For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes [sic] will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.
Starlink terms of service, 2022Footnote 1
Introduction
When registering with Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite-based Internet network, new customers may be surprised to find the statement quoted above in the company’s terms of service. Considering that Starlink’s activities are currently limited to Earth and that the legality of this contractual provision seems rather questionable, it is tempting to dismiss it as another one of Musk’s empty provocations. Yet commentators within the galaxy of think tanks associated with the neoliberal thought collective have taken it seriously. While TechFreedom’s counsel Corbin Barthold has defended Starlink against environmental regulators (including in front of a US Court of Appeals in 2021 and 2023) for the sake of Musk’s extraplanetary ambitions, the Foundation for Economic Education’s Thomas Walker-Werth praised Musk’s project of a stateless Mars.Footnote 2 Asking his readers to “imagine” the benefits opened up by the emergence of outer-space territories freed from earthly states’ regulations and restrictions on innovation and entrepreneurship, Walker-Werth speculated that “Mars, asteroids, and the Jovian and Saturnian moons … could all come alive with a plethora of different productive settlements, each with the potential to blossom into a new civilization.”Footnote 3
This defense of Musk’s Starlink initiative is not an isolated instance of neoliberal think tanks’ incursion into interplanetary politics. American neoliberal think tanks have sustained interest in space topics for decades, and their understanding of space often converges with the one promoted by Silicon Valley tycoons like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel. Over the last forty years, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Reason Foundation, TechFreedom, and other groups have published a plethora of reports, articles, and commentaries on the commercialization of space resources and territory.Footnote 4 Scholars associated with the neoliberal thought collective, such as Walter Block or 2007 Hayek Prize laureate Peter Leeson, have also supported privatizing space.Footnote 5 British neoliberal think tanks have followed a similar trend, demonstrated by the work of Andrew Lilico (formerly of Policy Exchange) and Mark Littlewood (the Institute of Economic Affairs—IEA) in the Daily Telegraph and The Times, and Rebecca Lowe’s report on property rights on the Moon for the Adam Smith Institute (ASI).Footnote 6 Lowe and Lilico have also expounded their views on space policies in CapX, a publication platform attached to the Centre for Policy Studies.Footnote 7
The aim of this article is to understand why neoliberal think tanks have developed this long-term idiosyncratic interest in space policies. I demonstrate that—as a realm beyond earthly limits and current institutional boundaries, yet seemingly within the reach of capital—space has become a locus for the projection of neoliberal fantasies. I argue that space acts as an affective mobilizer that enables neoliberal ideologues to reactivate their historical ideological struggle against collectivism while simultaneously helping them to rescue the neoliberal project from numerous epistemological threats—including the theoretical problem of private property’s origins and the concrete danger of climate change.
The article thus intervenes in the rich and still-expanding scholarship on the history of neoliberalism—here understood as a tradition of thought that spans from the interwar period until the present day, and which has been articulated by a well-organized international intellectual movement centering on the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) and a sprawling ecosystem of free-market think tanks.Footnote 8 In their pioneering edited volume The Road from Mont Pèlerin (2009), Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe show that the select group of scholars, journalists, corporate leaders, politicians, and think-tankers that took part in MPS meetings formed a “thought collective.”Footnote 9 Through their discussions and further organization, they collectively and iteratively shaped a common neoliberal identity and worked together to advance a common neoliberal cause.Footnote 10 Around Plehwe, a subfield in neoliberal studies has focused on how free-market think tanks orbiting the MPS have specifically contributed to this collective endeavor.Footnote 11 Marie-Laure Djelic and Reza Mousavi, for instance, examine the Atlas Network—to which all the think tanks discussed in this article are affiliated—as “the hub organization of a dense transnational community of neoliberal think tanks” that aims to diffuse and embed neoliberal ideas globally.Footnote 12 These recent studies on neoliberal think tanks have thus concentrated on how they influence policy makers and institutions, as well as on specific areas of neoliberal think-tank activism, like climate change policy skepticism.Footnote 13 Yet space policy as an area of neoliberal think-tank intervention has often been neglected despite explicit crossovers. For instance, I demonstrate here that space plays an important part in the alternative proposals that neoliberal think-tankers have put forward to tackle climate change.
Conversely, with the publicity given to Musk’s Mars colonization plans, there is a burgeoning scholarship conceptualizing the current wave of (commercial) space expansionism, to highlight either its colonial underpinnings (as in the works of Alina Utrata and Mary-Jane Rubenstein) or its questioning of international space law.Footnote 14 Yet these studies tend to focus on corporations, like SpaceX, somewhat overlooking the role of organized advocacy networks that have been long-term supporters of space colonization.
The specific contribution of this article is to bring these two scholarly traditions together by considering the involvement of neoliberal think tanks in the current push for further commercializing space. I am not the first, however, to tackle this issue. Matthew Johnson’s excellent 2020 doctoral thesis (recently turned into a book), “Mining the High Frontier,” discusses the emergence of New Space advocacy networks (the umbrella term for the private space industry) since the 1920s and their interplay with neoliberal policy networks.Footnote 15 While frequently drawing on Johnson’s work, my article is less about discussing the historical partnership between New Space and neoliberal advocacy groups, than about understanding why space still has such a power of attraction on today’s neoliberal ideologues and scholars.
To explore this, I mainly focus on US and UK think tanks’ post-2000 publications—that is, on contributions written after the founding of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic in 2000, 2002, and 2004 respectively, which marks a new chapter in the history of New Space. This corpus can be divided into two broad categories. On the one hand, policy-oriented documents generally written on behalf of neoliberal think tanks by engineers and space entrepreneurs (e.g. Rand Simberg for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Jeff Greason and James C. Bennett for the Reason Foundation), legal counsels (e.g. Corbin Barthold, James E. Dunstan and Berin Szóka for TechFreedom), or researchers (Rebecca Lowe for the Adam Smith Institute) tend to make room for some level of state intervention, for example by assuming that the state will build infrastructure to facilitate private space colonization.Footnote 16 On the other hand, more abrasive and frankly unhinged opinion pieces, often connected with the libertarian branches of the neoliberal think-tank network—for instance, think tanks like FEE (e.g. through its Hazlitt fellows, Saul Zimet and Thomas Walker-Werth) and the Heartland Foundation (e.g. Heartland Policy adviser and climate change denier Charles N. Steele), and controversial figures like Block and Lilico—offer anti-state accelerationist arguments.
