View of Earth from a camera on V-2 #13, launched October 24, 1946. Courtesy White Sands Missile Range/Applied Physics Laboratory
A countdown begins. File footage starts rolling. Engines at the base of a towering Saturn V ignite, and the rocket begins liftoff. We hear the voice of Jeff Bezos: “Ever since I was five years old—that’s when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon—I’ve been passionate about space, rockets, rocket engines, space travel.” A parade of inspirational images appears: mountain climbers at summits, explorers descending into canyons, an ocean diver swimming through a shoal of fish.
Cut to Bezos in a control room during a launch, adjusting his headset. His voiceover continues: “This is the most important work I’m doing. It’s a simple argument, this is the best planet. And so we face a choice. As we move forward, we’re gonna have to decide whether we want a civilization of stasis—we will have to cap population, we will have to cap energy usage per capita—or we can fix that problem, by moving out into space.”1
The soundtrack soars, and images of deep space are counterposed with shots of the busy freeways of Los Angeles and clogged cloverleaf junctions. “Von Braun said, after the lunar landing, ‘I have learned to use the word impossible with great caution.’ And I hope you guys take that attitude about your lives.”2
This scene comes from a promotional video for Bezos’s private aerospace company, Blue Origin. The company motto is Gradatim Ferociter, Latin for “Step by Step, Ferociously.” In the near term, Blue Origin is building reusable rockets and lunar landers, testing them primarily at its facility and suborbital base in West Texas. By 2024, the company wants to be shuttling astronauts and cargo to the Moon.3 But in the longer term, the company’s mission is far more ambitious: to help bring about a future in which millions are living and working in space. Specifically, Bezos has outlined his hopes to build giant space colonies, where people would live in floating manufactured environments.4 Heavy industry would move off-planet altogether, the new frontier for extraction. Meanwhile, Earth would be zoned for residential building and light industry, left as a “beautiful place to live, a beautiful place to visit”—presumably for those who can afford to be there, rather than working in the off-world colonies.5
Bezos possesses extraordinary and growing industrial power. Amazon continues to capture more of U.S. online commerce, Amazon Web Services represents nearly half of the cloud-computing industry, and, by some estimates, Amazon’s site has more product searches than Google.6 Despite all this, Bezos is worried. His fear is that the planet’s growing energy demands will soon outstrip its limited supply. For him, the greatest concern “is not necessarily extinction” but stasis: “We will have to stop growing, which I think is a very bad future.”7
Bezos is not alone. He is just one of several tech billionaires focused on space. Planetary Resources, led by the founder of the X Prize, Peter Diamandis, and backed with investment from Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, aimed to create the first commercial mine in space by drilling asteroids.8 Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, has announced his intention to colonize Mars within a hundred years—while admitting that, to do so, the first astronauts must “be prepared to die.”9 Musk has also advocated terraforming the surface of Mars for human settlement by exploding nuclear weapons at the poles.10 SpaceX made a T-shirt that reads “nuke mars.” Musk also conducted what is arguably the most expensive public relations exercise in history when he launched a Tesla car into heliocentric orbit on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Researchers estimate that the car will remain in space for millions of years, until it finally crashes back to Earth.11
The ideology of these space spectacles is deeply interconnected with that of the AI industry. Extreme wealth and power generated from technology companies now enables a small group of men to pursue their own private space race. They depend on exploiting the knowledge and infrastructures of the public space programs of the twentieth century and often rely on government funding and tax incentives as well.12 Their aim is not to limit extraction and growth but to extend it across the solar system. In actuality, these efforts are as much about an imaginary of space, endless growth, and immortality than they are about the uncertain and unpleasant possibilities of actual space colonization.
Bezos’s inspiration for conquering space comes, in part, from the physicist and science fiction novelist Gerard K. O’Neill. O’Neill wrote The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, a 1976 fantasy of space colonization, which includes lush illustrations of moon mining with Rockwellian abundance.13 Bezos’s plan for Blue Origin is inspired by this bucolic vision of permanent human settlement, for which no current technology exists.14 O’Neill was driven by the “dismay and shock” he felt when he read the 1972 landmark report by the Club of Rome, called The Limits to Growth.15 The report published extensive data and predictive models about the end of nonrenewable resources and the impact on population growth, sustainability, and humanity’s future on Earth.16 As the architecture and planning scholar Fred Scharmen summarizes:
The Club of Rome models calculate outcomes from different sets of initial assumptions. The baseline scenarios, extrapolated from then-current trends, show resource and population collapse before the year 2100. When the models assume double the known resource reserves, they collapse again, to a slightly higher level but still before 2100. When they assume that technology will make available “unlimited” resources, population collapses even more sharply than before due to spikes in pollution. With pollution controls added to the model, population collapses after running out of food. In models that increase agricultural capacity, pollution overruns previous controls and both food and population collapse.17
Limits to Growth suggested that moving to sustainable management and reuse of resources was the answer to long-term stability of global society and that narrowing the gap between rich and poor nations was the key to survival. Where Limits to Growth fell short was that it did not foresee the larger set of interconnected systems that now make up the global economy and how previously uneconomic forms of mining would be incentivized, driving greater environmental harms, land and water degradation, and accelerated resource depletion.
