Even the wording ‘liberated through private investment’ grates, as if millionaires piggy-backing publicly funded research were acting for the greater good. Yet that is in keeping with market fundamentalism and, as Marx writes, the likes of Jain have viewed the bounty of nature as somehow the result of capitalism for centuries:
Natural elements entering as agents into production, and which cost nothing … do not enter as components of capital, but as a free gift of Nature to capital, that is, as a free gift of Nature ’s productive power to labour, which, however, appears as the productiveness of capital, as all other productivity does under the capitalist mode of production.
To repurpose the phrase from capitalist realism: is it easier to imagine the end of the world than public ownership of the immense wealth beyond it? Why should it be?
For the first sixty years of space exploration, every significant breakthrough was achieved by nation-states. From von Braun’s V2 rockets to the USSR’s Sputnik and NASA’s iconic Apollo missions, private investment had no influence in any of these technological developments. As a result, there is an overwhelming case for space to indeed be the province of all. The technologies which are set to bring its abundance within reach were funded by ordinary people – not wealthy investors.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped certain countries trying to help domestic business interests at the expense of others. In 2015 Barack Obama legislated for American companies to engage in profitable of-world resource extraction for the first time – as long as those businesses are majority owned by US nationals. For now NASA formally maintains a neutral position on the matter, but the underlying reality is quickly changing.
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