Before going further, it is important to recognize that part of the scholarship differentiates libertarianism from neoliberalism, often to highlight the incorporation of libertarianism’s right-wing factions into today’s alt-right coalition and its opposition to more globalist forms of neoliberalism.Footnote 17 While acknowledging their difference and particularity (for instance by being attentive to the inflection specific to libertarianism, such as its virulent antistatism or its focus on homesteading), I prefer instead to follow the steps of Melinda Cooper and Quinn Slobodian in emphasizing their common belonging to the neoliberal thought collective.Footnote 18 To extend Cooper’s words, libertarianism—in both its reformist and its radical branches—sits “within the broad constellation of American neoliberalisms,” as is well illustrated by the trajectory of paleolibertarianism’s figurehead, Murray Rothbard.Footnote 19 Rothbard led the revival of neoliberal Austrian economics in the US and was a long-time member of the MPS—and this despite clear tensions within the thought collective on the issue of culture and race.Footnote 20 Other figures of American libertarianism mentioned in the article—like Walter Block and Robert Poole—similarly still hold membership in the MPS, further justifying my decision to keep neoliberalism as the common denominator between the free-market think tanks studied in this article.Footnote 21
My argument proceeds in three stages. First, I examine how the neoliberal publications on space operate in the context of their historical fight against international law: I go back to the first emergence of these publications in the late 1970s to then focus on their most recent institutional victories. The second and third parts of the article focus on post-2000 neoliberal think tanks’ publications on space by adopting a more thematical approach. The second part analyzes how space functions as a fantasy in neoliberal discourse that allows think-tankers to wish away a number of epistemological issues putting their ideal society at risk. The last section focuses on how space is presented as the ideal solution to the most pressing environmental threats and concludes with a discussion of the ideological role of the entrepreneur.
Appropriating the last commons: the battle against the Outer Space Treaty
The Moon Agreement and the specter of “collectivism” in the 1980s
While I mainly concentrate on post-2000 publications, it is useful to contextualize the emergence of space as a topic of discussion among neoliberal think-tankers. The first publications dedicated to the commercialization of space found in the online archives of US and UK neoliberal think tanks date from the late 1970s. They include a series of articles published by Reason magazine (from which sprang the Reason Foundation) between 1978 and 1985, followed by a multiplication of reports from FEE, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute after 1983.Footnote 22 This trend coincides with Reagan’s two presidential mandates marked by his commitment to develop further the commercial use of space, as, for instance, illustrated by the launch in 1984 of his Commercial Space Launch Act.Footnote 23 In the same way as post-2000 neoliberal think tanks’ publications on space have been galvanized by the founding of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, the 1980s reports accompany a rapid development of the commercial launch industry for communication satellites—with, for instance, the creation of Arianespace, the world’s first commercial space transportation company, in 1980, and the launch of Space Services Inc.’s Conestoga 1, the first privately funded spaceflight to reach space, in 1982.Footnote 24 One recurrent theme of these early publications is a critique of the alleged monopoly of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on space transportation and its space shuttle program.Footnote 25 Instead, these articles argue that only the private sector can legitimately lead the commercial development of space.
For the contributors of the 1980s, rapid technological developments in the space industry, and space telecommunication in particular, called for the introduction of private-property rights in an environment where they did not yet (and still do not) exist.Footnote 26 While the authors of these articles rarely give their theoretical references as they write for a nonspecialist readership or for policy makers, a 1987 Cato Journal article by Joel D. Scheraga stands out when it comes to the question of private property.Footnote 27 Scheraga used Ronald Coase’s work on the distribution of property rights for radio and television frequencies to argue that the failure to assign property rights to scarce space resources, like geosynchronous orbits, would inevitably lead to an inefficient use of these resources—thus threatening, for instance, to impede future communications via satellite.Footnote 28 He also alluded to Garrett Hardin’s 1968 theory of the “tragedy of the commons” by arguing that the absence of defined property rights would lead to an overuse of resources—taking the near-extinction of Great Plains bison as his example.Footnote 29 Lastly, Scheraga referred to Harold Demsetz’s framework to reassert his conviction that states would soon have a direct interest in establishing property rights in space as the benefits for doing so started to outweigh their social cost; states needed to leave it to the market as the market would “ensure that property rights to the scarce orbital slots [would be] defined and enforced.”Footnote 30 Scheraga was here directly challenging the nascent international legal regime on space, and nominally the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space (or “Outer Space Treaty”—OST), whose “failure to establish property rights” he judged to be “critical.”Footnote 31
Scheraga was far from isolated in his attack on the OST: most of the 1980s neoliberal think tanks’ publications on space are a direct response and challenge to it and other international space legislation. They specifically intervene in the context of a lobbying campaign against the 1979 Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (or “Moon Agreement”) orchestrated by the L-5 Society (now the National Space Society), a grassroot movement of space enthusiasts and early representatives of the forming New Space lobby defending the interests of private space actors.Footnote 32 As a result of their coordinated efforts, the US never signed or ratified the agreement. Crucially, neoliberal networks supported this successful campaign. In January 1980, only a couple of weeks after the Moon Agreement was opened for signature, the Reason Foundation’s cofounder Robert Poole exhorted his Reason readers to answer the L-5 Society’s call for action in order not to let “the promise of space be drowned in a sea of socialism.”Footnote 33 Reason followed up two years later by publishing an article by the L-5 Society’s representatives, including its cofounder, Keith Henson, where they attacked the entire international legislation on space.Footnote 34
The Moon Agreement is the last of a series of five United Nations treaties, around which the international space regime is organized.Footnote 35 Significantly, the other founding treaties and specifically its main one, the OST, had not—until then—attracted the neoliberal think tanks’ attention. Of course, only a handful of the think tanks discussed here already existed prior to 1967—with the bulk of them created in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet what triggered their reaction is that they identified the Moon Agreement as bearing the imprint of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), promoted from 1974 by the Group of 77 representing developing and nonaligned countries at the United Nations.Footnote 36 The 1980s neoliberal think-tankers specifically opposed the agreement’s definition of the Moon as the “heritage of all Mankind,” which they argued “assumes that the resources and wealth developed by the industrial nations somehow are ‘the common heritage’ of all mankind, and as such should be transferred by right to the developing states of the Third World.”Footnote 37 Such “unearned” transfer would be nothing less than “piracy,” according to Robert Poole. Similarly, think-tankers like Poole condemned the agreement’s provisions for the creation of an international “authority” (likely “controlled by a one-nation/one-vote assembly, whose decisions would be exempt from judicial review”) to centrally plan the exploitation of space resources.Footnote 38 Their rejection of the Moon Agreement was reinforced by the campaign they ran simultaneously against the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC), which also uses the concept of “common heritage of mankind.”Footnote 39 Neoliberals saw both legal texts as outgrowth of the NIEO “doctrine” and its alleged socialist redistributive principles.Footnote 40 Their ideological opposition to the consecration of outer space and Earth’s deep seabed as humanity’s commons is well captured by the trajectory of Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at Cato and prior to this at Heritage, who also served as Reagan’s deputy representative to the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea.Footnote 41 Bandow has zealously attacked the LOSC and the Moon Agreement since the 1980s, writing in 2020 that the latter was inspired by a group “represent[ing] largely socialist dictatorships which sought to guilt the West into transferring vast resources to their treasuries.”Footnote 42
Prior treaties, like the 1967 OST or the 1972 Liability Convention, were then a posteriori reinterpreted by the neoliberal think-tankers in light of the Moon Agreement.Footnote 43 Cato’s Edward L. Hudgins was characteristically able to write in 1998 that both treaties were “rather blatant forms of socialism.”Footnote 44 In other words, by 2000 the international space regime came to symbolize the remnants of the mid-century collectivist world order that the neoliberal thought collective had opposed in its quest for hegemony.Footnote 45 The think tanks’ coordinated attack on the outer-space regime thus offered the neoliberal thought collective a renewed opportunity to mobilize against a common enemy—a role that it still plays.
