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Dawn
In space exploration... we will rediscover progress.
—Ronald Reagan
SDI Program Kick off Speech
March 23, 1983
The year 1983 was marked by two science fiction milestones with the same name. On the one hand, the release of Return of the Jedi, the last film in the famous initial Star Wars trilogy and, a couple of months later, the release by Ronald Reagan — retired film actor and president of the United States—, of the SDI (Strategic Defence Initiative) space defence program, popularly known as the Star Wars program. An ambitious—fictionally ambitious—space defence strategy to combat Soviet nuclear threats in the Cold War.
The civilian committee chosen by Reagan to advise the White House on the controversial program was led by two science fiction writers: Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Niven rose to fame in the early 1970s for the Ringworld saga, an adventure book series set in a circular space structure millions of light-years from Earth. Pournelle, for his part, built a career as a Boeing technician in the 1950s, before writing several science fiction books. While there, he developed the concept of "God Rods", giant tungsten tubes that could be dropped on targets from space to create mass destruction without the need for nuclear weapons or explosives.
Pournelle's career is an example of the blurred boundaries inscribed in this story between government decisions and science fiction. His 1968 publication for the American air force on his research into stabilisation strategies, Stability and National Security, revealed an interest in a technological development that marched to the rhythm of the drums of war. His time in the aeronautical and military industry left strong marks in the construction of the Falkenberg Legion, a space mercenary force that the author developed through several science fiction novels.
Pournelle's interest in seeing the army beyond land limits, coupled with the enormous influence of Niven's stories, resonated strongly with Reagan's imagination. By the beginning of 1981, the president-elect decided to entrust them with a document in the form of a government plan to trace the route of a space program that would strengthen national security. The result of the commission was entitled: Space: The Crucial Frontier, a collage of ideas that brings together everything from special laser weapons to combat missiles in space, to complex satellite bases that closely resemble the space architecture of Ringworld.
The intricate report stressed that space should be understood as a blank canvas framed by right-wing ideological bases. An example of this is the demand to withdraw previous international space treaties, such as the one signed in 1967, which established the legal framework for all outer space resources to belong to humanity. Likewise, said space should be used for peaceful purposes, which expressly prohibited its use for carrying out weapons tests of any kind, military manoeuvres or establishing military bases, installations or fortifications:
“The treaty explicitly prohibits any government from claiming celestial resources such as the moon or a planet, since they are the common heritage of humanity. Art. II of the treaty establishes, in fact, that "outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, may not be the object of national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, use or occupation, or in any other way.”(art IV)
The document ended up being of great relevance in the official presentation of the project in 1983. During his famous speech, Reagan included several iconic phrases from the report, among which he spoke of powerful laser beams installed in satellites that, through complex space choreography, would be able to intercept nuclear missiles mid-journey, to promises of space bases that would function as storage centres for ultraterrestrial resources. Thus, he opened the door to the ultimate expansion of the North American empire.
“Deployed in Earth’s orbit, such a station could burn all missiles launched from anywhere by one side during an all-out nuclear war, and then calmly burn all enemy bombers,” the report states, continuing by saying that the gigantic spatial death ray could ensure victory and deflect any attack. "If such a space laser battle station could hold its own against all manner of attacks that its owners' enemies might direct against it, its ownership will confer the prize of a planet...as soon as it is launched into orbit."
The barrage of criticism that followed the speech, from the public opinion driven by scientists surprised by the disconnection with the logical and technical reality of the proposals, was not an impediment for Congress, with a Republican majority, to finance the program. However, as was expected, not much can be said about the technical or scientific results of the SDI. The most optimistic view is that it was a poker move by the United States to put pressure on the already battered Soviet economy, which after the media scandal had no choice but to increase the budget for the arms race, in order to catch up with American fictional extravagance.
