We Need a More Egalitarian Approach to Space Exploration
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
Ramin Skibba argues that humanity’s imminent expansion into space—with plans to mine the Moon, colonize Mars, and establish commercial operations on asteroids—risks repeating the extractive, exploitative patterns of European and American colonialism. Current approaches prioritize power and profit, with billionaires like Elon Musk transforming the night sky with satellite constellations, military programs developing space weapons, and companies preparing to carve up celestial bodies without collective oversight. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, while prohibiting territorial claims, has failed to prevent commercial exploitation or address modern challenges like space debris and megaconstellations.
Advocates including astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz and the JustSpace Alliance champion an alternative vision: treating space as a shared commons requiring egalitarian governance, environmental sustainability, and social justice. Drawing parallels to the Antarctic Treaty, they propose frameworks that prioritize scientific research and collective benefits over corporate monopolies. The article emphasizes that decolonizing space requires decolonizing Earth—addressing workers’ rights violations, Indigenous land disputes over telescope sites like Mauna Kea, and the fundamental question of whether space exploration serves humanity broadly or merely enables the wealthy to escape accountability for terrestrial injustices.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Colonial Patterns in Space
Current space exploration mirrors historical colonialism through extractive resource claims, commercial monopolies, and military expansion without collective accountability.
Space as Endangered Commons
Low-Earth orbit is clogged with debris from weapon tests; megaconstellations threaten the night sky’s appearance for future generations.
Inadequate Legal Frameworks
The Outer Space Treaty prohibits territorial claims but allows resource extraction; the restrictive Moon Agreement lacks major signatories.
Emerging Justice Movements
Organizations like JustSpace Alliance and Space Enabled advocate for inclusive decision-making, environmental conservation, and connections between space and Earth justice.
Antarctic Treaty as Model
The Antarctic Treaty demonstrates how international cooperation can prioritize science and conservation over commercial exploitation and military expansion.
Earthbound Justice Imperative
Decolonizing space requires addressing workers’ rights violations, Indigenous land disputes, and whether exploration serves humanity or enables billionaire escapism.
Master Reading Comprehension
Practice with 365 curated articles and 2,400+ questions across 9 RC types.
Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Space Ethics at Critical Juncture
The central thesis is that humanity stands at a moral crossroads in space exploration: we can either replicate the extractive, exploitative patterns of historical colonialism or establish egalitarian frameworks that treat celestial bodies as shared commons. Current trajectories—dominated by billionaire-led companies, military programs, and national competition—threaten to transform space into a site of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and social inequality. The article argues that preventing this outcome requires immediate action: strengthening international law beyond the Outer Space Treaty, prioritizing scientific and collective benefits over commercial monopolies, and ensuring that space policy decisions include marginalized voices, particularly Indigenous peoples who have experienced colonialism firsthand.
Purpose
To Advocate for Preventive Action
Skibba aims to persuade readers—particularly those involved in space policy, research, and industry—that the time to establish ethical frameworks for space exploration is now, before irreversible harm occurs. By drawing parallels between current space rhetoric and historical colonial justifications, he seeks to create urgency around adopting Antarctic Treaty-style international cooperation. The essay amplifies the voices of space justice advocates like Lucianne Walkowicz and Danielle Wood, positioning their work as essential counterweights to corporate and military dominance. Ultimately, the purpose is to demonstrate that egalitarian space exploration is both morally necessary and practically achievable, provided we act before commercial interests become entrenched.
Structure
Problem → Historical Parallel → Solution → Implementation
The article opens by establishing the imminent threat: multiple nations and companies preparing to exploit lunar and Martian resources. It then develops a sustained analogy between current space activities and European/American colonialism, examining resource extraction, military expansion, and exploitation patterns. The middle sections introduce alternative voices—the JustSpace Alliance, Space Enabled—and present the Antarctic Treaty as a concrete precedent for international cooperation. The conclusion pivots to implementation challenges, addressing Indigenous perspectives on telescope siting and the fundamental question of whether space serves collective humanity or billionaire escapism. This structure moves from diagnosis to historical context to prescription, building a comprehensive case for systemic reform.
Tone
Urgent, Critical & Analytically Rigorous
Skibba employs an urgent yet measured tone that balances alarm about current trajectories with reasoned analysis of alternatives. His background as an astrophysicist lends authority to technical discussions of orbital debris and megaconstellations, while his extensive interviews with advocates, historians, and space lawyers create a multi-perspectival richness. The tone is critical of billionaire space ventures and military programs without becoming polemical, instead allowing quoted experts to articulate systemic critiques. Literary and historical references—from Eduardo Galeano to Octavia Butler to Gil Scott-Heron—deepen the argument’s cultural resonance. The overall effect is scholarly activism: intellectually rigorous while maintaining clear moral stakes about justice, equity, and environmental stewardship.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
Click each card to reveal the definition
Build your vocabulary systematically
Each article in our course includes 8-12 vocabulary words with contextual usage.
Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
Tap each card to flip and see the definition
Large networks of coordinating satellites numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands, designed to provide global communications coverage but potentially transforming the appearance of the night sky.
“So-called ‘megaconstellations’ of many satellites coordinating together pose particular risks. SpaceX’s Starlink constellation will eventually build up to tens of thousands of spacecraft, a network that will be visible to the naked eye.”
Impossible to understand or interpret; mysterious and not easily comprehended through investigation or examination.
“Today, the cosmos is neither as distant nor as inscrutable as it used to be. Space agencies and space companies have designs on worlds well beyond Earth’s atmosphere.”
