Why should we want to go live in space? And, even if we did, where in space? Canonically, space is big. At the time of this writing, the observable universe is a bubble about 93 billion light-years across, containing 2 trillion galaxies. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains as many as 400 billion stars. Technically, the planet Earth is already in space, in orbit around one of those stars, but that’s not usually what people mean when they say we should go there. Getting to outer space beyond our planet is hard, leaving the Solar System into the vast spaces beyond, even more so.
When advocates for space settlement and exploration say people should go to space, they usually mean that people should explore, and eventually live, in orbit around Earth and on the other planets and moons in the Solar System. That’s also a very large area. If the Sun were an eighteen-inch-diameter sphere, Earth would be about the size of a small piece of pea gravel, half a block to the south. At the same scale (1:2.8 billion), Pluto would be about 1.5 miles further away. If we locate this model solar system in Baltimore, where I am writing this book, then Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to ours, would be a glowing tennis ball located a few hundred miles past the South Pole.
No human has ever gone farther into space than the Moon, a grain of sand about 5.5 inches away from our tiny pea gravel Earth. The International Space Station orbits this rock at a distance roughly equal to the thickness of a human hair.1 So even within our 1.5-mile-radius “neighborhood” of space at this scale—the Solar System—there are a lot of places to go, and, as we’ll see, not all of them are planets.
What is meant by live? People have been able to live in space—off of Earth, in its orbit—at least for a short period of time, since Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute flight in Vostok 1 in 1961. Currently the record for the longest time spent in space is held by another Russian cosmonaut, Valeri Polyakov, at 437 days. But long-term, and eventually permanent, occupation is the implied goal. At the time of this writing, the International Space Station has hosted rotating crews of usually six humans living in orbit continuously for over two decades, and it is expected to remain aloft until at least 2030. The Chinese space program currently has a space station in orbit, as well: Tiangong-2, which was occupied for thirty days by two Chinese taikonauts in 2016. If the Chinese space program expands as planned, along with parallel work expected from the American, Russian, Japanese, and European space agencies, then permanent, or at least very extended, human presence in space might have already begun.
But to live somewhere is not simply to take part in parallel, temporary coexistence with others. To live is to be born, to come of age, to form relationships and partnerships, to raise children, to produce culture, food, and art. To live is even to die. Despite (or perhaps because of) its dangerous reputation, the history of space travel and exploration includes only three human deaths that actually occurred in space so far. The crew of Soyuz-11, Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev, all died when their capsule unexpectedly depressurized before they left orbit. They were returning as the first occupants of the first human space station, Salyut-1, in 1971.
If it is so dangerous, why would anyone want to go and live there? Almost forty years of experience with space stations have taught scientists that the above list of activities that constitutes living includes some practices that are very unsafe in space. Spending long periods of time in free fall leads to chronic eye problems and reduced bone density, as human bodies try to adjust to the lack of gravity, and can lead to permanent damage. If a human, animal, or plant were to grow and develop in this environment, the changes it would undergo along the way are unknown and possibly irreversible. Space is full of radiation, especially as you move farther away from Earth, and this radiation seems to lead to higher incidence of cancer in living things—another factor that is especially dangerous for newly conceived or developing organisms. Moreover, shielding against cosmic rays and solar flares is heavy, cumbersome, and expensive. On Earth, humans have more or less constant access to gravity, light, air, and the protection provided by a thick atmosphere and a strong magnetic field that bends the deadliest cosmic and solar radiation away from the us and from the planet. Why would anyone want to leave any of that behind, only to reconstruct it all, at great expense and effort, in a set of environments that are toxic and inhospitable?
