Look to the stars to understand the future of humankind

Space connects all the grandiose dreams of individual people, science and technology, military strategy, global politics, human endeavour and courage, and the dark side of human nature.    

Not being particularly interested in space or astronomy, I didn’t expect Tim Marshall’s new book, The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World, to be a revelatory page-turner. Still, the former BBC and Sky News current and foreign affairs journalist has an ability to explain and connect events and to plausibly project their outcomes.

This is Marshall’s third book themed around geography-as-politics. Though nations extrapolate their geostrategies into the realm of space, do their actions involve geography as the discipline is understood?

The question adds intrigue, even wonderment to the book. To an extent, space is already mapped. We have defined the various levels of orbits around Earth, we have intricate knowledge of the passages into space, the distances within our solar system and other planetary systems, domains where intolerable radiation levels prevail, and the landscapes of neighbouring and faraway planets.

These understandings have been necessary not just for high-profile missions, but also to position infrastructure we take for granted, such as weather and communication satellites, of which there are nearly 8,000.

There are also anti-satellites, or killer satellites. China, Russia and the US have them (India probably does too). 

Predictably, the US, Russia and China dominate the current “space-scape”. This is partly attributable to the Cold War space race between the former two and, later, China’s ambition to catch up and overtake its rivals in at least some areas, whether exploration, weaponisation or technology to mine on the moon — and elsewhere.

It’s also a function of budgets. Space programmes chew resources and enormous costs are involved in bringing together materials, an army of supremely qualified people, testing facilities and cutting-edge technologies. Spending on the US’s space programme, for example, totalled $62bn in 2022 — 50% more than the combined total for all other nations.

A small detail illuminates the scale of this: to launch a rocket with adequate speed to power through gravity and reach beyond Earth’s atmosphere requires an Olympic-size swimming pool of fuel. The launch process drains it in 25 seconds.   

Readers may ponder whether the fulfilment of these space ambitions, and the pursuit of yet more, proves humankind’s stupidity: we already have a beautiful planet. Only, we’re destroying it because we prefer to live wastefully and with disregard for our home. Instead of prioritising solutions here on Earth, we look beyond, into the unknown and an unknowable future.

Elon Musk may bear some responsibility for this. The Starship programme of his company, SpaceX, is regularly in the news, most recently for a failed launch. It’s tied to his idea of establishing a city on Mars in the very near future.

Depending on one’s view of Musk, he is either a visionary genius or a megalomaniac.      

An exercise of power

We shouldn’t be naive about what has driven — and still drives — new frontiers in space. Despite the commercialisation of the supply chain producing rockets and rovers, satellites, probes and equipment, and ventures such as SpaceX and space travel offerings by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, space is about geopolitical power. Hence, it is primarily an experimental playground for the military.

Everett Dolman, professor of military studies & strategy at the US Air Force Air Command, distils how the world’s three main military powers think about space: “Who controls low Earth orbit controls near Earth space. Who controls near Earth space dominates Terra. Who dominates Terra determines the destiny of humankind.”   

Still, those first early visions of space exploration have been fulfilled, so perhaps we can now dream of a new and improved mode of thinking about what all global citizens should surely share.

Initially it seems contradictory, given his role, that Dolman himself has proposed a “mutual assurance reliance” space strategy. But there’s a neat logic to this as a 180° pivot from the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” — who shoots first dies second — that has worked to diminish the risk of nuclear holocaust for the past 60 years.

“Rather than focus on the fear of losing space access, instead we should make all states party to the gains to be made from the exploitation of space to create a green future for all humankind,” Dolman says. 

The sentiment makes sense. But as Marshall points out in multiple sections of the book, warm and fuzzy outlooks are not enough. The only genuinely international treaty regulating space is the UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which is outdated and too vague in critical aspects.

The Artemis Accords, a multilateral agreement written by US space agency Nasa,  has just 25 signatories. China and Russia are noticeably missing. These two powers ostensibly co-operate in space through their own Sino-Russian agreement — though in reality, Marshall writes, there is neither trust nor information-sharing. And China, in any event, leads its own bloc via the Asia-Pacific Space Co-operation Organisation.

It’s disheartening that, as Marshall puts it, there will be no meaningful and effective treaty until the main space powers “get past the weapons testing, the killer satellites, the probable military space stations and bases”. 

How space should be explored and exploited, and how nations should interact in space itself, is still very much up in the air. Despite the sense of marvel that Marshall conveys, it’s to his credit that he regularly pulls us back to earth by pointing out enormous technological hurdles or resource gaps that have yet to be overcome to achieve expanded ambitions. Walking on Mars and mining on asteroids are many, many years away.

The biggest obstacle may lie in the usual place. Quoting the philosopher Raymond Aron, Marshall comes back to the fact that warfare capabilities are inevitably considered paramount: “Short of a revolution in the heart of man and the nature of states, by what miracle could interplanetary space be preserved from military use?”  

The Future of Geography is a propulsive read. It’s also made me look at the night sky with renewed wonder. The book explains how far we’ve gone, and what we are doing up there. But it can’t answer a more emotive question: how far do we yet have to go?

The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World, by Tim Marshall (published by Elliott & Thompson, 2023)