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In October, at a tech conference in Italy, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos predicted that millions of people will be living in space \u201cin the next couple of decades\u201d and \u201cmostly,\u201d he\u2019d said, \u201cbecause they want to,\u201d because robots will be more cost-effective than humans for doing the actual work in space.<\/p>\n
No doubt that\u2019s why my ears perked up when, at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco weeks later, I found an on-stage prediction by Will Bruey, the founder of space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries, so striking. Rather than robots doing the work as Bezos envisioned, Bruey said that within 15 to 20 years, it will be cheaper to send a \u201cworking-class human\u201d to orbit for a month than to develop better machines.<\/p>\n
In the moment, few in the tech-forward audience seemed taken aback at what many might consider a provocative statement about cost savings. But that raised questions for me \u2013 and it has certainly raised questions for others \u2013 about who, exactly, will be working among the stars, and under what conditions.<\/p>\n
To explore these questions, I spoke this week with Mary-Jane Rubenstein, dean of social sciences and professor of religion and science and technology studies at Wesleyan University. Rubenstein is the author of the book Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse<\/em>, which director Daniel Kwan used as research for the award-winning 2022 film \u201cEverything Everywhere All at Once.\u201d More recently, she\u2019s been examining the ethics of space expansion.<\/p>\n Rubenstein\u2019s response to Bruey\u2019s prediction cuts to a fundamental issue \u2013 which is power imbalance.\u201dWorkers already have a hard enough time on Earth paying their bills and keeping themselves safe . . . and insured,\u201d she told me. \u201cAnd that dependence on our employers only increases dramatically when one is dependent on one\u2019s employer not just for a paycheck and sometimes for health care, but also for basic access, to food and to water \u2013 and also to air.\u201d<\/p>\n Her assessment of space as a workplace was pretty direct. While it\u2019s easy to romanticize space as an escape to a pristine frontier where people will float weightlessly among the stars, it\u2019s worth remembering there are no oceans or mountains or chirpy birds in space. It\u2019s \u201cnot nice up there,\u201d said Rubenstein. \u201cIt is not nice at all.\u201d<\/p>\n But worker protections aren\u2019t Rubenstein\u2019s only concern. There\u2019s also the increasingly contentious question of who owns what in space \u2013 a legal gray area that\u2019s becoming more problematic as commercial space operations accelerate.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> The 1967 Outer Space Treaty established that no nation could claim sovereignty over celestial bodies. The moon, Mars, asteroids \u2013 these are supposed to belong to all of humanity. But in 2015, the U.S. passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which says that while you can\u2019t own the moon, you can own whatever you extract from it. Silicon Valley got starry-eyed almost immediately; the law opened the door to commercial exploitation of space resources, even as the rest of the world watched with concern.<\/p>\n Rubenstein offers an analogy: It\u2019s like saying you can\u2019t own a house, but you can own everything inside it. Actually, she corrects herself, saying it\u2019s worse than that. \u201cIt\u2019s more like saying you can\u2019t own the house, but you can have the floorboards and the beams. Because the stuff that is in the moon is the moon. There\u2019s no difference between the stuff the moon contains and the moon itself.\u201d<\/p>\n Green light red light<\/strong><\/p>\n Companies have been positioning themselves to exploit this framework for some time. AstroForge is pursuing asteroid mining. Interlune wants to extract Helium-3 from the moon. The problem is that these aren\u2019t renewable resources. \u201cOnce the U.S. takes [the Helium-3], China can\u2019t get it,\u201d says Rubenstein. \u201cOnce China takes it, the U.S. can\u2019t get it.\u201d<\/p>\n The international reaction to that 2015 act was swift. At the 2016 UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) meeting, Russia called the Act a unilateral violation of international law. Belgium warned about global economic imbalances.\u00a0<\/p>\n In response, the U.S. in 2020 created the Artemis Accords \u2013 bilateral agreements with allied nations that formalized the American interpretation of space law, particularly around resource extraction. Countries worried about being left out of the new space economy signed on. There are now 60 signatories, though notably Russia and China are not among them.