COLLECTIVE STAKES AND “EMPTY SPACE”

Antarctica is often framed as the only truly pristine place on Earth. A land with no Indigenous peoples that captures, in its melting arms, histories of a global climate stretching back thousands of years.

In 1959, the 12 nations with stakes in Antarctic exploration at the time (including the U.S., U.K., USSR, Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand) signed the Antarctic Treaty. On the surface, this treaty declared the continent a demilitarized zone preserved for scientific research, hoping to conserve its unique environment for universal good. This display of immense international collaboration—a historic first for collective conservation—was preceded by decades of ‘heroic’ expeditions into the Antarctic, aiming to explore and, in both a figurative and material sense, ‘conquer’ previously uncharted natural territory.

This is what the British Naval Captain Robert Falcon Scott attempted to do in 1912, when he took an all-white, all-male team of explorers into “The Great White South,” only to have them succumb to its harsh conditions. Of course, the impacts of this expedition rang louder than just a few men, their egos, and— as a description of their deaths from a crew member’s biography read—the “greatness of England” they represented. This expedition, like several others at the time, was designed as a “pole hunt”—a race to the South Pole meant to capture the public imagination and secure funding for the colonial scientific efforts that would follow. While Britain and other imperial states framed the objectives of this research as universal, they wielded the very act of research as a political tool. Indeed, states that didn’t already have some extent of control over the Antarctic or large sources of funding for exploration—like these pole hunts—didn’t spend resources on research in the Antarctic, and were, as a result, excluded from the aforementioned Antarctic treaty. These efforts were also distinctly racialized, both in their repeated allusions to whiteness and in how British officials privately dismissed a Japanese expedition in the same year as interloping in a white man’s continent.

Further, the treaty didn’t outright reject the claims to sovereignty any of its signees could make over the region; according to Article IV of the treaty, it merely froze the existing claims for its duration. Seven of these 12 countries still continue to claim parts of the continent as ‘their own.’

Ten years after the Antarctic Treaty, the U.S. left its first footsteps on the Moon. Those imprints were the product of nearly two decades of militaristic and scientific competition with the USSR, another party in the treaty, in what was essentially an extraterrestrial pole hunt. It is both troubling and unsurprising, therefore, that much of the same rhetoric and political action has translated from Antarctica to outer space. Academic Deondre Smiles, in The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space, discusses how Donald Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address makes this rhetoric explicit. After asserting the need for the U.S. to “embrace the next frontier, America’s Manifest Destiny in the stars,” Trump went on to say:

The language around the “unknown,” and around “settling” and “taming” reflects the strategies that states like the U.S. have long used for their settler-colonial projects, but it also highlights the motives of the Robert Scott expedition and the nationalist pride surrounding his death. In “Appropriating Space: Antarctic Imperialism and the Mentality of Settler Colonialism,” environmental historian Adrian Howkins highlights this by showing how the intense competition that preceded the treaty was unique in being a settler-colonial power struggle over ‘empty’ space.

While Mars or the Moon may not have their own Indigenous populations, our experience with Antarctica shows that domination over territorial space is just as central to the settler-colonial mindset as domination over people. We may think of space travel or exploration as a universal push for the expansion of human knowledge, but the subtext of Elon Musk’s tweets about terraforming Mars or Donald Trump’s speeches about colonizing space contains a colonial motivation that has long contributed to the brutal subjugation of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands.

In the case of Antarctica, the U.S., the U.K., and France were cementing their role as active colonizers at the time, and their narratives surrounding their expeditions strongly resembled those they used to rationalize colonialism elsewhere. These states were exploring a “new frontier,” using the region’s “marine wealth” for economic progress, and establishing themselves in an “untamed wilderness” to further the knowledge of all humanity. Decades ago, their actions mirrored the plans they now lay out for the future of space exploration.

This rhetoric of universal human progress, in the context of space travel, isn’t just superficial; it has repeatedly had tangible impacts on Indigenous peoples all over the world. Smiles points out the example of Mauna Kea, where a 30-foot space telescope is being constructed largely against the will of the Native Hawaiians living there. Subsequently, they saw increased policing, ecological degradation, and physical violence in the process of clearing human blockades that prevented the telescope’s construction. This construction is directly in line with the idea of “Terra Nullius”—already common in our parlance of space exploration—where Indigenous lands are declared “empty” as moral and legal justification for settler projects and dispossession. The same can be said for the dispossession and displacement of formerly enslaved people of quilombos in Alcântara, Brazil, and the Kokatha and Pitjantjatjara peoples in Woomera, Australia to build more launch sites.

Clearly, giving paramount importance to the singular ‘common good’ of knowledge production in our approach to outer space is harmful, as is marching forward listening only to a colonial construction of science. The question then arises: what might a more humane, even decolonial approach to space exploration look like?

