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Abstract

In this paper, we examine the contemporary commercial space race – colloquially known as NewSpace – from a Marxian, technofeminist and decolonial perspective. Theorising the emergent entrepreneurial activities aimed at the human colonisation and exploitation of outer space as part of an ongoing process of primitive accumulation, we contribute innovative conceptualisations of 21st century entrepreneurial space adventurism as exoimperialism, and the privatisation of outer space resources as astropropriation. We develop the notion of geek saviourism as a function of the new geek hegemony within normative white masculinity, used to justify species-level risk under the auspices of homo entrepreneurus, a subgenre of homo economicus. Our critical examination exhorts extreme caution regarding NewSpace entrepreneurial activities, given the longstanding trajectory of entrepreneurial coloniality they reproduce, the mythoi from which they stem, and the devastatingly unequal sociogeny they can generate.

Keywords

astropropriation coloniality entrepreneurship enclosure exoimperialism Fanon geek saviourism masculinities NewSpace outer space primitive accumulation settler-colonialism technofeminism whitey on the moon Wynter

Introduction

“With all that money I made last year

For Whitey on the moon

How come I ain’t got no money here? Hmm, Whitey’s on the moon”

- Gil Scott-Heron, Whitey on the Moon, 1970

Outer space is the next area of deep tech entrepreneurial competition and expansion. Yet, in the last two decades, the character of space exploration has shifted. Traditionally, the industry was State-led, with technological capacity dominated by public finance, as the strictures of the Cold War constrained private investment in celestial journeying (Brown, 2011). Today, however, such leadership is increasingly in the hands of publicly subsidised private sector bodies (Paikowsky, 2017), underpinned by state support for commercial space entrepreneurship. For example, in 2016 the United States Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act was passed, authorising private citizens to recover resources from space and asteroids (Porras, 2017: 313). The economic value of the space industry is projected to grow 18-40% between 2004 and 2030; Morgan Stanley estimates it at over USD1$ trillion by 2040 (George, 2018). The expanding commercial sector sustains both public and private agendas, supporting state agencies like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with resupply missions while also pursuing more autonomous and radical visions of the future (Robinson and Mazzucato, 2019). As MacDonald (2007) argues, human engagement with outer space is no longer remote, but ordinary, with significant implications for civilian, commercial, and military power relations.

The emerging exoplanetary marketplace being built by private sector actors and organisations is collectively termed ‘NewSpace’. Wooten and Tang (2018: 1000) define NewSpace as ‘all products and services that arise in the course of exploring and utilizing outer space’. Golkar and Salado (2021: 2) focus on market development aspects, highlighting its ‘customer focus, new product development approaches, and new business models’. Increasingly associated with entrepreneurship (Peeters, 2018), NewSpace is dominated by recognisably entrepreneurial firms such as Virgin Galactic (2024), SpaceX (2024), BlueOrigin (2024) and Bigelow Aerospace (2024), as well as many other smaller corporate actors, like Nanoracks (2024), Zero2Infinity (2024) and Planet Labs (2024). Physically, what is called NewSpace includes sub-orbital, orbital and deep space, locations increasingly distant from Earth’s surface, with imagined purposes correspondingly more ambitious. Ideologically, the concept of NewSpace validates and normalises the use of burgeoning entrepreneurial private sector initiatives and investment to widen access to first, cheaper spaceflight, and later, colonisation of outer space territories to exploit for profit. Paikowsky (2017: 84) calls NewSpace ‘a new ecosystem for global and local activities’ that covers ‘new services, new frontiers, and explorations’. According to this perspective, the entrepreneurial marketisation of space becomes the next Great Leap Forward for humanity, economy and technology. Such developments reify a century of science fiction tropes and fantasies of advancement, exploration and salvation, buoyed by a relentlessly acritical, techno-optimistic perspective that believes in the right of humans to claim, and the capacity of technology to transform, outer space to suit our species (Herron, 2016).

Although NewSpace may be understood simply as ‘the arrival of capitalism in space’ (Shammas and Holen, 2019: 30), this formation omits the reality that this activity is directed by a very few, white male billionaires in a universe owned by nobody (Prescod-Weinstein, 2022). A handful of the world’s most powerful men play an outsize role in shaping the sociotechnical imaginaries (Benjamin, 2019; Jasanoff, 2015; Tutton, 2021) used to organise the future of humanity, science, technology and the corporation; in the case of NewSpace, this involves the capture of, and extension of capitalist dictat to, outer space and other planets. Responding to MacDonald’s call (2007) to develop Marxian, feminist, and postcolonial inquiries into the creation of a new space regime, we draw together Marxian notions of ongoing primitive accumulation (Federici, 2004; Fuchs, 2018; Gordon and Cornell, 2021), a technofeminist examination of geek entrepreneurial masculinities (Mellstrom et al., 2023; Mendick et al., 2021) and decolonial theory on sociogenesis and mythoi (Fanon, 1967; Wynter, 1999) to advance the concepts of astropropriation (Porras, 2017) geek saviourism, and exoimperialism in order to better theorise emergent aims to claim, colonise and capitalise upon astral territory. In so doing, we highlight the production of neo-imperialist patterns in NewSpace entrepreneurship through emergent processes of primitive accumulation and corporate enclosure, and their legitimising discursive frames.

The paper proceeds as follows: first, we outline the range of commercial activity taking place in NewSpace, highlighting entrepreneurial efforts to drive market creation activity. We then develop the Marxian, technofeminist and decolonial theoretical framework underpinning our argument, use this to generate a historically informed critique, and discuss the implications of our arguments, as well as potential directions for future research.

