by Ed Finn
Leopold’s actions in the Congo were much worse than any of those described in this anthology. In their stories, Barnes and Scholz do successfully raise the issue of the problems associated with public-private partnerships, most particularly those involving the development of key technologies. Under company rule or imperial rule, the technologies most closely associated with colonization develop in close conjunction with new power relations. In British India, as Daniel Headrick has written in The Tentacles of Progress, the introduction of railroads enhanced imperial control, while opening opportunities for both imperialist and indigenous businesses.[9] In South Africa, the introduction of technologies for mining and processing minerals such as diamonds and gold increased the demand for migrant labor and its regulation through racial segregation. In A History of South Africa, Leonard Thompson argues that in the late nineteenth century, the coming together of racism and capitalism was thought by many intellectuals to be generating the rapid acceleration of imperialism, a timely warning for a NASA volume about future colonization that is being produced in a year when it is still necessary for some to say that “Black Lives Matter.”[10]
It should be noted that in some cases, exploration can lead to imperial dominance, which in turn sometimes leads to colonization and sometimes does not. Plans for colonization were occasionally thought out well in advance, as they appear to have been thought out by Gideon Pace in Scholz’s story, “Vanguard 2.0.” The colonization of New England and New Zealand by farmers was partly planned, while Australia was initially intended to be settled by convicts. In all cases of colonial settlement, though, colonists were attracted by unplanned discoveries, such as gold in California, Australia, and South Africa. In many cases, though, settlement never occurred. Disease environments were sometimes hostile to Europeans, as was the case in West Africa, while a combination of climate, disease, and lack of available land made India unattractive for colonial settlement. Colonization follows domination only when the opportunities outweigh the costs. When opportunities are too costly, more purely extractive imperialism may be preferable. Plans for the future exploration (or domination) of space will face similar limits, whether or not the projects are run by private or public institutions. Natural circumstances will shape the characteristics of dominion. And much will be left unplanned.
Rethinking Governance in a Spacefaring Age
Whether planned or not, one of the key characteristics of imperial history is the evolving coproduction of technology, colonization, and power. This process is nicely articulated by Scholz in “Vanguard 2.0.” The Earth is in a downward spiral. “Universal surveillance was the new normal. Resource wars were the new normal. Climate refugees by the millions were the new normal.” The story’s main protagonist, Sergei, imagines that the villain, Gideon Pace, may be working on developing nuclear fusion weapons, manufactured in space from pellets of lithium deuteride and tritium. Pace brags about how his partners now play a role in the U.S. Department of Defense, while he also wants to redefine the state. He chillingly quotes Max Weber, who wrote that the “state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force,”[11] while speculating how he will reinvent the state, moving it forward from antiquated notions about nationhood.
European colonizers rethought governance, too, and presented the people of the Americas, Africa, and Asia with a range of choices. They could accept European domination or resist it, in ways large and small. Association and assimilation were options, too, that provided new ways to organize resistance. It is significant to note that key figures of resistance, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, were attorneys with a traditional British education, who nonetheless remained comfortable in their home traditions. In contemplating a future for the colonization of space, NASA will be keen to address issues of equality, as it is a bedrock value in the political culture of the United States. In previous centuries, colonization tended to amplify inequality, not equality, in two significant ways. On the one hand, the initial stages of colonization were led by hierarchical organizations, either businesses or armed services. This historical example has often been followed by science fiction authors: it is no coincidence that the name of Star Trek’s Captain James Kirk bears some resemblance to the British Empire’s famous naval officer and explorer, Captain James Cook. The armed services get the job of exploration done but they are hardly theaters of equality. The captain’s authority is complete, a situation attributable to the necessities of navigation as well as tradition. This authority has a special, public-spirited nature. As Greg Dening writes in his account of a famous mutiny, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language, there is a special authority that comes with an officer’s commission from the king’s government: “The Commission, direct from the Crown, in some way displaced the person commissioned, leaving much more room for a sense of public altruism and its rhetoric.”[12] The challenge to future space exploration will be to make certain that the martial values associated with initial exploration do not become the permanent values of colonial settlements, which should instead adopt the values of the broader public.
