The Interstellar Railroad, or Speculation and Shareholder Whiteness in the Space Economy
BY RÉKA PATRÍCIA GÁL
“The future of the corporation presupposes the future of the colonial state, and the law of the corporation colonizes the future.””
In a recent Lex Fridman podcast interview, Elon Musk refutes astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s famous quote regarding the singularly precious existence of Earth, a planet capable of supporting human life, in the universe. Musk reads Sagan’s words, “The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate," but quickly rejects them. He laughs: “This is not true. This is false... Mars.” Musk has been a proponent of the Red Planet’s colonization since the early 2000s. Along with numerous other private companies, he determined that private corporations could easily bypass – and, in fact, thrive on – the public scrutiny and organizational constraints that the US National Air and Space Administration (NASA) faced (Spaceref 2001). Following the Columbia shuttle disaster, in 2004, the President’s Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy called for a limitation of NASA's role to only those space operations that absolutely require government input. When US President Obama cancelled the shuttle programme and announced significant funding for private space corporations in 2011, entrepreneurs capitalized on the momentum, and the so-called New Space industry began to bloom (Valentine 2012, 1046; Weinzierl 2018, 180). The subsequent years have seen the proliferation of space colonization advocacy programs that promise to create an intricate mix of extraterrestrial settlements and space tourism, as well as asteroid mining, thereby allowing for capitalist extension while also conveniently offering a solution for Doomsday crises such as climate change or asteroid strikes. In other words, space colonization becomes a speculative strategy to maximize capitalist profits while mitigating future existential risks.
Musk regularly uses the rhetoric of “inspiration” and “creativity” to market a utopian future in outer space. In his company pitches, he positions the ‘New Space race’ by making two promises: the colonization of space is possible, and SpaceX will get us there. While most of Musk’s messaging is aimed at keeping the dream of colonizing Mars alive, SpaceX does also work on missions to the Moon “to gain valuable experience for missions to Mars and beyond” (spacex.com). Due to its proximity to the Earth, the Moon is the primary target for extractivist agendas, specifically space mining activities. The 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty clearly forbids ownership of the surface or subsurface of the Moon by any given nation and organization and the “development” of its resources is meant to be overseen by an international régime (Klinger 2017). However, Julie Klinger has shown that despite the treaty’s efforts, the Moon has become “an extended battleground” for international competition over resources and geopolitical power struggles, which are characterized by repeated regulatory offenses perpetrated by high-profile investors (2017, 201). As a transportation company to the Moon and beyond, SpaceX would tighten its grip on interstellar capital.
Indeed, Musk has carefully positioned his company as a space transportation company, and has explicitly compared the SpaceX project to building the Union-Pacific Railroad — for space (Robertson 2016). The colonial comparison is not surprising (Cowen 2020). Proponents of space colonization have long drawn parallels to the colonization of the Americas, enthusiastically representing frontier pioneering and imperialist expansionism as imperative to US American national identity (Billings 2007). The explicit comparison to North American railroad construction hints at a specific trend of space colonization advocacy that is focused on stimulating commercial space operations. The industrialist argument is that just as the construction of the transcontinental railroad was best undertaken by private entrepreneurs who were incentivized by the government with land grants and subsidies, the US American government should similarly aid private entrepreneurs in the establishment of the New Space industry (Mazlish 1965, Launius 2014, McCurdy 2019a). In fact, from the founding of SpaceX up to 2012, the additional government funding provided to SpaceX raised returns on investment by more than two percent--this is approximately the same return that a nineteenth century investor might have expected to gain if the railroad company they invested in received federal land grant subsidies (McCurdy 2019b, 48). Looking at the transcontinental railroad and current space colonial initiatives in parallel can therefore provide a helpful analytic for understanding, and struggling against, such a colonial expansion. What questions and conceptual understandings can thinking of commercial space travel alongside the transcontinental railroad generate?
Figure 1: Apollo 6 Saturn V during rollout. Source: Project Apollo Archive
I am particularly interested in thinking this analogy through some of the concepts advanced by Manu Karuka in his recent monograph Empire’s Tracks (2019). Karuka argues that the construction of the transcontinental railroad was foundational to the development of the modern US colonial state, which grew in tandem with finance capitalism and the modern corporation. Karuka’s systematic analysis unveils two central concepts that are useful for understanding the outer spatial analogies. First, that the financial speculation accompanying the gold rush was foundational to the establishment of the settler society’s extractive social order. And second, that the logic of corporate shareholding has served, and continues to serve, as the core vehicle upholding the white supremacist social order.
While SpaceX stocks are not publicly available yet, numerous venture capital firms have invested in the aerospace company, with some key investors being Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Google, and the Bank of America (McCurdy 2019a). A landscape of speculation enfolds over the lonesome weightlessness of outer space as these powerful companies are investing towards capitalizing on future shareholding profits. A future, which has been called into question by numerous people, because, as Shannon Stirone has put it simply: “Mars is a hellhole. [...] Mars will kill you.” Stirone explains that Mars has a very thin atmosphere and no magnetic field, which means that it has extremely high radiation, and no breathable air. All the while, the surface of the planet is −63 °C, and dust storms are extremely common. These concerns, however, continue to be ignored in favor of high-risk investment.
Figure 2: A view from the "Kimberley" formation on Mars taken by NASA's Curiosity rover. Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The corporate expansion into outer space is coated in a language of equality – of providing equal access to the wonders of outer space for all. An example of this is the recent private mission into space entitled Inspiration4, which developed in cooperation with the online payments startup Shift4Payments, and is currently raffling a seat to a random winner. The lottery acts as aspirational evidence of equal opportunity: Musk claims that these private missions are necessary to eventually make it possible for “everyone” to go to space (Chang, 2021). But Musk’s vision of making space travel affordable through economies of scale can only be made possible by creating initial demand through aspirational marketing. Just as railroad companies, aided by government grants and loosened regulations, facilitated the westward expansion of European colonists over Indigenous lands, so ought the colonization of Mars create a pastoral utopia in which inspiration and creativity for all abound.
