The Race to Colonize Mars Perpetuates a Dangerous Religion
My alarm rang me awake at 6:25 AM, and I drowsily yet eagerly tapped my way to YouTube, blinking my bleary eyes to see clearly. There was SpaceX’s livestream of its latest spectacle: the orbital flight test of its gargantuan new spacecraft and rocket, Starship, designed to take dozens of humans or heavy cargo to the moon, Mars, and the rest of the solar system. Millions had tuned in to watch it, excited by the uncertainty of what would happen.
I dropped in with the launch countdown at … three minutes! My heart began racing knowing those 33 engines might actually ignite, with double the thrust of the Saturn V (the rocket that took NASA’s Apollo crews to the moon). The SpaceX employees at the Hawthorne, California, headquarters sounded rapturous. At 30 seconds on the clock, they were cheering or shrieking with unhinged glee. Liftoff! I’ve watched so many CGI renders of Starship launching, it was uncanny witnessing the real thing. As if the engineers found some loophole in the physics of reality to get this 390-foot tall spacecraft off the ground. But that surreal sense gave way when Starship began cartwheeling in the clouds. It wasn’t long before it disintegrated (a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”) with a puff of smoke, like a magician disappearing from the stage. “Welcome to the Starship era, humanity,” tweeted Eric Berger, author of Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX, who was at the scene. “It began with a bang, as big things often do. The universe awaits.”
The one time we tried to establish a full-fledged sealed-off habitation it failed spectacularly.
That worries Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of religion and science in society at Wesleyan University. She’s the author of the recent book Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. I spoke with her last week, ahead of Starship’s flight test, to understand what concerns her about the technical strides and aspirations of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. We talked about the company’s mission of enabling thousands of people to live on Mars, and the ethics of terraforming the planet to be more like Earth. We discussed the danger of how unregulated space remains for nations and corporations, which risks stoking strife and violence. Rubenstein also explained, among other things, the religious underpinnings of the United States’ space program, and how even modern science is still hostage to imperialistic Christian ideas.
“I started realizing that religion shows up in the natural sciences and the contemporary world in a funny and alarming way,” Rubenstein said., about the origins and the ends of the world. And conjure characters who are heroes, gods, and monsters. I started tracking the way that the natural sciences themselves generate new ways of understanding the world that, a couple centuries ago, we would have called religion.” But that’s no criticism of religion. In fact, she thinks the leaders of the space race could benefit from considering “.”