The post-2000 neoliberal critique of international space regime
What is striking is that the neoliberal think tanks’ rhetoric on space legislation and entrepreneurship has remained remarkably similar up to the present. Some of the contributors writing against the international space regime in the 1980s, such as Doug Bandow or space entrepreneur and Reason contributor James C. Bennett (who also served on Reagan’s 1984 Task Force on Space Commercialization) remain active, still authoring reports and commentaries for today’s neoliberal think tanks.Footnote 46
The Moon Agreement’s common-heritage-based regime is characteristically still decried, for instance by TechFreedom’s counsel James Dunstan, as instituting a form of collective property of space resources and its provision for the creation of an “international regime” to manage and redistribute these resources as a form of intolerable taxation of mining activities in space.Footnote 47 To the great satisfaction of neoliberal think-tankers, only seventeen countries and no spacefaring nations have ratified it to this day—making it effectively, in the words of Bennett and his 2019 coauthor Jeff Greason, a “dead letter.”Footnote 48
Neoliberals criticized the OST along similar lines, although they deemed it slightly more acceptable. Defining space as “the province of all mankind,” the OST guarantees free exploration and use of space by all states, as well as “free access to all areas of celestial bodies.”Footnote 49 Article II also stipulates that “outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” As states traditionally remain the legal guarantors of individuals’ private property rights, the treaty prevents appropriation of space resources and land, which makes it—as discussed further below—particularly objectionable to neoliberals. They could find reassurance in the OST’s ambiguous formulation when it comes to private appropriation and activities because it only bans national appropriation. Yet the OST is unsatisfactory for second reason: it requires states to “bear international responsibility” for private activities in space (Article VI)—an excessive government oversight which, for Rand Simberg (CEI), will “inhibit … the development of market-based solutions.”Footnote 50
As shown below, the post-2000 think tanks’ publications still present international space legislation as no less than a danger to the long-term survival of human civilization because of its perceived threats to property rights and sponsoring of state and interstate authority. Today’s neoliberal reports on space tend to take the following steps. They first typically rhetorically construct space as central to “human flourishing” and space travel as “vital and beneficial to human well-being.”Footnote 51 For instance, Littlewood (IEA) writes that opening the private space race would result in “enormous benefits to wealth, health and Earth’s environment,” while Lowe (ASI) associates it with “new scientific discovery, democratized space exploration, and much more.”Footnote 52 Second, current international legislation is presented as thwarting efforts to unlock the promise of space by misunderstanding the beneficial influence of private property, the market, and entrepreneurship.Footnote 53
Specifically, the OST and the Moon Agreement’s hindrances to the instauration of strong property rights in space through their consecration of space as global commons is seen as a major obstacle to future developments of vital space activities. Like Scheraga in 1987, Peter Nelson and Walter Block use Hardin’s theory of the “tragedy of the commons” (and the bison as illustrative example) to argue that space resources will be depleted and overused if no property rights are defined for them.Footnote 54 Property rights, they believe, create a direct interest to care for a resource and protect it in the long term. Similarly, strong property rights are thought to be the necessary condition for the development of private entrepreneurship—entrepreneurs being here again presented as the only actors (as opposed to state actors) who can develop vital space activities in an efficient way. A recurrent example is the comparison between NASA’s and SpaceX’s launch prices, the former being three times more expensive.Footnote 55 As in the 1980s, the post-2000 reports generally agree that insecure property rights will “inhibit” space entrepreneurs and private entities from pursuing the “exploration and eventual exploitation” of space.Footnote 56 Profits guaranteed by property rights are needed to encourage the likes of Musk and Bezos to take upon themselves the enormous costs of private space ventures.
These seemingly practical critiques of the international space regime’s obstructions are underpinned by a strong moral commitment to private property—especially for the contributors also identifying as libertarians. As legal scholar Jessica Whyte highlights, there is a long-running tendency amongst neoliberals to consider that property rights are an essential foundation to other human rights.Footnote 57 From its creation in 1947, the MPS has defined private property (along with the competitive market) as an institution without which “it is difficult to imagine a society in which freedom may be effectively preserved.”Footnote 58 The twenty-first-century neoliberal think-tankers follow this trend: for FEE’s Walker-Werth, for instance, private property is a right “essential for human beings to be able to use their minds and live fully.”Footnote 59 Similarly, as shall be discussed in the second part of this article, Nelson and Block call for the establishment of property rights in space according to homesteading principles based on Rothbard’s interpretation of John Locke’s natural-law theory.Footnote 60 In placing themselves in this intellectual tradition, they designate property as a fundamental natural right, as important as life and liberty. The international space treaties thus represent a visceral threat, which explains the vehemence of their reaction.
