Some years ago, I saw a poll that suggested that a large majority of British citizens would decline a free trip to the moon, on the grounds that there is nothing to do on the moon. I am an extreme sucker for space stuff, and would jump at the chance to spend a week or so on the moon. Nevertheless, I had to admit they had a point. The moon is a neat rock. I could picture myself walking around up there, maybe driving the lunar rover in a big circle, but then what? On the other hand: It’s another celestial body. Wouldn’t you, as a hominid, kind of have to go, if you got the chance? Apparently not. I conducted an informal survey of my friends, and they basically all wanted to stay on Earth. Losers, cowards; this is why society is in such a dire state. We used to aspire!
So maybe most people would decline to actually go to space (even if I would like to go, I can’t; I have a job), but there is clearly a large appetite for media that is in some way about space. There is a vast corpus of TV shows, movies, plays, museums, books, and video games recounting the history of human spaceflight, gesturing at the dream of a multiplanetary future; and that is before we even consider science fiction. In his second inaugural address, the current US president promised a voyage to Mars, so his speechwriters must imagine there is a demand for it. Yet it is sort of difficult to imagine oneself into a space suit. The specialist knowledge required, the famously rigorous selection process for astronauts, the distance and danger and the lifelong dedication, mean that space travel does not immediately lend itself to mass participation or easy empathy. Astronauts are captivating to watch in any number of documentaries about life aboard the International Space Station, or preparing for various journeys, but in interviews, they are, like elite athletes, mostly at a loss to explain why the experience is meaningful, or what makes them so obviously special. So perhaps this is ripe territory for realist fiction: Are we crying out for the quotidian space novel, the space comedy of manners, the space bildungsroman, zero-gravity autofiction?
In this potential vacuum, Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize–winning novella, Orbital, the shortest such winner in decades, offers a radically appealing premise: plotless and concise, allusive and oblique, set in orbit. Six astronauts aboard the ISS carry out their experiments, gaze out the window, and reflect poetically on their shared situation. Harvey the novelist is here to explain to us what an astronaut never could: What does space feel like? Never having been to space, Harvey has access to the same tools as any other terrestrial writer approaching this task. In interviews, she has described experiencing some trepidation about writing so far outside her own experience. But Harvey is a human, like all the astronauts on the ISS, so there is a possibility of empathy and a frisson of difference in her attempts to tangibilize those experiences. So much the better. She has called Orbital a “space pastoral”; more precisely, in its almost complete uneventfulness, it is a book about nothing, Seinfeld in space. This need not be a bad thing. And as with Seinfeld, Orbital’s lack of plot and depth is in itself a form of signification. As Stalin allegedly said, quantity has a quality all its own; so too does brevity. The implication that fills Orbital’s void is that space is ipso facto profound, that the fact of being in space — even just a tiny bit, in low Earth orbit — is a particularity that expresses a kind of universalism.
“We” will never go to Mars. Well, I won’t.
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But brevity might also mean there isn’t really much to be said about being on the ISS, other than that it is self-evidently awesome, which it is. The uneventfulness of the book paints Harvey into some odd corners. She describes her astronauts all syncing up in various ways, up to and including the improbable fact that they all share dreams; but also in the sense that they blend together as characters, as generic space people, differentiated from humanity but less so from one another. Each of these flattish people stands in for the species as a whole, ruminating incessantly on destiny and purpose. Harvey’s prose constantly reiterates the sublimity of her characters’ experience and sometimes grasps for imagery that can be hard to follow. In the opening paragraph, “Raw space is a panther, feral and primal.” Is it? Dawn is “not much, just a portside smudge. Blue has turned purple but that’s about it. Green has turned purple, white has turned purple, America has turned purple, or what’s left of it anyway.” It sure has. There is also a pervasive literalness to much of the dialogue. Reflecting on a video of the first moon landing, one of the crew recalls thinking, “Who’d want to be an astronaut? It seemed kind of crass to me suddenly, like they were projections of all the sad frustrated men of America.”