After the Cold War, it is still possible to feel the strong echo of SDI in today's landscape. To understand its resonance, one must analyse several historical events that have their origins in the time: the privatisation of space, the conversion of the space race into a financial race driven by speculation —and the crazy fictional plans that drove it—, and the expansion of a devouring capitalism into outer space under the promise of infinite resources: the main piece that has always been missing in the logic of the system.
I shall never forget the sight, nor the exclamations of wonder that broke forth from all of us standing around, when the yellow gleam of the precious metal appeared under the 'star dust'.
—Garrett P. Serviss
Edison's Conquest of Mars, 1898
First mention of asteroid mining in science fiction
The fact that countries like Japan, East Germany or Great Britain joined forces to finance part of the SDI does not mean that they believed in the technical promises of the program. Instead, it was a forceful demonstration of the decision to bet on a speculative system where tangible advances were the least important. Vice President Lyndon Johnson's 1962 speech was a precedent that had a clear symbolic consequence. The proclamation came as part of the Seattle World Fair, an international event in which the city became the set of a B-movie science fiction movie. During one of the high points, Johnson valued an asteroid at trillions of dollars and, at the same time, he promised that science would find a way to bring one of those celestial bodies to North American soil: "Someday we will be able to bring an asteroid closer to Earth that contains billions of dollars in metals critically necessary to provide a great source of mineral wealth to our factories".
The appraisal of celestial bodies unleashed the frenzy of a new gold rush. The tone of the conversations around the potential of asteroid mining made it almost impossible to discern between theories proposed by scientists, governments or writers of fiction. Dr. Thomas B. McCord and Dr. Michael J. Gaffey, two renowned MIT scientists, for example, proposed putting thrusters on asteroids larger than a kilometre in diameter, so that colonies of space miners could drive celestial bodies to a point where gold bars and nickel bars could be shot towards the Earth, creating a rain of metals that would fall on the oceans, from where they would be collected by teams of divers specialised in the monumental task.
Far from being discarded, these kinds of theories preceded alliances between top-tier universities. Princeton and MIT devised a joint program to create, theoretically at least, an engine that could keep hope alive for all governments and investors who saw space mining as the last frontier of capitalism falling.
This alliance between governments, universities and private interests, advanced in step with legislative efforts to privatise space. In 1984, NASA's Office of Commercial Programs marked one of the greatest changes in the direction of the space program to date. The aerospace agency's alliances with the private sector would be the key to finding post-war financing, but they depended, to a large extent, on international treaties that would make space profitable. To accomplish that task, the space agency created the NASA Space Commercialization Task Force, with a clear motive: to stimulate free enterprise outside of planet Earth by removing bureaucratic barriers to the commercial use of space.
However, international legislation —preceded by the already mentioned ultraterrestrial treaty, and the 1976 treaty for the use of the moon— reaffirmed space as a common good for humanity. For decades thereafter, NASA's strategy was based on a well-known legislative case that took place after World War II. In 1945, the United States claimed exclusive jurisdiction over the continental shelf resources off its territory. Although novel, the claim became part of international law, since its formulation made the same right available to all coastal nations. However, in 1982, during the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the United States made its position clear: the seabed should be accessible to private companies and its resources could not be regulated by international treaties.
This approach was not supported by other countries, but the discourse of marine resources as loot for corporate pirates was a direct precedent for the gaze that the American aerospace institution directed at space in the midst of the disputes of the late 20th century and early 21st century. Before his resignation, Jim Bridenstine, the director of NASA, spoke of the "national appropriation" of outer space resources. His argument was based on the diffuse legislation of fishing on the high seas, where fish cannot belong to any state until they are caught.
The comparison with the California gold rush of the mid-19th century is apt. During this era, California was not entirely American owned and was still governed by Mexican law, without actually forming part of Mexico. This political-legislative hole opened the door to all those who decided to seek their fortune in these lands. The lack of rules was replaced by a finders-keepers policy governed mainly by the miners themselves, a situation that almost always ended in violence due to the reclaiming of lands that were historically owned by Native Americans - a population that would be almost exterminated during this period.
