Peaceful space travel for the benefit of all was ‘once upon a time’, now it’s all about profits

When, in 1979, an all-powerful company put the crew of a spaceship in mortal danger to secure its own profits, ‘Alien’ seemed like a simple, action-packed B-movie. Even in 2024, the idea of capitalism in space seems like the stuff of dark, cautionary visions of the future. Yet these scenarios have long since been in the drawers of powerful corporations, with capitalist states acting as their henchmen. The dystopias of science fiction author Philipp K. Dick or the Strugatzki brothers could hardly be more horrendously formulated.

Karl Marx wrote about the fetish character of the commodity in his work ‘Das Kapital’. Almost anything that capitalists can get their hands on can become a commodity, a tradable good. You can make a profit from almost anything. Space travel has long since ceased to be excluded from this basic law of capitalism.

This year alone, a turnover of 630 billion US dollars is likely to be generated by business outside the earth’s atmosphere, as reported by n-tv in July this year. By 2035, this already immense figure will almost triple to 1.8 trillion. A clear expression of this increase is provided by the number of satellites orbiting the earth. In 2023, the European Space Agency (ESA) estimated that there were more than 7,000 satellites orbiting the Earth. The majority are owned by private companies, and an increasing number are used for military purposes. Within the next six years, 60,000 satellites are expected to be orbiting our planet. For the time being, there is no concern about how to dispose of them – which is also characteristic of the global profit economy.

Just over 70 years ago, the Soviet Sputnik was still travelling all alone around our blue planet.

Question of ownership

The issue is no longer just about artificial celestial bodies in orbit. If we are to believe the world of ideas of Mathias Maurer, industrial plants will soon be starting work outside the atmosphere. The astronaut of the Artemis project is to fly to the moon with NASA and believes in entire factories in space, as he told n-tv in July.

Science fiction? At the moment, probably still. But those in power now want to take precautions. Nine years ago, the US set out and declared space as US territory. The House of Representatives and Senate approved the law, and then-President Barack Obama signed it.

The Space Act of 2015 allows US citizens to exploit raw materials on celestial bodies outside the atmosphere. All that is required is an application. If the application is approved, work can begin. Or it could begin, were it not for the enormous costs associated with mining natural resources on asteroids. This fact makes it rather unlikely that, for example, US wage earners will soon be pioneers in the extraction of rare earths on asteroids. However, large companies based in the United States could be in for fantastic profits. This law is made for them and their future profits.

In the year of the US Space Act, the asteroid ‘2011 UW158’ passed Earth’s orbit. It contains more platinum than has ever been mined on Earth. A 2021 Deutsche Welle article put the value of the metal on the asteroid ‘16 Psyche’ at a fabulous 700 trillion US dollars. Even an asteroid with a diameter of just 10 metres and a water content of 10 per cent has an average value of 250 million US dollars, explained Robert Jedicke of the PanStarrs Observatory in Hawaii in an article on ARD Alpha in 2018.

The prospect of huge profits is likely to make US capital, to quote Karl Marx, ‘positively reckless’.

That by no means only US capital is eyeing up the enormous extraterrestrial riches is proven by a parliamentary decision in little Luxembourg, of all places, which has not exactly been overly active as a space nation up to now. Two years after Obama’s signature, the smallest of the Benelux countries also passed a law allowing Luxembourg companies to extract raw materials from celestial bodies and privately appropriate the proceeds.

At the time, government circles announced that the country was in competition with other nations for access to raw materials in space. ‘First come, first served,’ was the dry comment of a spokeswoman for the Luxembourg cabinet to the press.

The state quickly became an investor in the company ‘Planetary Resources’, which initially moved its European headquarters to Luxembourg. However, the company went bankrupt in its attempt to conduct space mining long before the pickaxe could drill into a celestial body. A fate shared by the second major player that Luxembourg’s government attracted: Deep Space Industries. The company wanted to produce the equipment necessary for the exploitation of space.

At least the small country’s government succeeded in attracting investors by passing a law granting mining rights in space.

Undermining all legal rules

The fact that the legal regulations in force on Earth to protect people and the environment are largely suspended in space may have played a role in this. Environmental regulations, collective agreements, competition rules – you won’t find any of these in space.

Yet space would actually be quite well regulated if everyone stuck to it: the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty clearly stated that space does not belong to anyone and may only be used for civilian research. Whatever is explored, invented or mined in space should benefit all of humanity. The deployment of weapons in space was prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty.

