WeeklyWorker

13.02.2025
All that the astronauts did on the moon was plant the American flag, shoot some amateur film and carry back a few bags of rocks

Flags on Mars

In his inauguration speech Donald Trump talked of extending America’s “manifest destiny” into space and planting the “Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars”. Jack Conrad says the left would be well advised not to fall for the hype

Donald Trump’s aim of landing American astronauts on Mars within the next four years clearly delighted Elon Musk. He gave it an instant two-thumbs-up. Musk stands not only to make shedloads more money from lucrative government contracts: he sees this as a vital step towards establishing a human colony on the planet. A lifetime passion.1

However, the four-year time frame is far from realistic. After all, because of repeated delays in Nasa’s Artemis programme, there has not even been a return to the moon. Last time was Apollo 17 in 1972. But, whereas the moon is reachable within about three days, it takes a minimum of six months to get to Mars. Because of the huge distances involved, there are only two effective launch windows open during Trump’s presidency: late 2026 and late 2028.

Musk’s Starship is ideal for such a mission in terms of lift, cost and planned production run. However, it is obviously still under test and development. Flight 7, on January 17, successfully lifted off from Starbase in Texas, but ended eight minutes, 27 seconds later with what rocket engineers call ‘disassembly’ - ie, an explosion - and the release of 95 tons of metal and nitrogen oxide pollutants into the upper atmosphere. So maybe an uncrewed mission in 2026? Most likely not though.

What about 2028? Leave aside Space X’s Starship: there needs to be multiple strides forward in life support technology. Astronauts have to be shielded from deadly solar radiation and provision must be made for medical care, hygiene, water, food supplies and overcoming the inevitable psychological problems. That is, if astronauts are to return happy and healthy to Earth after more than two years of isolation. Remember, no real-time communication, nor any chance of rescue in the event of things going wrong.

More realistic would be a first crewed mission within 10 years - the sort of time frame set by John F Kennedy’s 1961 ‘moon speech’. Even that would be a breathtaking technological achievement.

Meanwhile, there is America’s ongoing plan to put a space station in high moon orbit and build a moon base - the Gateway programme (known informally as the Tollbooth). Some time in 2027 an Artemis space craft is due to head off to the moon with the initial modules and components. Perhaps a year later, another Artemis will deliver the first astronauts to the space station, from where regular moon landings will be launched. Once that gets underway, a permanent surface base would, stage by stage, be locked and bolted together - perhaps at Shackleton Crater near the lunar south pole, which is known to harbour water ice. Moon base would support a team of four astronauts for up to a week at a time.2 With such an outpost up and running, the engineering, endurance and survival techniques and equipment needed for a Mars mission in the mid-late 2030s can be tested and perfected with relative confidence.

However, it is clear that Nasa is in a mess. Leave aside purging the agency of Trump’s ‘diversity, equality, inclusion and accessibility’ bugbear, not to mention the two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, stranded aboard the International Space Station due to the failure of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. There is the moon. Why does Nasa need an orbiter? Why not go direct? Space X’s Starship could, once it is fully tried and tested, do that, if, of course, it was equipped with a suitable lander. But Nasa threw money at the so-called ‘National Team’ - a consortium consisting of Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Draper Labs, Boeing and some other smaller companies. Political sway decided. Robert Zubrin, a dedicated space wonk, damningly argues that, unlike Apollo, Artemis is “not a purpose-driven programme. It is a vendor-driven programme”. He says that the Apollo programme “spent money in order to do things”, while “Artemis is doing things in order to spend money”.3

Given the orbiter’s $6 billion price tag, incompatible equipment, the duplication of effort and what is seen as painfully slow progress, some, including Musk, demand a ‘straight to Mars’ approach. Why bother with the boring old moon. And, whereas once he kept his criticisms private, he’s now gone full XXX. On Christmas Day, for example, Musk issued this blunt message: “The Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient …. Something entirely new is needed.” Later he added: “No, we’re going straight to Mars. The moon is a distraction.”4

Of course, since January 20 he is no longer just a private citizen (who happens to be the world’s richest person). Musk now possesses unique political leverage within the Trump administration and is tasked with cutting government spending by $2 trillion. Starliner, Artemis, Gateway and Nasa itself must be targets for his axe. We shall see.

Basically, today’s US space programme is Trump’s space programme going back to his first administration. Compared with what had gone before, he oversaw a definite shift in emphasis. Trump told Nasa to establish an overwhelming military superiority in near space and to simultaneously press ahead with deep space missions. The Donald loves display.

He certainly has no time for the long-term considerations, that is clear. The Asteroid Redirect Mission was defunded in March 2017. Designed to bring an asteroid into the moon’s orbit not only with a view to studying it, ARM would be used to develop the technology necessary to head off an asteroid that threatens the Earth (65 million years ago an asteroid smashed into what is now the Gulf of Mexico, sent a huge plume of ash and debris into the upper atmosphere and triggered the extinction of roughly three-quarters of all animal species, including the dinosaurs5).

No less myopically, Trump ordered a $100 million cut in the already modest Earth science programme. The DSCOVER, OCO‑3, PACE and CLARREO Pathfinder missions were scrapped - all devoted to monitoring global warming.6 But, when it came to the militarisation of space, Trump ordered a 10% spending hike. And, further pandering to the top brass, Trump formed the United States Space Force, which now stands alongside the traditional branches of the US military - army, navy, marines, airforce and coast guard. The reasoning is straightforward: who commands near space commands the whole world.