These legislative gaps left the doors open for speculation about the possibility of mining and extraction in space, promoted among popular opinion through movies like Armageddon —in which the salvation of humanity depended on Bruce Willis's enormous drill, contracted to drill into an asteroid to save Earth from imminent destruction—; or Total Recall, a film that contained the seeds of all the fantasies of contemporary billionaires: utopias offering an escape to Mars, the mining of precious metals in space, virtual reality and many, many weapons.
The landing of the Hayabusa probe on an asteroid, cemented the definitive change of focus in aerospace research: what was once "One giant leap for mankind" was just one more step in the conquest of the market. The Japanese mission was the first to land on an asteroid to collect study material. Initially, the purpose of this mission was to thoroughly investigate the materials and formation processes of the solar system; in the end it ended up being the strongest argument to corroborate that the era of space mining was finally possible.
The year 2009 was known as “the dawn of space ventures”. During this time, companies such as Planetary Resources were formed that, using presentations full of motivational phrases and music from self-improvement videos, managed to convince big investors like Eric Schmidt and Google's Larry Page and, of course, filmmaker James Cameron, that they would be able to “add trillions of dollars to the global gross domestic product” represented in water and resources that could be captured from asteroids.
The modest plan of Planetary Resources would be made up of three phases, the initial one was presented in conferences with an animation that showed a complex network of satellites sensing the asteroids, to later be encapsulated in a second phase by a robotic capsule that would fold into the asteroid to capture it. The third phase would involve full automation of the systems through robots and spacecraft designed for this purpose.
Planetary Resources was not the only company that decided to invest in this arduous task. The Deep Space Foundation gave another twist to the ideological basis of these corporations. Its main promoter, an evangelical missionary named Rick Tumlinson, treated the aerospace issue like Sunday service. For him, the importance of the commercialization of space would be based on the need to create communities where us humans could end up with the infinite death that characterises space. For Tumlinson, nothing is impossible except our own belief system: "By opening space, for the first time in our history, rather than inexorably extracting the blood of life from this oh-so-precious sphere in our quest for wealth, we will turn outwards and upwards, creating new wealth from places already dead, advancing into places where there is no life, and bringing its seeds with us."
Celebrity investors fuelled the speculative fever over the aerospace industries. The amount of resources invested up to the year 2015 meant that the Space Act —the new legislative treaty on space— was approved without much problem by the US Congress. The law allowed North American companies to explore and exploit space resources, without exclusive rights to celestial bodies. The act even outlines that, if found, alien life "may not" be subject to commercial exploitation by the United States of America. The news of the approval of this treaty was reflected in the enormous growth of the shares of this type of company in the stock market. For 2015, the estimated value of the aerospace market was $400 billion, a figure that seemed to continue growing, fuelled by the new gold rush.
However, Planetary Resources and Deep Space disappeared after a short time: the frustration of investors, at not receiving short-term profits, turned into a disinterest in continuing to finance the program. In the words of Peter Marquez, one of the principal directors of Planetary Resources, "There was more attention on the religion of space than the business of space." The decline in faith in income led to the first burst of the speculative bubble that fuelled investments under promises that no one knew how to resolve with certainty.
Despite these failures, the speculative fever continued its course. Proclamations such as that of Senator Ted Cruz on the creation of the first trillionaire in space, and the space act of 2015, favoured the creation of the Luxembourg treaty in 2016: a permissive agreement that proposed the opening of space mining to international trade that it would advance at full speed, driven by the laws that made the country one of the main European tax havens. The government of the duchy, once known as one of the main iron and steel exporters in 20th century Europe, decided, in the midst of the crisis of the metallurgical industry of the 1980s, that the economic future of the country could be based on the satellite and financial industry. The mix of flexible policies for the opening and entry of foreign funds, the rise of telecommunications and, later, of the data industry, allowed the average gross income per capita related to space affairs to be the largest on the planet.