Entrepreneurial activity in NewSpace

NewSpace is the contemporary term for the commercial space industry, involving innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to space exploration and technology development. Innovations within NewSpace are diverse and varied: using patent analysis techniques, Garzaniti et al. (2021) classify activity into genres, including remote sensing & image acquisition, flying/launch systems, telecommunication systems, constellation management, digital processing architectures, image analysis, manufacturing process and materials, feature recognition and extraction, antenna systems and space platforms. These patent genres span two broad domains, known as ‘space-for-earth’, and ‘space-for-space’. ‘Space-for-earth’ covers goods and services made in space and consumed by Earth, and accounts for about 95% of the estimated $366 billion in current space sector revenue (Weinzierl and Sarang, 2021). It includes space-based orbital public and private telecommunications and internet infrastructure, space tourism and exploration, observation systems recording data about Earth’s condition, and national security systems (Shammas and Holen, 2019), and leverages existing technological innovations such as reusable rockets, artificial intelligence, and 3D printing to lower costs and improve efficiencies. In contrast, the ‘space-for-space’ economy, while currently smaller, is strategically intended to enable human space travel and habitation at scale. It involves ‘goods and services produced in space for consumption in space, such as mining the Moon or asteroids for material with which to construct in-space habitats or supply refuelling depots’ (Weinzierl and Sarang, 2021: 2). Together, these genres and domains are extensive enough to constitute what Denis et al. (2020: 431) call an ‘organizational ecology’.

In contrast to the previous era of state-driven activity, which was aimed primarily at geopolitical dominance and scientific exploration, the development and growth of NewSpace is now increasingly driven by private sector firms engaging in entrepreneurial activity for market creation. To illustrate, NASA intends to replace the International Space Station (ISS) with a commercial station by 2030, and have awarded $400 million worth of private sector contracts to that end (Alamalhodaei, 2021). NASA are also enlisting private firms to develop spacecraft, and have invested nearly $8 billion into SpaceX and Boeing to do so (Gohd, 2024). Space Capital reports that by 2019, 435 companies received $20 billion in investment (Hsu and Siggelkow, 2019). We contend that, in keeping with an Enlightenment-era legacy of valorising general scientific endeavour, past iterations of space exploration embedded militaristic control objectives within a hegemonic discourse that championed such exploration for the sake of human progress through the advancement of knowledge. However, the claim that space travel is necessary to achieve scientific aims has today fallen by the wayside, replaced by two alternative contemporary motives driving private sector engagement: human colonisation and entrepreneurial rent-seeking.

First, NewSpace is motivated by the colonial impulse, or the potential for establishing territorial boundaries, control over regions, and terraforming to eventually expand humanity’s inhabitable environments. Since space law is seriously under-developed (Herron, 2016), a first-come, first-serve approach is emerging in the competitive landscape. One prominent entrepreneurial organisation is Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, with its explicit aims to enable human planetary colonisation, terraforming Mars through nuclear bombing (Herron, 2016). SpaceX launched the first privately funded spacecraft to the ISS, developed reusable engines, and successfully landed a rocket booster back on Earth. The SpaceX Starship is intended to support the colonisation of Mars, as well as providing the means to transport people and material around and above Earth. Despite highly public failures such as the 2023 launch vehicle explosion (Olson and Archie, 2023), its work continues undeterred. However, less well known is that such costs are often mitigated by substantial indirect taxpayer contribution to the value of billions of dollars (Peterson, 2022), indicating substantial state investment in developing viable human colonies in outer space.

Second, regarding entrepreneurial rent-seeking, an obvious profit motive exists in the extension of capitalist property relations to outerspace through NewSpace entrepreneurship (Marx, 2020). Building a market for first, spaceflight, and later, space travel and residency, is imagined and presented as another step in the curation of lucrative, untapped and free-to-access resources enabled by great wealth, elite entrepreneurial vision, social privilege, influence over institutions of finance and politics, and cutting-edge technologies. However, despite the novelty of the technology and spatial arena, the unfolding of the current historical moment is reminiscent of earlier periods of European colonisation of the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and Africa, when enablers of accelerated capitalist extraction – legal frameworks and conventions, physical infrastructure, and new social structures and norms – also arrived in the wake of state-sponsored entrepreneurial venturing (Edwards and Go, 2019; Lawson, 2019). That entrepreneurial efforts in outer space represent an expansion in capitalist development resonates with Marxian economist Luxemburg’s assertion that capitalism is itself imperialism, since its central contradictions impel it to unceasingly pursue new markets (Luxemburg, 1913/2015 as cited by Cornell, 2021). The absence, to our knowledge, of indigenous entities on other planets, does not change the nature of the ideology justifying the export of hegemonic, white Western values and structures to Outer Space: a new era of ‘Manifest Destiny’ shaping humanity’s aims of space travel and settlement, much as imperialism and colonialism in the ‘New World’ shaped the modern era. We now introduce and develop the transdisciplinary theoretical framework we use to draw these parallels and analyse emergent entrepreneurial endeavours in NewSpace.

Theoretical framing: Marxian and decolonial technofeminism

In this section, we lay the groundwork for our historicised analysis of entrepreneurial activity in NewSpace by introducing and thinking with a set of transdisciplinary theoretical frames. First, we introduce Marxian feminist work on capitalism as an imperialist phenomenon, reliant on core mechanisms such as enclosures, expropriation, and extractivism. Next, we highlight the new hegemony of geek entrepreneur masculinities and theorise its application in geek saviourism from a technofeminist perspective. Lastly, we turn to decolonial theory on sociogenesis and the power of mythmaking to shape social outcomes. The final section employs these ideas to interrogate parallels between historical and current events.