As such, for libertarians like Nelson and Block, international space legislation should be simply axed.Footnote 61 The others propose more measured approaches. In typical Hayekian fashion, what is required from the state is to abandon “central planning” by dismantling the current space regime and providing instead a clear legal framework securing property rights that will foster, in Heartland Institute Charles N. Steele’s words, “imagination, entrepreneurial innovation, and a free market.”Footnote 62
Neutralizing the OST
The most extreme libertarians aside, and marking a slight inflection from the 1980s reports, the large majority of the post-2000 neoliberal space reports offer to preserve but “neutralize” the OST because it provides the foundation for international space law’s follow-up treaties, which the US government should see as furthering its own interest—such as the Liability Convention and the Rescue Agreement.Footnote 63 Thus Simberg (CEI) proposes exploiting the OST’s ambiguities on national but not private appropriation, by arguing that the treaty does not need renegotiation as it still allows states to “recognize the property claims of anyone who met specified conditions, regardless of their citizenship or nationality.”Footnote 64 In their 2017 written testimony to the US Senate, James Dunstan and Berin Szóka (TechFreedom) suggest that the United States should create an attractive domestic legal regime supporting private enterprise that other states will want to emulate, instead of directly reforming international treaties.Footnote 65 Greason and Bennett (Reason Foundation) support a similar approach: they advise concentrating on binational agreements between space-faring nations sharing similar interests.Footnote 66
Policy-related think tanks use the aura of expertise that surrounds them to strategically achieve their political goals.Footnote 67 As a telling example, TechFreedom, created in 2011, specializes in providing legal expertise to influence the regulation of high-technology sectors. To defend the interests of the space industry, it employs tech lawyers and counsels like Barthold, Dunstan, and Szóka to file legal comments for requests of information and comment issued by governmental agencies (e.g., NASA, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), or the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy) and amicus briefs in courts, as well as to provide testimonies as legal experts in front of US Congress’s specialized committees or to draft letters to members of Congress proposing technical bill amendments.Footnote 68
The lobbying efforts of the US neoliberal think tanks and their New Space corporate allies have started to bear fruit. In 2015, Congress adopted the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA), celebrated as a “victory for commercial space” by TechFreedom.Footnote 69 The CSLCA “promote[s] the rights of United States citizens to engage in commercial exploration for and commercial recovery of space resources.”Footnote 70 It thus opens the way to recognizing the appropriation of space resources by individuals and commercial entities. It also circumvents the constraints set by the OST by stipulating that the US will not thereby assert sovereignty or jurisdiction over any celestial body. In April 2020, President Trump followed up with an executive order stipulating that the US “does not view [outer space] as a global common” and will “encourage international support for the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space.”Footnote 71 Bandow greeted this clarification as a “good step forward.”Footnote 72 Finally, in October 2020, the US, along with seven other founding members (including the United Kingdom and Luxembourg) signed the Artemis Accords, which endorse the strategy of bilateral agreements that TechFreedom and the Reason Foundation advocate. Under the objective of establishing a framework for cooperation in the civil exploration and peaceful use of the Moon, Mars, and other astronomical bodies, the accords sanction the US reinterpretation of the OST.Footnote 73 Specifically, it guarantees a right to extract and appropriate abiotic resources like minerals and water under the reasoning that extraction “does not inherently constitute national appropriation under Article II of the Outer Space Treaty”—an argument that Szóka and Dunstan have also made, as in their 2015 letter to the US House representatives.Footnote 74 Similarly, it creates “safety zones” of noninterference and exclusion around areas of (for instance, mining) operations, here again mirroring suggestions that neoliberal space consultants have made.Footnote 75 Crucially, the US has conditioned states’ future collaborations on NASA-led projects, such as the Artemis Program for lunar exploration, to their compliance with the principles set forth in the Artemis Accords.Footnote 76 At the time of publication, sixty-eight states have signed, reinforcing the US push for the introduction of private property in space by making it international customary law.Footnote 77
Appropriating the final frontier: space as a fantasy
The second and third part of this article adopt a more thematic approach, to determine why space keeps being an object of fascination for twenty-first-century think-tankers. A first broad answer is that space has a special imaginative and affective texture. It acts as an empty screen onto which fantasies of myriad futures can be projected—something the neoliberal think-tankers tap into when focalizing their lobbying efforts onto the international space regime. Yet, as I show, the utopian speculations they associate with space as the “final frontier” are riddled with intellectual anxiety.
Space as the final frontier
The frontier is a widespread trope in the neoliberal think-tank literature on space.Footnote 78 It participates in what political economist Jamie Peck calls the “contemporary cultural and political recoding of that American frontier spirit, one that has long valorized movement on and out.”Footnote 79 While the motif of the frontier is not specific to neoliberal thought, its recurrence in neoliberal works on space calls for further analysis. Cato’s 2002 Space: The Free-Market Frontier, the CEI’s 2012 Homesteading the Final Frontier and Greason and Bennett’s 2019 Reason Foundation report all explicitly connect space with the American “frontier” and unambiguously celebrate it.Footnote 80 Nelson and Block recall how, “From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, based on the private settlements on the frontier in North America, a new commitment to freedom spread worldwide.”Footnote 81 Similarly, Greason and Bennett praise the frontier of the “American West” and its “pioneers,” along with the “sea” frontier traversed by European navigators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for catalyzing economic development.Footnote 82 These are the models that outer space development should follow. I distinguish two different dimensions in the neoliberal conceptualizations of space as a “frontier,” as a geographical concept and as an affective mobilizer.