Understandably, Russia, China, Japan, the EU, India and the UK all try to compete. Each country/bloc now has independent capabilities. Russia, of course, continues within the Soviet-era paradigm of regular manned flights, rocket launches, satellites, etc. Nonetheless, Dmitry Rogozin, director general of Roscosmos, Russia’s space corporation, has outlined plans for crewed moon landings beginning by 2030. Cosmonauts would live in an inflatable module. In pursuit of this ambitious goal Russia commissioned the new Yenisei super heavy booster with the capacity to lift 27 tons into lunar orbit.7 Yet, given the parlous state of the Russian economy, most observers express strong doubts.8

Over the last few years, officials from the European Space Agency have likewise vaguely talked of establishing a permanent moon base, which would, once again, be located near the south pole.8 The claim being that it will provide a staging post for getting Europeans to Mars by 2040.9

China, however, ought to be taken rather more seriously, when it comes to space. Through spending big time - around $19.89 billion in 2024 - China has undoubtedly hauled itself into the premier league. Progress has been steady and sure. In October 2003 the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft orbited Earth 21 times. Yang Liwei became the country’s first taikonaut. In September 2011 China established its first space laboratory (abandoned in 2013) and in May 2018 the country made the first soft landing on the dark side of the moon. A few days later its rover, Yutu 2, began exploring the giant Von Kármán crater. Not long after that, in 2020, China established the permanently crewed Tiangong space station. The third and final module was successfully added two years later.

Displaying an impressive confidence in the future, Chinese officials have plans for a crewed moon landing in 2030 and eventually going to Mars. Admittedly, this owes more to ambition rather than hard commitment. China’s Mars time frame lies somewhere between 2040 and 2060. Nonetheless, it is determined to catch up with and eventually overtake the US. The Hong Kong-based space consultant, Blaine Curcio, says China’s space programme is “perhaps now only 10 to 15 years behind the US’s in terms of technology”.10 There has, despite that, been talk of getting there by 2033.11 However, I take it as that - talk.

Meanwhile, US expenditure on space still more than equals that of the rest of the world put together.12

Economics

Private capital has been central to US space programmes from the start. But, where there were once multiple Nasa contractors, now private companies put cargoes and crews into orbit under their own brand name: eg, Space X, Blue Origin, Boeing and Sierra Space. And not only do we now have reusable launchers and disposable satellites: the cost of putting stuff into space has dropped massively. Titan II could launch a kilogramme into low orbit for $30,600, Saturn V $5,400 and the much vaunted Space Shuttle a whopping $65,000. With Space X’s Falcon Heavy it is a mere $1,500.13

Such dramatic cost reductions have made the commercialisation of space a viable prospect. Space tourism is being heavily marketed to the super-rich - a cash-strapped Russia was selling trips to the International Space Station for between $20 and $25 million. That came to an end in 2010. However, Space X, Blue Origin and Boeing each have their own plans for cislunar tourism and there is a long queue ready and waiting to go. The promise is that they will be sent looping round the moon and back to Earth, awed and “forever changed”.14

There are other commercial plans afoot too. Companies such as Deep Space and Planetary Resources have well connected billionaire investors and the idea is to capture and direct mineral-rich asteroids into Earth orbit. About 15,000 asteroids have been identified for potential mining activity. One, 16 Psyche, purportedly contains $700 quintillion worth of gold - “enough for every person on Earth to receive about $93 billion”.15 Believe that and you’ll believe anything. Obviously the asteroid-mining advocates appear to be ignorant of the labour theory of value, going back to Adam Smith and David Riccardo (leave aside Karl Marx). They also appear to be ignorant of the elementary laws of supply and demand (going back to James Steuart16).

Crudely put, double the supply of gold and you halve the price of gold.17 Today the value of all gold ever mined is about $7.5 trillion. Flooding the market with $700 quintillion - that is, 700 billion billions - would quickly reduce the value of a kilogram of gold to the equivalent of cardboard! And the idea of asteroid-mining trillionaires distributing their lucre equally to “every person on Earth” is touching, but no less fanciful.

There is, after all, the little problem of getting such an object back to Earth - even if it comes in bits and pieces - that is, without wreaking massive destruction, as it slams into the planet. 16 Psyche is much bigger than London and has an estimated mass of near (2.287±0.070) x 1019 kg. For the likes of you and me that means 16 Psyche weighs one hell of a lot and can potentially cause one hell of a lot of damage.

Nonetheless, such ventures have been given the green light by the 2019 Space Commerce Free Enterprise Act. It allows US companies to circumvent parts of the Outer Space Treaty agreed with the USSR back in 1967. Under the terms of that treaty not only nuclear weapons were banned from space: so too were territorial claims. And yet mineral-rich asteroids are being claimed by space capitalists at this very moment - perhaps the seeds of future space wars fought by rival buccaneer outfits.18

Mining asteroids comes with the promise, as might be expected, of doing away with the dreadful air, water and soil pollution caused by normal mining operations here on Earth. Even the child labour involved would apparently be done away with. Again believe that and you’ll believe anything. Say a chunk of 16 Psyche is crash-landed into Australia’s Gibson Desert. Leave aside the impact debris: the gold would still have to be extracted using existing mining methods. Frankly, though, I am sceptical. I would expect the cost of extracting a kilogram of gold here on Earth to be far cheaper in terms of labour inputs than asteroid mining for the conceivable future.

Colonies

We need to be sceptical too when it comes to plans for colonising the moon. As its name might suggest, the Moon Society, founded in 2000, is “dedicated to promoting large-scale human exploration, research and settlement of the moon”.19 Jeff Bezos, boss of Blue Origin, envisages linking up with Nasa and the European Space Agency to found a moon colony “for human settlers and heavy industry”.20 Newt Gingrich even canvassed the idea of a 13,000-strong colony and the moon becoming the 51st American state.21 Doubtless there will be exploratory missions, even bases. But heavy industry and a self-sustaining population? Unlikely any time soon, if ever.

True, the moon has water, metals and rare-earth minerals and is well suited for generating solar power (there is no air, no clouds). Perhaps that would allow for making rocket fuels, establishing hydroponic gardens and specialised industrial processes impossible here on Earth. However, the idea of exporting anything back to Earth on scale would simply be prohibitively expensive. On the contrary, any moon base or colony would be dependent on constant supplies from the home planet. Without that it is death.

The moon’s low gravity, toxic regolith and lack of an atmosphere to provide protection from solar radiation, represents little or no problem for robots. That cannot be said of us flesh-and-blood human beings. Low gravity, about a sixth of the Earth’s, leads to a steady loss in bone density and many other physiological problems besides: “muscles in the arms and legs experience atrophy, the cardiovascular system is compromised, the immune system is suppressed, and increased cranial pressure leads to vision problems and neurological impairments”.22 Things can be mitigated through rigorous exercise, but only marginally. Our bodies are intrinsically adapted to Earth.