A core reason why research in Antarctica continues to this day is climate change. Despite the region’s lack of large oil reserves, its glacial ice can capture dust, soot, volcanic ash, and sea salts—airborne relics of the Earth’s past. This ability makes it useful for studying climate histories, while the state of its ice caps serves as a powerful indicator of the effects of global warming. The importance of this research lies not in an abstract notion of human progress, but rather in the collective stakes people have in how we treat the Antarctic environment.

The idea of collective stakes can stretch far beyond a singular characterization in the context of space travel. Instead of thinking about universal goals, or goals that all of humanity share in their relationship with outer space, we can give more weight to the idea that there are several states, institutions, and communities of people across the planet that have distinctly different relationships with space. The former notion is one of dominance: There is a set of goals, presumably decided by entities that already hold a lot of power, that take precedence over the needs of individual communities. The latter, instead, is one of inclusion: People have their own associations with outer space, and our treatment of space and the processes we use to get to it should respect others’ relationships with this environment.

The hegemonic history of space and humanity is located in the U.S.-USSR space race, where the two states’ goals for interacting with space were centered on military development and acquiring power on an international scale. China’s space program had similar military roots in the late 1950s, when China began a ballistic missile program in response to perceived U.S. and Soviet threats.

In contrast to this military posturing by existing or to-be global superpowers, several histories of space in the Global South come from post-colonial countries aiming for rapid economic development on Earth. For example, the precursor to India’s current space program, the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR), was founded with the goal of using networks of satellites for broader agricultural data, communication and media broadcasting, remote sensing, and meteorology. Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa all started space programs with similar aims.

In addition to human development goals, however, state ambitions around space did often carry an underlying motive of gaining international recognition and power, in both a figurative and military sense. India’s space program, for example, soon moved beyond commercial space activities like navigation, pouring resources into 13 satellites now in orbit that are used by India’s armed forces as an early warning system for external military actions. By developing an additional intercontinental ballistic missile, the Indian space program entered a more explicitly combative realm too. Over the last four years especially, India and Pakistan have been engaged in a space race of their own, with both countries aiming to send manned missions into space in the near future. The potential for leveraging space travel and military power to attract international investment hasn’t been lost on states, but such military intent, even when wielded by post-colonial countries, seems antithetical to the goal of decolonizing space.

The largest state-level subversion of these ideals came from Zambia. Almost immediately after Zambia gained independence from the British in 1964, Edward Mukuka Nkoloso—a grade-school science teacher, former freedom-fighter, and the director of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy—declared his ambitions for the nation’s space program. This program, by all means, was a serious science project—Nkoloso’s own son, Mukuka Nkoloso Jr., went through its astronaut training regime in his childhood. However, at each step, the program’s publicity carried a distinctly satirical edge, subtextually hinting at goals that differed from the norm for space programs of that era. In an op-ed that a New Yorker profile called “a parody of British colonialism in Africa, refracted through a paranoid Cold War sensibility,” Nkoloso wrote:

and:

In addition to 17-year-old Mwamba and the cats, the space program included 11 other astronauts, who were known to train by spinning around a tree in an oil drum (to simulate low gravity), and walking on their hands, “the only way humans can walk on the moon.” Zambia’s space program, for all its effort and humor, failed to receive the funding it needed to take off. Nkoloso blamed this on “those imperial neocolonialists,” who were “scared of Zambia’s space knowledge.”

Namwali Serpell, the author of this profile, detailed Nkoloso’s revolutionary history and the sheer extent of his education and experiences. During Nkoloso’s time in Ndola, a town in one of the most contested parts of the British colonial territory in present-day Zambia, he joined the town’s Urban Advisory Council, and spent his days vocally attacking the colonial structures imposed upon the town’s people. He defended “equal pay for equal rights” and fiercely criticized the colonial federation for raising their Native Tax, i.e. a tax levied in order to force the people of Ndola to seek different forms of work as a part of the British colonial project. He soon gained a reputation as a powerful political agitator in the region, which aligns with his son’s suggestion that the space program was simultaneously a real science project and a cover for revolutionary organizing. Indeed, Nkoloso apparently gave military training to freedom fighters in other still-colonized African nations in the Chunga Valley, the erstwhile headquarters of the National Academy he was in charge of. Another one of Nkoloso’s colleagues confirmed this, and even claimed that Nkoloso drew many of his astronauts from the national independence party’s Youth Brigade. The Zambian space program’s association with space wasn’t commercial or military; it was nearly absurd in its complete detachment from the hegemonic views of space at the time, and revolutionary for the same reason. In a strange way, Nkoloso’s approach hints at what a decolonial relationship with space can look like. The crux of such a relationship lies not only in whose relationship it is, but also what processes they employ to materialize it.