Marxian feminist economics: Understanding emergent primitive accumulation

Marxian feminist analyses centre social reproduction, resource distribution, and the enablement of capitalism’s expansion by ongoing primitive accumulation (Federici, 2019). Marx theorised primitive accumulation as an initiatory process in the first phase of European capitalist development, in which sources of raw materials were identified and appropriated by capital for further processing into commodities (Marx, 1867). However, contemporary Marxian and especially Marxian feminist theory no longer views primitive accumulation as a one-time event at capitalism’s dawn, but instead a recurrent and ongoing process, one that tends to disproportionately negatively affect women and racialised minority groups (Federici, 2018, 2019; Gordon and Cornell, 2021). Primitive accumulation processes are now understood as continuous, reconfiguring as capitalism expands, featuring concentrations in key periods, e.g. during European colonisation in the 15th–19th centuries, and neoliberal ‘globalisation’ at the turn of the 21st century. Federici (2018) articulates how globalisation continues to divest farmers of their land, drive witch-hunts against women, and instantiate new property relations across the Global South. Technological advancements, however, do produce novel differences, such as the way that data has become capital, a commodity both gendered and racialised (Fuchs, 2018). Our Marxian feminist perspective thus justifies attending carefully to emergent forms of primitive accumulation in this early phase of NewSpace venturing.

Identifying key accumulatory mechanisms in past iterations of capitalist expansion can make today’s iterations more visible. Land enclosure and privatisation of the commons was a basic device and starting point of accumulation processes, established through a combination of fencing and walling, new laws, and taxation regimes, which accelerated throughout the European colonisation period (Federici, 2018, 2019) For example, from 1604-1914, historically communal land comprising 1/5th of England’s total area was enclosed through Acts of Parliament (Parliament, 2024). This expropriation of historically communal resources for private commercialisation dramatically shifted community relations and increased social hostilities (Federici, 2018: 16). Comparatively, however, NewSpace enclosure is less about dispossession than it is about simple possession, gained through first mover advantage (Goswami and Garretson, 2020). Nonetheless, we expect corporate moves towards enclosure to pave the way for NewSpace expropriation, supported by State policy, new laws, and favourable interpretations of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST). Whether outer space territories and resources are treated as belonging to no one (res nullis) or to everyone (res communis) will have a bearing on what is permitted (Sutch and Roberts, 2019). However, concerted political, legal, commercial, and discursive efforts are likely to reserve use of the new resources for a wealthy elite, transforming relations of social reproduction in the process.

Contemporary Marxian theory also emphasises capitalism’s reliance upon the divisions generated by patriarchy and racism to achieve rulership by the capitalist classes (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Fuchs, 2018; Robinson, 2000). While European peasants were being dispossessed of their common land, at the same time, another type of enclosure was occurring – the process of claiming territories for Europe and parcelling out land along arbitrary geographical lines. Indigenous peoples suffered from land grabbing, expropriation, enslavement, and other forms of genocidal violence, both exacerbating existing and fomenting new tensions between groups (Kimari and Ernston, 2020; Langan, 2018). Today, the patriarchy and racism of capitalist expansion into NewSpace has two faces: first, the immense resource investment in outer space futures, using land and materials appropriated from indigenous and local people (Witze, 2020) and second, the simultaneous disinvestment in, or organised abandonment of (Povinelli, 2011; Wilson Gilmore, 2008), places and people most vulnerable to the effects of climate catastrophe, relations structured by and emergent from the histories of empire (Sealey-Huggins, 2018). Climate change is increasingly understood to exacerbate existing regional conflicts and wars for resources as well as introduce new ones, impoverishing indigenous women in communities worldwide and heightening the sexual and gender-based violence weaponised against them (Csevár, 2021). Hardening borders currently prevent refugees and other migrants from entering the wealthy countries of Europe, North America, and Austronesia. This is enabled by novel military, surveillance and carceral technologies such as biodata, drones, and facial recognition (Benjamin, 2019), in combination with strategic decisions taken by Western governments to let migrants of colour drown in Channel and Mediterranean crossings, and hamper rescue efforts (Sealey-Huggins, 2018; Walia, 2021). It is no coincidence, then, that in a time of climate emergency, privately wealthy entrepreneurial actors are redoubling efforts to extend capitalist relations into space.

Technofeminism: Geek saviourism racing into NewSpace

Technofeminism is a branch of feminist science and technology studies (STS) that aims to expand conceptions of technology and illuminate its complex, co-constructed relationship with gender, broader social structures and relationships of power (Wajcman, 1991, 2004, 2010). Highlighting and interrogating links between hegemonic masculinity, technological progress and power, technofeminism argues for the potential of a feminist politics of technology to generate greater equality (Wajcman, 2010: 145). As such, it offers a critical and necessary path away from the techno-optimism or techno-pessimism of parts of STS and public discourse about technology. Avle et al. define techno-optimism as ‘the enduring belief that technology use and production are promising for humanity’ (2020: 237), an ideological bias central to, though often implicit in, emerging narratives about NewSpace activity. From our technofeminist stance, we draw upon feminist organisation studies and gender studies work that explores the intertwined discourses of white and geek masculinities, technological progress, and economic rationalities, which we argue are used to justify risky NewSpace entrepreneurship. Drawing on the work of Fanon (1967) and Wynter (McKittrick, 2015), we advance the notion of ‘geek saviourism’ as a contemporary mythos that legitimates such activity in NewSpace, no matter the cost to humanity, Earth, other astral bodies, or our collective futures. The following section outlines the concept of geek saviourism, and how it stems from our technofeminist standpoint.

