The millionaires are serious. On Thursday, billionaire Jared Isaacman became the first civil (without the backing of any government organisation) who is carrying out a spacewalk, after paying for an entire mission aboard Elon Musk’s aircraft out of his own pocket. He climbed up through the hatch, made a couple of stiff gestures – “he looks like Monchito,” read a newspaper chat – and scored the space milestone. The two rich men have staged a dress rehearsal for what future totally private missions to space will be like, but according to some experts, the current legal framework falls short.
You know that on a Spanish road you have to drive on the right, but who tells Isaacman and Musk what they can and cannot do? There is a international treaty from the 1960s, which generically regulates these space activities, but its lyrics and music are pure Cold War: no weapons, peaceful purposes, space belongs to no one and everyone… The two blocks looked at each other out of the corner of their eyes and no one thought that half a century later the organization that takes the most gadgets off the planet is a private company.
There is only one sentence devoted to “activities of non-governmental entities in outer space,” noting that they “will require authorization and continued oversight by the relevant State Party to the Treaty.” Does SpaceX have authorization and continued oversight? It’s complicated. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has licensed it to fly, but it does not “continuously” monitor what it does. Some voices They point out that for that reason alone it would already be outside the treaty, but in the US, which is what matters to SpaceX, its paperwork is in order.
“More regulation is necessary, but at the moment it is legally covered. Science and technology advance very quickly and the jurist has to make an effort to cover the new regulatory needs that arise,” the lawyer summarises. Elisa Gonzalezpresident of the Spanish Association of Aeronautical and Space Law. Musk, who always pressures the FAA to give him permits faster (is waiting to launch the Starship again), also takes advantage a legal moratorium The US has already had a 20-year-old ban (extended until January 2025) that prohibits regulating the safety of occupants of commercial manned space flights, with the classic American argument that the rules hinder innovation (and may now give China an advantage). “Neither the outer space treaty nor US law requires a license for private citizens to travel into space,” he explains. Tanja Masson-Zwaana specialist in space law at Leiden University.
At the moment, Musk and his crew are trying things like calm downadvancing step by step in its megalomaniacal plans to turn humanity into a multi-planetary species. Of course, Isaacman does not declare how much he has paid and SpaceX does not diligently report the milestones of the mission, but instead makes us mere spectators of its commercial show on Musk’s social network. For now, they must behave well, and reluctantly adapt to the FAA licenses, because the company lives off the billions of public funds it receives from launching artifacts into space for NASA and the military. What will happen if one day it no longer needs them?
A pretty good National Geographic docuseries called Mars (no splitting hairs) tells in a reasonably realistic way —half fiction, half documentary— what the colonization of the neighboring planet would be like. In the plot, when a solvent base paid for by several nations has already been established, a ship from a company that is going to exploit the riches of Mars with a desire for profit arrives, called Lukrum (I already said that they are not very subtle), and it does so by parasitizing the resources of the international base: they deliberately do not bring water or energy, because they know that their rivals are obliged by treaties to help someone in need. Today, remembers Elisa González, the treaty “prohibits the appropriation, but not the exploitation of the resources” of other planets.
Is this an exaggerated scenario? In the episode in which Lukrum appears on the scene, Musk himself says: “I think that civilization on Mars will be very similar to an advanced version of Earth. Mars is for anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur and venture into a new world and risk their fortune, so it will be the planet of opportunity.” He said this in 2018, before he had completely fallen into the cave of ultra-conspiracies. Musk has even raised the idea of offering potential colonists the chance to defray the enormous cost of their tickets by providing labour on Mars. A delicious aroma of galactic dystopia.
Today, his rocket company has multiplied the average rate of workplace accidents in the sector by seven. A Reuters investigation documented at least 600 unreported workplace injuries by SpaceX: “crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye injuries, and one death.” For years, it has been filling the sky with satellites, interfering in the war in Ukraine, and only when it already has thousands in orbit and control of the sector has it begun to hear complaints from astronomers blinded by its devices.
And it’s not just Musk. There are already many private companies that launch devices to the Moon, for example, where they have already crashed all kinds of contraptions. These companies are selling tickets to take your ashes – once you die – to the Earth’s natural satellite, without asking anyone’s permission. The American investor Nova Spivack even had the nerve to send living beings, a handful of tardigrades, on a mission to the Moon that ended up crashing into its surface.
SpaceX’s ability to revolutionize space exploration with its powerful reusable rockets is one of the great technological news of the 21st century, but the interests of “all humanity” should prevail, as the treaty says. If NASA hires Musk’s ships for its purposes, it is the perfect example of public-private collaboration, the missions guided by the general interests of which economist Mariana Mazzucato speaks. In her book Mission economy (Taurus) on Musk: “What is the right way to share the rewards that result from this collaboration? Elon Musk has received $4.9 billion in public subsidies for his three companies, including SpaceX [dato de 2020]. This support is not part of the narrative of their business success story, nor is there any sharing of profits made at taxpayers’ expense.” Who will stop SpaceX from becoming Lukrum?
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