Nevertheless, arguments about why people should go and live in space run far and wide. Many of them are arguments against the conditions in which humans find themselves on Earth: that Earth is too small; that there are not enough resources; that there is not enough space for waste and pollution, and not enough room—most of all—for people to live comfortably. These rely on the same principle that this introduction started with: space is big. Space has seemingly abundant resources and energy supplies in its vastness, and plenty of places to throw away waste. Space has room for people to live. Space has space. Another thread of arguments in favor of living in space rely on the conditions that humans will discover and explore off of Earth. Earth, in this case, is presented not so much as small as it is closed. There are no gaps in the map left to explore, and the capacity for humans to invent new ways of living has diminished. New spaces and worlds will provide opportunities for new experiences and experiments. Humans will, in this line of reasoning, find and invent new social, political, and economic systems in the open unknowns of space. Both of these threads are based on contradictions. The first argument about the expansion of room and resources assumes that the current modes of existing on Earth—those that led to a lack of resources and room in the first place—need to continue unchecked indefinitely. The second line of argument assumes people need new modes of existence that are for some reason no longer possible on Earth. Both of these flawed lines of reasoning beg the question: Since Earth is already in space, why would anyone need to go elsewhere for a fresh start?
Some writers contend that humans should not attempt to live in space for the long term. The researcher and scholar Gary Westfahl, for one, has written two books that survey the history of the space station in science fiction. In a 1997 essay for the journal Science Fiction Studies, he makes “the case against space,” arguing that space settlement is essentially useless.2 There is nothing in space, argues Westfahl, that cannot already be had on Earth, for less effort and expense. Other writers have made moral arguments. How can the US government justify putting “whitey on the Moon,” wonders poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron in his song of the same name, when they have failed to address the legacy of slavery, racism, and injustice for the country’s Black population?
And indeed, throughout the 1960s, polls consistently showed that a majority of Americans believed the Apollo Moon-landing program wasn’t worth the public price. And this was the major point of disagreement in a growing movement that could be called “anti-escapist.” Aren’t there better things to do? Technical effort and material resources are limited, during any given period of time, so why can’t they instead be deployed in a way that expands access to justice, comfort, shelter, education, food, and health care for those who badly need it? As a climate crisis and a global pandemic expand in scope, the awareness of those needs and lacks is foregrounded around the planet. Isn’t it enough to address the challenges that the current state of the world presents, without having to worry about making or visiting new worlds?3
Arguments based on pending apocalypse are also common in this discussion. History and geology record a succession of cataclysms, collapses, extinctions; indeed, the planet Earth has been many different worlds in its past, and those have all ended. The case for or against space is bound up in the imagination and anxiety that these scenarios elicit. There are all kinds of things to worry about, and many of them contradict each other. For instance, if we spend all of our efforts trying to get to space, might this lead to the neglect, and collapse, of ecosystems on Earth? On the other hand, if we don’t spend energy and attention on spreading out into space, will that not leave us vulnerable to an asteroid or super-volcano? Some worry that if we continue to develop new technical capacities and new territories to control in space, these capabilities will eventually be turned away from peaceful exploration and toward war. Then again, others respond that if we don’t go to space, any war that does happen on Earth might also have a chance of wiping out humanity. Natural disaster, anthropogenic climate crisis, and nuclear war are all very different ends of the world, but in these arguments, the means for their mitigation could just as easily lead to their causation. Apocalypse is a moving target, and as a rhetorical absolute it can pull in all kinds of justifications for actions or plans that have already been foregone, anyway.
So, once again, why should we want to go live in space? One of the most crucial terms in that question, the one most in need of disambiguation, is “we.” Who is the “we” that wants to go? And who is the “we” that gets to go? Who is the “we” that stays behind? If the argument in favor of living in space is practical, based on the abundance of room and resources, who are the people that should have access to that material, energy, and space? If the argument is based on novelty—new experience, and on the potential for new social models and new knowledge—who collects that knowledge? And who benefits from it?
