On the 13th of October 2021, 90-year-old William Shatner became the oldest human to have gone to space. His eleven-minute journey to space and back was the second crewed flight made by private aerospace company, Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, with the goal of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth. Bezos is not the only billionaire with designs on the stars, however, with Elon Musk founding SpaceX in 2002 to enable humanity to colonise Mars.

Businesses around the world are created to meet customer needs and to maximise profits for their stakeholders. Human space exploration, on the other hand, helps to address fundamental questions about our place in the Universe and the history of our solar system. With private companies expanding into space, can these distinct purposes align for the benefit of all? Is competition between businesses, deemed largely healthy on Earth, necessary or effective when it comes to activities in space? Additionally, the reality of private companies expanding their operations outside the planet’s borders brings into question how commercial enterprise can effectively be regulated in the stars?

The concept of space travel has enthralled millions around the world for decades and has continually been used as an example that demonstrates the benefits of co-operation. As far back as the 1960s, President John F Kennedy made the case for a joint venture between the United States and the Soviet Union to send astronauts to the moon. In the end, no joint venture was made, with the US winning the “Space Race” in 1969 with its Apollo 11 spaceflight to the moon. This trend of competition persists, with today’s private business leaders engaged in a very public contest for dominance in the process of privatising the exploration of celestial bodies beyond planet Earth; or, at the very least, the moon.

In April, 2021, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build the first lunar lander to land astronauts on the moon since the last Apollo mission. A week later, Blue Origin filed a protest over the decision and lobbied Congress to require NASA to award two contracts and allocate $10 billion in funding, with SpaceX claiming that such a motion will undermine the notion of healthy competition. Both companies have been engaging in a heated online battle to shape public opinion, with Blue Origin posting graphics lambasting its competitors and Elon Musk taking to Twitter to lampoon Bezos and Blue Origin directly. Such public conflict, while juvenile, reinforces the idea that the future of space is to be a privatised one; with corporations and their interests, rather than that of nations, as the driving force for this new era of space exploration.

The idea of off-world colonisation is nothing new to anyone who follows science fiction, where stories abound of humankind journeying from Earth and setting up camp on other planets. The SpaceX Mars program is actively designed to eventually facilitate such colonisation on the planet Mars. Currently working to achieve a successful spaceflight to and from the surface of Mars, the overall goal for SpaceX is to send volunteers with supplies to live in a colony comprised of “glass domes” before engaging in terraforming processes to make the surface of Mars habitable. Such volunteers will likely be making a one-way trip, with Elon Musk confirming that dying on Mars is all but certain. However, with such a colony existing 389.38 million kilometres away from any direct jurisdiction or oversight from organisations on the Earth, a crucial concern will be establishing effective regulations to safeguard the individuals making their new homes in such corporate bubbles; along with a clear framework for how corporate entities can be regulated in space to begin with.

Currently, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 provides the basic tenets of governance for activity in space. Among other principles, this agreement specifies that any exploration and use of outer space is the province of all mankind, and that “states shall be responsible for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities.” However, experts are calling for more codified parameters in consideration of how privatisation, rather than national interests, is driving current space exploration. Without such legislative overhaul, scholars believe that there is a significant risk that “outer space could turn into the “Wild West” of the twenty-first century.”

The first successful human spaceflight was made in 1961. Sixty years later, we are only beginning to understand and formulate the reality of commercialised space exploration and what this new paradigm will mean for the future. It remains to be seen if business as we know it will translate effectively and fill the vacuum of space, but it is clear that the distance between such innovative companies and their bottom lines will only grow as they engage into the stars. Whether this will come at the expense of those of us left Earthbound remains to be seen.

By Tim Keogh

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