Don’t let them leave!
a treatise against space

for Laika

From the list of demands against the so-called city of Olympia, WA:

Number 13. Cessation of all space exploration

&

Number 2. Blow up the sun!

A ten point countdown as to why we oppose human conquest in space.

Our hatred of manned space travel has nothing to do with our love of science fiction! Even with all the problems with the genre, there is much to love and cherish. So much so, that we confuse and transpose this love onto modern-day space exploration, which is not, and will never be, as free and utterly wild as our dreams.

If you watch NASA films and look through their documents, what you see is not space opera--not Octavia Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin--but a sterile lab bleached of all our dreams and wonder. You see hardware and machines, and men building structures for business. A future architecture of our entanglement in domination. We’ve been fooled by their propaganda.

The hero is always some North American, flaunting some pure, good guy hero mysticism, in a gleaming white suit. With flags and expensive, gold-plated spaceships. Either in ruins or in perfect order.

NASA has the best propagandists in the world, even better than the police’s. And the point of this PR mission is to make space appear peaceful, serene, and sterile. But we know that the space industry is none of these things.

NASA is populated with the soft-spoken, intelligent professor, a white man. This is the number one cause for alarm. That should concern everyone. Space is for white people only. Say it again, and watch the footage, the newscasts, the documentaries. Space is for white people and their property, weapons and robots.

That is why rich, white billionaires are interested in space exploration. They don’t want us to see what lies behind space exploration. To look closer, without television lenses or cellphones. We need a countdown, for drama, for thrills. Like an execution.

Countdown

10. Space colonization and space travel are unethical

9. The sun, moon, and planets are not our junkyards

8. Space exploration is colonialism

7. You will be left behind

6. Weapons development and militarism

5. Tourism: everybody hates a tourist

4. Nationalism: space exploration is statist

3. Space exploitation is not vegan

2. Contamination!

1. Space is only for white men

0. Wernher von Braun

Supplement

10. Space colonization and space travel is unethical

There are numerous ethical concerns to consider regarding human space exploration. These concerns can be sorted into four realms.

The first realm to investigate is human society: how we behave toward each other and how this disgraceful state of affairs will be relocated into space and the exoplanets. While there are people houseless, while there are people hungry, while there are people dying on our streets, while there are prisons and people locked in cages, it is indefensible to waste any funds on rich people’s dreams. None of us can be free as long as these conditions exist.

The most common rebuttal to this position is that space travel receives only a small percentage of taxes in the US, having little impact on the redistribution of our collective resources. And yet, year after year, decade after decade, the poor grow poorer, the wealth gap expands, and the spaceships keep lifting off. We all are forced to support this status quo with our hunger and our poverty.

The second realm relates to the relationship between human civilization and the Earth: our planet’s richness of lifeforms and its very structures. Our history and behavior have shown the dangers that we humans represent. Through strip mining, clearcutting entire bioregions, industrial hunting and fishing species to the point of extinction, the draining of estuaries, the paving of wetlands, the dredging of rivers, killing the oceans, and mining the very heart out of our planet.

Space preservation requires that the solar system be valued for its own sake, not on the basis of what it can do for us. Space conservation insists that extraterrestrial resources ought not to be exploited to benefit the few at the expense of the many or of the solar system itself. Space sustainability asks that our explorations “do no harm” and that we leave the moon, Mars, and space itself no worse--and perhaps better-- than we found them.

- Margaret R. McLean

None of these preservationist or conservationist ideals are even accomplished here on earth. This leads to the obvious conclusion that no! We are not capable of responsibly caring for one planet, let alone an entire universe.

The third realm focuses on the notion that humans will invade other moons and planets, and that we will want to change them to resemble the Earth. This is a process known as “terraforming,” a term for the absolute destruction of entire worlds’ ecosystems. This process is in no way understood. We will be driven to terraform worlds because outer space is almost entirely uninhabitable for humans.