We locate our notion of geek saviourism at the nexus of discourses regarding hegemonic masculinities, technology entrepreneurship, and existential futures. Geek masculinity is an emergent gender phenomenon in which technological mastery plus outsider status confers masculinity (Mellstrom et al., 2023). Its relationship to NewSpace is complex, in that some aspects of NewSpace adventuring appear to idealise a hegemonic form of white masculinity that feminist scholar Connell (2016: 303) characterises as toxic, involving hyper-competitiveness, ruggedness, emotional distance and dismissiveness, and conflict-orientated, traceable through ‘the eras of decolonisation, postcolonial development, and neoliberal globalization’. Although the dominance of such heteronormative, patriarchal white masculinities in leadership goals and approaches is seen as unremarkable (Liu and Baker, 2016), the non-traditional masculinity of the geek not only reflects, but also rejects, the so-called ‘alpha male’ characteristics Connell describes, championing instead a ‘beta male’ figure that is asocial in its idolisation of technology (Willey and Subranamiam, 2017) and orientation towards disruption (Mendick et al., 2021). Mendick et al. (2021) argue that the geek entrepreneur, as a subgenre of geek masculinity, is in fact transforming hegemonic masculinity. By leveraging technology and entrepreneurship to attain unprecedented levels of capital and power, the figure of the geek is no longer a denigrated outsider, but has achieved elite and celebrity status.

Bell (2009: 100) notes the simultaneous rise in geeks’ economic standing coincides with their ‘recasting as saviours of the postindustrial network society’. Credited with the thoroughgoing transformation of daily life by digital technologies, geeks are correspondingly empowered by traditional institutions to envision and enact humanity’s future, including its entrance into outer space. The preferential treatment of geek masculinity shapes culture at, and through, some of the world’s most influential technology corporations: e.g., in the US context, Amazon, Alphabet (parent company of Google), Meta (formerly Facebook) and X (formerly Twitter). In this technosphere, women, people of colour, and critical perspectives are systematically marginalised and excluded through organisational inequality regimes (Alfrey and Twine, 2017) that ignore ethical implications of tech development and condone misogyny, discrimination and harassment (Gebru, 2020). Moreover, these corporations’ growing resource and power base is counterposed with the reduction of trust in, and thus the gradual weakening and dismantling of, state institutions (Greene, 2019). Alongside the cultural ‘rise of the geek’ has been the emergence of a contemporary Libertarian populism that foments anti-government sentiment while rekindling imperial notions of racial and gender superiority, buoyed by the racism and misogyny rampant in online spaces by which incubate geek masculinity (Ging, 2019; Mendick et al., 2021). Simultaneously, the species-level threat posed by climate catastrophe to Man’s supposed ability to control nature invokes significant anxiety for Western humanism (Baldwin, 2017). It is within this broader economic, cultural and political climate that an emerging discourse of geek saviourism is, we argue, used to justify, normalise, resource and enable NewSpace entrepreneurship.

Geek masculinity is therefore a technologically progressive, yet socially regressive, ideological mechanism of hegemony that valorises and fetishes Big Tech entrepreneurship (Mellstrom et al., 2023; Mendick et al., 2021). Building on the Schumpeterian notion of creative destruction, technology entrepreneurs are imagined to be lone wolves; independent, self-made, utopian heroes who save the world through technological and entrepreneurial innovation, demonstrating leadership, risk-taking, and sacrifice in the process (Luri et al., 2022). In this emerging mythology, geek saviours have the capacity to conquer space, settle new worlds and save humanity from the many crises of its own making (Hsu and Siggelkow, 2019; Renstrom, 2021). Geek saviourism thus promises salvation of the species through a combination of entrepreneurial foresight, science-fiction imagination, financial acumen, visionary thinking and ‘heroic’ leadership. Yet, far from offering a neutral promise of salvation for all, the sexism and racism inherent in geek masculinity (Ging, 2019) is leading the new space race. Racial dispossession based upon white solipsism, or living as though only white people matter (Liu and Baker, 2016) is already at play in these processes. All the key actors are White, and those able to exploit NewSpace opportunities, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, are mostly White. Such exclusivity has prompted Spencer to suggest settlement of Mars will see ‘the red planet turned racist country club’ (Spenser, 2017). Thus, in its idolisation of the (white) geek saviour, NewSpace is not only deeply gendered, but also implicitly racialised, with racially minoritised populations left ideologically outside the sphere of the human.

We now explore the ideological justification of NewSpace, and the activities of its entrepreneurial ‘pioneers’ further through a decolonial Fanonian-Wynterian lens, applying the notion of sociogenesis and examining the mythoi of the human upon which NewSpace relies.