To avoid the sun’s radiation colonists would certainly have to live in specially shielded modules - that or underground in caves. Nonetheless, the chances of getting bronchitis and cancers would considerably increase, not least due to toxic moon dust. Apollo astronauts experienced respiratory problems, itching eyes and sore throats. Apollo 17 crew member Harrison Schmitt called it “lunar hay fever.”23 He spent a total of 75 hours on the moon. Colonists would face far worse, their stay on the moon would, after all, be rather longer.

For any society to survive it must produce … and reproduce. That is true with the means of production, and it is also true biologically. Mice and medaka fish have been successfully mated in space, but, to put it mildly, “uncertainty remains around the feasibility and safety of human conception, gestation and labor in space”.24 The likelihood of women having spontaneous abortions and stillbirths must be very great indeed. No healthy lunar babies, no self-sustaining lunar colony.

Even if the problem of biological reproduction was somehow overcome, anyone born on the moon would not be able to function normally here on Earth due to the drastically different gravitational levels. Such people could conceivably evolve into an entirely separate species if they survived long enough as a population - the stuff of countless sci-fi novels.

Anyway, essentially the same problems are there with the Red Planet. Yes, Mars is the most Earth-like of all the planets and moons in our solar system. But that is not saying much. Gravity is about 38% of the Earth’s and there is an atmosphere or sorts. But actually Mars is virtually airless - the mainly (95%) carbon dioxide atmosphere is 100 times less dense than Earth’s. That counts as a laboratory vacuum. The virtual absence of an atmosphere also means that Mars has no ozone layer to shield the planet’s surface from solar radiation. Once again, therefore, the safest place for colonists to live would be underground.

Barren, pitted with craters, the planet is also prone to gigantic dust storms. And Martian dust is just as sticky and toxic as lunar dust. It would not find its way into human lungs through breathing on the surface - of course not. No, it would come from “airlocks” and “spacesuits”.25

To make matters worse, Mars is hellishly cold. On average the equatorial zone is 60 degrees Celsius below zero. Sometimes the temperature falls to -100˚. At its warmest temperatures can nudge up to just over 0˚. Antarctica is far more hospitable. Even an Earth plunged into a nuclear winter would be paradise in comparison - there would still be oxygen, oceans, a protective magnetic field. The only reason Mars is not covered in thick ice sheets is lack of surface water and lack of atmosphere.

True, there is plenty of iron and a little magnesium, titanium and aluminium.26 But, as far as we know, nothing exists there that cannot be made or obtained infinitely more cheaply here on Earth. However, the problems with Mars do not end with health, economics and climate. There is politics too. Musk’s stated goal is of a million-strong self-governing colony, which will escape the Earth’s climate crisis and preserve human civilisation in the event of ecological collapse on Earth by spreading from planet to planet … all the way to the stars.

Decisions will be made through “direct democracy”. That is, referendums, tick boxes and weak or no political parties. In fact, “direct democracy” means decisions being made by the person asking the question!27 In his half-crazed imagination that will, of course, be Musk himself - a recipe for one-man dictatorship. On X, Musk even called himself “Emperor of Mars”.28 Obviously a joke, but all jokes, if they are going to be funny, must have more than an element of truth to them.

His whole project, so he says, will take 40‑100 years before full realisation. Well before that, of course, Mars needs glass domes, power stations and an assortment of basic living fundamentals. After that infrastructure is complete, Musk then expects an “explosion of entrepreneurial opportunity”. Mars will require “everything from iron foundries to pizza joints”, he quips. Nonetheless, Musk has the honesty to admit that, to begin with, life on Mars will be “difficult, dangerous - a good chance you’ll die”.29

In fact, there is absolutely no chance of his project working out. Yes, as with the moon, human landings will doubtless happen sometime. There will be initial media hype and excitement. After that, though, popular interest should be expected to wane. But a million people on Mars? No - not even in a million years.

Frontiers

Nonetheless, Trump is impatient. He wants the Stars and Stripes planted on Martian soil during his presidency. Given this is his second term, that means, as already argued, an altogether improbable late 2028.

Clearly, DJT, like JFK before him, longs to put an indelible mark on history. It almost comes off the pages of Niccolò Machiavelli: “Nothing brings a prince more prestige than great campaigns and striking demonstrations.”30

Telstar, Alan Shepard, the 1969 Apollo landing, Space Shuttle, Space X, a return to the moon, mission Mars - all resonate with American national mythology. When captain James T Kirk of the USS Enterprise spoke of space being the “final frontier”, he not only referred to his 23rd century present, but America’s post-colonial past.

After 1783 and the Peace of Paris, Americans “shifted” from being a seaward-orientated people, with European preoccupations and a reliance on Atlantic supplies. Instead of being a European outpost, they increasingly looked west to taking hold of the interior - “that vast, tempting, unexplored wilderness”.31 From then on the US welcomed successive waves of poor and downtrodden Europeans to its shores ... and ever expanding frontier lands.

While many migrants settled in the great cities of the east and north-east as proletarians, millions headed west: “To the west, to the west, to the land of the free” (19th century English folk song). The native population was either subjected to genocide or driven from the best lands by wave after wave of these incomers - trappers, traders, adventurers, prospectors, loggers ... but above all small farmers. Alike Jeffersonian populism, Abraham Lincoln’s Yankeedom and Hollywood epics turned this class into a national icon: hence Daniel Boone, Davie Crockett, Bill Cody and the films of John Huston and Clint Eastwood. Dominant American ideology still lauds individualism, movement, expansion and internal colonisation ... and the final frontier is now projected into the vastness of space.

