Bleddyn Bowen (Hurst)
THE debt that the space age owes to Nazi Germany’s killing machines may not be written in the heavens, but it is there for all to see on the streets of London. Around the city, memorial plaques record the sites where Nazi rocket designer Wernher von Braun’s supersonic V2 ballistic missiles struck.
In all, some 3000 V2s were launched during the second world war, killing more than 2700 in London and 1700 in Antwerp, Belgium. After the war, however, instead of prosecuting von Braun – whose rockets had been built using slave labour from the . Other Nazi V2 engineers ended up in the Soviet Union: the space race was on.
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Later, von Braun became the chief technical architect of NASA’s Apollo programme, and his skills in engineering liquid-fuelled orbital and suborbital rockets led to the US being the first to land humans on the moon, in 1969. Ever more astonishing feats have since been achieved in space: people can now live in orbit on the International Space Station and we recently defied the sun’s gravity to divert an asteroid. We also depend on satellite constellations like Starlink for internet connectivity, and GPS or Galileo for navigation.
Does this mean space-flight technology is now an out-and-out public good? No way, says Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy analyst at the University of Leicester, UK. In , he writes that all such space feats and applications are mere sideshows, just “the tip of an iceberg” serving to disguise that space technology is, and always will be, a militaristic and economic tool of nation states, designed to enhance the killing power of their militaries and extend the invasive reach of their intelligence services.
Space flight has this enduring militaristic bent, Bowen argues, thanks to what he calls the sector’s “original sin”: that it was based on the employment of people like von Braun, whose appalling weapons were built by Holocaust victims. Like the concept of original sin in Christianity, he says, space flight can’t escape this.
People might think, writes Bowen, that the establishment of organisations like the US Space Force in 2019 means that the militarisation of space is new, when it has, in fact, always been that way. He wields convincing research to support this.
For instance, while civilians might laud the glory of the Hubble Space Telescope, Bowen describes how Hubble is, actually, an adapted, repurposed version of a Pentagon spy satellite – one that points away from Earth instead of at it. And the space shuttle that rescued Hubble when it needed new optics? Also originally designed, he says, to suit and US intelligence community needs. His book is overflowing with examples of quiet military advances in space that happened when everyone else was looking the other way.
Although the religiosity of the title is irksome – as space flight is now a multinational effort involving dozens of non-Christian countries – religion is an apt concept here for another reason: adherents of civilian space flight have always had something of a . With the advent of spacecraft like the SpaceX Starship, which could reach Mars, that zeal has taken on new dimensions. Twitter is replete with wannabe Mars colonists with a salvation ideology of their own – that of making humanity an “interplanetary species”.
Bowen gives them short shrift. In claiming that they will set up a homesteading frontier on Mars, free of Earth’s legal shackles, he dubs them “naïve and ignorant”, pointing out that UN law applies equally on Mars. On top of that, he says, cosmic libertarians need to remember that the US’s frontier “was a product of the imperial state, not a fantastical libertarian escape from it”. But who knows? One day they may place plaques on Mars showing us where the faithful tried to prove otherwise.
Paul Marks is a technology and space‑flight writer based in London
For more on the politics of space, see “We need a new model of space governance to address today’s challenges“