This acceptance of radically reshaping outer space mirrors the way we have already drastically transformed Earth with industry and fossil fuel combustion. But forget this point, and listen to their maniacal plans to improve other planets instead of this one. Their plans for outer space seem to be the complete destruction of the worlds they find, like we’ve destroyed the world where we were born, and which we have an obligation to share with all of life, whether edible or not.

Robert Sparrow argues that terraforming “demonstrates at least two serious defects of moral character: an aesthetic insensitivity and the sin of hubris ... To change whole planets to suit our ends is arrogant vandalism.” He claims that we can demonstrate aesthetic insensitivity in two ways: firstly, by destroying beauty directly and, secondly, by using beauty “for one’s own purposes in ways that make no reference to its beauty” even though that beauty is not destroyed. The basis of this ethical problem is not knowing how our actions, no matter how noble in intent, might affect life so fundamentally different from ourselves.

- Liz Miller

The fourth realm of ethical concern we must face is our incredibly limited understanding of time, non-human history, and non-human, non-biological nature: the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets themselves. Is there geological life, lunar life, star life? Some panpsychism?

The centuries old doctrine of panpsychism--the idea that consciousness is universal, existing as some kind of mind stuff inside molecules and atoms. Consciousness doesn’t have to emerge. It’s built into matter, perhaps as some kind of quantum mechanical effect.

- George Johnson

Keekok Lee argues that we should go further still, beyond the biocentric view, and “develop a conception of intrinsic value which is not necessarily tied up solely with the fate of biotic Nature . [and] confront the issue of abiotic or inanimate nature as a locus of intrinsic value”. His approach is to start by constructing an ‘intrinsic value ethics’ for the Earth (with a view to later extending it to Mars) based on the following considerations. Firstly, Earth did not come into existence (or continue to exist) for the benefit of human beings. Secondly, although human beings find much of nonbiological Nature useful, it doesn’t follow that Nature exists for humanity. Expanding on this, he points out that: a) the genesis of the Earth is independent of the arrival of humans; b) Earth and its biota would not be extinguished if humanity were to become extinct; c) the functioning of the biota as a systemic whole would be independent of humans; d) Earth and its biosphere are autonomous; and e) from the perspective of Earth and its biota, humanity is dispensable and maybe even redundant.

- Paul York

We don’t know the full spectrum of what is definable as life. We can’t even understand the life of a tree, let alone consciousness.

Do we care about the geological life history of Mars, or the possibility that if we left other planets alone, that one day a billion years from now, life might come into being? Or the notion that life exists there already, but we have failed to comprehend its existence because we are blinded by our own imagined brilliance.

While this is written from the human perspective, there are infinitely more complex points of view to consider. Points of view which our very first attempts at space exploration could destroy.

Our last thousand years on Earth have shown us that we as a species are not capable of coexisting within any natural ecosystem. While science fiction lovers and the poets will scream and protest that, individually, we are magnificent, brilliant, and capable of transcendent miracles, history has nothing but genocide to show us, cities carpeted over forests, the complete destruction of all life that dares not serve some purpose of mankind. Our individual beauty is wholly wiped away when one looks back over our shoulder at this dead earth: these cemetery cities; the festering trash pools of our oceans; the hazed-out, polluted sky; the radioactive waste; the extraction- fueled hellscape that we have created. If your fake-ass gods were not bound to your image, they would instantly kill us all. We deserve nothing less.

The answer to whether or not we should be allowed to explore other worlds is a giant

NO!

Followed by a painful slap to our faces.

Fuck you, mankind.

9. The stars, moons, and planets are not our junkyards.

This is a list of materials that NASA, among others, has dumped on the moon. The orbit of Earth is full of even more garbage and toxic waste.

