Marx would probably have found Musk’s Martian ambitions bewilderingly romantic.
As a quick glance at The Communist Manifesto will (not unsurprisingly) reveal, Karl Marx was not exactly an admirer of (most) of the personal qualities of those he referred to as the bourgeoisie (“the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor”). After tearing down the old feudal order, for which Marx shed no tears, the bourgeoisie had
left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
And so on and so on.
But he could not help but be impressed by what the wicked bourgeoisie had achieved:
It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.
I suspect that he would have been similarly impressed by the latest launch of a SpaceX Starship.
Neither the Starship vehicle nor its Super Heavy booster survived all the way through to their intended splashdown, but SpaceX officials said the test flight achieved several of its key goals during the flight . . .
“This flight pretty much just started, but we’re farther than we’ve ever been before,” SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said just after liftoff in a livestream. “We’ve got a starship, not just in space, but on its coast phase into space.”
[Starship’s latest] launch, designated Integrated Flight Test-3 (IFT-3), was the third test mission for the fully stacked Starship. The first and second Starship launches both ended explosively last year, with the vehicles detonating before the completion of each flight’s mission objectives. However, data collected during those first flights helped SpaceX engineers get Starship ready for success down the road . . .
Starship’s upper stage continued flying after separation, but didn’t attempt to go into a full orbit. Instead, the spacecraft entered a suborbital coast phase.
Marx would probably have found Musk’s Martian ambitions bewilderingly romantic, but he would not have been surprised to see the expansion of commerce into space, once technology permitted.
The Communist Manifesto:
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The idea that “the bourgeoisie” would have stopped at the surface of the globe would have struck him as ridiculous.
Ramin Skibba is an astrophysicist turned writer and something (I would guess) of a Starship skeptic.
Here he tweets ahead of the launch:
So the FAA now gave SpaceX approval to test launch Starship for the 3rd time. The pressure’s on! I suppose if the rocket lasts more than 10 minutes and doesn’t destroy the pad or the neighboring wildlife refuge, that’ll be considered a success.
This time the flight lasted nearly 50 minutes.
Oh well.
Back in 2021, Skibba wrote an article for Aeon in which he wrote that:
[T]he Moon is only a foothold, a first step on the edge of a vast landscape. Humanity stands on the brink of a new era of exploration, in which brief, intermittent and tentative space jaunts could be replaced by a multitude of cosmic activities conducted by many competing interests. Within 20 or 30 years, crewed missions could make giant leaps toward Mars – 500 times further away than the Moon – to map out the terrain and even establish colonies. Asteroids and other distant destinations will be next. With this new age dawning, we face a collective responsibility to consider the moral challenges before us . . .
Well (and Skibba talks about this at some length) there is certainly a discussion to be had at about the clutter humanity has left in orbit, and about what we see in the night sky in future. There is also a case to be made that the Moon (as a satellite of the Earth) ought to be subject to a more extensive terrestrial treaty than it now is, although no such treaty should be allowed to limit either commercial development or the ability to use the Moon as a jumping-off point for journeys deeper into space. It is one thing to preserve wilderness on Earth, but different considerations should apply when it comes to a place some 240,000 miles away.
Skibba maintains that “no one wants the next few decades of space activities to result in a Moon pockmarked with excavations, or Mars littered with abandoned dwellings and ice miners.” Really? Despite the distinctly bleak way in which Skibba paints that picture, evidence of our species’ progress deeper into space is something to celebrate, not mourn. And last time I checked, the universe is not short of barren rocks. The position Skibba takes is yet another reminder that the ideology of “sustainability” owes more to an aversion to technological progress than to anything else.
Moreover, it’s hard to see — at least as a general principle — why the writ of some sort of terrestrial authority should extend beyond the Moon and Earth’s immediate vicinity. That said, it could clearly be useful to have agreements struck between voluntarily contracting nations to provide a mechanism to avoid quarrels about who, say, can mine a certain asteroid causing trouble back on Earth.
And then (of course!) there are questions about how to deal with any contact with alien life. I’ve seen enough movies to realize that bringing any of it (or anything potentially contaminated by it) can give rise to . . . difficulties. While I doubt that we will encounter any little green men any time soon, even deciding how to deal with a planet inhabited by some sort of alien lichen poses issues that will require some thought.
Skibba, however, wants far more constraints:
A new regime that preserves the beauty of space for everyone will need to prioritise scientific research and public access to its benefits. International agreements could demarcate limited space zones for particular kinds of commercial activity. Sustainable, egalitarian operations in space would focus on social equity, environmental conservation, workers’ rights and balanced economic benefits. Many more people would have access to the benefits of space, not dependent on the beneficence of a few billionaires; decisions would be similarly democratic and consultative.
Taking that sort of approach would mean that humanity’s advance into space will not get very far.