Out of the cradle

Space war was once the remit of army personnel, security analysts, and members of the intelligence services. Although it has long been known that modern armies rely on satellite imagery, and that most wars since the first Gulf War have in that sense been space wars, we have only recently witnessed increased public attention on astropolitics, the projection of geopolitics into space. Two developments have fuelled this rising interest. The first is the accelerated growth of the commercial space sector, which in 2023 was reported to be worth $546 billion and projected to grow by 41 per cent over the next half decade.Footnote ¹ SpaceX’s founder and CEO Elon Musk has promised to further cut space transportation costs and eventually colonise Mars, creating new forms of authority beyond the confines of earthly law. In the visions of a new generation of billionaire space barons, the cosmos emerges as a place where humans can escape their dying planet and rescue the project of limitless growth.Footnote ²

The second concerns the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The rollout of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband over Ukraine has been widely reported as crucial to the war effort. But as the global media were flooded with high-quality satellite imagery of exploding Russian tanks, questions were raised over whether SpaceX had been geofenced so as not to support any offensive actions in territories that were held by Russia at the time of the invasion, particularly the Crimean peninsula. On top of this, there is a growing concern about what Russia and China might be launching into orbit. In January 2024, The Economist warned its readers that ‘war in space is no longer science fiction’.Footnote ³ Two weeks later, the chair of the US House intelligence committee asked the US president to declassify information about a mysterious new Russian space weapon. Soon, the global media landscape was flooded with speculation about Moscow’s new technology and how it might alter the global balance of power.

These events are clearly related. And yet, they also highlight different facets of the space age 2.0: space is not just a sphere of economic opportunity, colonisation, and salvation – but also a source of great anxiety. For those searching their newsagent or bookstore for a guide to this brave new space world, there is The Future of Geography, written by the former British war journalist turned popular author Tim Marshall. The book is part of his Prisoners of Geography franchise which has sold millions of copies and includes a children’s book edition. It also comes with a foreword from a former chief of the UK’s foreign intelligence service. Marshall’s story on outer space is neither convoluted nor indeed new to those familiar with discourses of the first space age: as human life is genetically programmed to be restless, humans constantly seek to move and migrate, explore, and conquer. But sadly, the earth’s resources and terrestrial space are limited. It is thus that humanity needs to expand into the solar system and beyond.

And although some might dispute Marshall’s confidence in the benefits of lunar extraction, there is nothing new or remarkable about his cosmic daydream. It synthesises what is already in a media sphere oversaturated with stories about the new US Space Force, Indian and Russian moon landings, Chinese anti-satellite warfare, and plans for the establishment of Martian colonies.

Perhaps even more than Marshall’s earlier books, The Future of Geography is targeted at a male audience with an interest in off-earth militarism, space expansionism, and cosmic escapism. It is written for men who see in Elon Musk a visionary, men who want to realise their boyhood dreams, regardless of the amount of rocket fuel that this would take. Despite all the talk of asteroid mining, space weapons, lunar bases, and interstellar travel, there are earthlier themes in Marshall’s space book, which will be familiar to those acquainted with the wider genre of geopolitical writing. Here is a story of great powers operating under the inevitable influence of environmental constraints, the slow force of geologic and climatic agency. But his cosmic journey introduces something new, namely the assumption, and it is an assumption rather than an argument, that outer space is ‘an extension of the geography of Earth’.Footnote ⁵ Much else depends on this, most notably Marshall’s vision of outer space as one which will naturally be as divided and conflictual as terrestrial space.

Marshall sees little shame in marching into politically perilous territory. Like others who draw on geopolitics, he likes to invoke the heartland theory of Halford Mackinder, a geographer on whose 1899 expedition to Mount Kenia eight Indigenous porters were executed. By using antiquated theories to make sense of a cosmic future, he achieves an act of retrofuturism. And he is not alone. He has landed his intellectual spaceship in the expanding field of astropolitics, a genre of knowledge which spans applied military strategy, academic work, and popular non-fiction, and which confidentially projects 19th- and early 20th-century geography into outer space.

This paper is driven by a curiosity about the origins of the idea that outer space can and should be thought about in geographic and indeed geopolitical ways. The term geopolitics was coined in the early 20th century by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén as a shorthand for the political geography of the settler colonial enthusiast Friedrich Ratzel, whom Kjellén admired.Footnote ⁶ Ratzel’s political geography emphasised the environmental bedrock on which state formation and competition took place, and the ways in which geology and climate conspired to shape the fate of individual polities. Whilst there were arguably precursors,Footnote ⁷ it was only in the 1890s that geography, organicism, and Darwinism were fused into a political theory which read states as organisms whose struggle for survival was in fact a struggle for space.Footnote ⁸

Debates on International Relations (IR) have witnessed a growing interest in geopolitics. Indeed, recent and ongoing research has exposed the key – but long forgotten – role which geographers and geopoliticians played in advancing debates in IR before after the Second World War.Footnote ⁹ And whilst much of this research is historically motivated, there is clearly contemporary relevance. Many have documented the revival of geopolitics as a vehicle for the critique of liberal order.Footnote ¹⁰ Others are examining geopolitics as a guide to the climate crisis and an obstacle to effective action on global warming.Footnote ¹¹ There is, in other words, a growing consensus that geopolitical ideas have not just shaped the interstate system and the way in which we think about it, but that geopolitics holds the world back from tackling the most pressing issues of our time.