Sociogenesis, imperialism and the mythos of the NewSpace pioneer

Before continuing, it is worth briefly distinguishing between imperialism, colonialism, and settler-colonialism. Imperialism is the ideology, political motivation and sanctioning for colonial domination, possession and extraction. It may be thought of as the mission statement: a positioning of States in relation to others, characterised by purposive domination and subjugation (Liverani, 2017: 1). The imperial project here refers to the process of expanding of public and private ventures to acquire ‘foreign’ lands, both for the purposes of territorial acquisition for its own sake, and to gain access to resources therein, by economic, military, cultural and diplomatic means. Decolonial scholars offer extensive insights into how the practice of imperialism damaged and reshaped the material conditions and psyches of colonised peoples in both the colony and metropole for centuries, and thus, how the effect of empire reached far beyond the mere lands it claimed (Fanon, 1967; Gopal, 2020; Said, 1978). Wilkinson (1968: 397) defines imperialism as ‘the… policy or advocacy of seeking to extend control or dominion either by forcible annexation of adjoining territory or by acquisition of alien colonies and dependencies’. Whilst her definition originally conceptualised nation-states as key actors, it is nonetheless relevant for our exploration of entrepreneurial ventures paving the way for public-private partnership in Outer Space enclosure and expropriation. Colonialism, then, may be seen as a means of realising, or exercising, imperialism. It commonly refers to conquest and extraction of resources for trade (Wolfe, 2006). Settler-colonialism refers to the permanent presence of colonists for trade and self-sustenance, focusing on a different lifestyle beyond home regulations and the domination of local socio-economic activity, sometimes with the protection and/or oversight of metropolitan-colonial state forces and polities, but not exclusively and not always effectively, even when the latter are present (Mamdani, 2015; Odukoya, 2018). We return to the idea of settler-colonialism in the following section.

In direct challenge to the pseudoscience used to derive biological justifications for the construction of systems of racial stratification during the colonial period (Saini, 2019), decolonial scholars sought to understand the social origins of a given phenomenon, as opposed to the ontogenistic, or biologically deterministic, approaches employed by architects of imperialist colonisation. Decolonial psychoanalyst Fanon (1967) theorised the concept of sociogeny to conceptualise the ways in which white, Western power in the form of Empire, coloniality, race-based domination and subjugation had long-standing, multi-layered effects on the lives, souls and psyches of Black and colonised people. Historically, imperialism was a primary mechanism driving sociogeny, since the racial domination that lay at the heart of imperialism was not an ontological inevitability, but a systematic social construction of difference, Otherness and inferiority (Said, 1978). Wynter (1999) builds on Fanon’s concept of sociogeny to theorise the ‘sociogenetic principle’, or the shaping of life according to the norms of a particular culture. Moreover, she stresses, the norms of contemporary Western culture are hegemonic, due to the ways in which they emerged from and alongside imperialist expansion globally (Wynter, 1999).

Wynter’s work, and that of Wynterian scholars, elucidates the ways in which our species uses mythos or storytelling, enforced by power, to coalesce around certain conceptions of critical historical moments. For example, whether we characterise Columbus’ 1492 arrival in the Caribbean as either heroic, criminal or incompetent can be understood from a sociogenetic perspective, as the stories we tell ourselves shape the direction of travel of our species (Parker, 2018). Wynter describes two archetypal and presumed universal notions of ‘the human’ emerging from the Western intellectual tradition, Man1: a combination of homo religious and homo politicus, and Man2: a secular homo oeconomicus (McKittrick, 2015). These mythic archetypes, she asserts, were employed to delimit the sphere of the human, and devalue and deny the humanity of excluded others. Understanding how mythos contributes to sociogeny shows us, for example, how migrants and refugees can be portrayed by Western governments and right-wing media outlets as non-human (Ibrahim, 2018). We imagine a similar process will be used to characterise those populations NewSpace activity can be expected to leave behind. Conversely, NewSpace entrepreneurs, having established themselves as the epitome of Man2 through their economic conquest on Earth, are, through the mythologising processes here described, characterised as supermen whose ambitions to reach and exploit outer space resources are both natural and laudable.

The emergent NewSpace narrative, in which billionaire tech entrepreneurs task themselves with determining and driving humanity’s future, is, we argue, sociogeny in action. This discourse emphasises a techno-optimistic salvation through the disruptive vision of heroic geek entrepreneurs, producing a social imaginary that cloaks NewSpace’s present resemblance to power relations of the near past. Such discursive justification of NewSpace exploration, and material diminishment of any concerted opposition, is enabling the newest spearhead of capitalism to land, uncontested, on exoplanetary beachheads.

Scramble for outer space: NewSpace entrepreneurship as exoimperialism

The primitive accumulation of astropropriation and settler-colonialism

Important insight about the likely trajectory of this transformation may be gleaned from historical patterns. In the process of gaining control of new resource pools and opening new markets, capitalist and colonialist logics operate in conjunction to undergird the mythification, romanticisation and enactment of entrepreneurial activity (Bhattacharyya, 2018). We therefore anticipate the familiar primitive accumulation devices of enclosure, allocation, and expropriation to reoccur in this new arena, through space travel, mining, terraforming and settlement, on astral bodies as well as orbiting spacecraft, introducing competing ownership claims which may conceivably provoke armed conflict.

The term ‘astro-propriation’, coined by Porras (2017), refers to space mining for scientific and commercial ends. Since his interest is primarily in the uncertain nature of investment in such exploration, and whether such activities can and will be afforded investment protection, our use of the term diverges from his. Nevertheless, the concept accurately captures the way in which resources available in space are currently and will continue to be privatised. We therefore develop and extend the notion of astropropriation (hyphen removed) beyond the activity of mining, and use it to refer more generally to the claiming of any territory or resources in outer space for a private individual, organisation, or geopolitical nation-state or territory. According to this definition, for example, the planting of the US flag on the Moon is an astropropriative act. But flag-planting is only an initial step in a process that legitimates the allocation of specific areas of space or astral bodies to entities that are enabled to do with them what they will: occupying, mining, terraforming and settling, through any means deemed appropriate, including violent ones.