I am certainly not qualified to assess whether she accurately represents the experience of astronauts — I’ll leave that to critics based off-world — but once she turns her gaze back to Earth, where I live, Harvey loses speed. Earth is fragile; we ought to preserve it; it is, after all, our only home. You leave Earth, you gaze back at it, and you are infused with a new perspective, species-level patriotism, beauty and urgency and precarity. You’ve heard this before, most recently from Katy Perry. This is hardly sustainable as a political project unless we propose to take all eight billion people to space so they can experience a brief epiphany, but it does seem to be a real phenomenon. Much is made, in Orbital and in the trope of space epiphanies, of the fact that borders are not visible from space, but so what? Neither are class or hunger or love. The conceit that borders and nationalisms are merely vacuous abstractions that could easily be imagined away, if only we were enlightened enough to do so, might be plausible with sufficient distance, but if you’ve been around a real border, you know. People are just people, sure; but one of the central facts of politics is that some of them have guns, and they want my stuff.
At least since the start of the cold war, space has functioned in part to launder earthly political commitments through humanist universalism. It is a de-ideologizing dream. Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” contained a double bluff. On one hand (and rather transparently, because Armstrong immediately planted an American flag), it was a project of national dominance, enacted against the backdrop of the cold war to assert American primacy. John F. Kennedy initially professed disinterest in space, and was persuaded to go to the moon “and do the other things,” as he Trumpily asided, only because the Soviets happened to get into orbit first. On the other hand, NASA’s achievement had to be cloaked in some language other than superpower competition, and by the time Richard Nixon was calling the lunar surface to congratulate Armstrong and Aldrin, the narrative was set:
Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world, and as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man all the people on this earth are truly one — one in their pride in what you have done and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.
Contained within the liberal generalities was an invitation to partake in the moon landing, to imagine it as having happened on one’s behalf. This applied not just to Americans (Nixon was already looking ahead to the 1972 election) but to a political constituency that could contain the entirety of the species. NASA’s victorious generosity was an invitation for everyone to become American, tipping over the melting pot and spilling its molten contents across the solar system. Yet this rhetorical maneuver was not entirely cynical, nor did it originate with Kennedy and Nixon. For many of the scientists and diplomats tasked with implementing America’s space program, the desire to turn down the temperature on geopolitical competition was quite sincere; rocket engineers who had come of age watching V2s rain down on London had no doubts about the direction of travel implied by the space race.
Thus followed a series of gestures and policies of deliberate, if generally symbolic, magnanimity. The astronauts of Apollo 15, the fourth moon landing, left behind a plaque bearing the names of the astronauts and cosmonauts who had died in the project of space exploration — though it omitted the names of Valentin Bondarenko and Grigory Nelyubov, whose deaths were at that time unknown to the West, and Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., who was African American. Two years before the first moon landings, the United States, under Lyndon Johnson, ratified the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, generally known as the Outer Space Treaty. This instrument prohibited nuclear weapons and military activity on the moon, banned sovereignty claims in space, and, most ambitiously, avowed that space “shall be the province of all mankind.”
Inevitably, calls for unity are most easily made by the aspiring universal subject, and even at the time, amid popular enthusiasm for the Apollo missions, there was skepticism at home about the use of the first-person plural. In 1970, Gil Scott-Heron performed a spoken-word poem called “Whitey on the Moon”:
I can’t pay no doctor bills
But whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still
While whitey’s on the moon
“We” will never go to Mars. Well, I won’t. Someone might. In fact, I think it is more likely than not that someone eventually will. It may even happen within my lifetime. But while I am filled with wonder at the thought of twelve members of my species having visited the moon more than fifty years ago, I am less sure that I have a claim to it. I’m not, after all, an American. I’m not an astronaut, and I won’t be. “We” went to the moon in the same sense that “we” are seven feet tall, or have a PhD in astrophysics, or were born in Luxembourg. Someone did; not me. At most, someone went to the moon on my hypothetical behalf, which is a very different proposition. As someone who was unable for reasons both national and temporal to vote for either Kennedy or Nixon, I wasn’t even asked if I thought it was a good idea. And nobody is asking me — or “us” — if going to Mars, now or soon, is a good idea, either.