One area which has thus far received much less attention, though it is clearly connected to all of the above, is the renaissance of a colonial geopolitics in the sphere of off-earth political thought and military strategy. Given the centrality that post- and decolonial critique has played in the analysis of outer space activity,Footnote ¹² this lacuna is perhaps a little surprising. To be clear, there exist critiques of key astropolitical texts which do interrogate the latter’s colonial nature.Footnote ¹³ But whilst there are vast literatures on the history of the space race, space weapons, space programmes, space law, science fiction, as well as studies on the role of extra-terrestrials in political theory and philosophy, an intellectual history of astropolitics – thus of the attempt to launch geopolitics into outer space – is yet to be written.Footnote ¹⁴ The study which comes closest is Daniel Deudney’s 2020 epic Dark Skies, a passionate critique of space expansionism in its various guises. Deudney begins to draft an intellectual history but prioritises constructing a typology of different arguments around space colonisation.Footnote ¹⁵ Like others before him,Footnote ¹⁶ he relates space expansionism to German living-space thinking. What space expansionists fantasise about is, for Deudney, ‘the distribution of humans and their machines throughout the outer solar system and, eventually, across the vast voids of interstellar space to a Lebensraum of galactic proportions’.Footnote ¹⁷ With some using the language of habitat expansion and living space freely,Footnote ¹⁸ and others acknowledging their debt to a German tradition of geopolitical thinking,Footnote ¹⁹ Deudney is clearly onto something.

This paper picks up this thread. It does so by travelling backwards in time, offering a reverse chronology which exposes earlier, unexpected, and now forgotten layers of astropolitical debate. Rather than presenting a comprehensive intellectual history of outer space in IR and political theory, it seeks to understand the entangled history of geopolitics and astro-strategy. I begin by discussing two of the foundational authors who established astropolitics as a genre and whose ideas echo through the current moment, Colin S. Gray (1943–2020) and Everett Dolman. The paper then proceeds to unpack the resonances between contemporary astropolitics and the thought of the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) and the legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), zooming in on the former’s understanding of growth and colonisation, and the latter’s conception of land appropriation and international law, respectively. I then examine Schmitt and Ratzel as astropolitical thinkers in their own right, revealing that neither of the two in fact endorsed space expansionism. Whilst Ratzel developed an esoteric panpsychist theory of cosmic evolution in the late 19th century, Schmitt sought to make a name for himself as a critic of the 1950s space race. I argue that the reason for this unexpected finding is to be located not at the level of ontology but in the analytical conservatism of geopolitics.

Dolman and Gray

Let us begin by peeling back the first layer of astropolitics. This entails travelling to a period of American triumphalism which begins with Reaganism and ends with the crisis of neoconservatism in the mid-2000s. Towards the end of this era, the figure of Everett Dolman comes into vision. An ex-NSA analyst who lectures at the USAF Air War College in Alabama, Dolman plays a crucial role in initiating astropolitics as a recognisable subfield of military strategy. His 2002 book Astropolitik: Classical Geopolitics in the Space Age is written as a practical guide to the ways in which outer space might be conquered and governed with geopolitical tools. It is a manual for how states, particularly the United States, should think about cosmic chokepoints and outstations, whether Washington should respect the Outer Space Treaty (the answer is no), and whether human settlements elsewhere in or outside our solar system might ensure species survival.

Dolman, whom Marshall thanks in his acknowledgements, discusses ‘the common perception’ of how space colonisation is an evolutionary stepping stone which ensures humanity’s survival, either because of ‘overpopulation’, ‘wealth-maximisation’, or an ‘escape to another habitable planet before we ruin this one’.Footnote ²¹ He speculates that ‘strands of DNA with incubating material can be sent to every star conceivable’, which he envisages as a ‘broadcasting of spores’.Footnote ²² In the context of these constraints, astropolitics to Dolman is ‘the grandest strategy of them all’, space the ‘ultimate high ground’, the latter a Cold War-era phrase repeated by Donald Trump in 2019.Footnote ²³ And just as if to dispel any residual doubts about the colonial nature of his endeavours, Dolman reassures us that his space colonisers will be as ruthlessly suitable as those European settlers who populated America and Australia.Footnote ²⁴ In 2016, he and three co-authors at the Air University urge Trump to ‘make space great again’.Footnote ²⁵

Dolman promises ‘the extension of primarily nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of global geopolitics into the vast context of the human conquest of outer space’.Footnote ²⁶ Developing Mackinder’s famous dictum on the Eurasian heartland, he continues: ‘Who controls low-Earth orbit controls near-Earth space. Who controls near-Earth space dominates Terra.’Footnote ²⁷ And yet the geopolitics of outer space is one which must leave Mackinder’s earthly scales and analytics behind. For when seen from outer space, Dolman explains, the earth is smoother than a billiard ball. Topography effectively disappears behind a ‘rich vista of gravitational mountains and valleys, oceans and rivers of resources and energy alternately dispersed and concentrated, broadly strewn danger zones of deadly radiation, and precisely placed peculiarities of astrodynamics’.Footnote ²⁸ What matters to an understanding of this world is orbital mechanics, not geomorphology, geology, or climatology. Once this has been accepted, particularly desirable orbits and lines of travel come into vision, which states will desire to control.