As already mentioned, in 1961 JF Kennedy made his famous speech before congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”32 Kennedy spoke during the cold war. And in that atmosphere of artificially generated superpower rivalry every success for the Mercury, Gemini and finally the Apollo programme - annual cost around 1% of US GDP - generated rapturous popular enthusiasm. Of course, the US always possessed a huge technological and material advantage over the Soviet Union. Indeed, arguably, from the 1960s onwards, the USSR fell economically “under American hegemony”.33

Kennedy was not around when Apollo’s Eagle lander module touched down on the Sea of Tranquillity. He died in Dallas, Texas, on November 22 1963, killed by an assassin’s bullet. So it was Richard Nixon, the 37th president, who, on July 20 1969, made “the most historic telephone call ever made from the White House”. He addressed Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon ... and an estimated 600 million TV viewers.34

Getting to Mars is going to be hugely expensive. Mainstream estimates vary from $100 billion to $250 billion over the time span of the whole project (though I have come across figures as high as $1 trillion35 and as low as $1.5 billion and $420 million annually “to keep it going” - the latter figure unsurprisingly coming from Robert Zubrin, co-founder of the Mars Society36).

Despite the preordained criticisms of such costs, high or low, the likes of Trump, Musk and Zubrin bank on the undiminished popularity of space spectacles - a YouGov poll in 2023 found 57% of Americans supported sending astronauts to Mars, with only 19% against.37 Leave aside America’s frontier heroes. There are sci-fi novels going from HG Wells’ The first men in the moon (1901) to Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996) by Kim Stanley Robinson. Crucially there are the long-running Star trek and Star wars TV and film franchises. Because of such mythopoeia, space is commonly thought of as ripe for human colonisation. It is the new America, the final frontier, over which naturally, America claims special responsibility. It, after all, is the quintessential frontier nation.

Space therefore constitutes one of those few elements around which national unity can be constructed in the US. As Zubrin remarks, Mars “isn’t just about science. It’s about America. It’s about who we are. Are we still a nation of pioneers, leaders of the free world, a people whose great deeds are celebrated not just in museums, but in newspapers? The program needs to be our affirmative answer to that existential question.”38

Moreover, without moving into space there is the supposed inevitability that problems here on Earth will continue to stack-up to the point of collapse. According to Rick W Tumlinson, co-founder of the US-based Space Frontier Foundation, unless we humans make the leap into space colonisation, we will “begin to slide into a new dark age”.39 He is far from alone. Because of “climate change, overdue asteroid strikes, epidemics and population growth, our own planet is increasingly precarious ... so humans must leave Earth and colonise a new planet soon,” reckoned Stephen Hawking.40 Bezos worries that Earth will “run out of resources”, and that by the time we realise we need the infrastructure to get off-planet it will be too late to build it.41

Germs and labour

In my opinion all this is bunk. The suggestion that space is the modern equivalent of crossing the Atlantic and ‘discovering’ the New World in 1492 is altogether unconvincing. The Americas, perhaps even before the end of the last ice age, supported abundant human life. Estimates of first habitation vary widely - “from 11,500 to 50,000 years ago”.42 Nevertheless, whenever people first arrived, they flourished and settled everywhere from Alaska in the far north to Tierra del Fuego in the far south. They also produced their own high civilisations: eg, the Aztec and Inca empires.

Christopher Columbus, and the European conquistadors who followed him over the next 30 years, claimed vast swathes of territory and within next to no time allowed the Spanish monarchy to get its hands on unprecedented riches. The native people were enslaved en masse and gold and silver flooded into Madrid’s bulging coffers. America, confirms the distinguished French historian, Fernand Braudel, represented the “treasure of treasures”.43

There was, however, a fundamental problem: labour. Everything comes back to labour, Marx stressed in Capital. Because of Eurasia’s much greater population densities the Spanish had developed a certain immunity to a wide range of diseases: measles, typhus, tuberculosis, smallpox, influenza, etc. Not the native Americans. European conquistadors came with their flintlocks, horses, steel swords and armour ... and germs.

Hernando Cortés beat the fiercely militaristic Aztec empire not only because his forces possessed immense technological advantages: in 1520 half the Aztec population - including the emperor, Cuitláhuac - died from a raging infection, which miraculously spared the Spanish. “By 1618,” writes Jared Diamond, “Mexico’s initial population of about 20 million had plummeted to about 1.6 million.”44 The same happened when Francisco Pizarro and his raggle-taggle army of 168 men took on the millions of the Inca empire in Peru. Smallpox arrived just ahead of them and decimated the native population, killing both the emperor, Huayna Capac, and his designated successor. Throughout the Americas it is estimated that around 95% of the native population died from European diseases.

Germs facilitated European conquest, but destroyed virtually the entire potential workforce. And without labour the Americas were as good as useless (what remained of the native slaves would annoyingly take flight into what was for them the familiar surrounding hills and forests). Labour therefore had to be recruited from the outside if the Americas were to be transformed from an ever-diminishing object of plunder into a self-expanding source of profit. After indentured European labour was tried and largely failed, the richest classes amongst the colonialists - and their Old World investors and state backers - turned to systematically buying black slaves.

They were typically purchased from the most advanced areas in west Africa (peasants made the best slaves, hunter-gatherers tended to go native and become Maroons). And, though you would not have thought it, given the British establishment’s gushing nonsense about the leading role played by William Wilberforce - an independent MP, evangelical Christian and lifelong opponent of revolution and all radical causes - in the abolition of the slave trade, it should never be forgotten that slaves resisted, escaped, fought back, and, with Toussaint Louverture’s revolution, they established their own St Dominique/Haiti free state.45

Only after that seismic event - a Caribbean October 1917 - did the UK parliament vote for abolition of the slave trade (not slavery). Of course, highly respectable British plantation owners, including the Church of England, made themselves fabulously wealthy through the exploitation of slave labour.

Some 12 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic (one and a half million perished during the ‘middle passage’ and an unknown, but surely even greater, number died prior to embarkation). These poor wretches partially substituted for the ghosts of the native Americans. African slaves were central to the plantation system - tobacco, coffee, but above all, sugar. Overwork, pitiless exploitation and malnutrition took a terrible toll. Up to a fifth of the slaves died within the first year. No problem: the labour force “could be replenished by further slave purchases”.46

Only after two or three centuries of superhuman efforts - half driven by base greed, half by desperate yearnings for freedom - were the Americas reinvented and transformed into Europe’s other half. Europe and the Americas fused into a single system - but one whose centre of gravity inexorably shifted from east to west. By the dawn of the 20th century the precocious US ‘child’ had already surpassed its aged ‘parent’. The defeat of the Germany-Italy-Japan axis in 1945 certainly saw the transfer of world domination away from the exhausted British empire and the beginning of the so-called ‘American century’. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the US as the sole global superpower.