\u00a0<\/p>\n There is grumbling in the background, though. \u201cThis is one of those instances of the U.S. setting rules and then asking other people to join in or be left out,\u201d Rubenstein says. The Accords don\u2019t say resource extraction is explicitly legal \u2013 just that it doesn\u2019t constitute the \u201cnational appropriation\u201d that the Outer Space Treaty forbids. It\u2019s a careful dance around a fraught issue.<\/p>\n Her proposed solution to addressing it is straightforward if exceedingly unlikely: hand control back to the UN and COPUOS. In the absence of that, she suggests repealing the Wolf Amendment, a 2011 law that essentially bans NASA and other federal agencies from using federal funds to work with China or Chinese-owned companies without explicit FBI certification and Congressional approval. <\/p>\n When people tell Rubenstein that collaboration with China is impossible, she has a ready response: \u201cWe\u2019re talking about an industry that is saying things like, \u2018It\u2019ll totally be possible to house thousands of people in a space hotel,\u2019 or \u2018It\u2019ll be possible within 10 years to ship a million people to Mars, where there\u2019s no air and where the radioactivity will give you cancer in a second and where your blood will boil and your face will fall off. If it\u2019s possible to imagine doing those things, I think it is possible to imagine the U.S. talking to China.\u201d<\/p>\n Rubenstein\u2019s broader concern is about what we\u2019re choosing to do with space. She sees the current approach \u2013 turning the moon into what she calls \u201ca cosmic gas station,\u201d mining asteroids, establishing warfare capabilities in orbit \u2013 as profoundly misguided.<\/p>\n Science fiction has given us different templates for imagining space, she notes. She divides the genre into three broad categories. First, there\u2019s the \u201cconquest\u201d genre, or stories written \u201cin service of the expansion of a nation-state or the expansion of capital,\u201d treating space as the next frontier to conquer, just as European explorers once viewed new continents.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s dystopian science fiction, meant as warnings about destructive paths. But here\u2019s where something odd happens: \u201cSome tech companies seem to sort of miss the joke in this dystopian genre and just sort of actualize whatever the warning was,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n The third strand uses space to imagine alternative societies with different ideas of justice and care \u2013\u00a0 what Rubenstein calls \u201cspeculative fiction\u201d in a \u201chigh-tech key,\u201d meaning they use futuristic technological settings as their framework.<\/p>\n When it first became clear which template was dominating actual space development (fully in the conquest category), she got depressed. \u201cThis seemed to me a real missed opportunity for extending the values and priorities that we have in this world into those realms that we have previously reserved for thinking in different kinds of ways.\u201d<\/p>\n Rubenstein isn\u2019t expecting dramatic policy shifts anytime soon, but she sees some realistic paths forward. One is tightening environmental regulations for space actors; as she notes, we\u2019re only beginning to understand how rocket emissions and re-entering debris affect the ozone layer we spent decades repairing.<\/p>\n A more promising opportunity, though, is space debris. With more than 40,000 trackable objects now circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, we\u2019re approaching the Kessler effect \u2013 a runaway collision scenario that could make orbit unusable for any future launches. \u201cNobody wants that,\u201d she says. \u201cThe U.S. government doesn\u2019t want that. China doesn\u2019t want it. The industry doesn\u2019t want it.\u201d It\u2019s rare to find an issue where every stakeholder\u2019s interests align perfectly, but \u201cspace garbage is bad for everybody,\u201d she notes.\u00a0<\/p>\n She\u2019s now working on a proposal for an annual conference bringing together academics, NASA representatives, and industry figures to discuss how to approach space \u201cmindfully, ethically, collaboratively.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether anyone will listen is another question. There certainly doesn\u2019t seem to be much motivation to come together on the issue. In fact, back in July of last year, Congress introduced legislation to make the Wolf Amendment permanent, which would entrench restrictions on China cooperation rather than loosen them. <\/p>\n In the background, startup founders are projecting major changes in space within five to ten years, companies are positioning themselves to mine asteroids and the moon, and Bruey\u2019s prediction about blue-collar workers in orbit hangs in the air, unanswered.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n