The wisdom (or otherwise) of near-term Mars settlement is the question set out by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, a “wife-and-husband research team,” in their comprehensive book A City on Mars. The tone is deceptively lighthearted, and there are cartoons scattered throughout; Zach is the creator of the sciency webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, while Kelly is an accomplished biologist and science writer. Their scientific engagement is rigorous and encompassing. They largely sidestep the problem of getting to Mars, instead focusing — as SpaceX conspicuously doesn’t — on what will happen once people start to arrive. There are chapters on the problems of space law and space politics, and on the deleterious effects of space on the human body; there is a lot of detail on the near-impossibility of safely reproducing in exotic gravities. The challenges of getting to Mars pale in comparison to the challenges of remaining there. Worse, conflict over space resources, or between rival space colonies, might trigger wars back on Earth. The Weinersmiths are not opposed to going to Mars. They think that it is both possible and desirable over a long enough timescale. But their assessment of going to Mars now, especially in a rushed, haphazard manner, is both scathing and persuasive.
For all the deep time and long horizons of its analysis, A City on Mars drives home just how bound to this political moment the Mars discourse has become. A new preface, written in early 2025, concludes: “The international order is a net good. If some or all of that order is gone by the time you read this, we hope the chapters contained here will at least convince you that it had been worth keeping.” When Trump mentioned Mars in his speech, he invoked manifest destiny, implying if not exactly saying outright that America, rather than humanity, was going to become multiplanetary. This twists beyond recognition or ignores entirely a whole architecture of international law enacted after the Second World War to prevent a second colonial gold rush. The Outer Space Treaty explicitly prohibits extraplanetary territorial claims. As the Weinersmiths note, with some trepidation:
Space is a commons. It is shared. Nobody is allowed to appropriate any territory. However, under many modern interpretations, and absolutely under the American interpretation, everybody can use as much of the surface as they like. Let’s sit on that for a second: you can use the entire lunar surface any way you please, ad libitum, as long as you never say, “This is mine in the sense of being my territory.” . . . Other players could do likewise: China, India, the European Space Agency, or private launch corporations, for that matter. Add in the fact that only a tiny amount of the lunar surface is especially useful, and that the most likely parties to an agreement are nuclear powers, and you have what might be called an interesting situation.
“This is where other space-settlement books typically leave off,” the Weinersmiths write. “We think skipping over the law is a colossal mistake if you want to have any idea about how space settlement is likely to happen.” They report extensive conversations with people in the space industry whose ignorance of the law is both staggering and willful, people who “assume that space law will just melt away due to the amazingness of space settlement.” The Weinersmiths would rather space law be part of “an internationally managed regime, both for space activity and space property.” It can sometimes feel as if they are writing for two distinct and nonoverlapping audiences: generally pro-science liberals who might be interested to learn that Mars comes with a lot of baggage, and fanatically pro-space, libertarian-coded enthusiasts whose enthusiasm needs to be tempered by a dose of reality. Their account of earthly institutions coming up against cosmic problems is laudable; this is a genuine gap in the literature. But the idea that America in its current state, or indeed any other superpower, will simply agree to be bound by international law when so much wealth and prestige is on the line seems as fanciful as putting a million settlers on Mars in the 2030s.
Space travel in the 2020s is about one particular guy, and that guy happens to be extremely, gratuitously, calamitously ideological.
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The British philosopher A. C. Grayling, a liberal ethicist and public intellectual whose previous books address religion, philosophy, democracy, and the Allied bombing of civilians in the Second World War, takes up the case in Who Owns the Moon? His guide to space law, through an examination of the possible precedents set by the Outer Space Treaty, the Antarctic Treaty System, and the 19th-century Scramble for Africa, is richly detailed and for the most part very bleak. The Antarctic Treaty System, long held up as an example of peaceful international cooperation, is already fraying under Chinese pressure. The Outer Space Treaty, as Grayling demonstrates, was very much about foreclosing the possibility of superpower competition in space, but there is no reason to expect today’s superpowers — less ideological and certainly much more cynical than their cold war counterparts — to uphold that precedent. It does not take a great deal of bad faith to read the Artemis Accords — a multilateral arrangement for managing lunar settlement drafted and signed during Trump’s first term and expanded under Biden — as a blueprint for establishing American spheres of influence on the moon. While claiming sovereignty in space would remain off-limits under Artemis, signatories are able to benefit from resources gathered in space. In this circumstance, a private company, chartered in the United States, would be prohibited from, say, claiming sovereignty over an asteroid — but would be completely within its rights to cut up the asteroid, take it back to Earth, and sell its components.
