Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration

In the 1960s and ’70s, America spent $24 billion (around $150 billion in today’s dollars) to land humans on the moon and win the space race. And while humans took their first steps on an extraterrestrial landscape, protesters at Cape Canaveral asked: Why waste money on space when there are so many issues here on Earth?

More than fifty years later, an oligopoly of commercial space companies—Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic—has begun sending civilians into space. These civilians are the first generation of what will undoubtedly be an extensive family of space tourists. Commercial space companies aim to expand access to space, find new sources of energy, mine outer space resources, and conquer extraterrestrial lands. But their goals remain those of a capitalist and imperialist class, intent on new-frontier profiteering.

Savannah Mandel uses cultural anthropology to trace the trajectory of the space industry as she faces the social, political, and economic repercussions of commercial space ventures head-on. In doing so, Mandel holds the space industry accountable for its actions by asking the same questions that some thought leaders asked in the 1960s: Should we go? Is it worth it to send humans to space? What cultural outcomes will result from continued human space exploration and the colonization of other worlds? And last, what can we learn about our present selves by studying our most extreme visions of the future?

Copyright © 2024 by Savannah Mandel

All rights reserved

Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-64160-992-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024932178

Interior design: Jonathan Hahn

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

To all the social scientists who fight for a cause. I hope you get funding.

"To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, —

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do

If bees are few."

—Emily Dickinson, To Make a Prairie

"We went to the moon to have fun,

but the moon turned out to completely suck."

—M. T. Anderson, Feed

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Protest

PART I: A LETTER TO THOSE LIFTING OFF

1 Past the Potato and into the Future

2 The Crossroads

3 On Faith and Sacrifice

4 Asteroids and Access

5 A Trip Down the River Styx

6 Six Decades of Space Protests

PART II: A LETTER TO THOSE LOST IN SPACE

7 On Success and Failure

8 Celestial Motivations

9 This Land Is Our

10 The Exorcism of Manifest Destiny

11 They May Not Be Man

12 The Death of Outer Space Dreams

PART III: A LETTER TO THOSE LEFT BEHIND

13 An Anthropologist’s Call to Arms

14 The Caretaker’s Demand

Epilogue: Earthward Auguries and Activisms

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

THE PROTEST

King’s Cross Station, London, 2018 CE

It’s easy to fall in love with London. Easy to slip into its rhythm and cadence. To drift between pub and kebab shop, pause with a coffee in hand to watch a violinist perform at Covent Garden, or swim with a tide of pedestrians down Oxford Street. It’s easy to succumb blissfully to that world, even with a hand clenched tightly to your wallet for fear it might be pocketed into the bag of another. And it’s easier still, I think, to forget such a city’s powerful position on the world stage.

But in the summer of 2018, London’s political omnipresence and perfect positioning in what feels like, to many, the center of the world (though decolonial scholars would disagree) was the last thing on my mind.

I was simply happy to be back.

I had only just returned from my anthropological fieldwork, in which I had been studying human interactions with outer space at Spaceport America in New Mexico. A little sunburned and emotionally exhausted, I was blissfully unbothered by Earthly issues and far more focused on turning my collection of scribbled field notes into a cohesive argument.

And I was struggling to make sense of those field notes. Struggling to figure out how to balance what I had seen with what my participants had said. Because for some reason, the two did not match up. In one margin, I had scribbled comments about the struggles of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico—a city that funds Spaceport America via taxpayer money—with poverty and drought, and in the other margin I had a list of celebrities who had bought tickets for Virgin Galactic spaceflights. Pages of my notes were dedicated to protests at the French Guiana Spaceport and the Thirty Meter Telescope, and just as many pages questioned why commercial space companies strove to build more spaceports in other postcolonial regions.¹

My participants’ political mission statements and optimistic aphorisms uplifted a vision different from the commercial reality of the spaceport. These were the individuals I studied, and sorting through their beliefs and values about human space exploration made me realize that their dreams left many individuals behind on Earth. These dreams were also built on the backs of those who would never touch the stars.

