
Elon Musk, head of Tesla and SpaceX, started out as an Internet entrepreneur pioneering online banking services such as PayPal. Alongside Bezos, Zuckerberg and Page, Musk has accumulated vast wealth from our data and activity as we live our everyday lives on their platforms. This wealth fuels extravagant technology projects aimed at remoulding humanity’s future in ways of their choosing. We have an idea about some of these works-in-progress whilst others are kept secret. Those we do know about include: self-driving cars, teleportation (!?), ubiquitous global internet, ways of interfacing the human brain to computers, and AI (always AI). Like demigods generally, these modern Olympians are not especially democratic; they presume their vision is one that we all desire and one that will be universally beneficial. However, there are only Faustian bargains on the table. Each innovation promises bit more divine power for the masses whilst ensnaring everyone more fully within their service ecosystems. Their ambition is often two-tailed, or perhaps you could say two-faced. Aware of approaching crises each of them have invested heavily in novel green technologies, but uncertain of the ultimate fate of the planet some have also hedged and invested in space exploration too. So while they work on technical fixes for the earth’s problems they also stand prepared to leave it behind should the shit really hit the fan.
Of the modern Olympians mentioned above, Musk has gone the furthest in getting stuff into space and counts among his achievements the first manned spaceflight by a private corporation. Samuel (my son), mentioned to me that the docking of the Dragon capsule with the International Space Station was being live-streamed and that he had been watching from earlier in the day. I tuned in and was immediately engrossed by the spectacle of live spaceflight: the vivid imagery of space, the communications with mission control, the manoeuvring of the capsule, the commentary, the little details such as how the stream was lost and regained as the line of sight to satellites shifted. I was prompted to dig around to understand Musk a little more and the motivation behind SpaceX. This post is an attempt to make sense of those impressions.

One of the most striking things about the Dragon capsule is its aesthetic. The cockpit is adorned with blue and white touchscreens displaying space station schematics. The astronauts wear styled pressure suits and recline in white contoured seating. The smooth curvaceous interior of the capsule closely resembles cinematic images of science fiction spacecraft in franchises such as Star Trek. It is reported that Musk worked personally on the pressure suits over three years, a massive investment of effort. During this time he was was concerned with their appearance just as much as their comfort and practicality and engaged a superhero comic artist to inform the design. SpaceX is an aesthetic project as much as it is a engineering one. It is cosplay as much as exploration. The image it strives for connects to a specific mythology of progress. It taps into a familiar strand of science fiction narrative that depicts our ascension as space faring beings as a natural continuation of humankind’s restless expansion. From this perspective, the problems we now experience on earth are not a crisis as such, they are merely growing pains. Having overshot our planetary constraints we are more than ready to occupy the next phase of our development with Musk as the heroic enabler of this destiny.

A second impression that I had of the Dragon capsule was of a distinct connection to nautical traditions. Strikingly, its navigation lights are identical to those on sailing vessels – green on the starboard side, red on the port. The commentary for the live-stream mentioned the nautical practice adopted by the ISS of ringing a bell three times when vessel comes alongside and crew are taken on board. I have no idea if this is a true practice, but in any case these historical connections help ground this futuristic endeavour in the safety of a familiar heritage helping to make it seem less alien.
But as well as similarities, disparities with sailing were just as obvious. The motion of the Dragon capsule was smooth and unperturbed as it headed towards an improbably steady space station. The lighting in the video feed was stark and intense, the images unnaturally crisp. All of this spoke of the alien coldness of a frictionless, gravityless vacuum. In contrast, a boat on the sea is continuously in touch elemental energies. Different forces simultaneously jostle and steady the vessel. The grip of the keel in the water and the power of a wind filled sail smooth the boat’s motion against the assault of the waves. Working together, the boat and its crew continually sense and balance the surge and shift of wind tide and waves, carving the boat’s motion out of these elemental materials. In space, though, there is nothing to push against accept yourself. There is no alternative but to be self-sufficient. Nothing outside will help you.

