Two versions of history began when, one fall night in 1957, a two-stage rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and deposited a Soviet satellite called Sputnik into orbit around Earth. The first version is the one that is well-known: the grand romance of a terrestrial species bounding out of its cradle, the sharpening of America’s own hunger for this scientific adventure, the astonishing realms of knowledge bequeathed to us by the Space Age. The alternate history casts the space race, first and foremost, as a surly, selfish contest for military and ideological supremacy.
The prospect of being snooped upon from space by the Soviets got the Americans worked up enough to accelerate the development not only of Explorer 1—the first U.S. scientific satellite, launched in January 1958—but also of the Corona program of spy satellites. Just as worrying for the Eisenhower administration was the rocket on which Sputnik rode: an R-7 Semyorka, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. (Edward Teller, who helped build the hydrogen bomb for the United States, described the news of Sputnik as “a technological Pearl Harbor.”) If you could put a satellite on the R-7 and send it into orbit, you could also put a nuke on it and send it to Chicago. The Russians had set a precedent, Eisenhower’s advisers insisted in a closed-door conference; the United States, too, could and should lob missiles into outer space. Moscow was surreptitious and scheming in its own way. To dupe the Americans, the spaceport referred to as the Baikonur Cosmodrome was, in fact, nearly 200 miles southwest of the mining town of Baikonur. These cold warriors had not so much thoughts as afterthoughts of science.
All narrators of the Space Age as a sordid geopolitical competition will invite several accusations. That they’re narrow- and mean-minded, so intent on sweating the politics that they’re unable to cherish the scientific advances—not to mention the glorious vistas of our universe—that our spacefaring has brought to us. That they’re Luddites. That they’re too idealistic, too eager to believe that we would have reached the moon when we did even without the pants-on-fire urgency of Cold War militarism. Or that they’re not idealistic enough, because they aren’t able to imagine the egalitarian space bound future that will rescue us from our ramshackle present.
These charges hold varying levels of merit. You’d certainly have to be staggeringly cussed, for instance, to dismiss the images of Saturn’s rings captured by the Voyager and Cassini probes, or the truths that space telescopes, picking up cosmic microwave background radiation, revealed about the age and shape of our universe, or just the daily conveniences of GPS, memory foam mattresses, and runners’ Mylar blankets that have spun out of space missions. The clear-eyed will see, on the other hand, the utter hokum that is the space utopia now hawked to us by a handful of libertarian billionaires. They will also spot the bright, continuous line that connects the space race of the twentieth century to that of the twenty-first. Just as scientific universalism was once used, at least in part, as a cover for the power struggles of the Cold War, today’s techno-libertarian drive outward into space cloaks a steroidal American urge to impose its will upon the world. The signs can be read through the history of space exploration, right up into Artemis—the recent lunar mission hastened along by Donald Trump’s vanity, his desire to “never be second,” and the plot to “establish U.S. dominance on the moon.” It’s futile to deny that we got the Space Age we got because one country grew drunk on capitalism and is still zealous about defending its mythic exceptionalism beyond the literal ends of the earth.
For David Ariosto, the author of Open Space, that defense must be led by U.S. companies, with an aim to grab their share of space before China does. Ariosto describes himself as the founder of a “strategic communications and intelligence firm redefining how organizations navigate the space frontier,” and while his book is scattered and incoherent, it is revealing in one way. In being thoroughly and constantly obsessed with what China is up to, Ariosto reveals the id of America: its paranoid lust for military and industrial preeminence, its self-regard, its delusion that the future belongs to no other nation. During his first spasm of panic about China, which comes as early as the second page of the prologue, Ariosto writes that “we” ought to “acknowledge that it is wiser to have trusted stewards at the table than to surrender control to those who may do us harm.” It’s uncertain whom he means by “we,” but he leaves no doubts that the stewards should be Americans—or American corporations.
This clumsily posed binary choice has a rich heritage. In the “battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny,” John F. Kennedy told a joint session of Congress in 1961, the time had come “for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.” It was almost existentially important for humanity to see that the American system—or the Soviet system, as the case may have been—was the best to grasp the universe, and also to weaponize it en route. Again and again, the space programs of the two Cold War antagonists were waylaid or warped by the priorities of their militaries. When, in the late 1940s, the Soviet engineer Sergei Korolev wanted to propose building a satellite, his superiors, wary of subversive talk, warned him to back off. Practically as soon as satellites confirmed the existence of the Van Allen belt, a zone of charged particles high above the atmosphere, the United States began detonating nuclear bombs within it, trying to generate enough radiation to disrupt the mechanisms of Soviet warheads. Both Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn rode to space on ICBMs; so useful was NASA to the Pentagon, the political scientist Daniel Deudney writes in Dark Skies, that “Lyndon Johnson claimed the space program had saved ten times as much as it cost by reducing arms expenditures.”