The data industry once again transformed the emerging landscape. The global economy, now controlled by tech giants that pulled all sorts of tricks to hide the heart of their business from the public, gave aerospace mining a new lease of life. A good example is Mitch Hunter-Scullion, founder of Space Mining Industries. The young entrepreneur invested his inheritance in a company that claims to be the centre of European space mining. However, the company does not develop technology. His business is to capitalise on the information he gets from third-party sensors and satellites, making speculative data about potential future mining profits his primary source of income.
Leaving aside the great world powers, the outlook for the aerospace industry is bleak. In 2021, Colombia signed the Artemis Accords, the new legislation that secures the United States the position of director for life in the now imagined Galactic Trade Federation. The asymmetry of the diplomatic act could not be more remarkable: Marta Lucía Ramírez, former vice president of Colombia, signed an agreement that guarantees unconditional support for scientific efforts that would put the first woman on the moon. The issue is that Colombia has never had a space program, nor does it have any state investment in any related industry. The few constitutional laws that speak of outer space date from 1996, and they hardly mention the possibility of securing a place in the orbit of geostationary satellites, something that never happened, since the money that could have been used to ensure telecommunications in the country was stolen by government contractors in a scandal that became known as ‘Centros Poblados’.
The outright privatisation of the contemporary aerospace industry grows in proportion to the size of the egos of complex-ridden billionaires. Dreams of escape from Earth, expressed in delusional tweets promising salvation for humanity, provided the perfect excuse to start another colonisation process: they see space as a place where resources would be infinite. The creation of the space army during the Trump administration, Elon Musk's convertibles flying in space, or the giant dildo-shaped satellite whose stunning sound could only be overshadowed by the self-congratulatory speeches of a Jeff Bezos dressed as an astronaut-cowboy only leave something clear: the future is trapped in the fantasies of speculators.
Images by Juan Cortés
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Dawn
In space exploration... we will rediscover progress.
—Ronald Reagan
SDI Program Kick off Speech
March 23, 1983
The year 1983 was marked by two science fiction milestones with the same name. On the one hand, the release of Return of the Jedi, the last film in the famous initial Star Wars trilogy and, a couple of months later, the release by Ronald Reagan — retired film actor and president of the United States—, of the SDI (Strategic Defence Initiative) space defence program, popularly known as the Star Wars program. An ambitious—fictionally ambitious—space defence strategy to combat Soviet nuclear threats in the Cold War.
The civilian committee chosen by Reagan to advise the White House on the controversial program was led by two science fiction writers: Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Niven rose to fame in the early 1970s for the Ringworld saga, an adventure book series set in a circular space structure millions of light-years from Earth. Pournelle, for his part, built a career as a Boeing technician in the 1950s, before writing several science fiction books. While there, he developed the concept of "God Rods", giant tungsten tubes that could be dropped on targets from space to create mass destruction without the need for nuclear weapons or explosives.
Pournelle's career is an example of the blurred boundaries inscribed in this story between government decisions and science fiction. His 1968 publication for the American air force on his research into stabilisation strategies, Stability and National Security, revealed an interest in a technological development that marched to the rhythm of the drums of war. His time in the aeronautical and military industry left strong marks in the construction of the Falkenberg Legion, a space mercenary force that the author developed through several science fiction novels.
Pournelle's interest in seeing the army beyond land limits, coupled with the enormous influence of Niven's stories, resonated strongly with Reagan's imagination. By the beginning of 1981, the president-elect decided to entrust them with a document in the form of a government plan to trace the route of a space program that would strengthen national security. The result of the commission was entitled: Space: The Crucial Frontier, a collage of ideas that brings together everything from special laser weapons to combat missiles in space, to complex satellite bases that closely resemble the space architecture of Ringworld.