Exactly how a trip to a Martian colony could be paid by anyone was revealed in recent Tweets by Musk in which he has reinvented indentured servitude for extraplanetary colonization (McKay 2020). Territorial expansion, based on financial speculation, facilitated by corporations and using unfree imported laborers is exactly what Karuka unveils about the logics of railroad colonialism. He explains,
As investors became increasingly disconnected from the sources of their revenue, financial profits seemed to arise through agreements between individuals, seemingly separated from, even independent of, the sweat of specific bodies in specific places. With the maturation of the modern corporation in the wake of emancipation, investors imagined financial accumulation as autonomous from labor, whiteness as autonomous from blackness and indigeneity. (2019, 150)
Here I want to hone in on Karuka’s key concept of shareholder whiteness. Karuka explains that slaveholders maintained their economic advantages after the emancipation of slaves by excluding Black people, the Chinese workers who constructed the railroad, and the Indigeous peoples whose lands they occupied, from corporate ownership. According to Karuka, “Racism is an effect, not a cause, of imperialism. [...] Whiteness is fiction, not a biological reality, [...] Finance capital and whiteness ripened through a historical elaboration of relationships between imperial corporations and colonial states, forging and sustaining continental imperialism” (Karuka 2019, 150).
The extension into the cosmos has already been theorized by scholars as a way to allow for the unfettered continuation of capitalist accumulation, and the New Space companies of the last decade have repeatedly claimed humanity’s extension into the cosmos as an inevitable consequence of “progress” (Dickens 2007; Valentine 2012; Klinger 2017). With little left on Earth to be financialized, companies are turning outer space itself into an asset. I could hardly think of a better example of fictitious capital that would produce such profound alien-ation from the act of production. Whether we are thinking of asteroid mining, space settlements, or simply private space voyages, the shareholders are, and will continue to be, removed from production on our planet, but will in the event of space colonization also be separated from it by several atmospheric layers, hatches, pressurized rooms, and spacesuits. Karuka writes, “the future of the corporation presupposes the future of the colonial state, and the law of the corporation colonizes the future” (2019, 153), and his analysis of the role of the modern corporation in the establishment of the US colonial state proves to be an entirely-too fitting prediction of a future neoliberal space dystopia.
Figure 3: Apollo 14 Hasselblad image from film magazine 66/II - EVA-1. Source: Project Apollo Archive
The particular colonial expansion perpetrated through the railroad was achieved through “blending the economic and military functions of the state” (Karuka 2019, xiv). The policing of racial and territorial borders was at the heart of imperial expansion as the colonizing states guarded reservation borders as sites of containment. It also allowed the states to enforce the rules of colonial market relations on occupied Indigenous lands. To this day, the militaries of the US naval empire serve the vital functions of presenting their interests at sea. This produces another apt analogy when we consider the same mercantilist logic is being extended into space with the recent development of the United States Space Force, a new branch of the Armed Forces that is meant to facilitate, and ultimately guard, the supremacy of the United States in outer space.
Rather than produce a new world or a vastly different future, interstellar-railroad-colonialism seems to aim, at best, to re-entrench and, at worst, to exacerbate the ongoing inequalities that exist on Earth. This is especially true for conditions produced in and through colonial relations. Space exploration is explicitly settler-colonial. It projects the same logic of terra nullius into outer space that was used as a justification for the appropriation and colonization of the North American lands that were inhabited by various Indigenous nations, while also reproducing existing colonial relations on Earth through the expansion of space colonization infrastructure. For example, the observatories, telescopes, and other space exploration related buildings continue to be erected on Indigenous lands all over Earth, from Hawaiʻi, through French Guiana all the way to Aolepān Aorōkin Ṃajeḷ (Marshall Islands) (Smiles 2020; Prescod-Weinstein et al. 2020; Durrani 2019). As his Tweet about indentured servitude in space shows, Musk is already counting on the extension of the (likely racialized) material exploitative practices from Earth to outer space.
Figure 4: An Indigenous person of the Shoshone tribe looking at the Central Pacific Railroad. Source: Library of Congress
But this is also the one major difference between railroad colonialism and space colonization: while the colonial expansion in North America was articulated as the colonizing European’s ongoing fight against the sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, the fight over territory in outer space might not be fought against extraterrestrial natives. Instead, it will likely continue to be fought against the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples on Earth, and in space, against other spacefaring nations, such as China and India. As such, what remains open for me is to what extent shareholder whiteness remains the same, or transforms with this move of the corporation into outer space. Will whiteness remain the currency of the future, or will the shareholder privilege of the future turn towards something else, something new yet equally insidious? How does shareholder whiteness function under a global economy? And more importantly, what tools for resistance can we learn from those who struggled against colonial expansion and specifically, the transcontinental railroad? Can we break with the logics of finance capital, empire, and whiteness in interstellar space, and speculate towards a better future?
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Réka Patrícia Gál is a PhD student at the Faculty of Information at University of Toronto and a Fellow at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. She completed her master’s in Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her main research interests are in feminist media theory, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, and anthropology of outer space. In her dissertation project, she investigates contemporary outer space colonial initiatives, focusing on the implications of human-machine interdependence in outer space as it relates to issues of sustainability and environmental justice.
Banner photo by NASA for Unsplash.