Astropolitics has been explicit about its use of various imperial geopoliticians, including most notably the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) and the aforementioned British geographer Halford Mackinder (1861–1947). Incidentally however, neither Mahan nor Mackinder have anything to say about outer space. The relationship of astropolitics to the imperial German tradition of geopolitics, which runs from the writings of the geographer Friedrich Ratzel via the Nazi sympathiser Karl Haushofer (whose work was largely derivative of Ratzel’s) to the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, is more interesting, not least because it is here that spatial expansion is celebrated. Dolman acknowledges his debt to the deeply discredited tradition of Geopolitik, not least by naming the book Astropolitik.Footnote ²⁹ And whilst this may seem like a curiously self-undermining move, Dolman is correct to flag the overlap. It is in Geopolitik that we find a biological-evolutionary worldview coupled with Malthusian principles, a naturalisation of war, and a fetishisation of the settler colony – which are neither present in Mahan nor fully in Mackinder. And whereas Anglo-American geopolitics has nothing to say about outer space, its German counterpart does. As we shall see, the latter approaches outer space in ways that subvert the central tenets of its theory.

Despite pledging allegiance to Geopolitik, Dolman does not make much reference to the texts of German geopolitical thinkers. When he does, the reader gets the impression that he has not read them.Footnote ³⁰ Dolman does however draw on émigrés like the Austrian-born one-time advisor to Barry Goldwater Robert Strausz Hupé, who begins his 1942 book Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power with a Ratzel epigraph and explores the German geographer’s ideas in detail in a chapter titled ‘The discovery of space’.Footnote ³¹ Dolman also invokes Nicholas Spykman, who is himself under the influence of Karl Haushofer and other German geopoliticians.Footnote ³² Dolman’s reading of German geopolitics seems to resemble moreover that offered by the British military strategist Colin S. Gray, editor of the series in which Dolman’s book appears.Footnote ³³ Like Dolman, Gray has links to the Air University. In the 1980s, the prolific author is known as a nuclear hardliner who advises US president Ronald Reagan on the Star Wars missile defence project and who expresses his willingness to sacrifice 20 million US citizens in a ‘winnable’ war against the Soviet Union.Footnote ³⁴ In his published work from the early 1980s, Gray rails against arms control in outer space and warns that the very fear of a cosmic arms race might paralyse the United States.Footnote ³⁵ He uses geopolitics to think through the logistics of entertaining a credible space force and to produce an inventory of things that might matter to outer space. It is in his writings that we read of space as ‘the highest of vantage points’.Footnote ³⁶

Gray is not the first to transfer Mahanian ideas into outer space. A similar move has already been performed in broad strokes by David Lupton, a retired USAF officer for the Air University in the late 1980s,Footnote ³⁷ although it should be noted that Gray has already brought Mackinder to bear on nuclear strategy a decade earlier.Footnote ³⁸ Whilst Gray relies heavily on the key theorists of geopolitics when discussing nuclear weapons, his writings on space warfare remain technical and policy-focused. In the 2000s, Gray endorses Dolman’s text and makes extensive use of its maps.Footnote ³⁹ To be clear, Gray, Lupton, and Dolman are not alone in theorising space warfare. There is a lively debate throughout the 1960s and 1970s on how to make sense of war in space and how the latter will play out.Footnote ⁴⁰ But none of these earlier theorists see in classical geopolitics the answer to the questions posed by the space age.

What might we find if we try and peel back astropolitics further? Here, the picture becomes more frayed as a number of discourses come into focus, chiefly those of astrobiology and rocket science, but also narratives of manifest destiny – across fiction and non-fiction. In the 1950s, the Nazi turned American Cold War hero Wernher von Braun views humanity’s voyage into outer space as a mere extension of the European colonisation of the Americas. If the United States does not rise to the challenge, he warns, others will.Footnote ⁴¹ He lobbies aggressively but unsuccessfully to receive funding to build a rotating wheeled space station which could function as a research base and battle station. Able to launch pre-emptive nuclear missiles, he hopes that his orbital space habitat can achieve ‘space superiority’ over the Soviets whilst serving as a harbour for further voyages into space.Footnote ⁴² Von Braun is fantasising about a god-like eye on the earth, an Olympian form of power that can produce mass death at the press of a button. It is not perhaps geopolitics in the purest sense of the word, as a use of geographical concepts to gain some form of mastery, but it is not far removed.

Many of the writings of von Braun, his teacher Hermann Oberth, and Willy Ley are technical, featuring detailed discussion of ballistics, rocket designs, and equations. They are also written in a highly optimistic and celebratory tone. Clearly, they promote the expansion of human habitat on both a planetary scale and local scale, i.e. how living quarters on spaceships can be made viable. Whilst this is thus living space by proxy, it is not geopolitics in the strictest sense. Hermann von Oberth, an unrepentant Nazi, writes in the 1980s about all aspects of political life (happiness, art, communism, reproduction, UFOs, and so on) but has only very little to say about geography, a brief comment on buffer states in an age of nuclear war aside.Footnote ⁴³ That said, he too confesses in the 1920s to being a reader of geopolitical pamphlets, probably a reference to Karl Haushofer’s Zeitschrift für Geopolitik.Footnote ⁴⁴

Ultimately, there is a common language which connects the worldview of the mid-century space pioneers to German geopolitics: evolutionary theory, competition, spatial expansionism, and militarism.Footnote ⁴⁵ To get a better sense of the primordial soup within which astropolitics is born, we must return to the pivotal figures of German spatial thought.