Ecosystem

Neither the moon nor Mars are in any way modern equivalents of the Americas. Leave aside the lack of atmosphere and the absence of flora, fauna and running water: there is no native labour, nor is there a realistic chance of substantial population transfers. Zubrin writes of taking people on one-way trips to Mars at a rate similar to visits to the International Space Station - permanently manned since November 2000. To date 280 individuals have visited the facility.47 However, some have made repeated trips, so we might put the total number of visits at 400. That would mean roughly 20 new Mars colonists arriving per annum.

But who would seriously volunteer to spend the rest of their lives confined most of the time to a system of caves or interconnected brick-covered domes, with the prospect of endless toil ahead of them? Zubrin’s colony is expected to obtain its water from the underground permafrost, practise CO2 agriculture in flimsy greenhouses and produce all their basic industrial needs. However, the Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona, designed as a test bed for a Mars colony, was not able to produce either enough food or enough oxygen.48 Moreover, a 2014 report by MIT researchers warns that Mars colonists would soon be dying - from suffocation, starvation, dehydration or incineration. The analysis also concludes that a fleet of 15 Falcon heavy rockets - costing around $4.5 billion - would be needed to support just the first four Mars colonists.49

Of course, Musk proposes the idea of thousands of Starships landing tens of thousands of people, with a view to creating a metropolis that will “preserve the light of consciousness” in the event of civilisational collapse here on Earth. An interplanetary D-Day. But, while Operation Overlord landed 150,000 allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, they were supplied and resupplied by ships capable of carrying 10,000 tons of cargo from the other side of the Channel in a matter of hours. Starships might be able to carry 100 tons from Earth … but they would take between 6 and 18 months in transit. Not enough could be delivered … by far.

Regardless of the figures, no Martian colony could possibly survive a collapse on Earth. Technological civilisation “requires a vast division of labour”. Given the multitude of components and alloys that go into an Apple watch, it is unlikely that any Martian colony could produce one, or “even a wristwatch battery, let alone an iPhone”.50

Hence Musk’s vaulting projections of a million people on Mars and the promise of phenomenal returns are quite frankly risible. There is no chance of plunder, profit, let alone sustainability. The chatter about mining “gold, silver, uranium, platinum, palladium and other precious metals” is just that - chatter.51 Talk of Martian cities and towns acting as humanity’s technological driver, etc owes everything to quackery and nothing to a rational investment of labour time. The relative unit costs of doing virtually anything on Mars would be a thousand, a million times greater than on Earth. Ferrying things back here, to Earth, is technologically feasible, of course, but commercial madness to the nth degree.

Nor do space fantasies stand in the noble tradition of Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein - a ridiculous suggestion, made by Dr James Williams of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.52 All that the astronauts did on the moon was plant the American flag, shoot some amateur film, leave some dusty footprints and carry back a few bags of rocks. Apollo was neither about economic returns nor scientific discovery. It was a propaganda triumph over the Soviet Union - a second-rate superpower.

What the moon missions of China, Russia, Europe, Japan and India announce is that they too possess engineering prowess, they too have the surplus wealth needed and they too should command global respect. Such missions are certainly designed to generate a giddy popular enthusiasm. But, even with the additional bonus of eventually going on to Mars, once the first crews arrive, enthusiasm rapidly dwindles. After the first two Apollo missions the American public tended to lose interest. Subsequent moon landings did not command the same rapt attention, that is for sure. Conceivably the same phenomenon might see a future US administration concluding that Mars projects are simply a waste of public money.

Crewed Mars missions have no immediate economic or scientific worth, that is for sure - the overwhelming consensus. Let me cite three US space establishment old hands. Douglas Osheroff, a Nobel prize-winning physicist, who sat on the committee which investigated the 2003 Columbia accident, is perfectly frank: “Right now there is no economic value in going to Mars.”53 Ed Weiler, former assistant advisor of Nasa’s office of space science, is equally candid: “These missions will not be driven by science.”54 Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and member of George W Bush’s Mars commission, admits that if “pure science” was the purpose, “it’s obvious that you would send robots”.55 Compared with astronauts, robots are 50 or 100 times less expensive.

No-one with a modicum of scientific knowledge ever doubted that various metals can be found on Mars. There is also frozen surface water at the poles and beneath the planet’s rocky surface. We do not need astronauts travelling in a tiny metal box over 60 million miles to tell us that. Spectroscopic telescopes, satellite cameras and rovers long ago proved that.

Some breezily talk of terraforming.56 Mars might conceivably be artificially warmed with giant space mirrors, water-rich asteroids could be bought down to the surface and nuclear-powered plants may one day pump out perfluorocarbons (super greenhouse gases). But, before water once again runs on the surface and recreates seas and lakes, much time would have to pass: perhaps a hundred thousand years. Mars would, despite that, still remain cold, alien and thoroughly inhospitable to life as we know it on Earth - except for micro-organisms.

So, once again, hidden dangers. Each one of us hosts 100 trillion micro-organisms. They constitute our “extended genome”.57 While Mars rovers are sterilised, that is impossible with us humans. Micro-organisms are vital for our digestive system, etc. Hence we are bound to contaminate Mars. And micro-organisms are in turn bound to evolve on Mars - if it is terraformed - maybe into forms against which we, neither on Mars nor on Earth, possess immunological defences. Note, the returning Apollo 11 astronauts were kept in quarantine for 21 days, having returned from a sterile moon in 1969.

Worshippers of science doggedly insist that going into space is the one sure way to escape the usual list of so-called intractable problems mounting up here on Earth: eg, war, overpopulation, hunger, growing inequality, global warming and resource depletion. For them technology holds the solution to virtually everything. By the same measure the huge exertions required for space colonisation would encourage humanity to leave behind parochial concerns and become themselves.