• More than 70 spacecraft, including rovers, modules, and crashed orbiters

• 5 American flags

• 2 golf balls

• 12 pairs of boots

• TV cameras

• Film magazines

• 96 bags of urine, feces, and vomit

• Numerous cameras and accessories

• Several improvised javelins

• Various hammers, tongs, rakes, and shovels

• Backpacks

• Insulating blankets

• Utility towels

• Used wet wipes

• Personal hygiene kits

• Empty packages of space food

• A photograph of Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke’s family

• A feather from Baggin, the Air Force Academy’s mascot falcon, used to conduct Apollo 15’s famous “hammer-feather drop” experiment

• A small aluminum sculpture, a tribute to the US and Soviet “fallen astronauts” who died in the space race, left by the crew of Apollo 15

• A patch from the never-launched Apollo 1 mission, which ended prematurely when flames engulfed the command module during a 1967 training exercise, killing three U.S. astronauts

• A small silicon disk bearing goodwill messages from 73 world leaders, left on the moon by the crew of Apollo 11

• A silver pin, left by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean

• A medal honoring Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin •A golden olive branch, left by the crew of Apollo 11

The moon alone currently hosts nearly 400,000 pounds of man-made trash and toxic waste. That is humankind’s monument on the moon, a mirror of what we’ve built on the Earth.

As for Mars, the planet has nine recognized landing sites and 18,631 pounds of trash and wrecked spacecraft.

Earth’s orbit holds nearly 20,000 trackable pieces of space junk, weighing in at 2,000 tons.

8. Space exploration is colonialism!

We should all know by now what colonialism is: hatred, racism, genocide, capitalism, land theft, and ecological destruction. Forever.

For those of us who are descendants of Europeans, if our grandparents’ grandparents had known this, they could have stood on the docks in Spain, England, and Portugal and torched the ships of the conquistadors and conquerors: The Nina, the Pinta, and the fucking Santa Maria. They could have burned those ships of war, death, and disease to the waterline and then walked to the castles and cathedrals and done the same. But they didn’t know what was to become of the world across the seas. But we do! It is our great challenge to stop these modern murdercraft from killing the universe.

These men, particularly Musk, are not only heavily invested in who can get their rocket into space first, but in colonizing Mars. The desire to colonize — to have unquestioned, unchallenged and automatic access to something, to any type of body, and to use it at will — is a patriarchal one. Indeed, there is no ethical consideration among these billionaires about whether this should be done; rather, the conversation is when it will be done. Because, in the eyes of these intrepid explorers, this is the only way to save humanity. Rather, the impulse to colonize — to colonize lands, to colonize peoples, and, now that we may soon be technologically capable of doing so, colonizing space — has its origins in gendered power structures. Entitlement to power, control, domination and ownership. The presumed right to use and abuse something and then walk away to conquer and colonize something new.

- Marcia Bianco

Is there anyone alive with an ounce of empathy, a beating heart, who thinks that the conquest of the so-called Americas was a wonderful thing? That Manifest Destiny and the opening of the West was justified ? Only a soulless patriot could justify the death and slaughter of over 100 million people.

We don’t get a second chance to pretend that we are all alone in the universe.

Yet this is exactly what NASA and all these bootlicking capitalists are pursuing while throwing stars in our eyes: nothing less than the destruction of the heavens, so that they can mine asteroids and save some make-believe “humanity.”

It’s a truism that capitalism never solves its problems but only moves them around. Finally it’s running out of space. The conditions necessary not only for social but biological life are being eroded. It’s running out of minerals; it’s running out of value (the amount of debt on the planet now exceeds the total value of everything on Earth). And all this is accompanied by ghastly mocking nebulae and the idea that the greatest possible course of action for humanity is for us to go about exploring the galaxy, turning void into value, giving capital an infinite field in which to work its sinister magic.

- Sam Kriss

Decolonize space!

7. We will all be left behind; you, me, your mother, your friends. Everyone.

They will not be offering us a scholarship to outer space, or to Mars, or anywhere but the kitchen, to do the dishes, create the food, and entertain them in servitude forever. The very goal of manned space travel is to get away from the masses, for the billionaires to free themselves of the workers, the poor, and people of color.

Traveling to the vacuum of space costs some serious first-class money, and you and your mother aren’t going to be invited.

