Humanity’s return to the moon is a deeply religious mission |
The context you need, when you need it
When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.
We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?
Humanity’s return to the moon is a deeply religious mission
Space barons like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk don’t seem religious. But their quest to colonize outer space is.
Editor’s Note, April 1, 5:00 pm ET: The interview in this piece was conducted when NASA first revealed the crew for Artemis II in 2023. With the launch now taking place, Vox is republishing the piece.
The crew taking part in the Artemis II launch includes two historic firsts: the first woman, Christina Koch, and the first person of color, Victor Glover, to go on a lunar mission. Hailed by NASA spokespeople as “pioneers” and “explorers,” they have been greeted with fanfare befitting “humanity’s crew.”
But behind the Artemis II program are much more corporate goals. It’s not just that private industry helped build the program’s spacecraft. Space mining companies competing for government contracts want to turn the moon into a cosmic gas station. The vision is to mine the lunar surface for rocket fuel that can then propel us all the way to Mars — and beyond, as humanity takes its self-appointed place in the stars.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein told me that vision makes her want to throw up. A Wesleyan professor of religion and science in society, she’s the author of the book Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race.
What’s “religion” doing in that title, and why is a religion professor writing a book about the space program? Rubenstein argues that today’s corporate space race — helmed by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and others who propose to “save” humanity from a dying planet — is actually rehashing old Christian themes that go all the way back to the 15th century, when European Christians colonized the Americas. Remember how Donald Trump described the Artemis mission and eventual settlement of the moon and Mars? He called it “America’s manifest destiny in the stars.”
But as Rubenstein points out, not everyone thinks it’s the moon’s destiny to be strip-mined, or Mars’s destiny to be settled by human colonists. In fact, some believe these celestial bodies should have fundamental rights of their own.
I talked to Rubenstein about the fear of screwing up space like we’ve screwed up Earth: Is that really a fear of trampling on space’s own intrinsic value, or is it more a fear about human nature? A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
When you see news about space exploration, like the announcement about who will be going to the moon next year, is your dominant feeling … excitement? Dread?
It’s a little bit of dread. Because I worry that all this is getting going before the public really understands what’s happening.
One thing I’m worried about is that some of the astronauts will be tokenized to make it clear that Artemis is a feminist and anti-racist movement. But if we’re looking to make space exploration a liberationist project, just putting representatives of different identity groups there isn’t going to be enough. I worry that it’ll look like the job is somehow done because there is a woman and a person of color on this mission.
The mission itself needs to be analyzed from a feminist and anti-racist perspective first. Then you figure out how to do it well, and then you figure out who’s going to be on it.
There are two words you use to refer to the corporate space race in your book, and the rationale for using those words might not be obvious to readers. You talk about it as “religion” and as “colonial.” Why?
What I’m arguing is that the new corporate space race is an extension and intensification of the initial space race of the late ’50s and into the early ’70s. And that that space race is an extension and intensification of the colonial project that settled the Americas.
The journey that Europeans made across the seas to conquer the Americas and then the journey that white-descended Americans made across the North American continent through what’s known as Manifest Destiny gets extended in the mid-20th century as a new frontier is proclaimed to be open, the frontier of outer space. The space race is a new chapter in European-style colonialism — a vertical extension........