The world nation powers are shifting capital back to the research and development of tools and equipment for space travel after fundamental budget cuts in the 1990s as a reverberation of the tragedy of Challenger. The game also has plenty of new players from the private sector. Otherwise pragmatic billionaires dream of their pompous funerals on Mars, one day in the distant future, because they’ll live almost forever thanks to genetic manipulation, cloning or regular infusions of youthful blood. Space exploration moved far beyond its naive natal phase of little ideological skirmishes or dreaming about interstellar civilizations and jumped right into a state of ferocious conquest easily corresponding with the highest era of colonial expansion. Non only is the Moon a necessary stopover destination for any kind of journey far, far away but applications of technologies and materials developed for space travel on Earth have limitless potential. From scratchproof glass; lightweight, high-storage batteries powering all our smartphones or electric cars, memory foam and fireproof fabric or GPS, originally developed and designed for smooth navigation in outer space. On the horizon of growing investments shines a vision of fully autonomous artificial intelligence, biometric sensors, art-traffic control as well as crop fertilizers and greenhouse LEDs adapted from systems now in development for establishing otherworldly agriculture. And beyond all that lies a realm of practically boundless mining of rare earth elements and colonies of Earth originating Martians, where one for sure won’t have to worry about taxes.
To be honest, the framework of the outer space is but a mental exercise allowing for a better understanding of our current conditions. Staring the Climate crisis. Before we start digging under the surface of the Moon or on Mars, the first steps will be mining operations in the deep ocean or the arctic circle for the first time accessible by heavy machinery due to receding icebergs. The Western colonial past plays the second violin. Before conceiving a functioning governing system in a future space colony comes an urgent need to reevaluate the history of western expansions and from it resulting in a blazing state of late capitalism.
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