At the time, my research at Spaceport America would not lead me too deep into this philosophical wormhole, and compared to the political conflict I was about to walk into at King’s Cross Station, the internal dilemma of sorting through notes was far from existential. But my own internal crisis was preventing me from turning the wealth of experiential, qualitative data I had acquired in New Mexico into concrete, pragmatic analysis.

It wasn’t just my notes that caught me off guard. Another aspect of the project had me on edge. Something that no adviser or handbook on ethnographic methods could have prepared me for: it was incredibly difficult to research what many viewed as a utopia.

People liked outer space (well … except for that one girl I dated who said that the thought of outer space gave her cold sweats), so to talk bad about outer space during my fieldwork felt akin to talking bad about someone’s mother. As I started to uncover things that made outer space exploration (specifically human space exploration) look bad, it felt like I had little room to critique the prospect without alienating myself from half the world. What’s more, the utopians living in the utopia I researched (a.k.a. Spaceport America and other commercial space organizations) not only didn’t like to talk bad about outer space but also didn’t like to talk about the children being sacrificed to make their utopia function smoothly. (This is a reference, in case you didn’t get it, to an excellent short story by a science fiction icon.)² In other words, I had seen the skeletons hidden in the closet, and now, regretfully, I wished that I had interviewed them instead.

This was what was going through my head as I rode through the London Underground. Not politics. Not the massive, thousand-strong protest I was about to unknowingly walk into. No, I was thinking about what Lady Gaga was going to wear to outer space and how to carefully frame my participants in a light that didn’t make them look bad.³ I was thinking about how I would pull my literary punches and what cultural critiques I would mask behind a facade of empiricism. And I was trying to ensure that my participants’ world looked utopian, while presenting a scholarly critique easily defendable for the purpose of earning a degree.

Intensely distracted, I did not even lift my nose from my field notes as the train pulled into King’s Cross Station. I walked straight into a revolution.

I’ve always been able to walk while reading, and yes, many individuals—strangers, family, friends, teachers—have reprimanded me for it over the years. But strangers I could (and did) ignore, and so I walked, head down, nose in notes, through the maze of underground corridors that I knew better than the hallways of my own apartment building.

Except this time as I did so, something odd happened. The flow of passengers coming on and off the various trains in King’s Cross Station became congested and then tangled, as if someone was redirecting everyone. Which was a feat in itself, seeing as King’s Cross hosted over 140,000 passengers a day on average. I remember I sighed, brushed my blue hair out of my face, placed my book in my bag, and thought two things: One, that a train or an escalator must have broken down or perhaps that someone had thrown themselves onto the tracks. And two, that this was annoying.

Now, my words might sound heartless, especially if you know the context of what was happening during the spring and summer of 2018 across London. But this story is one of hard truths and unfiltered realities, in the context of both my personal journey as a scholar and young woman, and the development of the commercial space race. I refuse to censor my own thoughts because I want you, the reader, to see how my personal imaginaries evolved with the rise of the commercial space industry itself.

But I’ll get to that in a minute.

A transport official was directing the crowd, and I remember them telling us (as if nothing in the world was wrong) that we couldn’t exit the way we usually would have.

If you’ve never been to King’s Cross Station, then you might not know that it has many, many exits. Once you exit a train and leave the ticket turnstiles, you enter what could only be described as a shopping plaza that is also connected to St. Pancras Station. Parts of it are aboveground and parts of it are underground. It is a massive maze of corridors and coffee shops and station entrances and exits, covering over seventy-five thousand square feet.

The crowd of passengers and I were redirected a second time … and then a third … and then a loud noise ruptured the subtle din of confusion. Yelling and screaming. Another heartless thought went through my brain: There must be a drunk person causing trouble. Or someone who’s mentally ill. But it did strike me as odd that all of the passengers near the trains at that point were redirected again away from the source of the noise.

And then again.

And then they herded us like confused cattle into the aboveground section of St. Pancras Station—which has glass windows and doors on all sides—and I looked outside and realized that there were police lined up around almost all of the entrances and exits in an effort to block off a sea of protesters from entering the area.

The protesters were calling for an end to the Turkish invasion of Syria and the mass murder of Kurdish people.