Ratzel and Schmitt

The most obvious root of contemporary astropolitics can be found in the writings of the Leipzig geographer Friedrich Ratzel, famous for popularising the idea of Lebensraum (living space). Ratzel uses the term to capture a logic of spatial expansion which he finds in all life, flora and fauna, and which he sees as checked only by the planet’s finite resources. In essence, he employs living space as an act of semantic blending of what are previously distinct logics: the biological habitat and the political territory.

After volunteering in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/1, where he is wounded, he embarks on an expedition to the Americas as a travel writer. It is this experience that sparks in him the idealisation of the Anglo-Saxon settlers of North America over the French and Spanish colonists. It is because of their greater conception of space (größere Raumauffassung) that the Anglo-Saxons purchase Indigenous territories one after another. They alone, Ratzel argues, are able to see how this land is beginning to form a new Lebensraum. He admires their ruthless extermination of the Indigenous Americans.Footnote ⁴⁶ Having encountered the rise of the ‘lost cause’, he also daydreams about a global system of racial segregation modelled on the American South.Footnote ⁴⁷ After returning to Europe, Ratzel becomes one of Germany’s loudest advocates for settler colonies in Africa, serving as a member of the Pan-German League, rightly designated as a proto-fascist organisation by Hannah Arendt.Footnote ⁴⁸ He is well networked in Germany’s colonial elite, active in the German Colonial Society, and corresponds with some of the empire’s most notorious landgrabbers. Nations and states, he theorises, are subject to a ‘colonisation drive’ (Colonisationstrieb) which prompts them to migrate and subdue until they reach another polity or a geographical barrier (although some of these too may eventually be overcome). Migration and military advances are ultimately epiphenomena of the Colonisationstrieb which he observes in the plant and animal kingdom.

Trained as a zoologist, Ratzel is in the camp of the so-called Darwinisten, a group of scholars who defend evolutionary theory and seek to apply its lessons, much like Darwin does, to aspects of human life. Ratzel has devoured Charles Darwin’s work as a student and translated ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ Thomas Henry Huxley into German. He is perhaps most directly influenced by his mentor Ernst Haeckel, a man who sells more books than Darwin in the 19th century. There is clearly also a Malthusian barrier in Ratzel’s thinking. As he argues in his 1901 Lebensraum essay:

It is in Ratzel then that we can detect the clearest articulation of what Tim Marshall and other space expansionists see as the fundamental impetus behind cosmic colonisation, that tension between the movement of life (that restlessness) and the finitude of the earth’s resources. Ratzel frames states as organisms that struggle for space under the influence of environmental factors, a language which Wernher von Braun will pick up and develop, too.Footnote ⁵⁰ Building on this, Ratzel develops the law of spatial growth which holds that states grow with their level of civilisation. The ‘enlargement of the geographical horizon’ is followed by ‘political expansion’; the ‘growth of states proceeds through the annexation of small territories to amalgamation, while at the same time the attachment of the people to the soil becomes ever close’.Footnote ⁵¹ In order to develop such an attachment, states need to establish permanent settlements and develop agricultural ties.

Ratzel tends to return to the influence of environmental factors which induce political spaces to grow or contract. But there is in wide space itself also something ‘creative’ that does things politically.Footnote ⁵² It is precisely this idea of space acting creatively upon a nation or state’s desire to colonise which the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt picks up from Ratzel. Known today for his theory of sovereignty, critique of liberalism, and musings on world order (for which he prefers the Ancient Greek word Nomos), Schmitt gravitates in the 1940s towards the school of Geopolitik without ever fully embracing it. He begins to consider what a world of politically autonomous greater spaces (Großräume) might look like and what place a territorially augmented German Reich might have within such an order.Footnote ⁵³ Schmitt never renounces his wartime writings, or indeed national socialism, and remains well networked in Francoist Spain.

We get a sense of Schmitt’s geopolitics and how it might prefigure astropolitics in his 1942 Land and Sea, a wartime blueprint for his post-war Nomos of the Earth. In this short pamphlet, supposedly written as a bedtime story for his daughter Anima, Schmitt seeks to read world history as a struggle between land and sea. But rather than treat this conflict as entirely binary and ahistorical (although he clearly displays a tendency to do so in some passages), Land and Sea also develops the notion of ‘spatial revolution’ (Raumrevolution). These are epoch-making changes to the way space is perceived and organised. The circumnavigation of the world and colonisation of America constitutes one such revolution which forms a new planetary consciousness. In the mid-20th century, the world is experiencing a further such revolution. Although the outcome is yet to be determined, it is clear to Schmitt that this new and fully globalised order is unlikely to be marked by the kind of stability he sees in the order of European states.

Schmitt propagates arguments which many would today associate with political realism. Indeed, E. H. Carr drew inspiration from Schmitt in the 1940s, much to the dismay of another realist – Hans Morgenthau.Footnote ⁵⁴ Schmitt’s ‘realist’ lines of reasoning include, most prominently, a critique of liberalism and international law, an attempt to divorce morality from politics, and a crude valorisation of the Westphalian system of states, transposed by Schmitt onto the sphere of ‘greater spaces’. As the case of Morgenthau reveals, Schmitt’s realism was not embraced by all mid-century American realists. It certainly lacks the deep-seated liberalism and constructivist ethos of someone like John H. Herz.Footnote ⁵⁵ If at all, synergies are clearer with neo-realism. Schmitt’s concept of Großraum, moreover, clearly contains a meaning that is close to ‘sphere of influence’, as used by contemporary realists such as John Mearsheimer.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although Großraum is not a concept Mearsheimer, unlike Carr, adopts, he draws on Schmitt in developing a critique of liberal order.Footnote ⁵⁷ And although Schmitt, as we shall see below, is more nuanced on the question of deep historical change than neo-realists like Mearsheimer, the German spatial theorist too tries to find intellectual ways to oppose the downgrading of great power status and to legitimate expansionism as a form of balancing.