The Pentagon wanted the space shuttle to be designed so that it could fly over Soviet latitudes, release a spy satellite or capture one, and then return to its launchpad after a single orbit. As a result, the wings had to be shaped differently, the cargo bay had to be enlarged to hold the bigger reconnaissance satellites that were in the offing, and the spacecraft itself grew heavier. When the shuttle lagged behind schedule and ran over budget, Jimmy Carter kept funding it in the hope that it could be used to check up on the Soviets, to see if they were sticking to the terms of arms-limitation treaties.
In the Reagan era, NASA’s scientific funding shrank, even as the Strategic Defense Initiative, which relied so heavily on space-based missiles that it was nicknamed “Star Wars,” received more and more money. In 1986, when NASA’s entire budget clocked in at $7.4 billion, Reagan asked Congress for $5.4 billion for Star Wars alone. And then, when the Cold War petered out—when the United States felt it had won, when history ended—America’s space adventurism deflated. To be sure, there was serious and excellent research conducted aboard the International Space Station and by observatories on the ground and in the sky. But the once-frantic ambition to push ever upward seemed to fall in America’s priorities when there was no burning strategic or military objective to tether the space program. Net-net, Deudney writes with provocative boldness, “the consequences of what has actually happened in space are much less positive than space enthusiasts and many others believe.”
It can’t be total coincidence that the U.S. space sector revived around the dawn of another rivalry of great powers and their clashing ideologies. Beijing didn’t offer tactful euphemisms for its aspirations. Ye Peijian, the head of the Chinese lunar exploration program, said of the moon in 2019: “If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.” This kind of directness has been the rhetorical equivalent of the R-7 rocket: a license to freely frame the new space race as a tussle for control and wealth.
If Ariosto is any measure of the U.S. space industry today, everyone has an anxious eye turned eastward. When he suggests that space has become a “gatekeeper to humanity’s AI-driven future, offering solar energy, abundant resources, and natural cooling”—a thorough deromanticization of the universe if there ever was one—he frets in the very next sentence that China has surged ahead in batteries, solar cells, rare earths, robotics, and quantum technologies. An Iranian-born space entrepreneur working in the United States tells Ariosto that he wants to “ensure the Chinese never surpass us in space technology.” If the high seas might be read as an analogue to deep space, Ariosto writes elsewhere in the book, China signed the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea but then showed its willingness to ignore the treaty whenever
it saw fit. (He neglects the fact that the United States has refused to sign up to UNCLOS, just as it has rejected treaties that ban nuclear testing, act against climate change, and recognize the International Criminal Court.) In detailing how satellites might help build “digital twins”—real-time models—of practically anything on Earth’s surface, he points out that the notion raises “major questions of privacy.” He means, of course, not the capacity of governments to intrude into the lives of their citizens, but the possibility that China could obtain critical insights into Western infrastructure.
Ariosto devotes two whole chapters to China’s construction in Argentina of a ground station to support its space missions; he is allowed to visit the facility, he watches scientists and engineers at work in their labs—and then he seems to hint that the station is likely to have been set up to intercept U.S. electromagnetic signals. (Las Lajas, the town in the Andean foothills where the Chinese built this complex of buildings, is thousands of miles from the continental United States—much too far to eavesdrop on the president’s cell phone calls.) It’s never wise to be too credulous of the subterranean motivations of great powers, as the United States itself has taught us again and again. But Ariosto’s manner implies that, for Americans, space wouldn’t be worth a second look if they weren’t mightily alarmed about China’s interest in it. When he describes Apophis, an asteroid that will pass uncomfortably close to Earth in 2029, I half-expected him to urge America to load it with explosives before the Chinese can make a move.
For that is really what Ariosto thinks it will mean for the United States to excel in space: weaponize better, extract more, and colonize faster than anyone else. In this, he resembles most of the Americans he speaks to and writes about—even Barack Obama, who in 2015 made it legal for U.S. companies to own minerals and other resources found in space. The act may well violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which banned governments from claiming sovereignty over any celestial body. But the flag bearers of the modern space race must view the 1967 treaty as part of a brief and regrettable infection of idealism in the American establishment. They certainly regard that establishment as not being aggressive and cutthroat enough in its extraterrestrial pursuits. (One of Ariosto’s sources, deciding that words really hold no intrinsic meaning, ascribes the laggardness of the United States in the 1960s to the “socialist paradigm” of the time.)
Today’s space titans—including those in China—plan to avoid those old-timey, rookie mistakes. The only reason, really, to send probes to asteroids is to figure out how best to strip-mine them. (“Will we actually land on an asteroid and get these beautiful samples? Probably fucking not,” says the CEO of AstroForge, an American space mining startup, sounding as if he were assessing his chances of rushing a frat. “But do we hope to … show people the price point we’re doing this at is doable? I hope.”) A senior Chinese official envisaged a “special economic zone” between the moon and Earth that might, by 2050, yield $10 trillion in yearly revenue. The Adam Smith Institute published a report arguing that we should privatize the moon altogether, sweetly pretending that the objective is to “turbocharge scientific discovery.” The abject lack of any enforceable space law is a feature, not a bug; SpaceX’s general counsel has said that his company would “move to impose our own legal regime” on Mars. The laissez-faire code of outer space will, it is implicitly believed, engender better civilian technology—which will, in turn, prove useful in preparations for war. For the Americans in Ariosto’s book, this future cannot arrive fast enough. What better way, after all, to champion the free market, the military-industrial complex, the internalized hallucinations of Manifest Destiny, and all the other pillars of the American way of life than to put them to use, nakedly and in concert, in the conquest of space?
