Space Colonization: Will the Human Race’s Ambition Be on the Brink of Politicization in the Future?
As the classic scientific wonder prophesized, we might soon be living above the Earth, on the Moon, or on other solar system’s bodies. Unless things go down the wrong way.
Upon hearing the idea of human race colonizing the space, we might quick to assume it as a mere cliché premise of 2000’s Sci-Fi movies. However, most people didn’t know that the notion of human race permanently colonizing the Earth’s orbit, the Moon, other planets, or even asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter has been popular since the late 1960s. One of the pioneers of the said scientific wonder was Gerard K. O’Neill, Princeton University’s prominent physicist, well-known for his paper called ‘The Colonization of Space’ (1972) and his breakthrough book which introduced his O’Neill cylinders as the future constructed Earth-Moon system habitat, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1967). O’Neill analyzed and predicted the scientific probabilities on creating outer Earth habitat with the first wave colony designed to reside on the orbit between the Earth and the Moon, precisely on Lagrange 5 (L5) zone (O’Neill, 1974). Believe it or not, it is a scientifically possible idea to colonize the space outside our 4-billion-years old Earth.
The idea of colonizing the space began as a mitigation alternative due to the multiple interrelatedly complex issues that have been going on for decades on Earth, to name few, global population boom, food and agricultural crises, and extreme environmental degradation. Nevertheless, colonizing the space is not a matter of a piece of cake. Technically, it comes with a wide array of non-scientific challenges; political, moral, and socio-cultural ones that surround even the beginning of ‘architecturing’ the colonization require all hands to solve them altogether. I’ll explain later.
One of the political challenges on modern-day space expansion, and mayhap soon, colonization — a byproduct of the outdated and deliberately questionable Outer Space Treaty (1967), formally the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space — is the ambiguity and inadequacy of current outer space legal regime in answering many political and legal questions on the issue, for instances who will be allowed to colonize the space and how colonizing the outer space should not defect the Treaty’s rule of law which constitutes that the outer space ‘shall not be subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty of any nation’, yet states, according to the same treaty, will be able to retain jurisdiction over any of its space-launched objects (Article II and VIII of Outer Space Treaty 1967). That is unless some significant, and surely up-to-date, changes are made to the Treaty. Basically, the Treaty wasn’t meant to deal with contemporary game-changing space technological advances that the world is now seeing — it was made solely to alleviate the tension between US and USSR during Cold-War-era Space Race and prevent either of them from stationing nukes or other weapons of mass destruction on the Moon or other celestial bodies first. Back in the 60’ and 70’s, other than the wonder of colonizing Mars, the Moon or asteroids, the frightening idea of, either US or USSR, installing nukes on the Moon was real. Luckily, the Outer Space Treaty (1967) was there to save the world from mass annihilation and ensure that Space Race didn’t need to hurt anybody. Yet, nobody foresaw that in present-day, it would turn to be a cause of international discord since it provided no certainty to whether vastly modern space expansion and exploitation activities, such as lunar and asteroids mining, are legal nor does it rule what new space actors can or can’t conduct — by new space actors, I mean private enterprises engaging in the field from across the globe — and the limitation of their activities regarding space exploration and exploitation essential for building future space colonies, including extracting water, minerals, chemical elements, or precious metals from extraterrestrial bodies, like the Moon and asteroids, for on-Earth and in-space life sustenance, space missions’ gas-refueling, or simply global economy support (Mallick & Rajagopalan, 2019).
Under such absence of rules, state governments tend to arbitrarily (and biasedly) interpret the current international law and principles which stipulate that the outer space is a ‘common province of all mankind’ that’s free for exploration and use by all States (as the lawful party according to the Treaty), or bodies representing States, under peaceful purposes (Banks & Kovic, 2019). Following the proliferation of private enterprises dealing with space exploration and resource exploitation — with some being in-great-deal funded by the government — concerns are thriving regarding how the space colonization idea might be orientated for certain parties’ interests. Few commercial enterprises that are gaining international recognition are Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which, by the way, had just launched two NASA astronauts in their Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station three weeks ago (NASA, 2020), Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Joel Sercel’s Trans Astronautica Corporation (TransAstra), which was recently awarded by NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) for its asteroid-resources-harvesting technology (NASA, 2020), Tokyo-based tech company, ispace Inc., and Luxembourg’s Kleos Space.