Schmitt’s 1950 The Nomos of the Earth, often seen as his magnum opus, is explicit about its indebtedness to Ratzel and other geographers, including Mackinder. Like Ratzel, Schmitt is interested in global forms of ordering. The term Großraum is already used by Karl Haushofer and other Ratzelians at the time and even appears in adjectival form in Ratzel. And yet there are crucial inflections which stem in part from Schmitt’s legal perspective. Schmitt ontologises the capture of land (Landnahme) as the original act of ordering. The acts of appropriating, dividing, and pasturing are the crucial features of each Nomos. The law, in other words, follows the crude exercise of power. If at all, this is only implicit in Ratzel. Ultimately, Schmitt is not a thinker of immutable environmental forces but of spatial revolution.

Clearly, Dolman and Gray are trying to replicate an American canon of political realism of which German geopolitics is a crucial ingredient.Footnote ⁵⁸ In doing so, they are operating with a shortened version of realism, essentially as ‘strategic realism with an attention to geography’.Footnote ⁵⁹ But there are also obvious Schmittian undertones in the diagnosis of the space age as a Nomos in which those who are up there first (SpaceX et al.) will define the rules, i.e. the acknowledgement that here too law and ethics will follow power. Dolman is using a Schmittian line of reasoning when he rejects the Outer Space Treaty and argues that ‘might does make right’.Footnote ⁶⁰

One thing that is missing in both Ratzel and Schmitt but which is present in contemporary astropolitics is a concern with military strategy. Although Ratzel and Schmitt are increasingly recognised as historically important theorists of war,Footnote ⁶¹ neither of them produces a work of strategy. Ratzel’s follower and Schmitt’s contemporary Karl Haushofer, however, does. It is Haushofer’s 1934 Wehrgeopolitik (defence geopolitics), which first draws an intellectual lineage from Clausewitz to Ratzel, Mahan and Mackinder. Indeed, his attempt to catalogue the geography of terrestrial war (the role of oceans, vegetation, the built environment, etc.) with the copious use of maps, of which neither Ratzel nor Schmitt make much use, prefigures what astropolitics tries to do for outer space. Already in 1934 Haushofer writes about the military significance of the entire planet, from subterranean oil deposits and the use of echo-sounding technology in the depths of the oceans to the projectiles of the so-called Paris gun.Footnote ⁶² A German siege weapon employed briefly in 1918, the latter’s projectiles reached stratospheric heights of over 40 kilometres on their way to the French capital. But a personal interest in astrology notwithstanding, Haushofer seems uninterested in theorising outer space. He takes his life in 1946 without reflecting on the rise of liquid propellant rocketry and the latter’s political impact.

As we have seen, Ratzel and Schmitt (and to a lesser extent Haushofer) supply a conceptual vocabulary and political vision for the emergence of astropolitics as the application of geopolitics to outer space. By the 1940s, Geopolitik has thoroughly shaped a generation of German intellectuals and scientists, especially those willing to do business with the Third Reich, a group which of course includes the German space pioneers. It has also forged the worldviews of American émigré geopoliticians who will, in turn, prove an influence on early astropolitics. And yet neither Ratzel nor Schmitt are in fact, as we will see, outer space expansionists. How, then, do they engage with the question posed by the conquest of outer space?

Schmitt’s critique of astropolitics

Schmitt does not consider outer space before the end of the Second World War, either because he previously deems the cosmos inaccessible to humanity, or, quite simply, because his mind is elsewhere. But he does, unlike the other key figures of the classical geopolitical canon, live to witness the space race. In the years that follow the Second World War, he begins to ponder whether geopolitics could and should extend into outer space.

Around 1949/50, Schmitt starts collecting newspaper clippings about space suits and speculates in private about alien invaders who might instrumentalise humanity’s existing Cold War rift to divide and rule planet earth.Footnote ⁶³ Outer space appears for the first time in writing in the 1950 foreword to The Nomos of the Earth. Here, the jurist observes that the traditional Eurocentric order established by ‘a legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new world’ is now in ruins.Footnote ⁶⁴ ‘Only in fantastic parallels can one imagine a modern recurrence’, he continues, ‘such as men on their way to the moon discovering a new and hitherto unknown planet that could be exploited freely and utilized effectively to relieve the struggles on earth.’ Schmitt cautiones immediately that the question of world order, with which he is grappling, is ‘not answered with such fantasies, any more than it will be with further scientific discoveries’.Footnote ⁶⁵ He clearly does not want a repeat of 1492. Humanity’s only hope is to reaffirm its terrestrial home.

It is instructive to examine how Schmitt arrives at this consideration of outer space by venturing back to Land and Sea. On the final page of his 1942 pamphlet, Schmitt considers the challenges posed by the rise of aerial warfare and which reveal both an ambivalence towards air power and a willingness to consider the latter as a spatial revolution.

Schmitt does not mention outer space in 1942. When he publishes Nomos of the Earth eight years later, he returns to the question of air power, but now includes space colonisation in his warning.