If the case for space depends on the premise that anyone who goes might have a chance to survive a cataclysm that could end human life on Earth, who gets to inherit that future? And whose future is foreclosed? Spaces have subjects: the design and production of a space is also partly the design and production of the people that are invited into that space. The modernist architect and urban designer Le Corbusier created a system of dimensions and proportions for spatial design, based off of his conception of ideal human dimensions. He used this system to specify everything from the depths of countertops to the heights of buildings and the width of streets, in projects around the world. To justify his choice of six feet as the base height for his reference person, he wrote, “Have you never noticed that in English detective novels, the good-looking men, such as the policemen, are always six feet tall?”4 He had made a universal constant out of a male European authority figure. Any conception of a specific space is also the conception of a specific “we” who that space is for, and sometimes the conception of that subject reinforces existing power structures instead of offering new ways to live.
When designers, planners, and geographers make space on Earth, all of the givens that define the world tend to broaden the perceived limits of subjectivity within space on this planet. Wherever we humans go on the surface of the planet, we can usually depend on finding breathable air, one g of gravity, and a temperature range that we can mitigate with clothing. Experimental musician and artist Brian Eno wrote about the concept of a “big here” and a “long now” that can change the way people think about duration and location.5 On Earth, I’d add, many take for granted that there is a “wide we”: one that collectively participates in efforts like space exploration, or collectively suffers from crises like the one happening to the climate. This is an illusion, and one that covers for the unequal distribution of blame, credit, and impact.
Such a sense of a “wide we” can also gloss over the way design is used to include and exclude different people from different spaces. For example, the standard temperatures of office environments are often set according to gendered prejudice, weight standards on objects determine what abilities make people eligible for jobs, and the slope and texture of a surface affects who can walk on it and who can’t. In built environments in outer space, all of the given constants of Earth become variables: gravity, light levels, atmospheric composition and temperature, ambient sound and noise. And all can be fine-tuned and used, deliberately or accidentally, to include or exclude. In space, all of the implied questions about how a world is constructed, and how that construction is expressed, come to the fore, in a kind of crisis of specificity.
This book is a survey of the roughly 150-year history of the idea that humans could and should live in space, off of Earth, for indefinite—maybe functionally infinite—periods of time. This is not a comprehensive account of every development and every layer of this idea, but more like a set of core samples from a timeline too complicated to be completely excavated or catalogued all in one place. The major portion of the book tells the stories of seven paradigms for living in space. Each one has its own unique answers to the question of why humans should go and live there, and each one has its own unique implications for life on Earth. In order to tell these stories, I draw on concepts from multiple spatial disciplines—architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and geography—and I will also rely on other fields that track the cultural imagination.
For the purposes of this book, there are no hard and fast boundaries between space science and science fiction; both are places where people get to speculate about other worlds. Each of these seven paradigms crosses the blurry boundaries between fiction and science, and the contexts that surround each of them contain opportunities to identify critiques and counter-narratives. All of these plans to make new space for future humans include, implicitly or explicitly, an idea about a “we”—that is, about who those notional humans are.
Whether humans eventually go and live permanently in space or not, we will continue to see an ever more complicated and visible relationship between the creation and control of worlds and the collective subjectivity within them. Regarding the climate crisis, the historian and postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty told interviewer James Graham in a 2016 book, Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, “The moment we ask ‘what should we do?’ we discover that the ‘we’ needs to be constructed.”6 If the catastrophic changes in Earth’s climate, produced without conscious intention by human intervention, are to be addressed, then deliberate effort will have to be brought to bear on conditions that were previously considered unintended consequences. One way or another, a new world must be constructed, along with Chakrabarty’s new “we.” A reduction in global carbon production, and a hold on, or reversal of, temperature rise, would be a demonstration of what sociologist and theorist Saskia Sassen calls a “capability”: a new technical skill that hadn’t been available before, whose implications and capacity might not be obvious right away.7
Sassen points out that a capability derived to accomplish one purpose might eventually be used to achieve other, yet unknown goals. After all, the first rockets that went to space were developed from missiles that carried deadly warheads. The capability to design and prescribe every aspect of a total environment in space brings in the possibility for more and more unknowns—future uses to which those powers might be applied. These unknowns arise, ironically, even as a side effect of the attempt to broaden the ability to control and optimize for predictability. The specification of environmental parameters as part of the construction and control of a world is the general case that describes a central issue in both long-term space settlement and climate crisis mitigation. Specificity creates its own kind of crisis. And the specificity of that future world’s conditions is deeply entangled with the construction of a “we.”