Covered with numerous small holes, indentations, or scars; having a surface marked by pits, craters, or other depressions.
“Still, no one wants the next few decades of space activities to result in a Moon pockmarked with excavations, or Mars littered with abandoned dwellings and ice miners.”
Wreckage or cargo that remains floating on the sea after a shipwreck; more broadly, useless or discarded objects, debris, or remnants.
“This belt of space-junk includes the countless bits of shrapnel and flotsam produced by anti-satellite weapon tests, such as the ones undertaken by China in 2007 and India in 2019.”
Preserved or cherished as sacred; established or embedded in an official or authoritative document, law, or tradition.
“The Barack Obama administration’s Space Act of 2015 declared that the US would not claim any space territory, but it also enshrined the principle that space companies could own, use and sell any resources they obtain.”
A cultural aesthetic and philosophical movement that combines science fiction, history, and fantasy to explore the African diaspora’s experience and imagine alternative futures centered on Black culture and liberation.
“We don’t yet have an alternative language for our new travels in space, Treviño says—at least outside of Afrofuturism and Indigenous science fiction, whose authors often emphasize sharing, ancestral knowledge and diverse, welcoming, resilient communities.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to the article, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits nations from claiming space territory but does not prevent commercial entities from owning and selling space resources.
2What does Danielle Wood mean when she describes allowing powerful countries and companies to claim space resources as an “imperial mindset”?
3Which sentence best captures the article’s central argument about why current space exploration approaches are problematic?
4Based on the article, determine whether each statement is True or False.
The Antarctic Treaty serves as a precedent for managing conflicting commercial, military, and scientific interests in uninhabited territories.
Indigenous peoples have experienced space exploration’s impacts through telescope construction on sacred sites and launch facilities built without community consent.
SpaceX’s DarkSat coating successfully solved the problem of satellite visibility, preventing megaconstellations from altering the night sky’s appearance.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5What can be reasonably inferred about why the article references Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” and Gil Scott-Heron’s poem?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
The article states that ‘ice and other space materials are essentially fossil resources; they will not be replenished.’ Unlike Earth’s water cycle or renewable biomass, water ice on the Moon or Mars exists in finite quantities deposited over billions of years through asteroid impacts and other ancient processes. Once extracted and used, these resources cannot regenerate on human timescales. This challenges the narrative that space offers unlimited resources—while materials may be abundant by current human needs, they remain exhaustible without natural replenishment mechanisms, making sustainable management crucial from the outset.
Historian Daniel Immerwahr observes that the Moon landing’s visuals—’a conquistador planting a flag in unknown territory’—appeared profoundly colonialist. However, the plaque Armstrong and Aldrin left deliberately conveyed a different message: ‘We came in peace for all mankind,’ indicating the US was not claiming possession. This occurred during a period of substantial decolonization following World War II, when the US and European powers were granting independence to territories. The Moon landing thus embodied competing impulses: nationalist triumph symbolized by the flag, but internationalist ideals expressed through the Outer Space Treaty and the plaque’s messaging about shared human achievement rather than territorial conquest.
The article explains that while ocean vessels can navigate around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, space debris operates differently: ‘it’s not so simple in the atmosphere. Even a single errant bolt hurtling in space can collide with a spacecraft and render it dysfunctional.’ Objects in low-Earth orbit travel at approximately 17,500 mph, meaning tiny fragments carry enormous kinetic energy. Unlike ocean pollution which largely affects specific zones, space debris occupies orbital paths that functioning satellites must cross, creating collision risks that can trigger cascading failures (the Kessler syndrome). Additionally, atmospheric drag eventually brings some debris down, but this process takes decades or centuries depending on altitude, during which the debris field continuously threatens active spacecraft.
Readlite provides curated articles with comprehensive analysis including summaries, key points, vocabulary building, and practice questions across 9 different RC question types. Our Ultimate Reading Course offers 365 articles with 2,400+ questions to systematically improve your reading comprehension skills.
This article is rated Advanced due to its sophisticated argumentation, technical vocabulary (megaconstellations, extractivism, despoil), and integration of multiple disciplinary perspectives—space law, colonial history, environmental ethics, and political economy. It assumes familiarity with concepts like the Outer Space Treaty and requires tracking complex analogies between historical colonialism and contemporary space activities. The 3,800-word length demands sustained attention, while the nuanced treatment of competing interests (commercial versus collective, national versus international) requires careful analytical reading. Successfully comprehending this essay means synthesizing insights from astronomy, social justice movements, Indigenous studies, and international relations into a coherent understanding of space governance challenges.
Ramin Skibba is the space writer at Wired magazine and a former astrophysicist, giving him dual expertise in both scientific content and journalistic investigation. His background in astrophysics provides technical understanding of orbital mechanics, space missions, and astronomical impacts of megaconstellations. His science writing has appeared in major publications including The Atlantic, Slate, Scientific American, and Nature, demonstrating sustained engagement with communicating complex scientific issues to broad audiences. This combination—scientific training plus journalistic rigor—positions him to synthesize technical space policy details with broader ethical questions about colonialism, justice, and environmental stewardship. His extensive interviews with space law experts, advocates, historians, and Indigenous scholars further demonstrate thorough research methodology.
The Ultimate Reading Course covers 9 RC question types: Multiple Choice, True/False, Multi-Statement T/F, Text Highlight, Fill in the Blanks, Matching, Sequencing, Error Spotting, and Short Answer. This comprehensive coverage prepares you for any reading comprehension format you might encounter.