In writing The High Frontier, O’Neill wanted to imagine a different way out of the no-growth model rather than limiting production and consumption.18 By positing that space was a solution, O’Neill redirected global anxiety in the 1970s over gasoline shortages and oil crises with visions of serene stable space structures that would simultaneously preserve the status quo and offer new opportunities. “If Earth doesn’t have enough surface area,” O’Neill urged, “then humans should simply build more.”19 The science of how it would work and the economics of how we could afford it were details left for another day; the dream was all that mattered.20
That space colonization and frontier mining have become the common corporate fantasies of tech billionaires underscores a fundamentally troubling relationship to Earth. Their vision of the future does not include minimizing oil and gas exploration or containing resource consumption or even reducing the exploitative labor practices that have enriched them. Instead, the language of the tech elite often echoes settler colonialism, seeking to displace Earth’s population and capture territory for mineral extraction. Silicon Valley’s billionaire space race similarly assumes that the last commons—outer space—can be taken by whichever empire gets there first. This is despite the main convention governing space mining, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which recognizes that space is the “common interest of all mankind” and that any exploration or use “should be carried on for the benefit of all peoples.”21
In 2015, Bezos’s Blue Origin and Musk’s SpaceX lobbied Congress and the Obama administration to enact the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act.22 It extends an exemption for commercial space companies from federal regulation until 2023, allowing them to own any mining resources extracted from asteroids and keep the profits.23 This legislation directly undercuts the idea of space as a commons, and creates a commercial incentive to “go forth and conquer.”24
Space has become the ultimate imperial ambition, symbolizing an escape from the limits of Earth, bodies, and regulation. It is perhaps no surprise that many of the Silicon Valley tech elite are invested in the vision of abandoning the planet. Space colonization fits well alongside the other fantasies of life-extension dieting, blood transfusions from teenagers, brain-uploading to the cloud, and vitamins for immortality.25 Blue Origin’s high-gloss advertising is part of this dark utopianism. It is a whispered summons to become the Übermensch, to exceed all boundaries: biological, social, ethical, and ecological. But underneath, these visions of brave new worlds seem driven most of all by fear: fear of death—individually and collectively—and fear that time is truly running out.
I’m back in the van for the last leg of my journey. I drive south out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, headed toward the Texas border. On my way, I take a detour past the rocky face of San Augustin Peak and follow the steep drive down to the White Sands Missile Range, where in 1946 the United States launched the first rocket containing a camera into space. That mission was led by Wernher von Braun, who had been the technical director of Germany’s missile rocket development program. He defected to the United States after the war, and there he began experimenting with confiscated V-2 rockets—the very missiles he had helped design, which had been fired against the Allies across Europe. But this time he sent them directly upward, into space. The rocket ascended to an altitude of 65 miles, capturing images every 1.5 seconds, before crashing into the New Mexican desert. The film survived inside of a steel cassette, revealing a grainy but distinctly Earthlike curve.26
View of Earth from a camera on V-2 #13, launched October 24, 1946. Courtesy White Sands Missile Range/Applied Physics Laboratory
That Bezos chose to quote von Braun in his Blue Origin commercial is notable. Von Braun was chief rocket engineer of the Third Reich and admitted using concentration camp slave labor to build his V-2 rockets; some consider him a war criminal.27 More people died in the camps building the rockets than were killed by them in war.28 But it is von Braun’s work as head of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he was instrumental in the design of the Saturn V rocket, that is best known.29 Bathed in the glow of Apollo 11, washed clean of history, Bezos has found his hero—a man who refused to believe in impossibility.
After driving through El Paso, Texas, I take Route 62 toward the Salt Basin Dunes. It’s late in the afternoon, and colors are starting to bloom in the cumulus clouds. There’s a T-junction, and after turning right, the road begins to trace along the Sierra Diablos. This is Bezos country. The first indication is a large ranch house set back from the road, with a sign in red letters that reads “Figure 2” on a white gate. It’s the ranch that Bezos purchased in 2004, just part of the three hundred thousand acres he owns in the area.30 The land has a violent colonial history: one of the final battles between the Texas Rangers and the Apaches occurred just west of this site in 1881, and nine years later the ranch was created by the one-time Confederate rider and cattleman James Monroe Daugherty.31
Blue Origin suborbital launch facility, West Texas. Photograph by Kate Crawford
Nearby is the turn-off to the Blue Origin suborbital launch facility. The private road is blocked by a bright blue gate with security notices warning of video surveillance and a guard station bristling with cameras. I stay on the highway and pull the van over to the side of the road a few minutes away. From here, the views stretch across the valley to the Blue Origin landing site, where the rockets are being tested for what is expected to be the company’s first human mission into space. Cars pass through the boom gates as the workers clock out for the day.
Looking back at the clusters of sheds that mark out the rocket base, it feels very provisional and makeshift in this dry expanse of the Permian Basin. The vast span of the valley is broken with a hollow circle, the landing pad where Blue Origin’s reusable rockets are meant to touch down on a feather logo painted in the center. That’s all there is to see. It’s a private infrastructure-in-progress, guarded and gated, a technoscientific imaginary of power, extraction, and escape, driven by the wealthiest man on the planet. It is a hedge against Earth.
The light is fading now, and steel-gray clouds are moving against the sky. The desert looks silvery, dotted with white sage bushes and clusters of volcanic tuff punctuating what was once the floor of a great inland sea. After taking a photograph, I head back to the van to begin the final drive of the day to the town of Marfa. It’s not until I start driving away that I realize I’m being followed. Two matching black Chevrolet pickups begin aggressively tailgating at close range. I pull over in the hope they will pass. They also pull over. No one moves. After waiting a few minutes, I slowly begin to drive again. They maintain their sinister escort all the way to the edge of the darkening valley.