In his conversations with reporters, Nkoloso often highlighted the subtextual role race plays in hegemonic views of space: “Our posterity, the Black scientists, will continue to explore the celestial infinity until we control the whole of outer space.” Since then, several Black artists, musicians, and scholars, in different Afrofuturist traditions, have posited associations with outer space that see it as a realm for reimagining power structures on Earth, instead of just reproducing them.

Eclectic jazz musician Sun Ra, Nkoloso’s American contemporary, built a mythology for himself as an alien abductee, who was taken to Saturn and told by aliens to “transport Black people away from the violence and racism of planet Earth.” Sun Ra’s music used technology to create ethereal textures, notably helping start the subgenre of “space jazz.” Later in the 1960s and ‘70s, artist and educator Alma Thomas took on the Space Race directly with her vibrant, abstract paintings about space. Floating among the black and blue shades of her painting Starry Night and the Astronauts is a warm-colored vessel, presumably for the astronauts she imagined. Art critic Elizabeth Hamilton called this “a statement of possibility,” leaving the segregation and oppression she and her students inhabited “in hopes of a liberated future.” More recently, Zambian artist Stary Mwaba drew from Nkoloso’s original visions to create DKALO-1, a sculpture reflecting Nkoloso’s model of a type of space capsule. Mwaba’s large-scale balloon, encased in bright-patterned local materials, was meant to treat Nkoloso’s space efforts with awe and respect as a Zambia-centric counter-narrative to the mockery it received in most mainstream coverage.

Art is but one way people have expressed their relationships with the cultural landscape of space. Many of the Indigenous peoples displaced by space research and launch projects, for example, have engaged with outer space via astronomy and spiritual practices for a long time. Anthropologist M. Jane Young noted, for example, that when asked about the moon landings, the Inuit people she interviewed said:

We didn’t know this was the first time you white people had been to the moon. Our shamans have been going for years. They go all the time ... We do go to visit the moon and moon people all the time. The issue is not whether we go to visit our relatives, but how we treat them and their homeland when we go.

In The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space, Smiles mentions how his own people, the Ojibwe, “have long standing cultural connections to the stars that influence storytelling, governance, and religious tenets.” Our present colonial treatment of outer space often disrupts these Indigenous practices. There is documented concern, for example, that the reckless deployment of satellites can obscure parts of the observable night sky, threatening Indigenous astronomy, cosmologies, and knowledge systems.

Moving towards a decolonial approach to space travel and exploration, therefore, must involve recognizing the multiplicity of associations people can have with space— especially the people whose land and labor have thus far been exploited in developing space resources. In other words, this means recognizing that “empty” space, even when truly uninhabited, is not devoid of the relationships people have with it.

The scope of this recognition cannot only be rhetorical, though it goes without saying that our vocabulary around space “colonization” and “development,” our “Manifest Destiny,” and “Terra Nullius” needs to change. We must also shift the legal and environmental frameworks within which states and companies operate, both in outer space and on Earth.

Such a central shift in operative frameworks might seem far-fetched, but it does have precedent. In a response to the Canadian Space Agency’s 2021 call for consultations from Canadian citizens, Hilding Neilson and Elena E. Ćirković highlighted the legal shortcomings in NASA’s Artemis Accords, which NASA calls a shared vision to “create a safe and transparent environment which facilitates exploration, science, and commercial activities for all of humanity to enjoy.” Neilson and Ćirković noted how the settler government in New Zealand accepted Indigenous perspectives to declare the Whanganui River as a living entity that belonged to no one, thus allowing a committee of humans—including local Maori representatives—to act as a guardian for the river. In contrast, they pointed out that the Artemis Accords allow nation-states on Earth to exploit the Moon and Mars for industrial purposes like mining while claiming to act in humanity’s collective interest. The Moon and Mars, they said, play an important relational role in the knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples from around the world, and while these relations could conceivably be respected in coexistence with mining, this would require a serious reconsideration of “what constitutes a human right to interact with the Moon and Mars.”

As for what we do on Earth: we can question the very premise of building an observational tool on Mauna Kea—colonized Native Hawaiian land. This questioning should come even before the same institutions consult the communities indigenous to Mauna Kea about where they should build, how this construction could occur without disrupting local routines and practices, what economic roles both parties play in this construction, and how the knowledge produced by the telescope could be used and disseminated. At its core, a project like the one at Mauna Kea needs to be reflexive. The production of knowledge cannot be a goal in and of itself, and more importantly, it cannot overlook the tangible ways it affects people in the process.

When a state ignores these effects, like the U.S. in Mauna Kea, it perpetuates the same form of science the colonizers of Antarctica did: one that relies on a singular notion of universal progress as a means of domination. By drawing from the multiplicity of relationships we have with outer space—and our collective stakes in it—we must instead hold the drivers of this colonial model of science to account, and look to the generative, critical, and deeply personal ways in which people conceive of, study, and use space.

SWETABH CHANGKAKOTI B’24 is blasting off again.