The main players in space travel at the time, the USA and the USSR, agreed to these rules. The main reason for the capitalist United States was that it had fallen behind the Stalinist Soviet Union in the space race. The treaty was intended to curb the progress of the at least temporarily successful USSR. The USSR probably had a similar interest, as the US space agency NASA was clearly gaining ground in the race to the moon. 123 countries signed the treaty.

Today, there is no reason for capital interests to be bound by the Outer Space Treaty. Why should one feel bound by the cloudy talk of an outer space treaty from almost sixty years ago when it comes to ‘bare payment’, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described the interests of capital in the Communist Manifesto?

It is to be expected that other countries will also enact laws similar to those of the United States and Luxembourg, especially if there is hope of making private profits from the riches of space through technological advances.

For a profit of ‘100 percent,’ capital ‘tramples all human laws under its feet,’ Marx had stated.

Commercialisation of space travel

There is no doubt that capital has a strong interest in mining outside the Earth’s atmosphere. The asteroid scientist Robert Jedicke, already mentioned, is in favour of a targeted search for celestial bodies that can be used for this purpose.

In order to achieve the desired profits, one thing in particular must change: the costs of transport. The quantities of material brought back from asteroids are still very small, far too small to even begin to generate the profits that companies are envisioning.

This is not least due to the immense costs involved. The space industry still charges for the loads to be catapulted into orbit by the kilogram.

The awarding of government contracts to large private investors is primarily intended to help reduce costs, which is at least partially successful. For a long time, the cheapest way to transport cargo into orbit and back to Earth was to use a Russian Soyuz capsule. Now, Elon Musk’s SpaceX can do it much more cheaply.

In the process, the public sector is pumping billions into the pockets of large private companies. Musk’s space company is a particular point of contact. After 2030, when the International Space Station (ISS) is to be brought down in a controlled manner, SpaceX is to supply the spacecraft that, coupled to the ISS, will bring the 430-tonne colossus down, whereupon it will burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The contract is said to be worth around 840 million US dollars.

Meanwhile, German companies are researching small rockets that will launch once a week to carry mini and nano satellites into orbit. Flights into space are to become commonplace, at least for transporting material into space. In this way, capitalism is likely to further escalate the environmental catastrophe.

Once this hurdle has been overcome, the costs for space mining will fall drastically and thus profits will increase, or, to follow Marx, the rates of profit will become more interesting for capitalists. Karl Marx explained the rates of profit as the ratio between the constant and variable capital to be employed and the profits generated. This ratio is still far too uninteresting for capital.

But many places are increasingly preparing for a change in this situation – and not only with laws in individual countries. Meanwhile, space mining can be studied at the renowned Bergakademie Freiberg in Saxony.

A dystopia all round

Jeff Bezos, the second major investor in space travel, is thinking further ahead in a way that is giving cause for concern. He envisages a humanity that has largely left Earth and is living in large space stations orbiting the Earth. The blue planet would then only be visited by holidaymakers. Bezos himself wants to create the conditions for this. When Bezos presented these plans, they spread rapidly in the press.

For Dicks or the Strugatzki brothers, the billionaire and his vision would certainly have been the inspiration for their next dystopian novel. We can congratulate the heirs to his fortune on their frequent visits to Earth, while the space proletariat shoots in rotating tubes at breathtaking speed in circular orbits around our home planet, exploiting asteroids to keep the cash tills ringing for the likes of Bezos.

The utopia of the rich is the dystopia of the poor. In the search for future investment opportunities, no idea is too crazy to be expressed. But basically, Jeff Bezos, as one of the most outstanding representatives of capital, reveals his innermost thoughts, and his world of ideas should give us serious cause for concern.

A new space race

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are just two entrepreneurs who are making a name for themselves with supposedly visionary plans and are competing for contracts in the space industry.

Some scientists have long been talking about a new gold rush. Low Earth orbit has long since been commercialised. Thousands of satellites are chasing around the Earth. From most of them, banknotes flutter into the wallets of heavyweight investors. And they want more. The path to mining in space – on asteroids and perhaps even on the Moon – is basically mapped out and, as a large investment field, is becoming more and more likely.