In the explicitly libertarian circles, the motif of the American frontier is used to conceptualize the boundary between corrupt failing states on the one hand and new territories where a utopia might be created on the other. Walker-Werth (FEE), for instance, depicts how, “centuries ago,” there were still “areas of Earth’s surface that were not ruled by governments—areas beyond laws, regulations, taxes, kings, and politicians. Those frontiers provided an opportunity to set up new societies based on radical ideas, free from the trappings of the old world.”Footnote 83 The US is, for Walter-Werth, the “shining example” of such places. To draw on Matthew Johnson’s work, outer space is assimilated to these extralegal spaces of exception, placed beyond the state.Footnote 84 These spaces function as a blank sheet on which like-minded “freedom-loving” communities can escape the smothering grip of the state and its normative rules to redefine the values according to which they want to live.Footnote 85
The rules of the free market will order the space communities imagined by neoliberal and libertarian authors. As Alexander Salter and Peter Leeson argue in Cato Journal, the absence of sovereign states in the “celestial anarchy” that they champion will not result in lawlessness. Private arbitration associations such as the International Chamber of Commerce, whose operations transcend states’ legal boundaries, prove that the private sector can organize itself to guarantee property rights.Footnote 86 Private arbitration thus is an effective alternative to state rule. As another example of independent space communities, Walker-Werth and Barthold (TechFreedom) find Musk’s self-governing Martian settlement promising. As the owner of the settlement’s infrastructure, Musk would also be able to determine its rules, thus acting as its de facto sovereign.Footnote 87 Walker-Werth and Barthold seem unfazed by the risks of Musk overreaching. His status as a star entrepreneur seems enough for them to believe he will uphold the free market as a fundamental governing principle. These space reports follow a larger trend in neoliberal libertarian circles—recently analyzed by historian Quinn Slobodian—characterized by its championing of new sovereign communities seceding from states and organized around the model of the corporation, where voting power is concentrated in the hands of shareholders.Footnote 88 Contrasting—in Nelson and Block’s case explicitly—their ideal space community with the model of the commons (in which no ownership is deemed to lead to an overuse or waste of resources), private ownership becomes the sign of having a stake in the long-term future of the community and thus comes with a sovereign right to shape it.Footnote 89
A striking sense of settler colonial nostalgia also transpires from the libertarian prose. As Walker-Werth deplores, “There are no new frontiers left in which to establish a freer kind of society” on Earth today.Footnote 90 Or, in the words of fellow libertarian Peter Thiel (close to the neoliberal thought collective), “there are no truly free places left in our world.”Footnote 91 All territories have been claimed by states and submitted to their sovereign rule. For Thiel, “the mode for escape [from world politics] must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried [technological] process that leads us to some undiscovered country.”Footnote 92 Outer space plays such a role as its “vast reaches … represent a limitless frontier … [as well as] a limitless possibility for escape.”Footnote 93 For Walker-Werth, space is the final frontier that makes up for the disappearance of frontiers on Earth.Footnote 94
Beyond the libertarian circles, the motif of the frontier is used in neoliberal space reports to trigger certain affects and mobilize their American readers. The myth of the frontier appeals to a sense of collective pride in what authors and readers perceive as the glorious achievements of Manifest Destiny.Footnote 95 As literary theorist Roland Barthes argues, myths have a hailing function: operating on an affective and emotional level, they include us, spectators, in an indistinctive and uncritical universality.Footnote 96 Specifically, the neoliberal think-tankers tap into the epics of adventure allegedly associated with the frontier.Footnote 97 For instance, Christopher Talgo (Heartland Institute) praises “America” for “embrac[ing] exploration and ingenuity” since “its founding”; he recounts the “European settlers [who] ventured to the New World despite the hardships that awaited them,” who “braved the elements and many other threats.”Footnote 98 Space privatization would allow the US to “continue to push the boundaries of discovery.”Footnote 99 The figure of the space entrepreneur (more so than the astronaut) is thus uncritically lionized as the one thanks to whom the limit between the known and the unknown will be overcome, leading to developments in the field of health, technologies, and sciences, and providing access to new natural resources.
Yet, as Dunstan makes clear, science actually comes second: the commercial exploitation of space resources should remain the primary objective of space exploration.Footnote 100 For Simberg, space should not be conceptualized as a “scientific preserve,” but rather as a “new venue for human expansion.”Footnote 101 His remark illustrates well what Marxist theorist Jason Moore describes as capitalism’s dependency on “frontiers of cheap nature.”Footnote 102 Because of its reliance on fantasies of endless accumulation and consumption, capitalism expands outwards both to find raw material, energy, and labor, and to create new markets, a tendency that Marxist geographer David Harvey conceptualizes as the “spatial fix.”Footnote 103 Sociologists Peter Dickens and James Ormrod use this idea in their work to think about the function of space in the capitalist imaginary.Footnote 104 Like the other frontiers celebrated in neoliberal thought, space as the “limitless frontier” must thus be read as a cultural project that justifies and glorifies appropriation.Footnote 105 According to this anthropocentric fantasy, the universe is amenable to entrepreneurial agency; outer space can be reached, understood, and, ultimately, controlled.
Of course, both geographical and affective evocations of the frontier erase the most problematic historical dimensions of the age of “discovery” and settlement. This is particularly obvious in their uncritical and dehistoricized celebration of space “colonization.”Footnote 106 The word “colonization” and its derivatives are commonly used in these reports, often without a second thought given to the horrors of the colonial past. For instance, Lilico limits his column on the colonization of Mars to the question of economic viability.Footnote 107 When seemingly addressing the issue, Nelson and Block make a historically unjustifiable distinction between pernicious state-led colonization—the colonization of the “Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores [which] despoiled native lands, killed inhabitants, and stole their valuables”—and benign private colonization by “freedom-loving” English settlers.Footnote 108 Even when conceding that “‘[c]olonization’ has a bad press” because of its association “with exploiting helpless people” (although they swiftly reference MPS-member Niall Ferguson’s “argument that this process was actually helpful to its supposed victims”), they argue that it happily will not have such deleterious effect in outer space because there are no natives—no “Martians or Venusians”—to dispossess.Footnote 109 As Matthew Johnson writes in his study of the New Space lobby, these fantasies of “guilt-free appropriation” are related to the depoliticizing process of “mythologization” denounced by Barthes.Footnote 110 For Barthes, myths do not hide colonialism itself, only its “contingent, historical, or in one word fabricated, quality”; their function is not to “deny things” but, on the contrary, “to purify, exculpate and found them in nature and eternity.”Footnote 111
Property rights reloaded
Yet the neoliberal appropriation of outer space might not be as devoid of “guilt” as its proponents delude themselves. The myth’s purification process leaves a remainder that cannot be fully repressed. The inherent violence of appropriation remains a haunting presence in the narratives analyzed. Yes, there are no natives to dispossess, but because of space’s peculiar legal status as res communis it is humanity that would be the victim of extra-planetary robbery. The appropriation of celestial bodies particularly runs counter to other traditional uses and conceptualizations of space. The two examples that are often mentioned in the academic literature are the way many Indigenous cultures conceptualize celestial bodies as spiritual beings or as relatives, and the way the light pollution created by the multiplication of satellites in the sky, such as Musk’s Starlink constellation, endangers traditional celestial navigation.Footnote 112
As private property is such an important pillar of neoliberal thought, any doubt or concern about the fundamental arbitrariness and violence of initial appropriation may constitute a genuine epistemological and normative threat for the neoliberal theoretical project. This is what is at play in the neoliberal and libertarian debates on homesteading in space—which amply build on hailing spatial fantasies, like the myth of the frontier. These texts go to great lengths to prove the morality of private appropriation of space resources. “Homesteading” as a concept is itself closely associated with the history of white settlements and the dispossession of Indigenous people on the American frontier, as for instance represented by the US 1841 Preemption Act and 1862 Homestead Act, which gave settlers the right to appropriate frontier lands as extralegal spaces, providing settlers continuously occupied and “improved” these lands.Footnote 113 Continuing the ideals expounded in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, they established that “fructifying” the land through cultivation or extraction dispenses a moral right (and therefore property rights) to territory, especially if it is unoccupied or “wasted.”Footnote 114 In Locke’s vivid description, as owner of himself and of his labor, the settler who works the land has “mixed his labour with and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”Footnote 115 Locke is an explicit reference in several post-2000 neoliberal space reports—as in the two variations on homesteading examined below.