The spaceship, in other words, is an extension of humanity’s grasp for the air, which he has already described eight years earlier. Again, he uses the word ‘fantastic’ to characterise such endeavours but does not explain what exactly makes them fantastic at a time when the United States have already used von Braun’s V-2 rocket to take pictures from orbit and launch animals into space. Given the centrality that Schmitt gives to technological advances such as the transition from oared vessels to sailing ships or that from sailing ships to steamboats, it is surprising that he comes out in 1950 as ambivalent if not dismissive of humanity’s attempts to conquer outer space. It is particularly puzzling because Schmitt has in 1942 already warned that the arrival of the aeroplane is contributing to a Raumrevolution.

This is not Schmitt’s last word on outer space. Faced with his difficulty of finding paid employment in West Germany as an unrepentant Nazi, he briefly tries to become a public intellectual to earn money. He writes two popular texts on ‘new space’ in the 1950s. Although framed as Socratic dialogues, they are biblical in tone. Schmitt understands that technology has improved to such a degree that if the Cologne Cathedral stood on the Moon (Schmitt is Catholic), humans could now see it there. But although the dialogues are underwritten by a concern with the effects of unencumbered technological advances, there is more here than meets the eye.

In Dialogue on New Space, Schmitt stages an encounter between two figures, a natural scientist and an ancient historian (who represents Schmitt himself). Just as the two men are in full swing, discussing science, history, theology, and politics via the prism of land and sea, their dialogue is interrupted by a character Schmitt names ‘MacFuture’. MacFuture stands for a naive, spaceless (and clearly American) form of liberalism which celebrates technological advances, particularly the advent of nuclear weapons, the rise of computation, and humanity’s grasp for outer space. Bruno Latour notes that MacFuture could function as an exceptionally well-drawn caricature of Elon Musk.Footnote ⁶⁸ Schmitt dismisses MacFuture in no uncertain terms in a 1962 foreword to the Spanish edition as ‘a young North American, MacFuture, who is of the opinion that the earth has been too small for quite some time and who desires to pursue further, in cosmic dimensions, the discovery of America and the industrialization of his country’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Schmitt’s shorter writings from the 1950s are attempts to defend ideas first presented in Land and Sea and Nomos of the Earth in the context of the nuclear arms and space race. Clearly, he is making a case for geopolitics as a terrestrial form of knowledge. Just like elsewhere, he leans on Mackinder, whom he calls ‘brilliant’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Unlike in 1941, when he speaks of Ratzel as the ‘founder of a new science of space’ who recognised the mastering of space (Raumbewӓltigung) as ‘the defining trait of all life’,Footnote ⁷¹ or in 1950 when he cites him approvingly in Nomos of the Earth,Footnote ⁷² Schmitt neither invokes the Leipzig geographer by name nor does he discuss his cosmic writings. And yet he uses MacFuture to remind humanity that its Lebensraum – and Schmitt continues to use Ratzel’s now-discredited term – remains on planet earth.Footnote ⁷³ Schmitt ends by making a case for a ‘terrestrial mode of being’ (terranes Dasein) upon which institutions such as ‘property, marriage, family and hereditary right’ are built.Footnote ⁷⁴ Whilst the spatial archetype of maritime existence is the ship, which represents for Schmitt a celebration of technology, it is the humble house which materialises a terrestrial mode of being. Like elsewhere in his writing, Schmitt valorises the peasant who works the farm which gives ‘the land’ in him too an agricultural connotation.

When MacFuture speaks of ‘the infinite spaces of the whole cosmos [which] open themselves to us’,Footnote ⁷⁵ the ancient historian Altmann (i.e. Schmitt) responds that MacFuture is unable to see the conquest of outer space as anything but ‘a new edition of the discovery of America’.Footnote ⁷⁶ A potential spatial revolution will not, Altmann explains, stem from the vast unknowns of outer space (‘with the exception, at best, of flying saucers’) but rather from the dangers of unencumbered technology. MacFuture, Schmitt claims, ‘could make a spaceship out of our earth’ but he would still fail to heed the call of a new spatial revolution posed by dangers of limitless technology. ‘The one who manages to restrain unencumbered technology, to bind it and to lead it into a concrete order has given more of an answer to the contemporary call than the one who, by means of modern technology seeks to land on the moon or on Mars.’Footnote ⁷⁷ And he continues on the next page that ‘the human is a son of the earth, and he shall remain as long as he remains human’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even when in later years he speculates about astronauts morphing into ‘cosmopirates’ and ‘cosmpopartisans’ in the far reaches of the universe,Footnote ⁷⁹ he is quick to repatriate and re-earth his discussion and its protagonists.Footnote ⁸⁰

Given such an explicit rejection of the act of projecting geopolitics into outer space, Schmitt may not seem like an obvious intellectual precursor of astropolitics. And yet, in his crude power politics, where the law is a mere tool of the victorious and where land appropriation is celebrated, and in his insistence on spatial revolution, he clearly prefigures it. Although Schmitt seems keen to critique space colonisation politically as a symptom of American liberal spacelessness, it is not clear why he cannot nonetheless categorise humanity’s grasp for outer space analytically as a spatial revolution. There is in Schmitt then something of an unaccounted-for gravitational pull back to earth, which we can also observe in Ratzel. The caveat here is of course that Ratzel dies in 1904, long before the V-2, Sputnik, and Apollo.