Sociologist Lisa Messeri has a term for the kind of thinking that deals with the constitution and experience of worlds: “the planetary imagination.”8 Messeri studies the way astronomers, researchers, and planetary scientists start to conceive of the objects of their study in space as places instead of databased abstractions. That conception, and the practice of the planetary imagination, is mediated by technology, analogy, representation, and even fiction. The planetary imagination has to do with all the ways in which humans organize their perceptions of, and relationships with, worlds. In this sense, the capability to mitigate climate crisis would be an exercise in applied planetary imagination. So too would be the practice of conceiving a plan for living in space. If each of the seven space narratives in this book reveals assumptions about the nature of the subjects within its world, then each also depends on some specific worldview. Each of the stories is sustained by unique imaginations, planetary and otherwise. Living off of Earth is a kind of world-making, and any variation on that practice will need some basic idea of what a world is, and what a world is for. After all, and again, the current climate crisis is the result of the application of a specific kind of unexamined planetary imagination—that this world is for some groups of humans to use and instrumentalize toward certain ends.
Colonization is another very particular kind of planetary-scale imagination. The phrase “space colony” is often used uncritically, without any thought for the larger implications of the second term in it. If the fraught history of colonization on Earth is considered at all, it’s usually dismissed in the next breath. Proponents of the term “space colony” point out that in uninhabited outer space, there are no preexisting people to be “colonized.” However, this is a narrow view of the historical process of colonization; besides the displacement and subjugation of indigenous people, colonization is a matter of forcible redirection of whole systems of social life, biology, politics, and material infrastructure.
Even when it comes to supposedly “empty” spaces, colonization depends on massive amounts of forced immigration combined with coerced labor. Colonization doesn’t begin or end with the arrival of armed men in boats, taking away someone else’s territory. Colonization is the ongoing production and maintenance of social hierarchies. It is the economic arrangement of places into center and edge, with one feeding off of the other. It is an approach to resource management that sees ecosystems and geography solely in terms of their use value. More than anything, colonization is another attitude about what worlds are for, and the result of that attitude is ongoing global trauma. Moreover, as we’ve seen and will see, the total production of an environment—necessary in space—is also the total production of the human subject within it. If the paradigm for space habitation is a colonial one, then the inhabitants will literally be colonial subjects. And those who are outside of these habitats will be there by design, as effectively displaced as any other people on Earth. But models for living in space don’t have to be colonial. In the scenarios in this book, unless it appears in quotes, the phrase “space colony” and its variants won’t be used without consideration. If the model is an explicitly colonial one—and sometimes the protagonist insists that it is—it will be called out as such.
As geophysicist and researcher Mika McKinnon says, for human life, “Earth is easy mode.”9 There are a lot of conditions here that are taken for granted, and a lot of unknown challenges to living in space. Space scientists and writers often repeat an old homily when things go wrong: “Space is hard.” But often, as astronomer and writer Lucianne Walkowicz observes, “what happens in space happens on Earth.”10 The challenges of going to, and living in, space demand an accelerated pace of technological innovation, many products of which have been brought back to Earth. The Dustbuster, freeze-dried food, and improvements in water purification and solar cell technology, among other inventions, owe their origins to various space programs. But space is also a laboratory for the ways that new technologies will impact social and political life on the home planet. As human presence, public and private, expands in space, the capacity for technical and social change will expand too. But as more techno-social experimentation takes place in space, the consequences of failure also grow. Fragile artificial worlds are not the best place for large-scale, large-stakes experiments. And their successes, where reimported to Earth, could carry huge costs—especially if their new applications include means of social or political control.