Correspondingly, we expect settler-colonialism to function as a key mechanism by which NewSpace imperialism will be enacted. Prototypical geek saviour, Elon Musk, normalises the idea of the colonisation of Mars, and has stated plans to have the first settlers there by 2030 (Platt et al., 2020). In his mind, Martian terraforming would be initiated through nuclear weapon detonation (Herron, 2016); settlers would continue the process and also extract resources where possible – the details are understandably vague for now. Musk has further suggested that loans for settlers’ transport to Mars can be paid off through indentured servitude, common to the development of North America (Suranyi, 2021) and not dissimilar to variants of colonialism involving debt bondage (LeBaron, 2014). In this potential future, Tavares et al. (2020: 1) argue that NewSpace exploration, in its replication of ‘public-private partnerships as a colonial structure’, will reproduce all the vices of settler-colonialism:

violent colonial practices and structures - genocide, land appropriation, resource extraction, environmental devastation, and more - have governed exploration of Earth, and if not actively dismantled, will define the methodologies and mindset we carry forward into space exploration. (2020: 1)

The destructive consequences of the above have created the conditions from which Musk and others are advocating escape, yet they pursue the same objectives: the expansion of capitalist centres of power in the competitive search for greater resource wealth.

It stands to reason, therefore, that the emergent arrangements surrounding NewSpace are likely to reproduce imperial relations, centred this time upon corporate rather than monarchic or nation-state power. Yet this does not mean there will be no role for the State. Contemporary State legislation is presently central to NewSpace: the State ‘assembles outer space as a domain made accessible in legal, technical, and economic ways’ (Shammas and Holen, 2019: 7). Until recently, the astrological realm of NewSpace was decreed in the Outer Space Treaty (Collis, 2017) of 1967 to be terra nullius, limiting incentives for private sector actors. As such, this convention is now being challenged and, in some respects, abandoned (Pekkanen, 2019). In the US, for example, the Free Enterprise Act (Congress, 2024) declares that ‘space is not a global commons [paving] the way for private property rights and the exploitation of precious resources in outer space’ (Shammas and Holen, 2019: 5). Such Earthly legislation – much like the formation of the corporation, a public sector decree in favour of private capital – paves the way for new processes of enclosure, enabling primitive accumulation through astropropriation of outer space territory and other resources.

In this process of seeking new spaces, then occupying and extracting from them, NewSpace reproduces the old imperial ways of the right to dominate, take, own and use, regardless of law, occupation or morality. These colonial legacies perpetuate distributive injustices which Sutch and Roberts (2019) note are all too easily exported into space. We posit that the emergent figure of the geek saviour as a legitimate actor in astropropriative processes is a key ideological means by which this reproduction of unjust historical patterns is taking place. Through creating the conditions for outer space settler-colonialism, geek entrepreneurs seek to extend ‘Earthly regimes of power’ (MacDonald, 2007: 610) through the establishment of exoimperialist relations of domination, which we theorise below.

The sociogenesis of exoimperialism

Since NewSpace builds upon the ‘economic globalization and financialization of monopoly capitalism’ (Enfu and Baolin, 2021: 22), and imperialism is fundamental to capitalism (Luxemburg, 1913/2015 as cited by Cornell, 2021, we use the term ‘exoimperialism’ to conceptualise this propulsion to capitalism's latest, highest stage. If imperialism justifies reaching beyond conventional sovereign boundaries through asymmetrical relations of power to acquire ‘alien’ spaces, then NewSpace is clearly a manifestation and continuation of the same. Yet we find the idea of imperialism, or even neo-imperialism, falls short of encapsulating the ideological processes behind NewSpace. Like Orwell’s Newspeak (Blakemore, 1984), the concept of NewSpace truncates and disguises the identity and extent of power, so an alternative, expanded notion is required. In ‘exoimperialism’, ‘exo’ refers to being outside, in this case, of Earth. Coupled with ‘imperialism’, it identifies the ongoing process of exploitation and extraction in spaces beyond Earth, whether on planets, asteroids, satellites or settler colonies, as being in the same vein as Earthly imperialism. Building upon decolonial work that cogently illustrates imperialism’s sociogenetic consequences, we contend that this new exoimperialist phase of capitalism is likely to have similar deleterious effects.

Wynter (Marine-Street, 2020; Parker, 2018; Wynter and McKittrick, 2015) illuminates how the creation of normative stories, what she calls mythos (plural mythoi), is key to the sociogenetic process, since effective storytelling conceptually legitimates the actions taken under its auspices. She argues that the first imperialist era was justified by a androcentric and racialised mythos empowering the archetypal figure of Man1: homo religious and homo politicus. The intention of Man1 to claim and Christianise the globe was seen as a desirable and inevitable endeavour, based on the valorisation of religion as a means to salvation. Later, Man1 evolves into Man2: homo oeconomicus, the European Enlightenment’s ‘rational economic man’, who prioritises personal utility and choice above all. Wynter’s identification of structural continuity between Man1 and Man2 illuminates the evolving cultural justifications for the racism underpinning colonialism (Topolski, 2023). Notably, both Man1 and Man2 gain and perpetuate wealth and power through technological dominance as well as raced (and gendered) dehumanisation; not only does this combination produce the contemporary sociogenetic outcomes of inequality that Fanon and Wynter so compellingly identify, but it also feeds into emerging narratives about NewSpace.