Isaac Asimov, the celebrated 20th century science fiction writer, touchingly hoped that “cooperation in something large enough to fire the hearts and mind” - like a Mars mission - would make people “forget the petty quarrels that have engaged them for thousands of years in wars over insignificant scraps of earthly territory”.58 Carl Sagan expressed similar sentiments: “For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.”59 Ray Bradbury, author of The Martian chronicles, was no less embarrassing: “The moment we land on Mars all the people of the world will weep with joy.”60

Marxism does not doubt the benefits that can come from cooperation, the desire to explore or overcoming parochial concerns. But cooperation, exploration and overcoming parochial concerns must be examined historically and contextualised socially; not treated in a manner which universalises the American dream and Elon Musk.

Scattered around the Indian Ocean coast, in India and Pakistan, the Philippines, and Malaysia - marking the southern route out of Africa and the “beachcombing” trail to Australia - there are genetically distinct “remnants” of the original homo sapiens.61 Having arrived between 80,000 and 75,000 years ago, they often liked what they found. With the subsequent expansion in population numbers and pressure on natural resources, some immediate descendants would trek off to the next suitable location along the coast. But enough were perfectly happy to stay firmly put.

Nor should it be forgotten that until recent times many groups of hunter-gatherers contentedly enjoyed what some would describe as a primitive existence (others might be tempted to call it idyllic). Such was their mastery of the local environment - yes, through cooperation and exploration - that necessary labour could be reduced to a couple of hours. The rest of their day was spent eating, story-telling, playing with the children, dancing, etc. Why move under such benevolent circumstances?

Nor should technological progress be viewed as linear. After 1450 China scuppered its ocean-going fleet of big treasure ships and dismantled its shipyards (mechanical clocks and water-driven spinning machines were also abandoned). Between 1600 and 1853 Japan virtually eliminated what had up till then been a lucrative line in the production of guns. In the 1880s legislation put a stop to the introduction of public electric street lighting in London. Jared Diamond provides other examples of technological “reversals”, which occurred during prehistory. Aboriginal Tasmanians abandoned bone tools and fishing, aboriginal Australians may have abandoned the bow and arrow, Torres Islanders canoes, Polynesians pottery, etc.62

There are materialist explanations for all such seemingly aberrant behaviour; but clearly teleological notions of an inevitable progression from flint axes to landing humans on Mars are quite erroneous.

Science

Marxists have always had a positive attitude towards science and technology. But we do not privilege science and technology or take an uncritical view. Motivation, application and consequences must all be thoroughly interrogated. Neither science nor technology are neutral. So it is wrong to conflate scientific and technological progress with social progress (a mistake which joins ‘official communism’, Silicon Valley billionaires and so-called leftwing accelerationists).

The main locomotive of history is class struggle and the constant striving for human freedom: eg, the Athenian citizen-peasant revolution of 508-507 BCE, the 73-71 BCE Spartacus uprising, the 1381 peasant revolt, the Hussites of 14th century Bohemia, the 1789 French Revolution, Chartism, the First International, the 1871 Paris Commune, the 19th century democratic breakthrough in Europe, the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Development of the productive forces and the rational application of science create the objective basis for generalised human freedom and the rounded development of each individual. But capitalism does not do that. Capitalism skews progress - it performs technological miracles, while simultaneously leaving millions in poverty. Capitalism perverts science - not only by bending it to the lopsided, narrow and demeaning dictats of profit, but by turning it against humanity, to the extent of threatening our very survival.

The insights, ingenuity and resources of science have been channelled into ways of killing and destroying on an almost unimaginable scale: carpet-bombing, gas chambers, nuclear warheads, chemical and biological weapons. Walter Benjamin therefore damningly wrote: “If the natural use of productive forces is impeded by the property system, then the increase in technological means, in speed, in sources of energy will press towards an unnatural use. This is found in war.”63 Hence for him revolutions are not so much about speeding up the train of progress, “but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake”.64

The fact of the matter is that the US space business is a branch, or extension, of the military-industrial complex. Indeed there is a military-space-industrial complex. What is true for the US is true for Russia, China, the EU, Japan and India too. Satellites, rockets, tracking stations, etc owe far more to military requirements for spying, pinpoint targeting, the delivery of weapons of mass destruction, real-time command and battle communications than so-called pure science.

Loring Wirbel, a peace activist and expert in space technology, shows that even back in the 1950s the US “civilian satellite programme served as a cover for a wide-ranging spy satellite programme”.65 Nowadays, the US military relies on space technology, including commercial systems, which by their very nature have a dual use.

Take the Global Positioning System (GPS) of satellites, which allows motorists, seafarers, airline crews and even hill walkers to locate themselves to within a few feet. But, however welcome, this is merely a by-product. It should never be forgotten that GPS has overriding military functions. When a Ukrainian Storm Shadow missile hits a Russian command bunker with pin-point accuracy, that is GPS at work. When a vehicle suspected of carrying Hamas militants is blasted to pieces by an Israeli drone strike in Gaza, that is GPS at work. When precision bombs slammed into Baghdad in 2003, that was GPS at work.

Indeed the US military boasts that during the invasion of Iraq 60% of all aerial bombardment was accounted for by GPS-guided bombs. The US deployed not so much airpower as spacepower. As former US airforce secretary James Roche triumphantly announced, concluding an April 2003 speech, “The war in space has already begun.”66

Running alongside mission Mars and the highfalutin language of discovery, human adventure and manifest destiny lurks a sinister agenda of ensuring total US domination of space. The US military-space-industrial complex has tested all manner of exotic kinetic and laser weapons. And, of course, Trump issued one of his countless executive orders on January 27 2025 giving the go-ahead to a “next-generation missile defense shield” that can “defend” the US against “any foreign aerial attack on the homeland”. He has called it “the Iron Dome of America” - obviously a direct reference to Israel’s successful Iron Dome.

However, to scale that up to US proportions would be insanely expensive. A $2,470 trillion figure has been cited. Leave aside the branding: what appears to be on the table is, among other things, creating a system of monitors and sensors in space and giving them teeth with space- and ground-based interceptor missiles. The promise is that even the most advanced hypersonic ICBMs can be stopped.67

There is another aspect to mission Mars, which cannot be ignored. The US Mars project, like the rest of the military-space-industrial complex, constitutes a so-called third department of production (the other two being the production of the means of production and the production of the means of consumption). Department three allows capitalism to guarantee “maximum” self-expansion from the firm basis of the “minimum” consumption of the relatively impoverished masses.68 Their limited ability to purchase the means of consumption no longer constitutes a barrier.