TransAstra alone even made it clear — as noted on its website — that their vision is to enable ‘humans homesteading the solar system powered by asteroids’ resources’ while their mission is ‘using asteroids resources for NASA and commercial spacecraft’ refueling stations’ (Trans Astronautica Corporation, 2020). To most people, those might sound like thrilling Sci-Fi movie pitch potentially turning into realities, yet politically speaking, they sound rather horrible. Those corporations’ trajectories signal exclusivity in creating the future extraterrestrial home for said humanity, or to be truly precise, certain groups of people that benefit these companies most. Since, to be clear and fair, the US, with NASA, already had the upper hand among other nations in space technological race and, predictably, there will only be relatively scant people who can afford to leave the planet for tourism or migration, even when the Earth is in its worst shape due to the stockpiles of mundane problems in the next 50, 70 years. Most of those people would be the wealthiest ones coming from developed nations.
Space expansion, considering the status quo, gradually prompt us with more and more questions rather than answers; who will be allowed to build colonies or sponsor the colonization on the outer space? Will it be individual states, groups of states, transnational bodies representing states, or commercial actors? Who will be the migrants or colonizers? Should the colonies be built exclusively based on nationality, race, economic welfare, or categories of occupation? Once the colonies are built, what type of government and political order should be adopted? How would the constitution be made? Since starting a new life outside Earth would be unprecedented and unimaginable, which culture, norms, values, or ways of life should be socially upheld and put into practice? Will capitalism continue to reign? If private enterprises are welcomed in the game, wouldn’t they only be after the profits and money? If a state, or one of its representing private space exploration companies, launched colonies construction on the Moon, wouldn’t it be under the jurisdiction of the state, and, almost inevitably and exclusively, under its sovereignty, too? Wait, wouldn’t that breach the law of the Treaty?
There are simply a lot more space exploration and exploitation activities that are not regulated specifically by any international legal basis than the ones that are. The privatization of unprecedented space exploration, and maybe, soon, colonization activities is slowly turning into a vulnerable political and business agenda. With States’ growing eagerness and competitiveness in advancing their outer space technologies and benefit from it — underpinned by significant unilateral actions, as the United States had demonstrated through the legalization of Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act in 2015 (Stockton, 2015) and American Space Commerce Free Enterprise Act in 2018 (Smith & Lamar, 2018) and Luxembourg through its adoption of the Space Resources Act in 2017 which recognizes commercial entities’ rights to own and use space resources (Graas, 2017), for example — legal renewal of the Outer Space Treaty (1967), as the ‘Constitution’ of international space regime, and other international legal frameworks on the same issue, in general, are much needed to answer a bunch of questions on how human race’s space colonization might take place in the future. Or, is the idea of space colonization even legally accepted, to begin with.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Banks, I., & Kovic, M. (2019, February 7). Political, moral, and security challenges of space colonization. Retrieved October 6, 2019, from https://zipar.org/discussion-paper/political-moral-security-challenges-space-colonization/.
Graas, J. (2017). Luxembourg Space Resources Act: Paving the legal road to space — Allen & Overy. Retrieved 19 June 2020, from https://www.allenovery.com/en-gb/global/news-and-insights/publications/luxembourg-space-resources-act-paving-the-legal-road-to-space
Mallick, S., & Rajagopalan, R. P. (2019). If Space Is ‘the Province of Mankind’, Who Owns its Resources? The Potential of Space Mining and its Legal Implications. Retrieved June 20, 2020, from https://www.orfonline.org/research/if-space-is-the-province-of-mankind-who-owns-its-resources-47561/
NASA. (2020). NASA Invests in Concepts Aimed at Exploring Craters, Mining Asteroids. Retrieved 18 June 2020, from https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-invests-in-tech-concepts-aimed-at-exploring-lunar-craters-mining-asteroids/
O’Neill, G. K. (1974). The Colonization of space. Physics Today, 27(9), 32–40. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3128863
Smith, & Lamar. (2018, April 25). H.R.2809–115th Congress (2017–2018): American Space Commerce Free Enterprise Act. Retrieved October 9, 2019, from https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2809.
Stockton, N. (2020). Congress Says Yes to Space Mining, No to Rocket Regulations. Retrieved 19 June 2020, from https://www.wired.com/2015/11/congress-says-yes-to-space-mining-no-to-rocket-regulations/
Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space. Jan. 27, 1967, UNOOSA.
Trans Astronautica Corporation. Home. (2020). Retrieved 19 June 2020, from https://www.transastracorp.com/home.html