Manned space travel is the final battle in the class war they’ve waged against us. Next time you travel on an airplane, go look at first class and the flight deck. That is the space program. Now chop off the back of the plane where we are all smushed together and throw it away.

That is the world they will let us have: crashing down, on fire, destroyed, and sapped of all its resources.

Another of Stephen Hawking’s famous quotes reiterates his position that we need to get off the planet relatively soon. “I don’t think the human race will survive the next 1,000 years unless we spread into space.”

The problems with Hawking’s solution is that while it may save a “seed” of human life--a few lucky specimens--it won’t save Earth’s inhabitants. The majority of Earthlings would surely be left behind on a planet increasingly unfit for life.

- Tina Nguyen

They will choose who gets to leave this place. They will make us pay for their escape with our sweat, our toil, our taxes, and our labor. They will use up our air, our water, and our resources. They will make sure that this planet is completely used up. And then they will leave: a select few, the carefully- vetted wealthy, and their property. Off to start a new chapter, a new myth for mankind, without the pesky masses and our squalor.

And you know who they are. Of course you do. They own all the banks and all the land and all the cities.

They are the so-called Kings, Queens, and super-wealthy. They own the cops and all the troops. They live on islands and in penthouses and estates. They have ruled the earth since before the flutter of flags and borders on maps drawn with our blood.

The idea of space is the idea that we, those left behind in gravity wells, will not be allowed to see the new maps, the new stories built on new worlds.

The very idea of space is a future without the baggage of our oppression and suffering blemishing tomorrow’s history.

6. Space exploration is a platform for developing new weapons technology.

The birth of space flight and the ideas behind this sick dream can be found in the fantasies of men who sought not scientific truths and understanding, but to master Mars: both the planet and the god.

The god of war, twinkling red in the sky. Scientists and engineers who wouldn’t be able to fund their projects without a lot of money. At the end of World War II, the only people with access to this kind of money were national armies and their generals.

We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.

- Wernher Von Braun

Wernher Von Braun dreamed of space travel within the framework of conquest. He was willing to work with whomever would fund his rocketry. Wernher would go from bombing the UK to creating intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb payload delivery, to multi-warhead missiles.

A small step for one man, and a threat to all mankind.

Although Wernher escaped to the U.S.A. after WWII with his spacecraft full of explosives, his counterpart in the Soviet Union, a man named Sergei Korolev, would use Von Braun’s work, and his own brilliance, to beat the West into orbit. And with good reason: Korolev had spent almost a decade in gulag, forced labor camps, had lost all his teeth to scurvy and always expected a bullet. His life depended on successful space flight.

To the West, the race for space presented itself in megatons. And how Soviet missiles were somehow bigger than theirs. The nuclear arms race had been born: the child of Sputnik and the V-2.

*megaton: a unit of explosive power chiefly used for nuclear weapons, equivalent to one million tons of TNT.

The space race would lead to nothing but greed for these men and their militaries, and fear for the rest of us. The USSR would take the lead in space on so many levels and with such bravado that a panic-stricken U.S. would begin an arms race that has never let up to this day.

I regard space colonies as another pathological manifestation of the culture that has spent all its resources on expanding the nuclear means for exterminating the human race. Such proposals are only technological disguises for infantile fantasies.

- Brand

Some other examples of weapons-based interest in space exploration comes from science fiction and, specifically, writer Jerry Pourelle, who envisioned Project Thor while employed at Boeing in the 1950’s during the Cold War.

Project Thor was an idea for a weapons system that launches telephone polesized kinetic projectiles made from tungsten from Earth’s orbit to damage targets on the ground. This weapon was actually used against the Vietnamese people during the Vietnam war.

In March 1983, after being told that the Russians had installed a gun turret on one of their numerous space stations, US president Ronald Reagan told the world that he was going to build a Strategic Defense Initiative in space to shoot down enemy missiles with lasers and missiles. The world would simply call this program Star Wars. It was never built, but 20 scientists who worked on the program from 1983-87 committed suicide, under fairly odd circumstances, including mysterious suicides and violent drownings in close time and place to each other.