Grayling is more explicit than the Weinersmiths in drawing out how all this mirrors the colonial project. He is persistently gloomy about the future and, unlike the strenuously accessible Weinersmiths, is not averse to the occasional donnish flourish, referring to the international order as “an anarchy of self-interests only tenuously constrained by expediencies, these latter as shifting as the sparkles of sunlight on the sea.” And lest one note the ideological resonances between private space travel and early European settlement of the Americas, but wonder from whom an asteroid might conceivably be stolen, Grayling has a typically expansive and depressing answer:
In the history of European expansion . . . planting a flag in a putatively unclaimed region and asserting a claim to it was deemed enough to “own” it, for there was — in the view of the colonizers, and almost always wrongly — no one to gainsay. Is there no one to gainsay in the case of Mars and the moon? If local space, like the Antarctic and the world’s wildlife each in its own way, is a common possession or at least a common interest of all humanity, cannot humanity gainsay?
And yet, despite his plausible pessimism and wide-ranging analysis, Grayling is unable to quite look the implications of all this directly in the face. “Unless there is something available to humankind that is more powerful than partisan self-interest,” he writes, “the ‘tragedy’ in the ‘tragedy of the commons’ in space could, and probably will, be great.” He goes on:
The task that faces the world is finding the “something” that will avoid such an outcome. . . . Whatever it is, it will involve seeing that the self-interest of humanity as a whole requires that partisan self-interest — the self-interest of sections of humanity in opposition to other sections of humanity — has to end.
Well, good luck. Is this a greater or lesser fantasy than going to Mars? The implication of this sort of institutional assessment of the current state of space law is that the game is already lost. If all that we need to do is find the “something” that allows us to stop dividing humanity into sections — elsewhere Grayling describes the inevitability of conflict and competition over limited resources as “the nub of everything we know of the human story, almost to the point of being a law of history” — then we might as well give up now. We are back on the launchpad with Yuri Gagarin in 1961, moments before setting off to become the first human in space, effusing, “Dear friends, both known and unknown to me, fellow countrymen, men and women of all lands and continents . . .” before concluding with the much more terrestrial: “I would like to dedicate this first space flight to the people of communism, a society which our Soviet people are already entering, and which, I am confident, all men on Earth will enter.”
But on some level it was probably easier in 1961, and in 1969, to imagine that these events really were taking place in the name of some reified whole that could be called humanity, as mediated by one’s cold war ideology of choice. Space travel in the 2020s is about one particular guy, and that guy happens to be extremely, gratuitously, calamitously ideological, if in a rather idiosyncratic way. While Elon Musk happens to be an American citizen, nobody could imagine him as representative of all Americans, much less all humanity. And as much as one might wish to write about space without having to consider him, he is simply in the way. It would be very comforting to be smarter than this particular moment in history, and to see through him, to the core of his fraudulence and his secret averageness. The Weinersmiths, no fans of the space king, dismiss this as misguided, almost a conspiracy theory. Reusable rockets are the real thing, and they would not have happened without him. The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets do actually exist, and although a few of them have blown up on launch, most of them haven’t. They are really going up into orbit and then coming back down and landing, all the time, in a way that has already changed the world.
One of the things that makes it difficult to assess what space travel means, or will eventually mean, in the story of human civilization is that space travel is not yet remunerative. The reason that “we” haven’t gone back to the moon since 1972 is that it is exorbitantly expensive to do so, and there is currently no clear way to get a good return on investment. The main thing to do on the moon was to get there first. This is not true about launching things into orbit. There are plenty of lucrative reasons to care about orbiting Earth, from navigation to communication to mobile internet, and SpaceX is profitable because it can send payloads to space quite cheaply, which is possible in part because its rockets are built in-house and are often reusable. The price of sending mass into orbit fell slowly and irregularly, and sometimes not at all, between 1970 and 2010; the dramatic fall since then has made all sorts of more ambitious space travel seem conceivable. In today’s dollars, the Saturn V rocket, used for Apollo 11, cost $5,400 per kilogram to launch into low Earth orbit; SpaceX can do the equivalent with its Falcon Heavy rocket at just over a fifth of that.