The intricate report stressed that space should be understood as a blank canvas framed by right-wing ideological bases. An example of this is the demand to withdraw previous international space treaties, such as the one signed in 1967, which established the legal framework for all outer space resources to belong to humanity. Likewise, said space should be used for peaceful purposes, which expressly prohibited its use for carrying out weapons tests of any kind, military manoeuvres or establishing military bases, installations or fortifications:
“The treaty explicitly prohibits any government from claiming celestial resources such as the moon or a planet, since they are the common heritage of humanity. Art. II of the treaty establishes, in fact, that "outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, may not be the object of national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, use or occupation, or in any other way.”(art IV)
The document ended up being of great relevance in the official presentation of the project in 1983. During his famous speech, Reagan included several iconic phrases from the report, among which he spoke of powerful laser beams installed in satellites that, through complex space choreography, would be able to intercept nuclear missiles mid-journey, to promises of space bases that would function as storage centres for ultraterrestrial resources. Thus, he opened the door to the ultimate expansion of the North American empire.
“Deployed in Earth’s orbit, such a station could burn all missiles launched from anywhere by one side during an all-out nuclear war, and then calmly burn all enemy bombers,” the report states, continuing by saying that the gigantic spatial death ray could ensure victory and deflect any attack. "If such a space laser battle station could hold its own against all manner of attacks that its owners' enemies might direct against it, its ownership will confer the prize of a planet...as soon as it is launched into orbit."
The barrage of criticism that followed the speech, from the public opinion driven by scientists surprised by the disconnection with the logical and technical reality of the proposals, was not an impediment for Congress, with a Republican majority, to finance the program. However, as was expected, not much can be said about the technical or scientific results of the SDI. The most optimistic view is that it was a poker move by the United States to put pressure on the already battered Soviet economy, which after the media scandal had no choice but to increase the budget for the arms race, in order to catch up with American fictional extravagance.
After the Cold War, it is still possible to feel the strong echo of SDI in today's landscape. To understand its resonance, one must analyse several historical events that have their origins in the time: the privatisation of space, the conversion of the space race into a financial race driven by speculation —and the crazy fictional plans that drove it—, and the expansion of a devouring capitalism into outer space under the promise of infinite resources: the main piece that has always been missing in the logic of the system.
I shall never forget the sight, nor the exclamations of wonder that broke forth from all of us standing around, when the yellow gleam of the precious metal appeared under the 'star dust'.
—Garrett P. Serviss
Edison's Conquest of Mars, 1898
First mention of asteroid mining in science fiction
The fact that countries like Japan, East Germany or Great Britain joined forces to finance part of the SDI does not mean that they believed in the technical promises of the program. Instead, it was a forceful demonstration of the decision to bet on a speculative system where tangible advances were the least important. Vice President Lyndon Johnson's 1962 speech was a precedent that had a clear symbolic consequence. The proclamation came as part of the Seattle World Fair, an international event in which the city became the set of a B-movie science fiction movie. During one of the high points, Johnson valued an asteroid at trillions of dollars and, at the same time, he promised that science would find a way to bring one of those celestial bodies to North American soil: "Someday we will be able to bring an asteroid closer to Earth that contains billions of dollars in metals critically necessary to provide a great source of mineral wealth to our factories".
The appraisal of celestial bodies unleashed the frenzy of a new gold rush. The tone of the conversations around the potential of asteroid mining made it almost impossible to discern between theories proposed by scientists, governments or writers of fiction. Dr. Thomas B. McCord and Dr. Michael J. Gaffey, two renowned MIT scientists, for example, proposed putting thrusters on asteroids larger than a kilometre in diameter, so that colonies of space miners could drive celestial bodies to a point where gold bars and nickel bars could be shot towards the Earth, creating a rain of metals that would fall on the oceans, from where they would be collected by teams of divers specialised in the monumental task.