Ratzel’s cosmic geography

Much like Alexander von Humboldt before him, Friedrich Ratzel feels that all geographical inquiry should begin with cosmography, a description of the celestial bodies of which the earth is but one.Footnote ⁸¹ The Leipzig geographer is interested in solar spots, meteors, ‘dead stars’, and the possibility of water on Mars. He publishes extensively on astronomical questions, such as the physiognomy of the moon,Footnote ⁸² solar eclipses,Footnote ⁸³ an even the evolution of the solar system and universe.Footnote ⁸⁴

When Ratzel writes about outer space, he is often, perhaps always, grappling with the implications for his anthropogeography. He concludes that ‘we must take our scales of geographic space and time from outer space, not from the earth’.Footnote ⁸⁵ It is his observation that a view into the night-time sky is in fact a view into the universe’s past which inspires him to note that ‘in space, we read time’.Footnote ⁸⁶ This is in effect a recognition that the substance he is dealing with is not space but rather space time. Astronomical distance, after all, is measured in light years. Geographers, he feels, should read the earth’s surface as a vast clock face on which the planet’s past can be interpreted.

A second crucial preoccupation of his is the insistence on treating the earth as a planet. In his Lebensraum essay, he argues the following:

Crucially thus, the earth is not just a world or simply a soil – but a planet.Footnote ⁸⁸ The historic forces which his anthropogeography seeks to explain emerge from geology and climate, which are themselves ultimately symptoms of larger cosmic forces. In this vein, Ratzel continues on the same page of his Lebensraum essay:

It is striking that most of Ratzel’s cosmology (and he does use that term in passing) is esoteric and bears little resemblance to contemporary astropolitics. At a basic level, it is informed by a version of Haeckel’s monism, the confidence in the singleness of existence. This prompts Ratzel to incessantly collapse conceptual binaries. The Leipzig geographer also comes to believe that the age of the earth is unknown and that earlier evolution may well have occurred before the current one. Even though these evolutionary trees have been wiped out, they might become knowable in the same way as previous evolutionary stages could be deduced from studying embryonic development.Footnote ⁹⁰ This is a direct application of Ernst Haeckel’s credo that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Ratzel is a follower of the physicist-turned-philosopher Gustav Fechner, who theorises human subjectivity from the perspective of astronomy and particle physics in the mid-19th century.Footnote ⁹¹ Although he is today primarily remembered as one of the founders of experimental psychology, Fechner also writes semi-satirical pamphlets on the spirits of plants and even on the comparative anatomy of angels. He is a thinker of analogy. The nervous system of animals resembles the vascular system of plants; organism and planet are structurally similar, and so on.Footnote ⁹² Ratzel uses Fechner’s panpsychism to reason both that there is no meaningful boundary between life and death, and that the universe is consciously besouled. After death, human consciousness is poured out into cosmic consciousness. The demise of the human organism prompts, in other words, a cosmic rebirth.

Like Fechner, Ratzel theorises on the basis of astronomy. As he writes in 1901, ‘life on earth contains the sum of the telluric, solar and cosmic influences that have built up, that have permeated each other, that have battled and enhanced one another from the moment of life's first germination until this day’.Footnote ⁹³ Just as the evolution of life on earth is competitive and creative, so is the evolution of the universe. Ratzel likes to emphasise that his main object of analysis, planet earth, is in fact ‘interspersed and covered with the dust and debris of space’.Footnote ⁹⁴ He also notes that spectral analysis has only found similar chemical compounds and celestial bodies throughout the universe and interprets this to mean that there is a need to return to spiritual modes of inquiry to gain a deeper understanding of humanity’s place in the cosmos.Footnote ⁹⁵ In this vein, Ratzel postulates a ‘spiritual unity’ between the earth and the cosmos which ‘bring[s] the most distant celestial bodies closer to us’, thereby enriching ‘our earthbound existence’.Footnote ⁹⁶

But Ratzel adds a crucial ingredient to this harmonious, Humboldtian cosmology: earthly and spatial narrowness. Both Copernicus and Columbus, he argues, confront humans with the same truth, namely that the earth is small.Footnote ⁹⁷ This is the same telluric narrowness that is so crucial to his political geography. Political organisation and growth are subject to planetary boundaries, i.e. the Malthusian barrier presented by finite space and finite resources. It is thus that his political geography preaches that wide spaces, the kind that European settlers have conquered in North America, are crucial to the survival and flourishing of states.

Ratzel dies on the eve of the era of aviation. Unlike in the case of his contemporary Cecil Rhodes, there is no evidence that the Leipzig geographer fantasises about the projection of territorial sovereignty into the cosmos. In the late 1870s, he has already spoken out against the idea that proto-life may have travelled to earth via meteoroids.Footnote ⁹⁸ In later years, he remains non-committal on the question of whether there is life elsewhere in the universe.Footnote ⁹⁹ And yet his panpsychism has in many ways brought the universe closer to home. In a thermodynamic register, the Leipzig geographer notes that ‘just as the warmth of the sun makes the earth livable for us, so does insight into the nature of the sun make us feel more at home in the universe’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Like all the different Lebensräume on earth, the Lebensraum of planet earth itself must be understood in its environmental context, too. And that environment is the realm of cosmic forces. Within this vast ocean of stars and galaxies, earth is defined by a narrowness or lack of space which the age of exploration, both scientific and colonial, has made apparent. This telluric narrowness, Ratzel believes, is the source of all conflict on earth.