As previously discussed, self-described libertarians such as Nelson, Block, and Walker-Werth adopt Murray Rothbard’s Lockean approach to private property and homesteading.Footnote 116 Reusing Locke’s metaphor of mixing one’s labor with the land, they defend appropriation on an uncomplicated and unapologetic “first in use, first in right” basis.Footnote 117 The first settlers would also be granted the power, with a long-term impact, of deciding how to use the land they control—for instance, if they want to use it for mining, terraforming for settlement or tourism, or preserving as an environmental treasure.Footnote 118 Their plan would therefore provide an exclusive legal right to appropriate a resource-rich environment currently held in common to a small minority of stratospherically rich individuals, like Bezos or Musk, who are the only private actors who can currently afford partaking in space ventures. This sci-fi reenactment of primitive accumulation via colonial enclosure would certainly deepen the stark inequalities already existing in today’s world. Yet Walker-Werth, and Nelson and Block, still find the need to rhetorically circumvent such accusation: appropriation would be justified as these first settlers-cum-terraformers would necessarily, through their laborious efforts, improve a barren and infertile land, thus serving the greatest number in the long term.Footnote 119 Eventually, how much land they can directly transform to “make it useful” would be a natural limit to how much they can appropriate.Footnote 120
Lowe offers a more subtle understanding of appropriation, but her proposal for distributing Moon lands’ property rights is haunted by the specter of colonial dispossession: “debate rages about the property-related injustices of the past, here on Earth. Debates about the actions of our forebears, relating to the acquisition of property, the distribution of access to resources, and the colonisation of areas already serving as the livelihood and homes of indigenous peoples.”Footnote 121 Fully aware of “the costs that property rights regimes can impose,” she wants to find ways to ensure that “legal claims to ownership are also morally justified.” Space represents such an opportunity. As a blank page devoid of previous inhabitations, institutions, and history, it gives us “a one-time chance to get matters of property right, this time, from the off.” In other words, space has the potential to save private property from its shameful past. She proposes to avoid the limitations of the “first come, first served” principle by creating a competitive and market-driven system of rent in which an international committee would allocate lunar territory on a temporary basis to entrepreneurs who, as in Locke, shall prove that they enhance the land.Footnote 122 The rents would go to a common fund that would help currently less privileged individuals to also compete to become lunar tenants in the future.
In both variations, we can see that the speculative future uses of space are evoked to address the unstable core of neoliberal thought. Concerns about the sanctity of private property relating to its tarnished past are remedied by phantasmatic visions of justly developing the bounty of far-off worlds. Space acts as a fantasy—that is, a psychic mechanism through which gaps that mark the inconsistencies of a subject’s representations are contained, thereby providing a sense of coherence and wholeness—and therefore allows neoliberals to discard issues that could unsettle some basic tenets of their worldview.Footnote 123
“That was a no-brainer”: using space as an environmental fix
Climate change is another thorny issue for neoliberal hegemony that the fantasy of space can resolve. It is no coincidence that many of the think tanks mentioned, like the Heartland Institute or the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are well-known centers of climate denial.Footnote 124 For instance, Heartland’s Charles Steele co-authored the 2019 report of the climate-change-sceptic Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), Climate Change Reconsidered II.Footnote 125 Elsewhere, he asserts that fossil fuels are “on net, positive, and make humans better off,” while “current proposals for addressing climate change impose costs on people that far outweigh benefits.”Footnote 126
As in the case of the OST, neoliberal think-tankers tend to see any state-led coordinated action to tackle climate change as a potential threat to individual freedom and the efficient workings of the free market. Steele targets the 2019 report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—especially its call to scale down the use of fossil fuels through the funding of alternative energy sources, taxation, and social justice—as “a call for global central planning and income redistribution—a sort of ‘socialism lite’ dressed up as sustainable development.”Footnote 127 The IPCC recommendations endanger economic freedom and the free market, and, through them, “human prosperity around the world.”
To defuse the threat, neoliberal think-tankers strategically present carbon-fueled private entrepreneurship in space as a more efficient way to address the issue of climate change than regulations to curb carbon emissions. As often with neoliberal advocates, spreading market mechanisms to new domains is presented as the only adequate solution to the climate crisis.Footnote 128 Here again, marketized space enables capitalism to bypass planetary limits to growth.Footnote 129 Below I explore ways the neoliberal commentators use space to circumvent the problem of climate change, at least on a phantasmatic level.
Solving the limitation of earthly resources
Most of the texts analyzed advertise the appropriation of space land primarily for its mining potential. Asteroids could provide access to “rare earth material such as neodymium, scandium, and yttrium,” as well “platinum-group metals such as platinum itself and palladium.”Footnote 130 The Moon could also be used as a convenient low-gravity extraterrestrial refill station for aluminum, titanium, nickel, and iron, as well as water, hydrogen, and oxygen needed for longer outer-space journeys and infrastructure.Footnote 131 The think-tankers are quick to emphasize how lucrative space mining could be. Littlewood speculates that “a single, fully mined asteroid would be worth more than $800 billion,” while Nelson and Block reckon that some asteroids could “contain $20 trillion worth of valuable metals.”Footnote 132 Simberg, and Greason and Bennett, also highlight the strategic dimension for the US of investing in space mining to source rare-earth materials (which are used to manufacture lasers, chips, and batteries) at a time when their supply on Earth is dominated by China.Footnote 133
What makes these materials so precious is their relative scarcity on Earth. As such, the reports tend to connect their promotion of space mining with reflections on the limitation of earthly resources, but with an important twist that reflects the influence of business professor and MPS member Julian Simon on neoliberal environmental thought.Footnote 134 Simon is well known for his cornucopian theory on the infinitude of natural resources, which he expounded in The Ultimate Resource (1981). The book was constructed as a challenge to neo-Malthusian theories on resource scarcity and overpopulation as found in the works of Meadows’s Limit to Growth (1972) or Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968).Footnote 135 For Simon, it is not “economically meaningful” to conceptualize natural resources as quantitatively limited as we humans “have the capacity to develop additional ways to meet our needs” through technological innovation.Footnote 136 While some resources might have appeared physically limited at given moments in time, these impressions, along with the conceptualizations and calculations of what this “limit” consisted in, were always proven wrong.Footnote 137 If a resource that seems scarce is truly needed, it will be given a monetary value that will encourage enterprising individuals to find ways to produce it by other means (e.g. synthetic production or recycling processes), or find an alternative to it (for instance by discovering or creating new materials).Footnote 138
Importantly, outer space is already at the center of Simon’s provocative argument. As he wrote in 1981, in the unlikely event that specific natural resources on Earth become exhausted, “there is the possibility that humans will come to exploit the resources of other parts of the cosmos, which is so huge relative to the solar system as to render calculations irrelevant under any conceivable rate of growth.”Footnote 139 Space is here clearly used as a trump card that renders discussions on resource limitation “irrelevant.” Even if Simon were to be proven wrong and a resource could not be sourced by any alternative on Earth, we could expand “the boundaries of the system from which we derive resources” in the direction of “the Moon.”Footnote 140 Space creates the potential for infinite accumulation.