The future of the nation and the world are linked, in these stories, to decisions about colonization. “Vanguard 2.0” ends with Sergei reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, wondering about a future in which the Earth and space are dominated by the likes of Pace. By contrast, Barnes ends his story, “Mozart on the Kalahari,” on a more optimistic note. Culpepper, a mysterious scout for talent, reviews the flawed science project of the main character, Meek, as well as the project of another student, the “microgravity girl” Kathleen. Culpepper sees the potential behind the flaws and makes Meek and Kathleen part of a future project to colonize Low Earth Orbit. The new biomedical technology that gives Meek the capacity for photosynthesis also raises prospects for a better future.
The stories describe future space travel as a form of escape from a dysfunctional Earth. This sort of plotline reveals a degree of pessimism about the present world and its ills, yet it resonates with U.S. history itself, which, at its bedrock, is a story of migration and colonization. The New England colonies were founded by Protestant dissenters who left home believing that their High-Church Anglican countrymen were on a direct pathway to Hell. The colonization of New England involved social and technical challenges, such as farming in new, adverse circumstances, yet in the midst of those challenges, settlers were able to articulate new visions, in the Mayflower Compact, or in John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill,” that brought together old English values with the environment of the New World. By contrast, in Virginia, the initial project of colonization was undertaken by grasping businessmen, keen to find gold and grow tobacco. Decades of boom and bust, together with slavery and starvation, were eventually stabilized by control from London and by the establishment of a somewhat representative government. Even the grim world envisioned by the likes of Gideon Pace has the possibility to yield to political and technological stability, at least according to the familiar narratives of U.S. history.
If NASA has a role in the future colonization of Low Earth Orbit, it is not only to promote and develop technologies; it is to articulate a vision of what that colonization might look like. The stakes are high. One can only hope that the Earth’s health will be greater than the authors of these stories suggest. The enterprise of colonization has often shaped the values and identities of the home country, intensifying ideas about national identity. Nationalism and colonization are inextricably linked. For example, it is hard to imagine a national identity for the United States without the concept of a “frontier,” the expanding zone of U.S. influence in the West that was once characterized as the country’s “manifest destiny.” The colonization of the western U.S. shaped our country profoundly, and the choices we make about the “final frontier” of space may well define us in the coming century.
[1] Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). [back]
/> [2] Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al., The Internet Classics Archive, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009, http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.html. [back]
[3] Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1988). [back]
[4] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835; New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). [back]
[5] Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). [back]
[6] John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 20-22. [back]
[7] Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 50. [back]
[8] Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 172-173. [back]
[9] Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Power: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). [back]
[10] Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). [back]
[11] Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 78. [back]
[12] Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 21. [back]
Expanding Our Solution Space: How We Can Build an Inclusive Future
by Deji Bryce Olukotun
In early 2016, a 14-year-old email scam resurfaced about an astronaut from Nigeria who was lost in space. The premise of the scam, which had been updated for Facebook, was that the astronaut had been left behind on a secret Soviet space station during the Cold War, and his family needed money to bring him back to Earth. The scam was popular enough to circulate on the site BoingBoing as yet another example of the silly stuff the internet coughs up.
But that same year, Nigeria announced that it would send a real-life astronaut into space by the year 2030. Speaking from the capital of Abuja, minister of science and technology Ogbonnaya Onu said Nigeria would join the growing league of spacefaring nations, which now includes India, China, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Russia, South Africa, the United States, and the 22 member states of the European Space Agency. The list seems to grow every day—Nigeria’s nearby neighbor in West Africa, Ghana, also announced a program in 2012 to expand into space. The idea of Africans walking on the Moon can sound absurd in light of the fact that many, if not most, images of Africa portray its wild animals and its poverty, and not its space-age technology. It’s partly why I named my first novel Nigerians in Space, and it’s also why the email scam above continues to circulate on the internet.
The absurdity of Africans in space may just stem from our own prejudices. Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa, with an estimated gross domestic product of $486 billion, according to the World Bank, and Ghana is a prosperous democracy. By comparison, the United States is the largest economy in North America; Germany and Russia in Europe; and China in Asia—and we don’t scoff at their ambitions in space exploration. In fact, we expect them to launch spacecraft that probe the distant reaches of our solar system.
