In October, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos, predicted at a technology conference in Italy that millions of people will live in space “in the next few decades” and “mostly,” he had said, “because they want to,” because robots will be more cost-effective than humans to do the actual work in space.
That’s no doubt why my ears perked up when, at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco weeks later, I found a prediction on stage by Will Bruey, the founder of space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries, so striking. Instead of robots doing the work Bezos envisioned, Bruey said that within 15 to 20 years, it will be cheaper to send a “working-class human” into orbit for a month than to develop better machines.
At the moment, few in the tech-forward crowd seemed surprised by what many might consider a provocative statement about cost-cutting. But it raised questions for me – and it certainly has raised questions for others – about who exactly will be working among the stars, and under what conditions.
To explore these questions, this week I spoke with Mary-Jane Rubenstein, dean of social sciences and professor of religion and science and technology at Wesleyan University. Rubenstein is the author of the book Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiversewhich director Daniel Kwan used as research for the award-winning 2022 film “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” More recently, she has been investigating the ethics of space expansion.
Rubenstein’s response to Bruey’s prediction cuts to a fundamental problem – that of power imbalance.” Workers are already struggling to pay their bills on Earth and keep themselves safe … and insured,” she told me. “And that dependence on our employers only increases dramatically when you depend on your employer not just for a paycheck and sometimes for health care, but also for basic access, to food and water – and also to air.”
Her assessment of the space as a workplace was quite direct. While it’s easy to romanticize space as an escape to a pristine frontier where people will float weightlessly among the stars, it’s worth remembering that there are no oceans or mountains or chirping birds in space. It’s “not nice up there,” Rubenstein said. “It’s not nice at all.”
But worker protections aren’t Rubenstein’s only concern. There is also the increasingly contentious issue of who owns what in space – a legal gray area that is becoming more problematic as commercial space operations accelerate.
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The 1967 Outer Space Treaty stated that no nation could claim sovereignty over celestial bodies. The moon, Mars, asteroids – these are supposed to belong to all mankind. But in 2015, the US passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which says that while you can’t own the moon, you can own whatever you extract from it. Silicon Valley got starry-eyed almost immediately; the law opened the door to commercial exploitation of space resources, even as the rest of the world looked on with concern.
Rubenstein offers an analogy: It’s like saying you can’t own a house, but you can own everything inside it. In fact, she corrects herself and says it’s worse than that. “It’s more like saying you can’t own the house, but you can have the floorboards and beams. Because what’s in the moon is the moon. There’s no difference between what the moon contains and the moon itself.”
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Companies have positioned themselves to take advantage of this framework for some time. AstroForge pursues asteroid mining. Interlune wants to extract Helium-3 from the moon. The problem is that these are not renewable resources. “When the United States takes [the Helium-3]China can’t have it,” Rubenstein says. “Once China takes it, the U.S. can’t have it.”
The international reaction to the 2015 law was swift. At the meeting of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in 2016, Russia called the law a unilateral violation of international law. Belgium warned of global economic imbalances.
In response, in 2020 the US created the Artemis Agreements – bilateral agreements with allied nations that formalized US interpretation of space law, particularly around resource extraction. Countries concerned about being left out of the new space economy signed on. There are now 60 signatories, although notably Russia and China are not among them.
However, there is grumbling in the background. “This is one of those cases where the United States sets the rules and then asks other people to participate or be left out,” says Rubenstein. The agreements do not say that resource extraction is explicitly legal – just that it does not constitute the “national appropriation” that the Outer Space Treaty prohibits. It is a careful dance around a fraught problem.
Her proposed solution to solve it is straightforward, if highly unlikely: hand control back to the UN and COPUOS. Failing that, she proposes repealing the Wolf Amendment, a 2011 law that essentially prohibits NASA and other federal agencies from using federal funds to work with China or Chinese-owned companies without explicit FBI certification and congressional approval.
When people tell Rubenstein that cooperation with China is impossible, she has a clear answer: “We’re talking about an industry that says things like, ‘It will absolutely be possible to house thousands of people in a space hotel,’ or ‘It will be possible within 10 years to send a million people to Mars, where there is no air and where the radioactivity will give you eyes and if your blood will fall off and if your blood will fall off in a second. imagine doing the things I think, it is possible to imagine the United States talking to China.”
Rubenstein’s broader concern is with what we choose to do with space. She sees the current approach—turning the moon into what she calls “a cosmic gas station,” mining asteroids, establishing warfare in orbit—as deeply misguided.
Science fiction has given us different templates for imagining space, she notes. She divides the genre into three broad categories. First, there is the “conquest” genre, or stories written “for the expansion of a nation-state or the expansion of capital,” that treat space as the next frontier to conquer, just as European explorers once viewed new continents.
Then there is dystopian science fiction, meant as warnings of destructive paths. But this is where something strange happens: “Some tech companies seem to miss the joke in this dystopian genre and kind of actualize whatever the warning was,” she says.
The third strand uses space to imagine alternative societies with different ideas of justice and care—what Rubenstein calls “speculative fiction” in a “high-tech key,” meaning they use futuristic technological frameworks as their setting.
Once it became clear which template was dominating the actual space development (totally in the category of conquest), she became depressed. “This seemed to me to be a really missed opportunity to expand the values and priorities that we have in this world into the areas that we have previously reserved for thinking in different ways.”
Rubenstein doesn’t expect dramatic political changes anytime soon, but she sees some realistic ways forward. One is to tighten environmental regulations for space actors; as she notes, we are only beginning to understand how rocket emissions and re-entering debris affect the ozone layer we spent decades repairing.
However, a more promising option is space debris. With more than 40,000 trackable objects now orbiting Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, we are approaching the Kessler effect—a runaway collision scenario that could render orbit unusable for future launches. Nobody wants that, she says. “The US government doesn’t want it. China doesn’t want it. The industry doesn’t want it.” It’s rare to find an issue where all stakeholders’ interests align perfectly, but “space debris is bad for everyone,” she notes.
She is now working on a proposal for an annual conference that will bring together academics, NASA representatives and industry figures to discuss how to approach space “consciously, ethically, collaboratively.”
Whether anyone will listen is another question. There certainly doesn’t seem to be much motivation to come together on the subject. In fact, back in July of last year, Congress introduced legislation to make the Wolf Amendment permanent, which would entrench restrictions on China’s cooperation rather than loosen them.
In the background, startup founders are projecting big changes in space within five to ten years, companies are positioning themselves to mine asteroids and the moon, and Bruey’s prediction of workers in orbit hangs in the air, unanswered.