And yet a melancholy sense of mild futility persists. The old romanticism of the space race is harder to conjure now. If we are not going to become a spacefaring civilization, if we will instead mostly remain on Earth and its immediate environs, using space for primarily economic rather than heroic purposes, filling it with robots rather than human explorers, then perhaps most of the really compelling space innovations have already happened. Rockets and satellites will get better, China may settle the moon, and a few Americans may eventually walk around Mars for a while, but the drama would mostly still be at home. The ISS, already a very old piece of hardware scheduled for retirement in 2030, would be a relic from another age, which may be part of the reason why Orbital is paradoxically so claustrophobic and inward-facing. “Earth is the cradle of humanity,” wrote the Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, subsequently quoted by nearly everyone in the field, “but one cannot remain in the cradle forever.” Maybe not, but plenty of people settle down in their hometowns, even if they once took an exciting holiday abroad.
If Musk has a legacy in space, it is less likely to be the Martian accomplishment and more likely to be that he took Kennedy’s dream and made it tawdry, partisan, and stupid.
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The possibility that “we” might not get much farther than low Earth orbit, at least not on any kind of grand scale, strikes me as extremely dispiriting, even without accepting entirely the usual fable about inevitable and monotonic human progress from caves to the stars. There is a lot of credulous and very popular literature that retells, in various permutations, this somewhat reactionary story, and a lot of this literature projects that progress onward into space. In The Future of Geography, the journalist Tim Marshall, though more pop-facing than his competitors, undergoes a journey of disillusionment that neatly tracks this whole process. Marshall, who had a long career as a war reporter prior to becoming a writer of popular geography books, is at first glance an unlikely candidate to write about space. Initially, he is breathless about the general project: “We explored the world and discovered it is finite,” he says. “Now, just as our territory and resources begin to run out, we find that the big, beautiful ball in the sky — the moon — is full of the minerals and elements we all need” (highly debatable, per the Weinersmiths). Later: “Humans have always been wanderers, and in the last century have begun to move far from our planet.” He regards the settlement of Mars as assured. Yet once the bombast subsides, Marshall is even more pessimistic than other writers. He quotes the head of China’s lunar exploration program, Ye Peijian, as saying, “If we don’t go there now . . . then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to.” In this iteration of the space race, even the most enthusiastic proponents can muster only a negative case for space colonization.
Confronting the full horror that he has discovered, Marshall falls back on the same platitudes:
We need greater clarity and shared commitments to transparency, pooled resources, debris collection, spacecraft disposal, freedom of navigation, deconfliction. . . . [Superpowers] agree on very little at the moment . . . . They will need to be persuaded by everyone else that it is in their interests to cooperate.
But Mars or not, America needs launch capacity; there is no going back.
The major difference between this space race and the previous one is the chimeric public-private mergers, SpaceX foremost among them, which have characterized the past few years of space travel. Marshall nervously quotes Starlink’s terms of service:
For services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars . . . the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement .
This is in obvious conflict with the Outer Space Treaty, but what authority exists to stop this from being de facto the case, especially if Musk and SpaceX are so integrated into American governance that no fleeting personal feud could possibly disentangle them? It is one thing for a state to claim to represent humanity; it is another thing entirely for a corporation to do it. There are currently more than five thousand American companies that are, in some way, trading on space, and the prospects for effective regulation domestically, let alone abroad, are — well, guess.
One of Musk’s talents as a businessman has been his ability to trigger a cascade of falling prices due to novel competition. This was once the raison d’être of his self-proclaimed humanitarian mission. Electric cars used to be a luxury item; Tesla made them somewhat more affordable; now everyone is making them, and Tesla’s raison d’etre is increasingly obsolete. SpaceX found ways to make launching mass into orbit a lot cheaper; now providers like United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, and BluShift are competing to enter the launch market, and SpaceX’s sector dominance is far from assured. As the market has diversified, it has also internationalized, reducing the relative influence of the cold war protagonists and opening up orbital space to smaller national players whose vision for space may not accord so neatly with the dominant American paradigm. One way to read Musk’s latter political transformations is that he can see his own obsolescence coming.