Inclusion can mean many things in space. Countries with space programs handle diversity in different ways, and some may attempt to include as many people from their societies as possible, such as women and religious, ethnic, or sexual minorities. For example, the Russian space program could continue the Soviet tradition of launching women cosmonauts in Soyuz rockets. Then there is inclusion on the planetary scale, which means giving people from all regions and nations of the world equitable access to outer space. An example of this might be the crews that operate on the International Space Station as it orbits about 400 kilometers above the Earth. Even that is an exclusive club—only 15 countries signed its foundational agreement, and astronauts from 18 countries have visited the station. Sixty-three percent of the astronauts were from the U.S., 20 percent from Russia, and about 4 percent from Japan.[1]
There is ample evidence of the benefits of inclusion, such as improvements in innovation, creativity, and resilience.[2] But for our purposes, inclusion means giving more people access to the benefits of space. Inclusion can expand the range of solutions available to the complex problems inherent in space activity, and also advance notions of fairness and equity. In other words, the more inclusive the spacefaring community, the more challenges we can solve. But it’s also the right thing to do.
The Silicon Valley Space Race
Questions of representation become more complicated when you realize that the future of space exploration will likely soon involve dozens of private companies, each with its own understanding of inclusion. Private companies run by businesspeople from Silicon Valley are beginning to upset the traditional dominance of space contracting that has been enjoyed by consortia such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s joint venture, the United Launch Alliance. While private industry has always played a role in the development of space programs, we’ve entered a new era in which space projects are led by billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. These initiatives are far from vanity projects, and mark the beginning of a concerted scramble for profit off-planet. Elon Musk is supporting SpaceX and Jeff Bezos has put his financial muscle behind Blue Origin. These companies are striving to lower the cost of launches by developing reusable rockets and experimenting with new sources of fuel, one of the most expensive aspects of launching cargo and satellites into space. SpaceX, for example, won a $1.4 billion contract from the U.S. government in 2016.
The problem is that Silicon Valley has a terrible track record of inclusion—only about 1 percent of the technology team at Facebook are black Americans, 3 percent Hispanic, and 17 percent women, according to Fortune.[3] As these tech titans aim their rockets at the Moon, or Mars, or wherever they can make money, it’s plausible this new form of exploration will only exacerbate existing inequities. Even entrepreneurs seeking to expand access to space are catering to these divisions, like Richard Branson and his $250,000 tickets to orbit on Virgin Galactic.
Moreover, as author Cory Doctorow has observed, technology—and certainly space technology—can exacerbate inequality, leading to instability and collapse.[4] “As rich people get richer,” Doctorow writes, “their wealth translates into political influence, and their ideas—especially their terrible ideas—take on outsized importance.” It’s possible that the private space ventures led by Bezos, Musk, and Branson may bring excellent innovations, but they may also inculcate “terrible ideas” as well through their individual influence, with little accountability. Doctorow posits that “without a free, fair and open network with which to rally and marshal the forces of justice, the battle is lost before it’s even joined.” It’s unclear at present whether such a “free, fair and open network” exists with respect to space. NASA shares as much license-free data as it can in the interest of science, except where such technology could be used for military purposes (more on that later). But Blue Origin, SpaceX, or Virgin Galactic don’t necessarily share their innovations through a “free, fair and open network”—even when they receive government contracts.
The shifting ground rules of commercialization may only accelerate these inequalities, as the U.S. Congress has subtly begun chipping away at the United Nations Space Treaty of 1967 and the U.N. Moon Agreement, which together forbid ownership of space resources. In 2015, U.S. lawmakers opened space for business and asteroid mining with the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act. The law aims to open up outer space to market forces. Congress is betting that the American space industry can beat the rest of the world to lucrative new markets in a scramble for space. And other countries are equally interested—Luxembourg is encouraging private space companies to register there to
take advantage of the country’s new space commercialization law ensuring that “that private operators working in space can be confident about their rights to the resources they extract in outer space.”[5]
Creating an Inclusive Bureaucracy
The cost savings promised by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other new space ventures may lower the barriers to entry considerably, but international agencies still have a major role to play in space technology. One way to foster inclusion in space is to promote it inside country-level space programs. The first American astronauts were white and the program deliberately excluded women and African Americans as astronauts, but the country has made great strides in including more marginalized voices. Charles Bolden served as administrator of NASA throughout the Obama administration. Moreover, there have been many black astronauts, including Bolden himself, Mae Jemison, and Ronald McNair. Worldwide, there have been more than 60 women astronauts from 13 countries,[6] with many more waiting in the wings. And yet this represents a minute percentage of the whole. Of the 560 astronauts trained to participate in a human space flight program around the world, almost 500 astronauts were men, and the majority of those astronauts were white.
