The stars are up for grabs, but who gets to claim them? This isn’t just a question for sci-fi novels anymore—it’s a real, pressing issue. In October, at a tech conference in Italy, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, boldly predicted that millions of people will be living in space within the next couple of decades. His reasoning? Robots will handle most of the work, making it cheaper to outsource labor to machines. But here’s where it gets controversial: just weeks later, at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Will Bruey, founder of Varda Space Industries, flipped the script. He claimed that within 15 to 20 years, it will actually be cheaper to send a ‘working-class human’ into orbit for a month than to develop advanced robots. Wait, what?
At first glance, Bruey’s statement might seem like a win for human employment, but it raises a host of ethical questions. Who will these workers be? What conditions will they face? And this is the part most people miss: space isn’t the pristine, weightless paradise we imagine. As Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a space ethicist and professor at Wesleyan University, points out, space is harsh, isolated, and devoid of the comforts we take for granted on Earth. Workers wouldn’t just rely on their employers for a paycheck—they’d depend on them for air, water, and survival itself. Talk about power imbalance.
But worker rights are just the tip of the iceberg. The bigger, more contentious question is: who owns space, and what happens when we start mining it? The 1967 Outer Space Treaty declared that celestial bodies like the moon and Mars belong to all humanity, but the U.S.’s 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act created a loophole. While you can’t own the moon, you can own what you extract from it. Sound familiar? It’s like saying you can’t own a house, but you can take its floorboards and beams. Rubenstein argues that this isn’t just a legal gray area—it’s a recipe for global conflict. Companies like AstroForge and Interlune are already eyeing asteroid mining and lunar helium-3 extraction, but these resources aren’t renewable. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
The international community isn’t thrilled. Russia called the 2015 Act a violation of international law, and Belgium warned of economic imbalances. In response, the U.S. introduced the Artemis Accords, which 60 countries have signed—but notably, not Russia or China. Is this a power play, or a necessary step forward? Rubenstein suggests a radical solution: hand control back to the UN. But with the Wolf Amendment restricting U.S.-China collaboration, even that seems unlikely. Can we really afford to exclude one of the world’s leading space powers?
What’s most troubling is how we’re framing space exploration. Rubenstein divides sci-fi narratives into three categories: conquest, dystopian warnings, and speculative fiction. Guess which one we’re following? Yep, conquest. Instead of using space to reimagine justice and care, we’re treating it like a cosmic gas station. But there’s hope. Space debris, for example, is a problem everyone agrees on. With over 40,000 objects orbiting Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, the Kessler effect—a runaway collision scenario—is a real threat. Maybe this is where we can finally collaborate.
Rubenstein is working on a proposal for an annual conference to discuss ethical, mindful space exploration. But will anyone listen? Congress is pushing to make the Wolf Amendment permanent, and startups are already planning asteroid mining ventures. So, here’s the question: Are we colonizing space, or are we sharing it? What do you think? Is the current approach sustainable, or are we repeating the mistakes of Earth’s history? Let’s debate this in the comments—the future of space depends on it.