Far from being discarded, these kinds of theories preceded alliances between top-tier universities. Princeton and MIT devised a joint program to create, theoretically at least, an engine that could keep hope alive for all governments and investors who saw space mining as the last frontier of capitalism falling.
This alliance between governments, universities and private interests, advanced in step with legislative efforts to privatise space. In 1984, NASA's Office of Commercial Programs marked one of the greatest changes in the direction of the space program to date. The aerospace agency's alliances with the private sector would be the key to finding post-war financing, but they depended, to a large extent, on international treaties that would make space profitable. To accomplish that task, the space agency created the NASA Space Commercialization Task Force, with a clear motive: to stimulate free enterprise outside of planet Earth by removing bureaucratic barriers to the commercial use of space.
However, international legislation —preceded by the already mentioned ultraterrestrial treaty, and the 1976 treaty for the use of the moon— reaffirmed space as a common good for humanity. For decades thereafter, NASA's strategy was based on a well-known legislative case that took place after World War II. In 1945, the United States claimed exclusive jurisdiction over the continental shelf resources off its territory. Although novel, the claim became part of international law, since its formulation made the same right available to all coastal nations. However, in 1982, during the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the United States made its position clear: the seabed should be accessible to private companies and its resources could not be regulated by international treaties.
This approach was not supported by other countries, but the discourse of marine resources as loot for corporate pirates was a direct precedent for the gaze that the American aerospace institution directed at space in the midst of the disputes of the late 20th century and early 21st century. Before his resignation, Jim Bridenstine, the director of NASA, spoke of the "national appropriation" of outer space resources. His argument was based on the diffuse legislation of fishing on the high seas, where fish cannot belong to any state until they are caught.
The comparison with the California gold rush of the mid-19th century is apt. During this era, California was not entirely American owned and was still governed by Mexican law, without actually forming part of Mexico. This political-legislative hole opened the door to all those who decided to seek their fortune in these lands. The lack of rules was replaced by a finders-keepers policy governed mainly by the miners themselves, a situation that almost always ended in violence due to the reclaiming of lands that were historically owned by Native Americans - a population that would be almost exterminated during this period.
These legislative gaps left the doors open for speculation about the possibility of mining and extraction in space, promoted among popular opinion through movies like Armageddon —in which the salvation of humanity depended on Bruce Willis's enormous drill, contracted to drill into an asteroid to save Earth from imminent destruction—; or Total Recall, a film that contained the seeds of all the fantasies of contemporary billionaires: utopias offering an escape to Mars, the mining of precious metals in space, virtual reality and many, many weapons.
The landing of the Hayabusa probe on an asteroid, cemented the definitive change of focus in aerospace research: what was once "One giant leap for mankind" was just one more step in the conquest of the market. The Japanese mission was the first to land on an asteroid to collect study material. Initially, the purpose of this mission was to thoroughly investigate the materials and formation processes of the solar system; in the end it ended up being the strongest argument to corroborate that the era of space mining was finally possible.
The year 2009 was known as “the dawn of space ventures”. During this time, companies such as Planetary Resources were formed that, using presentations full of motivational phrases and music from self-improvement videos, managed to convince big investors like Eric Schmidt and Google's Larry Page and, of course, filmmaker James Cameron, that they would be able to “add trillions of dollars to the global gross domestic product” represented in water and resources that could be captured from asteroids.
The modest plan of Planetary Resources would be made up of three phases, the initial one was presented in conferences with an animation that showed a complex network of satellites sensing the asteroids, to later be encapsulated in a second phase by a robotic capsule that would fold into the asteroid to capture it. The third phase would involve full automation of the systems through robots and spacecraft designed for this purpose.