Today’s neoliberal think-tankers enthusiastically take up Simon’s argument—and not always in the most subtle way. For instance, Nelson and Block adopt an extreme-Simonian perspective when, citing Simon’s work, they argue that “‘running out of resources’ here, back on the home planet, is a fallacious notion” as “[w]e are at present (2016) up to our armpits in resources, and hardly need to venture out into the heavenly bodies to obtain any more”; they explain that their motivation to colonize space is by contrast purely ideological.Footnote 141 More to the point, in 2018, Gale L. Pooley and Marian L. Tupy from the Cato Institute launched a “Simon Abundance Index” to measure “the change in abundance of resources over a period of time.”Footnote 142 Unsurprisingly, they reach the very Simonian conclusion that, despite rising climate concerns, “the Earth was 379.6 percent more abundant in 2017 than it was in 1980.” Like Simon, they acknowledge that “[t]he Earth is a closed system,” but that “[o]ne day, we might be able to replenish our resources from outer space by, for example, dragging a mineral‐rich asteroid down to Earth.”
James Dunstan also follows Simon’s steps when linking space with the infinitude of its natural resources. For example, he compares space with a “pie [that] is nearly infinite.”Footnote 143 According to him, “Opening the space frontier brings access to the near-limitless energy of the sun, and the ability to harvest the quintillions worth of rare Earth metals contained in asteroids that will fuel the future hydrogen and fusion economies of Earth.”Footnote 144 Crucially, Dunstan makes a direct connection between the commercialization of space and future environmental policies—a connection that is also found in Simon’s work. When writing in 1981, Simon explicitly challenged Ehrlich’s and Meadows’s concerns by provocatively stating that “the [1981] world [was] creating new resources and cleaning up the environment at an ever-increasing rate.”Footnote 145 In other words, he argued that individuals and communities could always “overcome environmental problems” by finding new resources and technologies.Footnote 146 Dunstan also links entrepreneurial activity in space with the development of carbon-free (“hydrogen and fusion”) industries on Earth. He adds, “Such advances [in space] will allow us to wean ourselves off ugly fossil fuels without the economic devastation forecast if we use only terrestrial renewables,” for instance by developing solar power capture beyond the Earth’s surface.Footnote 147
Extraterrestrial dumpsters
Another way in which neoliberals envision space to solve Earth’s most pressing socio-environmental problems is by offering extraterrestrial uninhabited territories towards which some of these issues might conveniently be evacuated. As Greason and Bennett write, “global solutions to Earth’s challenges, especially environmental ones, are highly constrained when limited to the planet’s surface, and must be continually weighed against human welfare—especially in developing nations. Using the entire solar system seems in general more apt to result in a cleaner and safer Earth environment.” They use mining as an example. Whereas mining resources on Earth has clear “environmental impact externalities” (which led to temporary closures of US earth elements mines in the 2000s and 2010s), mining space resources instead can almost be presented as an act of social justice as it would transfer polluting mining activities into “airless, lifeless places.”Footnote 148.
Others, like Dunstan, mention how the environmental cost of alternatives to fossil fuels, such as nuclear waste generated by “fusion,” could be solved through the marketization of space.Footnote 149 Block and Huebert (for the FEE), for instance, propose that we send nuclear waste to Venus (aboard private rockets, of course!)—a planet whose atmosphere is already toxic to humans, and which could therefore not be more polluted than it already is.Footnote 150 The risk of nuclear convoys exploding in Earth’s atmosphere is dismissed as the “risk would shrink as the private sector moves further into space transportation.”Footnote 151 They also recommend moving the most toxic and polluting forms of manufacturing in space, an idea that Dunstan, Littlewood, and Greason and Bennett also embrace.Footnote 152 The latter also suggest moving dangerous scientific activities, such as manipulating viruses and advanced fusion, off Earth to create a protective “vacuum gap.”Footnote 153
Once again, the extralegal and extra-human status of space turns it into an imaginary speculative terrain in which today’s problems will magically be solved tomorrow.