And here I was caught up daydreaming about sending humans to space and what Lady Gaga would wear on her Virgin Galactic flight.*

Suddenly, something about that felt very, very wrong.

I stopped walking and stood absolutely still, staring out at the mass of people.

And as I did, members of London’s typically subdued police force wrestled a particularly passionate protester to the floor right next to Platform 9¾.

In all my time in London, I had never seen a police officer put their hands on someone, and trust me, I worked in a pub and was well used to late-night drunken shenanigans. On the eve of the World Cup finals, our bar wasn’t even legally allowed to serve beer in real glasses because of the prevalence of bar fights. Plus, I come from America, the land of police brutality protests, yet still it was shocking to see someone get tackled via brute strength next to an iconic Harry Potter–themed tourist destination.

I continued to stare, causing the line of disgruntled passengers being shepherded out of the station to come to a shuddering halt.

Someone pushed me, bumping my shoulder as they shoved past.

I exhaled. How long had I been holding my breath?

It was as if roots had sprouted from my feet and grown straight down through my boots. As if Mother Earth herself had turned my head and said, "Look. Look, you fool. They will be left behind. What say have they had, in these conversations about space, child? You’re dreaming of the stars while this is happening?"

We, public commuters, weren’t forced to stay in St. Pancras, and let’s be honest, that would have made bigger news than the protest itself. Instead, transport officials kept the rear entrance farthest from the protestors open. But rather than leave and escape the conflict, I walked up to the second floor of the station, sat down, and stared out the window at the individuals packed together, holding signs, marching the streets of London.

It started to rain.

My field notes hung limp in my hands.

Who was really benefiting from human space exploration? How many other protests were happening around the world at that moment? What problems were facing Earth then, at the very moment I was daydreaming about creating colonies on Mars and sending tourists into low Earth orbit? And what was I, an anthropologist, doing researching outer space? Weren’t we supposed to dig up artifacts and study villagers in a rainforest? Or maybe solve murder mysteries with forensics? Why was I helping any space capitalists hide skeletons in their closets?

This story starts at a moment of rupture. A night when the curtain was ripped down and an alternative future behind the veil exposed. I’m speaking in metaphors, of course, as those who write about human space exploration often do, but let me pause before continuing and make myself very clear: there are no utopian visions or interstellar daydreams or biographies of rock star billionaires in this story about space. This is a story that is as raw as it is grounded. It doesn’t leave out the awkward small talk or the inappropriate jokes made over happy hour cocktails. These words are messy. They are human.

In this story I trace the commercial space race (as many have before), but rather than focus on its rise, I describe what might arguably be its downfall. I make an argument for an alternative future. One that includes the voices seldom invited into techno-scientific conversations.

Here, I investigate the construction of global priorities and beliefs as the global becomes increasingly local. I do so through a realm of expertise as new as the commercial space race: outer space anthropology. It is through this lens of expertise that I confront current and historic perceptions of human space exploration. I will explain the birth of this field, and its impact on space science, in the coming chapters.

Who really benefits from human space exploration when access is granted only to those who have the money to get there in the first place? Should humans explore space at all? Is it worth it to send humans to space? What cultural outcomes will result from continued human space exploration and the colonization of other worlds? And last what can we learn about our present selves by studying our most extreme visions of the future?

This confrontation begins at King’s Cross in 2018, but it will travel back and forth through time to examine moments in our history and the present that act as analogues for our future.

To understand what motivates our species’ drive to explore—and our most imperialist urges—I’ll examine colonial histories and inequitable social structures stretching from ancient Greek history to the present day. I’ll resurrect often unacknowledged Apollo-era protests and dissent, which are reflective of space ethics and protests that circulate on social media today. From there, this story revisits historic moments such as the invention and failure of the Concorde and Aramis and the exploration of Antarctica, as a way of understanding technological ventures such as Virgin Hyperloop and Virgin Galactic.

Ground Control will also shine a spotlight on congressional discourse, annual budgets, fictional representations, the narratives promoted by leading commercial space companies, space law, and social media, to tease apart answers