The mythoi of Man1 and Man2 serve as the bedrock for the dominant social imaginaries regarding heroic entrepreneurship, and the geek saviourism it engenders. Such archetypes are deeply embedded in the belief that Nietzschean Supermen can be trusted to save us, through an innovative advancement of technology that will enable the species to transform and transcend (Luri et al., 2022; Ogbor, 2000). These imaginaries are constantly reflected in the emergent discourse on NewSpace. Forbes magazine discusses a space ‘gold rush’ (Kaufman, 2021). Other outlets (McCormick, 2021) describe ‘heroic’ actors at ‘frontiers’ as in the era of America’s ‘Wild West’. Former US President and current Republican candidate Donald Trump declared ‘America’s manifest destiny lay in the stars’ (Koren, 2020). By using such narratives of American exceptionalism and associated myths, argues Haskins, ‘white Americans were able to convince other white Americans that they were not only entitled to steal and conquer land and persons, but that it was their destiny’ (2018). Walkowicz (as cited by Haskins, 2018) notes that ‘the people for whom the American frontier myth were constructed, who were primarily white men, also now have the narrative of space’. The widespread use of language regarding NewSpace activity, such as ‘colonisation’, ‘frontiers’, ‘pioneer’, ‘settler colonies’, ‘Manifest Destiny’ or ‘Wild West’ in a neutral manner – as if they were not responsible for genocide, dispossession, brutality and myriad other ills – firmly links the ideology, processes and expectations of NewSpace exploration with those of New World and imperial domination, and the sociogenetic continuity between both processes. Empire and colonialism are portrayed positively, as conceptual blueprints from past successes upon which we may construct the future. They are idealised ‘as a positive, replicable aspect of American history’, an obfuscation of truths that have long dogged American (and British) history regarding their imperial roles, which ‘speaks to an unsettling indifference from leaders about the violent history of colonisation’ (Haskins, 2018). Such discourse normalises and endorses exploitative entrepreneurial activity based in technological innovation, and relies on mythoi to do so.

In their book, Scramble for the Skies, Goswami and Garretson (2020: 45) note that of mythoi characterising space as the ultimate territory for human dominance are central to the rush to astropropriation: ‘inspired by ancient myths in their societies or those who inspired these myths, achievements in space were viewed as the highest form of success’. The mythos thus being constructed around NewSpace entrepreneurship, through the rhetoric and language of its advocates, explicitly valorises and endorses exoimperialism. Echoes of Wynter’s Man1 and Man2 mythoi are perceptible in the emerging discourses: Man1, in the notion that space settlement and astropropriative dominance are the path to humanity’s salvation, and Man2, that in a context of resource scarcity, climate crisis and mass extinction (Cowie et al., 2022), those operating according to homo oeconomicus’ governing principle of self-interest can and should preserve themselves by going off-world. Building on Wynter’s conceptualisation, we add to Man2's homo oeconomicus the figure of homo entrepreneurus. Lounsbury et al. (2019: 1215) conceptualise this archetype as ‘a particular species of homo economicus’ that responds to Knightian uncertainty through risk-seeking and experimentation. Yet the exoimperialist experimentation and risk-taking behaviour that geek saviours are intent on enacting has the potential to, sociogenetically, impact both those left on Earth (Carbajales-Dale and Murphy, 2023; Ross and Jones, 2022; Semenkov and Koroleva, 2022) as well as those who travel off-world (Winkler, 2023; Palinkas and Suedfeld, 2021), for the transition into space potentially presents the possibility of the emergence of a new genre of human. This genre may be termed Man3, homo exoeconomicus: humans, for the first time, bounded neither by planetary nor gravitational constraints, existing beyond the reach of Earthly authority, untethered from the basic physical tenets that have comprised our evolutionary terminus since the origin of species.

Implications and future research directions

While imperialism has enabled global capitalism through asymmetrical power dynamics favouring the metropole, we expect this pattern to be reconfigured with exoimperialism, with expropriative consequences on Earth as well as for claimed territories in space. Writing in Worth, Yun (2020), argued that the ‘latest visions [of NewSpace] sound a lot like interplanetary imperialism’, and that the practices of ‘exporting problems to distant lands and extracting resources from them are as old as the history of imperialism [and are] the latest frontier of the same old story’. Expansion into outer space ensures capitalism has a future, characterised both by primitive accumulation in space and the ‘organised abandonment (Harvey, 1989: 303 as cited by Wilson Gilmore, 2008 : 31) of the Earth by capital, much like the 20th century abandonment of the former colonies. Then, capital imagined and created new socio-economic structures (e.g., GATT, Bretton Woods institutions) to achieve old goals. Now, it creates structures in Outer Space to fulfil the same needs for expansion and profit. Instead of the expropriative violence committed against indigenous people via the colonial encounter, this exoimperialist push, through its attention off-world, enacts harm upon an ever-expanding range of populations presently exposed to climate catastrophe, the breadth of which is increasing at a devastating pace. Key to the need to project capitalism into NewSpace is the perpetual growth model central to its systemic survival, since its current host is both boiling and drowning due to its parasitic nature. Space, then, for capital, is no longer a fanciful choice, but a necessary frontier.

