**Who Gets to Inherit the Stars? A Space Ethicist on What We’re Not Talking About**
As I sat in the audience at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow when Will Bruey, co-founder of space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries, made a bold prediction: within 15 to 20 years, it will be cheaper to send a “working-class human” to orbit for a month than to develop better machines. The tech-forward crowd barely batted an eye at this provocative assertion, but for me, it raised a host of questions. Who will be working among the stars, and under what conditions? Will it be a new class of space-faring workers, or just another chapter in the exploitation of the working class?
For space ethicist Mary-Jane Rubenstein, these are questions that have been on her mind for a while. As the dean of social sciences and professor of faith and science and technology research at Wesleyan University, she’s been grappling with the ethics of space expansion. Her latest book, “Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse,” explores the implications of space expansion, and her recent work has been focused on the increasing commercialization of space.
Rubenstein’s take on Bruey’s prediction is that it’s not just about efficiency; it’s about power imbalance. “Employees already have a tough enough time on Earth paying their bills and keeping themselves safe,” she said. “And that dependence on our employers only increases dramatically when one depends on one’s employer not only for a paycheck and potentially for healthcare, but also for basic access to food and to water – and also to air.”
She’s concerned not just about worker protections, but also about the legal gray area around who owns what in space. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty established that no nation can claim sovereignty over celestial bodies, but in 2015, the US passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which opened the door to industrial exploitation of space assets.
Rubenstein presents an analogy: It’s like saying you can’t own a house, but you can own everything inside it. “Actually, it’s worse than that,” she corrects herself. “It’s more like saying you can’t own the house, but you can have the floorboards and the beams. Because the stuff that’s in the moon is the moon. There’s no difference between the stuff the moon contains and the moon itself.”
Corporations have been positioning themselves to exploit this framework for a while. AstroForge is pursuing asteroid mining, and Interlune wants to extract Helium-3 from the moon. The problem is that these aren’t renewable resources, and once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. Rubenstein proposes a solution: hand control back to the UN and COPUOS, or repeal the Wolf Modification, which effectively bans NASA and other federal agencies from working with China or Chinese-owned companies without express FBI certification and Congressional approval.
Rubenstein’s broader concern is about what we’re choosing to do with space. She sees the current approach – turning the moon into a cosmic fuel station, mining asteroids, establishing warfare capabilities in orbit – as profoundly misguided. Science fiction has given us different templates for imagining space, and Rubenstein divides the genre into three broad categories: the “conquest” style, dystopian science fiction, and “speculative fiction” in a “high-tech key,” which uses futuristic technological settings as their framework.
When it first became clear which template was dominating actual space development, Rubenstein got depressed. “This seemed to me an actual missed opportunity for extending the values and priorities that we have on this world into these realms that we have previously reserved for thinking in different kinds of ways.”
Rubenstein isn’t expecting dramatic policy shifts anytime soon, but she sees some realistic paths ahead. One is tightening environmental rules for space actors, as we’re only starting to understand how rocket emissions and re-entering particles affect the ozone layer we spent many years repairing. A more promising opportunity, though, is space debris. With more than 40,000 trackable objects now circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, we’re approaching the Kessler effect – a runaway collision scenario that would make orbit unusable for any future launches. “No one wants that,” she said. “The U.S. government doesn’t want that. China doesn’t want it. The business doesn’t want it.”
