable venues for a capital that is always liable to become stagnant - dead capital. As Marx notes in the first volume of Capital, capital that doesn’t move, circulate, or accumulate, ceases to be capital at all and becomes more like treasure - in the sense of a pirate’s buried treasure, stagnant and inert, and in fact constantly depreciating.
The geographer David Harvey draws on Karl Marx’s idea of surplus capital to suggest that this fundamental tendency in capitalism explains why capitalism pushed out from beyond the narrow radius of Manchester’s cotton mills in the first half of the nineteenth century to become a global, planetary-level economic system. Capital is always seeking restlessly the next great investment opportunity, and that means seeking out new places: new mines in Congo, new sweatshops in Vietnam, and so on. Capital is about appropriating more space. Places that lived under traditional, non-capitalist economic systems tend to be colonized and gobbled up, as it were, by capital. David Harvey calls this a spatial fix: Faced with the problem of mounting surplus capital, capitalists seek out new spaces to invest their capital and thereby keep the wheels of the economy going.
Outer space, then, is just one more, final space in a long line of spaces that have served as fixes to capital’s need for expansion. But because outer space is potentially limitless, it is also the ultimate spatial fix. Capitalism has expanded from Manchester to Western Europe, to cover essentially all continents on Earth, with a few notable exceptions and pockets of more traditionalist economies here and there. Now that Earth has been more or less emptied out of capital-free spaces, outer space remains as one great, final virgin territory, so to speak.
Outer space is terra incognita: we do not know what is out there. But it is also terra nullius: land without ownership. Finally, it is terra pericolosa, dangerous land, a site of extreme risk. All of this combines to make it a very difficult and yet enticing place for capitalists to invest in.
Similarly, can you define “charismatic accumulation?
As a capitalist, you cannot simply be an impersonal machine that allocates capital. To be a truly successful capitalist requires an additional human supplement: a personality, a certain charisma, to use the German sociologist’s Max Weber’s key concept. This has always been a part of the capitalist game, from Henry Ford through Steve Jobs and onward. But there’s something about outer space that seems to concentrate the capitalist mind along these lines. Since the days of the Babylonian astronomers and ancient Egyptian sky-worshipping polytheism, outer space has been a crucial site for the free play of the human imagination. Adept entrepreneurs know full well that playing up to this all-too-human longing for the transcendent can be a very useful strategy in building buzz for their brand. While the novelty has worn off a little by now, for the first couple of years every SpaceX launch was something like a quasi-religious spectacle, watched by hundreds of thousands of people, online and in real-time. Launch events were—and still are to a certain degree—capable of producing a real sense of wonder: what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence,” a kind of bubbling-up of human fellow-feeling. Space seems to offer the possibility that this terrestrial life is not all there is. This is a huge selling point in the overcrowded marketplace of ideas.
At the same time, launching these expensive, complex products into space is a highly technical feat of human engineering. It allows people like Elon Musk to sell themselves to the public as purveyors of nerd capitalism: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg initiated and exploited the trend of geeky entrepreneurs, combining business savvy and dorm-room or basement-dwelling studiousness. The form of charismatic accumulation specific to high-tech industries like outer space seems to spin off this basic Silicon Valley personality type, combined with a heavy dose of engineering derring-do. While Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space enterprise emphasizes the “risk-all” madness of launching into space, Musk plays up to the more traditional love of Silicon Valley geeky obsessiveness. Whatever form it takes, the basic point is that the high-tech capitalism of our age seems to love a strong personality: It’s good for business, because it attracts investors, customers, and the media.
As the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk says, we live in an age of general excitability. If you’re not excited, you’re not alive to all the possibilities of the world, and are therefore in some sense dead to the world: “Excitability is now the foremost duty of all citizens,” Sloterdijk writes. Excitability is a kind of currency in an all-too drab, workaday world, beset with worries about crippling student debt, mortgage payments or rent, low wages, and unstable jobs. Charismatic space capitalists promise to break the monotony of this terrestrial life and feed the desire for excitement and the duty of excitability.
Do you think space capitalism is actually viable in the long-term? Is the market really there?
The annual launch market is still relatively small in the wider scheme of global capitalism. One estimate suggests that companies like ULA, SpaceX, Arianespace and others generated $8 billion in revenues in 2018 - a paltry figure when we recall that the global home decor market, to take one somewhat pedestrian example, was valued at a whopping $660 billion last year. Space capitalists are still small fry. When analyzing novel social phenomena, it’s always worthwhile bearing the current scale of such phenomena in mind to avoid aggrandizing them groundlessly.
Peter Diamandis, the chairman of the X Prize Foundation, has said that “there are twenty-trillion-dollar checks up there, waiting to be cashed.” He was talking about the promises of near-Earth asteroid mining. At present, all of this is quite far-fetched. (His own X Prize Foundation had to cancel the 2007-2008 Google Lunar X Prize, which challenged private teams to land on the moon and transmit HD video back to Earth, because there were no viable projects.) There is a huge amount of hot air in the private space enterprise - this is the downside of our culture of excitability: People get terribly excited about the slightest sign of novelty.
When speaking of viability, one aspect that gets underplayed are the significant ecological effects of launching into space. For instance, SpaceX is developing the idea of Earth-to-Earth space flight, which might entail moving passengers from any point on Earth to any other point within, say, half an hour. What would be the ecological consequences of burning tremendous amounts of rocket fuel to escape Earth’s gravity well, just so that a London-based billionaire could get to Sydney in 30 minutes? There is something perverse about the idea that all the rest of us are being enjoined to cut back on flying, even as Musk and his cronies tinker away to make life easy for the hyper-rich.
Of course, this would be just one more step in a general tendency under capitalism that the geographer David Harvey calls time-space compression: The speed at which capital circulates increases and along with it life also accelerates. Both space and time are compressed by new technologies. One unfortunate consequence of Earth-to-Earth space flight, if it is ever realized, would be its damaging effects on our already CO2-saturated atmosphere. But perhaps more worrying, according to some rocket engineers, is the trail of soot and alumina left in the wake of rockets that could accumulate in the stratosphere and deplete our fragile ozone layer. The United Nations’ 2018 Quadrennial Global Ozone Assessment is the first annual UN report to take this threat seriously. Ironically, as Musk dreams of shuttling humans off Earth to Mars as a species-preserving measure, he could be co-responsible for accelerating the very destruction of Earth that he purportedly fears.
In a radically decarbonized future, heavy caps on emissions might be enough to shutter the space industry - or at least seriously rein it in. This might not be a bad thing, because as a report from the non-profit Aerospace Corporation recently noted, emissions from rockets “inherently impact the stratosphere in a way that no other industrial activity does.” Reaching space on a grand scale might entail tearing open and ripping apart our own atmosphere in the process. This is why we may need to rethink our future in space—perhaps even holding off from launching too many rockets into space—precisely in order to preserve life here on Earth.