Planetary Resources was not the only company that decided to invest in this arduous task. The Deep Space Foundation gave another twist to the ideological basis of these corporations. Its main promoter, an evangelical missionary named Rick Tumlinson, treated the aerospace issue like Sunday service. For him, the importance of the commercialization of space would be based on the need to create communities where us humans could end up with the infinite death that characterises space. For Tumlinson, nothing is impossible except our own belief system: "By opening space, for the first time in our history, rather than inexorably extracting the blood of life from this oh-so-precious sphere in our quest for wealth, we will turn outwards and upwards, creating new wealth from places already dead, advancing into places where there is no life, and bringing its seeds with us."
Celebrity investors fuelled the speculative fever over the aerospace industries. The amount of resources invested up to the year 2015 meant that the Space Act —the new legislative treaty on space— was approved without much problem by the US Congress. The law allowed North American companies to explore and exploit space resources, without exclusive rights to celestial bodies. The act even outlines that, if found, alien life "may not" be subject to commercial exploitation by the United States of America. The news of the approval of this treaty was reflected in the enormous growth of the shares of this type of company in the stock market. For 2015, the estimated value of the aerospace market was $400 billion, a figure that seemed to continue growing, fuelled by the new gold rush.
However, Planetary Resources and Deep Space disappeared after a short time: the frustration of investors, at not receiving short-term profits, turned into a disinterest in continuing to finance the program. In the words of Peter Marquez, one of the principal directors of Planetary Resources, "There was more attention on the religion of space than the business of space." The decline in faith in income led to the first burst of the speculative bubble that fuelled investments under promises that no one knew how to resolve with certainty.
Despite these failures, the speculative fever continued its course. Proclamations such as that of Senator Ted Cruz on the creation of the first trillionaire in space, and the space act of 2015, favoured the creation of the Luxembourg treaty in 2016: a permissive agreement that proposed the opening of space mining to international trade that it would advance at full speed, driven by the laws that made the country one of the main European tax havens. The government of the duchy, once known as one of the main iron and steel exporters in 20th century Europe, decided, in the midst of the crisis of the metallurgical industry of the 1980s, that the economic future of the country could be based on the satellite and financial industry. The mix of flexible policies for the opening and entry of foreign funds, the rise of telecommunications and, later, of the data industry, allowed the average gross income per capita related to space affairs to be the largest on the planet.
The data industry once again transformed the emerging landscape. The global economy, now controlled by tech giants that pulled all sorts of tricks to hide the heart of their business from the public, gave aerospace mining a new lease of life. A good example is Mitch Hunter-Scullion, founder of Space Mining Industries. The young entrepreneur invested his inheritance in a company that claims to be the centre of European space mining. However, the company does not develop technology. His business is to capitalise on the information he gets from third-party sensors and satellites, making speculative data about potential future mining profits his primary source of income.
Leaving aside the great world powers, the outlook for the aerospace industry is bleak. In 2021, Colombia signed the Artemis Accords, the new legislation that secures the United States the position of director for life in the now imagined Galactic Trade Federation. The asymmetry of the diplomatic act could not be more remarkable: Marta Lucía Ramírez, former vice president of Colombia, signed an agreement that guarantees unconditional support for scientific efforts that would put the first woman on the moon. The issue is that Colombia has never had a space program, nor does it have any state investment in any related industry. The few constitutional laws that speak of outer space date from 1996, and they hardly mention the possibility of securing a place in the orbit of geostationary satellites, something that never happened, since the money that could have been used to ensure telecommunications in the country was stolen by government contractors in a scandal that became known as ‘Centros Poblados’.
The outright privatisation of the contemporary aerospace industry grows in proportion to the size of the egos of complex-ridden billionaires. Dreams of escape from Earth, expressed in delusional tweets promising salvation for humanity, provided the perfect excuse to start another colonisation process: they see space as a place where resources would be infinite. The creation of the space army during the Trump administration, Elon Musk's convertibles flying in space, or the giant dildo-shaped satellite whose stunning sound could only be overshadowed by the self-congratulatory speeches of a Jeff Bezos dressed as an astronaut-cowboy only leave something clear: the future is trapped in the fantasies of speculators.
Images by Juan Cortés