The Soviet space program designed and built laser handguns to shoot navigation optics. They installed 23mm cannons on their stations, replaced these with missiles, and issued triple-barreled pistols to their cosmonauts.

While it may seem as though the Soviets had all the weapons in space, we shouldn’t forget that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thus leading to the discovery of vast amounts of state secrets. Since the US government has not collapsed yet, all our secret space weaponry is still extremely classified and kept quiet.

And now, on the 19th of February 2019, the president of the U.S. has signed a new piece of paper declaring that the country will develop yet another branch of the military: a Space Force! Formally and officially militarizing space.

That’s right, a Space Force. A planning and commissioning agent to prepare for warfare in space, on the moon, on Mars. Kicking open the front door of the heavens and anticipating the use of weapons to defend stolen resources and stolen planets. A force designed to defend settlers and corporate interests.

. . .one of the other tenets of the Outer Space Treaty is that space will not be weaponized. I hope that lasts for a long, long, long time, but I mean, who knows, it seems like a pipe dream to think that would last forever.

- Eric Anderson

It looks as though this dream has been wholly destroyed by the only nation to drop nuclear bombs on a civilian population--twice!

The same country which has never once apologized.

The space age has been a roaring success. Telecommunications, weather forecasting, agriculture, forestry, and even the search for minerals have all been revolutionized. So has warfare. No power can any longer mobilise its armed forces in secret. The exact location of every building on the planet can be known. And satellite-based global positioning systems will guide a smart bomb to that exact location on demand.

- The Economist, June 2011

The GPS system is actually a military asset that is conveniently shared with all of us and that could be easily taken away from us.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to oversee all military space work. It is an advanced- technology branch of the U.S. Department of Defense first called the Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA’s first priority was to assert the United States’ military presence in space. The agency was created in response to the Soviets launching Sputnik into space in 1957.

Project A119, also known as A Study of Lunar Research Flights, was a topsecret plan developed in 1958 by the United States Air Force. The aim of the project was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon, to display U.S. superiority to the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.

1958: Project Lunex envisioned an Airforce base on the moon.

1959: Project Horizon studied the idea of a military Moon Base.

United States Space Command (USSPACECOM), a unified command of the United States military, was created in 1985 to help institutionalize the use of outer space by the United States Armed Forces.

The Soviet Union developed the R-36ORB Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) and Polyus Orbital weapons system, which used fucking nuclear space mines, recoilless cannons, and satellite and anti-satellite blinding lasers.

The US and Israel were the only countries to refuse to vote on renewing the Outer Space Treaty.

This treaty bans Nuclear weapons in space as well as weapons of mass destruction, and suggests that space be used for peaceful purposes.

Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny. . . Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.

- General Lance Lord-head of US Air Force Space Command.

Since its very beginnings, the quest for space has been a quest for military supremacy full of powerful men terrorizing each other and the nations over which they rule. They plan on nothing less than dominating all of the world and space!

5. Space tourism: everybody hates a tourist

Many private space travelers have objected to the term “space tourist.”

Space tourism will increase the commercial activity in the time of poor state of world economy. Space tourism will become a new area of commercial endeavor and give employment to thousands of people. Manufacturing of new and better spacecraft will give employment to many skilled people.

- DR PREM

Tourists will create more tourists and popularize this nightmare.

This is the whole shit show in one bubble. For example, let’s discuss Bigelow Aerospace, located in the tourist hell that is Las Vegas, a company owned by yet another whiteman billionaire. This billionaire owns hotels here on earth.

So being in the club, in the know, and well connected, Bigelow started an aerospace company after somehow getting the rights to inflatable space technologies. These are technologies which NASA studied and developed with our tax dollars.

Bigelow’s plan is to take these well-funded ideas and start a space hotel company: to move the hotel industry into low earth orbit, with plans to have two hotels launching in 2021. Space tourism and hotels on the moon and Mars are also in the works.

Tourism and the hotels that go with it are just yet another business model for space, along with research, manufacturing, medicine/pharmaceutical, communications, and, of course, the military.