Speculative futures
Think-tankers’ reports are characterized by their optimistic faith in the power of new technologies in space transport and in the mining sector to bring about a better future. Such celebration of a highly polluting industry often pioneered by autocratic eccentric billionaires and happening at a time of global climate breakdown and rising social inequalities might seem paradoxical. To give a sense of proportion, a single launch of Space X’s Falcon 9 emits 116 tons of CO2 in the 165 seconds of its first launch stage.Footnote 154 To justify their leap of faith, think-tankers emphasize the importance of uncertainty, thereby redeploying Hayek’s mid-century framework based on the limits of human knowledge.Footnote 155 For instance, Pooley and Tupy’s Simonian argument is also predicated on humanity’s inability to know “the full extent of our resources,” which encourages us, individually, to find ways to overcome these potential limits.Footnote 156 Saul Zimet (FEE) explicitly refers to Hayek when arguing that “the implications of future knowledge, by their very nature, are often unimaginable in advance.”Footnote 157 As such, as Barthold (TechFreedom) and Greason and Bennett remark, we cannot predict the ways and forms future technological developments will take, as “[t]he possibilities in the future … are limitless.”Footnote 158 Zimet observes that, however “unpredictable the effects of new knowledge,” they are likely to change the world “in ways that benefit virtually the entire human population, not just the privileged and wealthy.”Footnote 159
Hayek’s theory of knowledge denounced planners’ hubristic ambition to rationally organize and impose the “conscious social control” of the future.Footnote 160 In the same way, the think-tankers’ stance about the uncertainty of the future is directed against (in Block and Huebert’s words) the “deep ecology” of “state environmentalists.”Footnote 161 For instance, Steele dismisses the IPCC report by arguing that it is “driven by ideology, not science.”Footnote 162 True science would consider the economic cost of each of the policies advocated, acknowledging that interventionist policies might be more costly than what they are supposed to cure. As Zimet further argues, radical ecological policies “rarely facto[r] in … that continued economic growth, facilitated in large part by fossil fuels, will likely continue to produce unpredictable technological and scientific breakthroughs, creating new forms of security and wellbeing, and at new scales.”Footnote 163 Politicians should therefore not attempt to rein in industries based on their current environmental costs. Littlewood similarly notes that we should even restrain from criticizing what may appear as futile a venture as commercial space travel as it may result in unexpected “enormous benefits to wealth, health and Earth’s environment” by making access to space resources cheaper.Footnote 164 Zimet defends space tourism with a similar argument, explicitly appealing to Hayek’s celebration of the “extravagance and even waste” of the wealthiest few as opening the “path of advance”: they will fund what seems at first a luxury, contributing to bringing its price down in the long run, thus making it affordable for the many.Footnote 165
Such a rationale ends up flirting with some particularly problematic accelerationist positions, like Lilico’s, who invites his Daily Telegraph readers to “[c]hoose between spending $3-trillion on preventing the Earth heating up by 3C [sic] over the next 150 years and spending it on making Mars a blue planet”—arguing that the latter is more economically efficient.Footnote 166 For Lilico, it might ultimately make more economical sense to let the planet burn if it gives industries, and especially the most polluting ones like space manufacturing, the space they need to innovate, as they might stumble upon the technology that will save us all in the future. As he bluntly writes elsewhere,
in a century’s time, perhaps our great grandchildren will be sitting in their climate-controlled domes on Mars thinking “The deal was this: London flooded, the Mississippi overflowed even more than usual, and in exchange we got the cure for cancer, interplanetary travel, a life expectancy of 200, eyelid head-up-displays, telepathy, and all the other apparatus of modern life. That was a no-brainer.”Footnote 167
Humanity’s salvation might come from space, even if it entails a back-up composed of a select few sent to live on other planets (including Musk’s Mars colony)—as Nelson and Block candidly imagined in their nuclear-annihilation scenario.Footnote 168 The neoliberal space fantasy here reveals itself in its most nihilistic dimension. It disinvests from and devaluates the present terrestrial environment in the name of a future utopia beyond current material limits.Footnote 169 A highly speculative future, that might never materialize, potentially abandoning the rest of the world to its apocalyptic fate.
Conclusion
This article has shown that US and UK twenty-first-century neoliberals see space as an opportunity to reactivate their long-term struggle against collectivism, but also as a way to suture a number of epistemological threats to neoliberal thought such as the legitimation of private property or its unflinching support for capitalism.
Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk play a central role in this picture. Most of the writers analyzed do not hide their admiration for Silicon Valley’s space barons and often publicly support them. With a few notable exceptions, their ideological defense of the free market accommodates itself surprisingly well with the tech billionaires’ monopolistic tendencies.Footnote 170 Why? Think-tankers’ eagerness to rush to Musk and his friends’ defense can be explained by the important part given to the entrepreneur in the neoliberal imaginary—some neoliberal thinkers, such as former MPS president Herbert Giersch, even defend “innovative monopolistic competition” against “sterile perfect competition.”Footnote 171 Simon’s theories on the infinity of natural resources are, for instance, predicated on human ingenuity, and specifically on the ability of certain individuals to find alternatives to, or new ways of producing, resources in tension. Indeed, human creativity is the “ultimate resource” mentioned in Simon’s book title. It will enable humanity to bypass any present limits on physical resources. Thanks to it, “we and our descendants can manipulate the elements in such fashion that we can have all the raw materials that we desire at prices even smaller relative to other goods and our total income”; “our cornucopia is the human mind and heart.”Footnote 172
Crucially, neoliberal think-tankers wholeheartedly integrate Simon’s celebration of the entrepreneur into their case for the marketization of space. For instance, Szóka emphasizes that “Julian Simon was right: the ultimate resource really is human ingenuity, and the resources of space are really only there for what we make of them.”Footnote 173 Space resources are effectively barren if not transformed by the visionary terraforming action of an Elon Musk. As Nelson and Block write, if private developers were left in charge of the Moon, they would create “a veritable Garden of Eden [that] inspires the imagination.”Footnote 174 A think tank like TechFreedom is thus dedicated not simply to promoting private space exploitation but, very explicitly, as its official documents state, to supporting the interests of entrepreneurs in order to “unleas[h] the ultimate resource: human ingenuity.”Footnote 175
The neoliberal think tanks’ speculative plans for the future rely on a blind faith in the power of entrepreneurship to solve tomorrow the problems of the present. As Zimet writes, “Without visionaries like Elon Musk to bet their capital on the exploration of new technological frontiers, humanity’s future would be much less bright. But with them, there are no limits in view.”Footnote 176 The entrepreneur figure sustains the neoliberal discourse about the future by hiding its most blatant shortcomings: the lack of sustainability of and disruptions caused by the current capitalist modes of production. No need to curb today’s carbon emissions as tomorrow’s entrepreneurs shall find economically efficient (but energy-hungry) geo-engineered solutions to environmental problems.Footnote 177 Entrepreneurs like Musk, Bezos, and Thiel are so important to the neoliberal project because they convey in their discourse and embody in their practice an epic of space enterprise, which offers an opening on a hypothetical tomorrow that helps to displace the need for a robust decarbonization and energy transition. Their promising dreams of future off-world colonies provide the neoliberal think-tankers’ speculative plans with additional reality and affective texture. Thanks to them, space, the final frontier, seems within humanity’s reach.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Lars Cornelissen, Will Davies, Alan Finlayson, Isabel Oakes, Apolline Taillandier, and Troy Vettese for their helpful feedback and suggestions on the previous versions of the article. Thank you to the Modern Intellectual History editors and reader for their attentive reading and comments.
Financial support
This work was supported by the ESRC under grant ES/X007359/1.
Disclosure statement
The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.
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