Once upon a time, Musk claimed to be a proponent of extraterrestrial humanism. He described himself as socially liberal, or politically moderate; briefly, he identified as an anarcho-syndicalist. By his own account, he voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden before making what appeared to be his grand pivot. His main public view was that humanity was so unique and potentially so fragile that making our species extinction-proof was our primary moral imperative. His plan to accomplish this involved settling Mars in order to create a planetary backup, although this idea did not originate with him. There are a number of objections to this plan, although the romanticism of the basic formulation is compelling, at least to me. Human consciousness, whatever it is, really is unusual. Why not do everything we can to protect it?
Obviously, Musk was to some extent employing the idea of this heroic mission instrumentally, as a means of justifying more or less anything; the fact that he probably also believed it is, in a sense, immaterial. But even Musk and his fellow space tycoons cannot have been so naive as to imagine that they would personally be fleeing terrestrial catastrophe, climate-related or otherwise, for the safety of Mars. The stakes and timelines involved are both too grand and too finite for that. Earth has caviar, jet skis, ketamine, and breathable air; Mars has only freezing regolith. Even a pretty comprehensively collapsed Earth-based civilization would be a lot better than Mars. Maybe hundreds or thousands of years of determined terraforming will make Mars nicer, but until then, the billionaires already have their apocalypse-proof bunkers in New Zealand. Yet it says something about the nature of this space race, this projection of humanity to the stars, that the dominant image of what might happen is not “we,” not “us,” certainly not “all mankind,” but rather a tiny handful of extremely wealthy and unusual men abandoning the doomed mass of humanity for their own personal survival.
But perhaps Musk doesn’t want to go to Mars at all. In a rather cloying 2025 interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times, fellow tech magnate Peter Thiel opines that Musk has given up on the Martian scheme. This is supposedly a result of a Thiel-brokered conversation between Musk and the Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, in which Hassabis attempted to one-up Musk by making the point that “my AI will be able to follow you to Mars.” According to Thiel, Musk at this point fell silent, cinematically. In this account, Musk has found himself stranded atop a Jenga tower of flimsy concepts. The civilizational stakes of settling Mars have been repurposed, and as always, the flexibility is the point:
Thiel: Yeah, but what does Mars mean?
Douthat: What does Mars mean?
“Mars was supposed to be a political project; it was building an alternative,” Thiel explains. “If you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the woke AI would follow you.” Sublime stupidity aside, this is structurally more or less the same argument that the Weinersmiths are making, and Grayling and Marshall, too, in their way: Our Earthly culture and institutions are not prepared for space; we are only going to transplant and replicate our problems there; we have to solve our issues at home before we are ready, practically or morally, for the privilege of becoming multiplanetary. While they may disagree about what those specific issues are, they agree that we must defeat our political opponents here before we can risk letting them escape to the rest of the solar system. There is no point in appealing to humanist unity, because there isn’t any unity to be found. We cannot be unified by a vision of interstellar transcendence; our differences are too real, too tangible, too material. Once again we are in the realm of irreducible political conflict, which is really the only place humans can ever actually live, on whichever planet.
The story of humanity in space is not over, but the reality is that Musk is probably already yesterday’s man. The apogee of his arc was most likely the chainsaw tableau onstage at CPAC — and what a pathetic apogee it was: a man in late middle age, haunted and horribly unhappy, drug-addled and gibbering, further in that moment from Mars than he had ever been. If he has a legacy in space, it is less likely to be the Martian accomplishment and more likely to be that he took Kennedy’s dream and made it tawdry, partisan, and stupid. I have been wrong before, including about Musk — he might still do it. But while critical scrutiny would always have decimated the bit about all mankind, what Elon Musk stole from me, personally, was the ability to suspend my disbelief and feel that I and all my conspecifics had some claim on the endless sky.
But the point of space is that it feels like it might actually be as big as it is. Permit me a sentimental anecdote: A few years ago, I was camping in the Sahara with a family of camel-herding nomads, living in Arabic, eating a lot of camel-based products. In the middle of the night, I awoke, needing to urinate. I shook my shoes to check for scorpions, then walked out some distance from the tents, navigating by headlamp. The shadows of sleeping, groaning camels loomed against a night sky so vast and so pure and lightless that I felt a sort of physical disorientation. And just there, arcing above me: a satellite, racing across the celestial expanse. A machine labored upon in a sterile laboratory by humans very much like myself, traveling at incredible speed some inconceivable distance away while I crawled upon the surface of my native planet. There was a “we” after all, of some sort; it could not be denied.
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