No, private space colonies will not be dystopian hellscapes

The idea of pulling up stakes and moving to a space colony to start a new life is a compelling one. SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to build a city of a million people on Mars. Jeff Bezos wants to build free-flying colonies, first envisioned by Gerard K. O’Neill, that can sustain even more people. Space colonies are the stuff of science fiction dreams, invoking the settlement of the American West.

Not so fast, according to a story in Scientific American. Space colonies founded by private businesses are likely, in the story’s view, to be dystopian hells. The theory is that space colonists will be subject to the whims of their tech overlords. Free from the restraints of earthly laws, the founders of the first communities of humans beyond the home planet will do with their subjects as they like. The story cites accusations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment at tech companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin to buttress his case.

It even invokes Werner Von Braun in his brief against private space colonies. Von Braun, before he moved to America and became a champion of civil rights in the Jim Crow South, served the Nazi regime, even joining the Nazi Party and taking rank in the SS, though no evidence exists that he agreed with Nazi racial ideology. It seems to imply that space colonies could resemble the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where people were literally worked to death to build V-2 rockets.

The story seems also to have problems with what it called “American superiority in space” and resource extraction on the moon. It mischaracterizes the former, since the Artemis Accords, started by NASA, stipulate a regime of cooperation on the space frontier and not the dominance of any one nation. Why there’s disdain for mining the moon or other celestial bodies is left as an exercise for the reader.

The story’s thesis encounters one problem. If Musk’s Mars colony or Bezos’s free-flying space cities become latter-day East Berlins, who would want to move there? Space colonies are going to need the best and the brightest to become their citizens in order to survive and thrive. No one is going to sign up willingly to become denizens of outer space gulags.

Real-world experience on Earth proves the point. The United States is not a perfect country by any means. Yet millions of people, either legally or otherwise, aspire to move to that country to enjoy its freedom and economic opportunities. Neither Russia nor China can make the same boast.

Elon Musk has opened his mind about how he envisions his Mars city being governed. Far from being a company town ruled as a dictatorship, he envisions a direct democracy, much like an Ancient Greek polis, in which everyone decides government policy. He believes that representative democracy gives too much power to “special interests.”

Still, some set of principles for how a space colony should be governed could be laid out in advance so that people who decide to leave Earth forever to make new lives in space could be assured of what they are getting into. Something similar to the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution should be drawn up and agreed to. Anyone proposing to establish a space colony should promise to adopt a Space Colonist Bill of Rights stipulating what the government of a space colony can and cannot do with its citizens. Nations of the world could sign an agreement, much like the Artemis Accords, that promises to defend and enforce such a Bill of Rights.

People in the future who contemplate moving off of the planet should be aware that they will not be settling down in a utopia. Elon Musk has assured one and all that the first settlers on Mars will have a not insignificant chance of dying. While a Mars colony is unlikely to become the dystopian hell that Scientific American warns about, human freedom, as is always the case, will have to be balanced by the need for survival.

Still, people in the mid to late 21st century will have an opportunity that none have been offered since the closing of the American frontier in the late 19th century. They will have the chance to move to a literal new world, to participate in the next phase of human history. They will be in on the beginning of the spread of human civilization across the solar system and, in the fullness of time, to the stars.

Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled, “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.  He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times and the Washington Post, among other venues.