Turning the production of the means of destruction into a system of profit and self-expansion through state purchases effectively obliterates the distinction between consumption and destruction. This is possible precisely because for capital the purpose of production - the end aim - is not human consumption of use-values according to need: rather it is self-expansion. Problems of real use, and therefore real consumption, are overcome (though not eliminated) through the unlimited ability of the state to generate artificial demand and purchase waste - ie, the means of destruction - through credit and taxation. This innovative response to capitalist overproduction - initially tried before World War I and then after the 1929-33 world economic crisis - was made into a model of normality after 1945. Note, under Trump 2.0 the peacetime US arms budget is set to be $850 billion in 2025 alone (well over twice as much as China and Russia combined).

The Trump administration justifies this obscene squandering of human and material resources through peddling an ‘America first’ patriotism (and generating jobs). Of course, this approach has a long history: eg, kaiser Germany, Bolshevism, European fascism, post-World War II USSR, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, Islamic State have all been credited with being existential enemies. Now it is China. Voting in favour of the endless production of waste thereby becomes a national duty and imposes a welcome internal discipline over the working class. Spending on space is essentially no different. Except that, besides patriotism, it is able to harness another misplaced idealism - the quixotic belief that space represents humanity’s manifest destiny and promises solutions to countless seemingly intractable problems.

Poverty and plenty

Meanwhile, the UN estimates that over a billion people have no access to clean drinking water, some 840 million have to survive on significantly less than the recommended daily intake of calories and around 40 million are infected with HIV/Aids. There is nothing inevitable or natural about any of this.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank programmes of market ‘reform’ have greatly exacerbated the unevenness characteristic of the system over the last 40 years. Today the richest 1% own nearly half of the world’s wealth, the poorest half of the world just 0.75% And it is no surprise that a billionaire “emits a million times the carbon dioxide than the average person.69 Leave aside the so-called third world: in Britain some 2.3 million people used a food bank in 2022‑23.70 In America, by far the richest country in the world, there are an estimated 770,000 homeless people.71

Yet with organisation and political will humanity has within its reach the ability to easily meet all basic needs. The wealth exists in abundance. Simply diverting the US arms budget to real human needs would do away with global poverty - almost at a stroke. But such a turnaround can never happen through the banal platitudes and essentially diversionary calls of the NGOs, religious notables and various soft-left reformers for rich governments to do their moral duty. The modern state palpably exists to defend, serve and promote the self-expansion of capital - the two are inextricably interwoven and interdependent.

That, incidentally, is why leftwing calls to ‘tax the rich’ to overcome poverty, health underfunding and homelessness, is so misplaced. Mainstream governments do ‘tax the rich’. Ultimately government revenue derives from profits. So, if they do not want to see the goose that lays those golden eggs taking flight, not only must tax rates be limited, but prior capital accumulation is required. Therefore, in order to ‘tax the rich’, the rich must stay rich … and continue to exploit the working class. Taxing the rich in order to expropriate their riches, socialising capital - that, of course, is another matter entirely.

The fact of the matter is that capitalism long ago outlived any usefulness it once possessed. Now this most alienated of social relationships not only goes hand-in-hand with poverty, exploitation and war: it threatens to bring about a civilisational breakdown - perhaps some time between 2070 and 2090, through a tipping over of the climate crisis.72 Objective circumstances cry out for revolutionary change.

Once humanity has superseded capitalism, overcome self-alienation and become properly human again, who knows what we might choose to do? Mars, along with other planets and moons in the solar system, could be explored by intelligent, self-replicating, evolving, robots as envisaged by John von Neumann.73 From our solar system such probes could conceivably head off to nearby stars to explore Earth-like exoplanets.

If life arises whenever there is a suitably sized and suitably situated planet orbiting a suitably benign star, it means life must exist scattered here and there throughout the cosmos.

Life on Earth evolved through a DNA-RNA information system - albeit entirely randomly through natural selection - from a primeval soup some 3.5 billion years ago, to the point where consciousness emerged. Given the stupendous number of stars and planets in the universe, the chances are that we are far from alone when it comes to intelligence.

But is all that life out there the same as here on Earth? Does every life form need DNA-RNA? If in language, there is the Latin alphabet, can there not be the Arabic or Cyrillic … or Mandarin characters. We have long wondered about such existential questions. It would be expected, therefore, that future generations would want to find answers, if for no other reason than curiosity.

However, the closest star, aside from our sun, the unpromising red dwarf, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light-years away. Even using Jupiter, the biggest planet, as the gravitational slingshot, with present-day technology, a probe would take around 80,000 years before getting there. It would also take 4.24 years till we receive an arrival message back on Earth - that is, assuming we have managed to avoid extinction.

Now, though, the main subject of humanity must be humanity - as we find it, here on Earth. A planet which gave birth to our species and which has everything we need in terms of our evolved physiognomy and psychology. If we want to survive as a species, our prime mission ought to be taking care of planet Earth and restoring it to full health.

  1. A Crowley Redding Elon Musk: a mission to save the world New York NY 2019.↩︎

  2. www.space.com/nasa-artemis-base-camp-more-moon-bases.↩︎

  3. www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-mars-dream-is-back-how-to-go.↩︎

  4. arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/elon-musk-were-going-straight-to-mars-the-moon-is-a-distraction.↩︎

  5. See web.archive.org/web/20190505104727/www.psi.edu/epo/ktimpact/ktimpact.html.↩︎

  6. www.space.com/36112-trump-budget-cancels-nasa-earth-science-missions.html.↩︎

  7. tass.com/science/1219555.↩︎

  8. www.fpri.org/article/2024/07/russias-space-program-after-2024.↩︎

  9. www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Exploration/ExoMars/Europe_s_Mars_exploration.↩︎

  10. edition.cnn.com/2019/07/19/asia/china-apollo-us-space-race-intl-hnk/index.html.↩︎

  11. www.statista.com/statistics/745717/global-governmental-spending-on-space-programs-leading-countries.↩︎