This need for self-sufficiency extends beyond propulsion. Everything that is needed for human survival in space has to be shipped up there like an extravagant camping expedition. Many science fiction narratives neatly deal with this problem by proposing a-ecological solutions. The ‘life support system’ is one such trope, which comprises of a series of machines and mechanisms which preserve the space-farer’s environment fit for human habitation. Another is the ‘replicator’, able to construct organic produce at the press of a button. By using both, the crew of the Starship Enterprise buzz effortlessly around the galaxy sustained by their machines. In these stories, the mechanism do not replace human limbs and functions – the humans remain corporeally intact. What has been replaced by machines (and this is such an enormous step that it is barely visible) is the entire ecology of fauna, flora and geography that is integral to sustaining life. The replicators and life-support systems have become a simple plug-in replacement for a whole planetary ecosystem. When we watch or read this genre of science fiction, the magnitude of this switcheroo barely registers, not least because we have become acclimatised to seeing ourselves as separate from ecology and not integral to it.
This brings to mind an older and incredibly iconic image: ‘Earthrise’, taken as the Apollo 8 capsule orbited the moon.

This picture has come to signify the transcendent experience felt by astronauts gazing from space back at the earth. It is the quintessential image of as earth as Gaia – a living organism infinitely fragile when juxtaposed with the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. Astronauts report being humbled by the view of earth from space which often awakens a new awareness within them and upends their perspective on life. They go on to champion the earth as a unique and irreplaceable gem within a cosmos of cold rock and lifeless fire. But there are powerful ironies are at play here too. We are only able to attain orbit by virtue of the very industries that are devouring and destroying our planet. Stepping out of the earths atmosphere gives us one of the most powerful impressions of the earth’s preciousness at a moment when it may be too late to be saved.

Here we return to the fantasy of colonising planets beyond earth as the earth becomes increasingly exhausted. SpaceX is gearing itself up for a mission to mars where, reportedly, Elon Musk intends to grow a rose as a symbol of achieving a new era for humankind as an interplanetary species. Yet many agree that mars is a dismal prospect. Being more distant from the sun it is a much colder planet than the earth. Because of its weak magnetic field and thin atmosphere mars is subject to high levels of radiation. Without this magnetic protection, its thin atmosphere is continually being stripped away by the solar wind. Generally speaking, away from earth, space is a uniquely brutal environment. It is where unimaginable energies surge unchecked. Get beyond the earth’s ionosphere and you are literally being bathed in the radiation from an immense un-shielded fusion reactor. Stars are the vast stellar forges of the universe churning out the heavier elements needed for planets to form and for life to evolve. Mindbogglingly extreme events, such as supernovae or colliding neutron stars, brew up weightier metals such as iron and gold. The toxicity and violence of these galactic factories reveals our own industrial processes as puny in comparison. (And yet, it makes you wonder why we would consider mimicking those hellish industries, even in the smallest way, within the haven of earth’s magnetic shield? Isn’t that all stuff we want to keep safely on the outside?)
The simple truth is that there is nowhere in space to run to that would be more liveable than even a catastrophically ruined earth. A more profound truth is that even the very idea of running is incoherent. When we pop outside the atmosphere to take a look, or even take a trip to the moon, we haven’t actually left the earth in any meaningful sense. We are not entities independent from the earth’s ecology. We can no more dissociate ourselves from the planet than fleas can decide they are having no further truck with mammals. If the planet is doomed, there is no running that we can do. We are it and it is us.
I captured images of the International Space Station and the Dragon capsule when I was watching the live stream of the mission on my phone. The image ‘Earthrise’, and those of the martian surface and a vector graphics rose are all in the public domain. When I said “In space, though, there is nothing to push against except yourself.” then this isn’t strictly true. There has been longstanding interest in using immense sails to harness the solar wind to propel craft through space. Gravity is another force that is regularly employed to ‘slingshot’ spacecraft through the solar system. This piece owes a debt to Douglas Rushkoff’s chapter ‘Survival of the richest’ in the Extinction Rebellion handbook.