Even though Friedrich Ratzel does not endorse human expansionism into outer space, he assembles the conceptual and political vocabulary for it: he frames colonisation as a biological drive, establishes the laws of spatial growth, and notes his regret at the finitude of the earth’s resources. He even recognises that ‘the great importance of cosmic distances for geography’ lies precisely in the fact that they might ‘withdraw us forever from that telluric narrowness’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ ‘If only earth had more space’, he sighs in one of his final writings.Footnote ¹⁰²

Why so reluctant?

As we have seen, neither of the two spatial thinkers examined in this paper promoted interplanetary colonisation, despite having assembled the conceptual vocabulary for space expansionism. Why is this so? It seems obvious that Schmitt’s rejection of astropolitics, alongside aerial warfare and nuclear weapons, is politically rather than analytically motivated. There is nothing in his corpus that allows for a moral condemnation of specific technologies. Like Mackinder, Schmitt is all too happy to discuss milestones in the evolution of naval technology without ever denouncing any of these steps because they supposedly destabilise global order (which they most certainly did). Schmitt is, in other words, a technophobe only when it comes to recent technological innovations and particularly those that have benefited the victors of the Second World War. We may wonder what he would have written if Nazi Germany had won the war and von Braun had continued to develop the V-2 for the Nazis. Rather than rejecting rocketry as a symptom of a liberal spacelessness, he would have surely found a way to hail it as the agent of a definitive Raumrevolution, the birth of a new fascist Nomos.

Why does Ratzel struggle to see outer space as having potential for human colonisation? The obvious answer seems to be that he is writing before the age of modern rocketry and may not have contemplated multi-planetary evolution. And yet, we must remember that when Ratzel publishes his most notable ideas, speculation on space travel and life on Mars is rife.Footnote ¹⁰³ Indeed, some of his contemporaries are keenly trying to expand Darwinism into outer space, albeit in ways that push hard against the boundaries of science.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Even someone as eminent as Ratzel’s mentor Ernst Haeckel feels compelled in 1899 to deal with the question of interplanetary travel and extra-terrestrials, noting that ‘direct communication with such inhabitants of other planets seems to be excluded by the immense distance of our earth from the other heavenly bodies, and the absence of the requisite atmosphere in the intervening space’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Although Ratzel may have questioned some aspects of Haeckel’s theory in the final years of his life, he has not abandoned the Darwinisten camp. Perhaps he simply does not want to contradict his intellectual master in such a direct manner.

Another interpretation would be that it is Ratzel’s commitment to Malthusianism and panpsychism that prevents him from endorsing space expansionism. Indeed, the earthly limit which Ratzel likes to invoke to naturalise conflict on earth seems redundant once we assume a world of limitless space and resources. Fechner, moreover, has already taken a stance on the issue, arguing in the 1830s that the need for space colonisation does not follow naturally from his panpsychism.

It is hardly necessary, in other words, to colonise the universe with humanity’s consciousness, given that the dead already besoul the universe. But are Malthusianism and panpsychism really insurmountable barriers for space colonists?

Here, it is important to consider that in 1897, the same year in which Ratzel publishes his magnum opus Politische Geographie, the bestseller Auf zwei Planeten appears. On the bookshelves one year before H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, it tells the story of highly advanced Martian colonists who try to subdue humanity. The book has a significant impact on the formation of a German science fiction tradition and would become one of Wernher von Braun’s favourites. It is written by the Fechnerian science fiction writer Kurd Lasswitz.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ 1897 is also the year in which Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, later known as the ‘grandfather of the Soviet rocket programme’, devises his famous rocket equation. Too under the influence of Gustav Fechner, Tsiolkovsky develops a highly esoteric philosophy, known today as cosmism, alongside plans for space stations and detailed discussions on how human bodies might survive space travel.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Like Fechner and Ratzel, he believes that death is an illusion: atoms and spirits are immortal. But unlike Ratzel, Tsiolkovsky wants to find new space for humans, including resurrected humans, in other solar systems and galaxies as a solution to the problem of earthly overpopulation. Tsiolkovsky’s famous quote about the earth as the mere ‘cradle of humanity’ has hung over science fiction and space travel like few others.

The example of Ratzel’s contemporaries Lasswitz and Tsiolkovsky shows that thinkers who were both Fechnerian panpsychists and influenced by Malthus could nonetheless end up enthusiasts for space colonisation. The reason for Ratzel’s reluctance to endorse cosmic colonisation is thus less to be found at the level of ontology than in the fact that he is ultimately writing within an analytically (as well as politically) conservative genre.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This becomes particularly clear if we examine how geopolitics treats technology. In the same way as Mahan neglects the acceleration of technological change in his day,Footnote ¹¹⁰ Mackinder treats air power as a mere extension of land power precisely as Britain has witnessed the world’s first air war and European cities are turned to rubble under the weight of strategic bombing.Footnote ¹¹¹ Although Colin Gray certainly writes about nuclear weapons, he does so in a way that reduces them to mere instruments rather than as makers of geography itself.Footnote ¹¹² Geopolitics promises crystal-ball vision, but the content of such predictions are usually presented as more of the same, i.e. shifts in the global balance of power between states. Geopolitics theorises by reference to past historical and technological transformations whilst often overlooking that which is emergent. It is remarkable how little geopolitics has to say about outer space in the second half of the 20th century. Saul Cohen, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Robert Kaplan are almost entirely silent on the topic, even on the all-important question of satellite technology. Whilst Ratzel is unwilling to think about emergent technologies, Schmitt does so but dismisses their political agency.