  12. The figure for the US is $76.68 billion, Japan $6.8 billion, Russia $3.96 billion, the EU $3.71 billion and India $1.89 billion - www.statista.com/statistics/745717/global-governmental-spending-on-space-programs-leading-countries.↩︎

  13. ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-earth-orbit.↩︎

  14. www.blueorigin.com/new-shepard/fly.↩︎

  15. hir.harvard.edu/economics-of-the-stars.↩︎

  16. See J Steuart An inquiry into the principles of political economy Dublin 1770. He was, incidentally, the first to put together the words, ‘political’ and ‘economy’, in English. Marx, it should be added, considered James Steuart to be the most “rational” expression of the “monetary and mercantile” systems, praising his insights into the relative nature of profit within the sphere of exchange, but criticising his failure to fully recognise the production sphere as the source of surplus value (K Marx Theories of surplus value part 1, Moscow 1969, p43).↩︎

  17. Especially crude, because we ignore the possible role of gold in acting as the universal equivalent, now abandoned, but a central feature of classical capitalism.↩︎

  18. Subject of the recent book by Marc Feldman and Hugh Taylor - Space: preparing for a criminal crisis in orbit Hoboken NJ, 2025.↩︎

  19. www.moonsociety.org.↩︎

  20. The Sun May 28 2018.↩︎

  21. www.rt.com/usa/gingrich-moon-florida-space-795.↩︎

  22. www.nature.com/articles/s41526-022-00194-8.↩︎

  23. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017GH000125.↩︎

  24. www.nature.com/articles/s44294-024-00009-z.↩︎

  25. New Scientist May 8 2013.↩︎

  26. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_resources_on_Mars#Direct_evidence_for_useful_materials.↩︎

  27. See J Conrad, ‘Democracy, not referendums’ Weekly Worker April 19 2018.↩︎

  28. futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-imperator-mars.↩︎

  29. The Guardian March 11 2018.↩︎

  30. N Machiavelli The prince Harmondsworth 1975, p119.↩︎

  31. H Brogan The Penguin history of the USA London 1999, p220.↩︎

  32. Quoted in K Gatland Manned spacecraft London 1967, p141.↩︎

  33. O Sanchez-Sibony Red globalisation Cambridge 2014, p173ff.↩︎

  34. web.archive.org/web/20121017063611/www.nixonlibrary.gov/forkids/speechesforkids/moonlanding/moonlandingcall.pdf.↩︎

  35. web.archive.org/web/20161231152534/http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140422-mars-mission-manned-cost-science-space.↩︎

  36. www.geekwire.com/2018/moon-direct-mars-maverick-lays-low-cost-plan-set-lunar-bases.↩︎

  37. today.yougov.com/technology/articles/45635-views-space-travel-nasa-mars-2040-goal-poll.↩︎

  38. www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-mars-dream-is-back-how-to-go.↩︎

  39. Testimony of Rick Tumlinson before the Senate committee on commerce, science and transportation, October 29 2003 - archive.org/stream/fiscalyear1996na00unit/fiscalyear1996na00unit_djvu.txt.↩︎

  40. Time May 4 2017.↩︎

  41. www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-26/amazon-s-jeff-bezos-wants-to-send-you-to-space-too.↩︎

  42. S Oppenheimer Out of Eden: the peopling of the world London 2003, p280; J Raff Origins: a genetic history of the Americas New York NY 2022.↩︎

  43. F Braudel Civilisation and capitalism Vol 3, Berkeley CA 1992, p420.↩︎

  44. J Diamond Guns, germs and steel London 1998, p210.↩︎

  45. The classic account is still CLR James The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo revolution first published in 1938.↩︎

  46. R Blackburn The making of New World slavery London 1997, p3.↩︎

  47. www.nasa.gov/international-space-station/space-station-visitors-by-country.↩︎

  48. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2.↩︎

  49. www.extremetech.com/extreme/191862-the-first-mars-one-colonists-will-suffocate-starve-and-be-incinerated-according-to-mit.↩︎

  50. www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-mars-dream-is-back-how-to-go.↩︎

  51. nss.org/the-promise-of-mars-by-robert-zubrin.↩︎

  52. www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/moonbeams-shine-on-einstein-galileo-and-newton.↩︎

  53. The Stamford Daily February 10 2004.↩︎

  54. www.hwupgrade.it/forum/archive/index.php/t-613246.html.↩︎

  55. web.archive.org/web/20140814162448/http://publicdiplomacymagazine.com/space-chronicles-the-universe-as-public-diplomacy-an-interview-with-astrophysicist-neil-degrasse-tyson.↩︎

  56. R Zubrin The case for Mars: the plan to settle the red planet and why we must New York NY 2011.↩︎

  57. mpkb.org/home/pathogenesis/microbiota.↩︎

  58. I Asimov Exploring the Earth and cosmos Harmondsworth 1983, p153.↩︎

  59. C Sagan Pale blue dot: a vision of the human future in space New York NY 2015, p15.↩︎

  60. Quoted in Financial Times January 15 2004.↩︎

  61. S Oppenheimer Out of Eden London 2003, p201.↩︎

  62. J Diamond Guns, germs and steel London 1998, p258.↩︎

  63. W Benjamin The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and other writings on media Cambridge Mass 2008, p42.↩︎

  64. W Benjamin Selected works Vol 4, Cambridge Mass 2003, p402.↩︎

  65. L Wirbel Star wars: US tools of space supremacy London 2004, p19.↩︎

  66. Quoted in ibid p146.↩︎

  67. www.defenseone.com/technology/2025/01/trumps-iron-dome-america-plan-would-put-weapons-space-big-cost/402630.↩︎

  68. I Mészáros The power of ideology Hemel Hempstead 1989, p226.↩︎

  69. www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/wealth-inequality-oxfam-billionaires-elon-musk.↩︎

  70. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9209.↩︎

  71. www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics.↩︎

  72. actuaries.org.uk/document-library/thought-leadership/thought-leadership-campaigns/climate-papers/planetary-solvency-finding-our-balance-with-nature.↩︎

  73. A Bhattacharya The man from the future: the visionary life of John von Neumann London 2021.↩︎