Open Space likes to valorize the entrepreneurs it portrays. These aren’t the very grandest names in the business; Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who coined their wealth in other fields and then spent it on SpaceX and Blue Origin, only transit briefly through the book. They aren’t even the founders of companies in the next tier: the New Zealand-born Peter Beck, for instance, whose Rocket Lab has ferried more than 200 satellites into space, or the trio behind Planet Labs, whose Dove satellites, like manic shutterbugs, photograph Earth from orbit thousands of times a day. Rather, Ariosto takes us to startups striving to cash in on the space race. One company, Lonestar Data Holdings, wants to repurpose the moon “as a kind of off-world backup for Earth’s data.” Ariosto suggests that the eventual result of a lunar mission launched by another company, Intuitive Machines, will be the mining of the moon for iron and titanium. A third, D-Orbit, wishes to take apart old satellites and recycle their parts for profit.
The men—usually men—who lead these companies wear the heroic sheen not of philosophers at the frontiers of knowledge but of accountants toiling over their P&L statements. As a habit, in describing these endeavors, Ariosto will say: “Yet, admittedly, the path forward will not be easy” or “Turns out, it wouldn’t be easy” or “Of course, it wouldn’t be easy.” (Once, to change things up, he writes: “Failure was a very real possibility.”) Perhaps he intends to signal that he is a realist, a cool and clinical analyst of the state of play. But he offers no satisfying insights into what it means for the space sector to have intersected so neatly with Silicon Valley, and why that even came to be.
One factor behind this unholy marriage is the confluence of economic trends, as Ashlee Vance explains in When the Heavens Went on Sale, a closely observed account of the people and companies propelling the modern space business. Some things got cheaper—consumer electronics that could survive in space, materials for rockets, software—and some people got epic rich. It became possible to build a satellite for $100,000, rather than $1 billion, just when tech magnates like Musk and Bezos grew wealthy to the point that $100,000 was a meaningless sum of money—and also when they believed that they ruled their industry and wished for more worlds to master. They could have improved health care or paid off student debt, but these wouldn’t have been very American things to do. Just like the tech sector circa 2000, space exploration today holds the same promise of titanic and impersonal engineering challenges (“Of course, it wouldn’t be easy”), untold riches for first movers, and an unregulated playground. Aspiring to exploit the cosmos for personal gain is one exponential leap from aspiring to build an online store that crushes every other online store or to build a thinking machine that replaces humans. The hubris of it all, which Vance captures so well, and also the harm-be-damned approach of it all—that is very American. It may be corporations that are running this race, but they’re still direct and rather obvious proxies for national power.
It helps, too, that the tech moguls had, like their predecessors in the space sector, learned to garb their real motivations in do-gooding platitudes. Just as Neil Armstrong claimed to be arriving on the moon for all mankind but was really there for the United States alone, so, too, the pitch decks of Silicon Valley routinely talk about making the world a better place while pledging their loyalty in blood to shareholders. These new pioneers of space expansionism guarantee nothing less than utopia at the other end of the journey. In Open Space, Ariosto points to previous such projects that he deems to have succeeded: The expansion of Western empires, he writes, was driven by fine things like “new financial incentives and stock options [that] spurred entrepreneurial growth.” And the settlement of Mars, he says, might resemble the settlement of Jamestown: with some “tensions” between the early colonists, distant investors, and the English crown. He has left out the racist subjugation and extractive greed of imperialism, and the “tensions” with Native Americans that resulted in their large-scale slaughter. To forestall the possibility of industries ravaging outer space, Ariosto ponders some vague “earthly legal overseer,” but he isn’t very interested in details. It’s too important to dupe the world into thinking that this space mania—into which billions of dollars have been invested—will truly bring about colonies wonderfully low on violence, servitude, and greed, pies in the literal sky.
The tragedy of this space race is that it has left us unable to imagine or craft an alternative one. Because of course it’s essential for humans to know this universe that holds us, not only for what we will learn about the nature of matter, space, and time, but also for the genuine potential of this enterprise to unite us. Nothing about our recent record suggests that we’re even able to come together to combat threats that imperil us right this minute, let alone capable of forming world governments and moon cities that are just and free. If the future of humankind in space is to look any different from the state of humankind on Earth, it can’t be left, by default or out of despair, to the tech firms of Silicon Valley. We need other space programs, other agencies, other men and women to obsess over our role out among the stars. This won’t be easy, as Ariosto would no doubt say—but the moon shot will be worth it.