Furthermore, although Earthly regulation may be in effect, its reach and enforcement will be constrained by remoteness, distance, time and technology control. This would not be the first time that an imperial centre struggled to control a colonial periphery. The decaying orbit for public regulation over an increasingly independent and remote private sector mirrors the well-documented constraints on regulation of the colonies experienced from European capitals (Tambiah, 1977a). In short, whilst a powerful centralised State may legislate, it cannot necessarily enforce its will where its various agents – police, bureaucrats, armed forces – do not reach, or are compromised by, for example, social resistance. Parenthetically, the story of a powerful capitalist centre losing control of resistant workers in the far flung reaches of NewSpace – The Expanse – is one of Jeff Bezos’ favourite TV shows (Snowden, 2020). Hidden from regulatory oversight and enforcement, there is little to suggest this will be different in NewSpace, reproducing class and labour struggles and other social ills associated with earthly capitalism (Castro et al., 2020; Stephens, 2009; Ullah et al., 2021). Just as Colonel Kurtz lay out of reach of metropolitan discipline (Conrad, 1994), so is NewSpace predicted to expand to the point that, even if regulation has kept up with technology, technology may have rendered the private sector too distant to be controlled – if it is not already. As Utrata (2021) writes,

the rhetoric and history of celestial exploration reveal how the logics of capitalism, colonialism, and corporations have always been intimately, and violently, intertwined. And, as history shows us, allowing corporations the power to colonize space may result in outcomes that even states cannot control.

Our argument encourages future research into how exoimperialism impacts the climate crisis, since that which is required to take us off-world must first come from this one, a practice imbued with ongoing violence both to racialised populations and the Earth itself (Wan, 2019). In their exploitation of extraterrestrial resources to fulfil their fantastical visions, countries and corporations will further drain and disrupt Earthly reserves, not dissimilarly to the ways in which Bitcoin mining (Dai et al., 2023) and data storage (Hogan, 2015) demand massive amounts of natural resources. This will likely accelerate rather than decelerate global warming; empirical attention to these activities will be vital. Moreover, neo-imperialist relations mean that racialised places and populations are already suffering most from the effects of extreme weather events and conditions (Sealey-Huggins, 2018); empirical comparisons of the investment required to shore up their environmental infrastructure vs. investment made in NewSpace research and development could support revised policy directives. Finally, far beyond the practical reach of Earthly nation-states, international legislation may be too little, too late to prevent the occupation of other worlds and strip mining of outer space resources, since greater distance from the legislative metropolis renders actors less susceptible to its discipline (Tambiah, 1977b). In light of this, we suggest research evidencing these changes, and enabling urgent internationalist state intervention in, and regulation of, NewSpace entrepreneurial activity is required. We echo existing calls to challenge post-colonial inequities and centre the notion of common, rather than corporate, human interest in outer space activity (Sutch and Roberts, 2019) if a more just and survivable future is to emerge.

Conclusion

This paper has developed a transdisciplinary, Marxian, technofeminist and decolonial perspective to theorise the emergent phenomenon of entrepreneurial space exploration for the purposes of colonisation and profit. This novel way of framing NewSpace entrepreneurship elucidates the historical continuity between the first era of geoimperialism, which drove Earthly expropriation with disastrous consequences, and the current era of exoimperialism, in which astropropriation is legitimated and encouraged through an emergent mythos of entrepreneurial geek saviourism. Through drawing these historical parallels, our critique lays the conceptual groundwork for future examination, empirical investigation, and challenge to the unchecked entrepreneurial enclosure and exploitation of resources in space, in many cases far beyond the control of the nation-state. We observe in this phenomenon an ongoing process of elitist gendered and racialised exclusion serving individual billionaires and corporate interests, leaving denizens of Earth to struggle in the face of catastrophic climate crisis, resource scarcity and heightening conflict. Through theory building on astropropriation, exoimperialism and geek saviourism, we develop a critique of the destructive potential of the entrepreneurial ambitions of key NewSpace actors. In so doing, we seek to challenge such organised abandonment by opening conceptual pathways towards more just futures.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank three knowledgeable anonymous reviewers and the managing editor for their clear, constructive and insightful feedback on our article. Any errors contained are our own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Angela Martinez Dy

David Roberts

Dr Angela Martinez Dy is an entrepreneurial community builder invested in liberatory unlearning. As a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Loughborough University London, her expertise, research interests and communities of practice revolve around digital entrepreneurship, anti-racist intersectional technofeminism, and critical realist philosophy. She is a poet and scholar-activist with a track record of creating impact through community-based initiatives, collaborations, organisational formation and development.

Dr David Roberts’ research began with the Cambodian peacekeeping operation in 1991, and expanded to watching the West pushing Liberal conversion therapy onto many more former colonies in the wake of peacebuilding. Seeing a new era of imperialism ascendant steered him into postcolonial scholarship. His latest publications concern institutional racism in universities, and the elite Colour-Power Matrix evident in UK Higher Education. As a keen pedagogue, he uses multimedia methods that themselves decolonise the hegemonic textual pedagogy common to western Higher Education.

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Geek saviours to the rescue? Primitive accumulation,astropropriation,and exoimperialism in NewSpace entrepreneurship

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Entrepreneurial activity in NewSpace

Theoretical framing: Marxian and decolonial technofeminism

Marxian feminist economics: Understanding emergent primitive accumulation

Technofeminism: Geek saviourism racing into NewSpace

Sociogenesis, imperialism and the mythos of the NewSpace pioneer

Scramble for outer space: NewSpace entrepreneurship as exoimperialism

The primitive accumulation of astropropriation and settler-colonialism

The sociogenesis of exoimperialism

Implications and future research directions

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

References