Others may have concerns. Or perhaps it is more the case that it is because of concerns that this path is being taken. What if asteroids like the aforementioned ‘16 Psyche’ are exploited by a capitalist at some point in the future? The value of the rock, which is enriched with iron and nickel, exceeds the value of the entire global economy, even though it is only 250 kilometres in diameter. Whoever is able to exploit this asteroid profitably will have immense power.

The fear of being the last; the worry that someone could implement the plan before me and thus outdo me, has always been the driving force behind the capitalist world economy, pushing all concerns into the background.

The race for space has long since begun. How far this competition will go and what it will mean for the world depends above all on whether the labour movement will succeed in offering and fighting for an alternative to capitalist madness.

Star Wars not only on the screen

The establishment of the US Space Force, analogous to the US Air Force in the United States, also shows the extent to which competition in space is now flourishing. Its task is to monitor the satellites of other nations, to protect its own and, in the event of war, to help the USA and its allies to victory. Similar armed forces or units with comparable missions now also exist in Germany, China, Russia and India.

The USA, India, China and Russia have already practised shooting down satellites from the ground. With devastating effects. The disused missiles were targeted and destroyed using earth-to-space weapons. In all cases, the undertaking left debris clouds with thousands of tiny parts, creating sources of risk for civilian space travel that cannot be overestimated.

Space-to-space weapons also now exist. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibited all of this, but the parties fighting for power have long since ceased to honour the agreement.

More than 10 per cent of the EU’s economic output depends on geographical data supplied from space. In addition, satellites are essential for maintaining the internet, (mobile) communications, power supply and shipping and air traffic. Capital has an interest on all sides in protecting these sources of income from unauthorised access and at least potentially threatening those of the other side.

In the event of war, there is the threat of satellites being destroyed, resulting not only in the loss of vital data but also the creation of huge clouds of debris racing around the earth at speeds of tens of thousands of kilometres per hour. The safe transport of objects into orbit would then be called into question.

If those in power were to involve Earth’s orbit even more in their conflicts, this could also mean the end of civilian space travel and research for decades, which would mean drastic setbacks in medical research, research into climate and Earth’s development.

On an even larger scale than in Rosa Luxemburg’s time, this example also illustrates the alternative between ‘socialism or decline into barbarism’.

The treasures belong to everyone – the universe to no one

‘You are lost if you forget,’ Rousseau had already written in the 18th century, ‘that the fruits belong to everyone and the earth belongs to no one.’ With these words, the French revolutionary formulated a sentence that could easily be applied to the vastness of the cosmos as well. Just like the Earth, it should not belong to anyone, and what we work for, discover, and produce in space should be the property of all, democratically administered and used for the benefit of all.

There are actually treasures lying around us that could be put to good use. According to estimates by Andreas Hein of the University of Paris-Saclay, it would cost a total of 150 kilograms of CO₂ to get one kilogram of platinum from an asteroid to Earth. By contrast, mining the same amount of platinum on Earth produces up to 40,000 kilograms of the greenhouse gas. Beyond the capitalist logic of profit, there would be truly outstanding opportunities to shape life for all of us through the economic use of space travel.

However, against the background of market logic, such use will primarily mean misery, social inequality, environmental destruction and sometimes bloody competition.

If we want to shape space travel for the benefit of humanity, we have to abandon capitalism, because the interests of capital run counter to those of the vast majority of people.

This also means that space travel belongs in the public sector and that the goals, plans and effects of science in space must be openly discussed and democratically decided. All military units, which are all expanding the militarisation of space travel, must be disbanded immediately and the funds used for them must be channelled into the peaceful use of space travel.

All data collected in space must be publicly accessible free of charge. Satellites in space could already provide the entire population of the Earth with free internet access. This not only creates the possibility of doing so, but also the right of all eight billion people to have free access to the internet.

If we want to use the wealth that nature has given us in harmony with it and for the benefit of all, then we have to abolish capitalism, better today than tomorrow.

Or, to quote the much-cited authors of the classic science fiction novel ‘Stalker’, the Strugatzki brothers: ‘Everything would have to change. Not one life and not two, not one destiny and not two – every little screw of this stinking world would have to change.’

The Latin American revolutionary Ernesto Ché Guevara once put it a little less prosaically, much more earthly and yet just as accurately: ‘There is no alternative but socialist revolution.’

Steve Hollasky is a member of the national board of the SOL in Dresden and the author of several books published by Manifest-Verlag.

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