#from a wanky film student perspective

[mykashg]

HANNAH EINBINDER & PAUL W. DOWNS as AVA DANIELS & JIMMY LUSAQUE JR in HACKS 3.09 "Bulletproof" (2024)

[angstlers]

I know right? Me posting something what a change. I’m actually writing a longer piece on commission for this but I had a few thoughts and things I wanted to get off my chest and this is a useful way to get myself into writing today for the more important drudgery of Thesis Work.

So let’s get to it.

Last night I went to a public lecture in one of my university’s theatres. I was quite pleased about this because A - the last one I tried to attend was cancelled because fascists were going to target it B - it was free So why not, right? The theme on the tatty events leaflet I’d found was “The Future of Space Exploration” which is another bonus as I’m one of those awful humanities students that reads IFL Science and pretends like that’s actual enthusiasm for scientific development, and space is of interest to me because - well it’s space!

What I had not read was the subtitle: “from an International Relations Perspective” Oh yes, we got into some space politics.

Which actually is great for me, that’s the kind of stuff I’m fascinated by, the ways we negotiate space. The guest speakers the uni had brought in included a very lively woman who’s a senior adviser in the dept. for relations that the ESA has (I learned yesterday they have one but it’s you know, obvious) and an honest-to-god SPACE LAWYER who specialises in LAW IN SPACE. Law in space! This tangible stuff is exactly what I want. Dealing with legal or geopolitical realities as they relate to spaceflight gives it this delightfully tangible quality, a big splashy scifi thing you see in most blockbuster films post-Starwars but with a textured layer of boring reality. How does space work? Can anyone own bits of space? What impacts competing interests of nations up there, beyond our little pocket of air and rock? These were all things addressed and discussed.

Then we get to the bit I’d been expecting.

Towards the end of the ESA lady’s lecture she outlines commercial interests in space, pointing to Mike Pence recently saying there’s a need to get back into the stars (more on that in a sec), and looking at Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s competing space interests; Bezos privately funding his wanky-sounding Blue Origin nonsense and Musk with SpaceX. Both spoken of glowingly, of course.

So we get to Q&A. One guy directs us towards Bezos, asking a question I’d had in my head but not on my tongue. “So you said he’s putting his own money into Blue Origin,” the guy starts. “But... it’s not really his, is it? He gets it by not paying his factory workers. Doesn’t that matter?” The panel are briefly quiet before the ACTUAL SPACE LAWYER takes the mic and quite dismissively growls “actually he pays his engineers very well. You need to. You don’t get the best in space manufacturing by underpaying your engineers.”

Well then.

Oh yes we’re talking about the capitalist logic of space programs. Was the header image a give-away?

I doubt it surprises anyone that there’s a real ideological lock in the industry of space exploration. I don’t want to get into specifics or make sweeping statements about engineers or businessmen or whatever but I think our SPACE LAWYER’s answer really illustrates this; he’s thinking exclusively in the mechanical components of how to reach space. But that’s not the only way we get there, is it? (As a side note, Bezos may hire the best engineers but being involved in space flight is hardly a guarantee. The Martian Climate Orbiter disintegrated in the red planet’s atmosphere because Lockheed decided not to bother with metric measurements in its software and didn’t tell Nasa. It ballparks to about $20k to launch 450 grams of material into space, the orbiter was 338 kilos. All that money pissed down the drain)

Our national programs are governed by budgetary concerns and the policies of the government in charge. Pence can fondle as many pieces of equipment as he likes and make all sorts of Star Trekky promises but it doesn’t mean a damn when Trump repeatedly contradicts his position on Nasa and seems more obsessed with the big wooshy rockets (and the “cheaper” wooshy rockets SpaceX has) than any scientific advancement - he still cut down massively on their climate change department. There’s plenty bipartisan support for space but it’s the romantic vision of space not that tangible reality. Astronauts as heroes the way soldiers are heroes; in some vague symbolic sense.

As for SpaceX and Blue Origin, the question of their funder’s ethics is of absolute necessity. These men are guiding the culture of this grand effort to reach beyond our world and they bring their baggage with them. Bezos has been pretty fucking soundly critiqued for claiming that he doesn’t have anything else he could be doing with his money - you could be paying your fucking factory workers a decent wage, Jeff. You could stop them being so terrified of reprimands for idleness that they piss in bottles rather go to the sodding toilet.

I know I’m going to sound alarmist but this ideological taint is already measurable. That relations officer from the ESA? Her entire spiel was on the agency enabling the commercial sector to develop its programs and talked about ESA’s current big push “Space 4.0″ which had the wonderful slogan “innovate, inspire, interact, inform”.

You see what’s going on there? Innovate. 4.0. Sure this is the marketing arm of the ESA but these programs from beginning to end are a deep vein of neoliberal rhetoric. Space as a commercial venture. Space as an exploitable commodity. Something you can sell.

Our lawyer opened his lecture by discussing what’s referred to commonly as the Outer Space Treaty. Ratified by all the major space-capable governments, the treaty effectively puts a cap on what you can do out there. No military purposes; no planting of WMDs on the moon or in orbit or hiding behind a big flying rock. There’s no body enforcing it really, everyone thus far has just been polite enough to respect it, and it was his opinion that the way it’s set up means that will continue to be the case.

A follow-up called the Moon Treaty suggested a ban on exploiting the moon’s resources or land for ownership or sovereignty, or anything other than research.

Not a single space-capable nation has signed it.

Culture shapes our technology far more than people think. It’s not that capitalism made things like mobile phones possible as anime-avatar-wielding twitter users like to argue, it’s that capitalism lead to this permutation of these communication technologies, and the way they’re set up reinforces the ideologies that govern the world and the material realities of life under capitalism.

This is true of any technology and any scientific field you could name. These things are made by people. People have their attitudes and their politics whether they’re consciously aware of them or not.

I find it extremely fucking telling that both speakers referred to Europeans as “explorers” and touched on our colonial legacy as a symbolic metaphor for our reaching the stars.

Neither mentioned the cost in blood of those colonies. The genocides. The millions dead and the resources stripped.

I’m fascinated and excited by the future of space flight. But when the question is “how do we get to space” I think your scope needs to be wider than talking about the fucking rockets.

Enough space lawyers, let’s try and bring back the space communists.