Businesses require hotels and being pampered by workers in the private sector, draped in red, white, and blue uniforms of servitude.

Tourism is like gentrification: it is the first step toward normalizing being in places where you do not belong.

4. Nationalism: Space exploration is statist

Planting the American flag on the moon was controversial back in 1969, as no nation is permitted to claim territory in outer space. There was talk of a United Nations flag being used instead, but it was ultimately decided to use the stars and stripes to serve as a proud symbol of American achievement.

The newest film, First Man, about the moon landings fails to show this planting of the USA flag, which is now causing a controversy.

- Inside edition staff

This is total lunacy. And a disservice at a time when our people need reminders of what we can achieve when we work together. The American people paid for that mission, on rockets built by Americans, with American technology and carrying American astronauts. It wasn’t a UN mission.

- Marco Rubio August 31, 2018

Rubio is wrong!

The entire project was actually built by the Nazis, who only built it within the US to save their own asses and because of a shared hatred of the communist Russians,

The Nazis built these rockets in the first place to attack the UK and punish the British people who had tried to interfere with Germany’s land grabs to the east and to the west at the beginning of World War II.

Thus, the first modern spacecraft were developed because the Nazis couldn’t bomb the shit out of England with their reduced air force. So the Nazis developed the first spaceships, the Vengeance bombs, lifted straight out of Golden Age pulp science fiction and art.

These spacecrafts were built to silently terrorize a civilian population from the air.

Space exploration, and the wars and space race that spawned it, began at the feet of military necessity. Space exploration has perpetuated the past 500 years of state power dynamics and shifts in state control of land, resources, and domestication of peoples.

These projects culminated in the modern International Space Station (ISS). The ISS has never meant to represent the people of the earth as a species without flags and borders. Instead, the “International” in this case merely means superpowers expressing their unbridled domination over all of us. The evidence is in who flies their flags over the structure, who controls the approach, access, and egress. The word “International” merely means the USA and the Russian Federation: the nations with all the bombs, all the history of genocide and oppression. The International Space Station can be viewed as a gatekeeper and an extension of border walls keeping us, the undesirables, from leaving or ever coming back. The ISS represents control of all resources, all commodities terrestrial and extraterrestrial. Forever.

Capitalist planners, businessmen, and investment bankers have already mapped out, catalogued, and monetized the asteroids. It turns out that the value of rare earth minerals and rare earth elements contained in the asteroids equals about 100 billion US dollars per person of the entire population of earth. This is why when people speak of space, they always mention asteroid mining. Out of this comes venture sci-fi and this crazed, greedy lust for space travel. It is always about the money. Follow the money.

Protect the investments.

Commodify the dream.

3. Space exploitation is not vegan and is an extension of speciesism

If we as a race can offer our animal friends only pain and exploitation, how do you suppose that we would treat alien life, in whatever shape of shade or shell, we find it thriving in the bloom of life, its very own life?

Forms of non-terrestrial life are not ours to decide whether we can use them for their beauty or a taste.

Laika was a stray dog living in the streets of Moscow and the first Earth being sent to space to die for mankind’s quest to conquer space.

Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists responsible for sending Laika into space, expressed regret for allowing her to die:

“Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it ... We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.”

All arguments for the colonization of other planets embrace the notion that humans must be saved from extinction, without question. Do we need or deserve a safety net that we have never offered any other living beings whose extinction we have caused?

On October 18, 1963, France launched Felicette the cat aboard the Veronique AGI rocket. Felicette had electrodes implanted into her brain. A second cat, unnamed, was sent to space on October 24, 1963. There was a delay in the recovery of the capsule, and this cat was found dead. Felicette was the only cat to survive these French space experiments, but was killed and dissected a few months later in the name of science.

This is a partial list of our animal friends that NASA has carried into space: Crickets, mice, rats, frogs, newts, fruit flies, snails, carp, medaka, oyster toadfish, sea urchins, swordtail fish, gypsy moths, brine shrimp, jellyfish. And Ham, the “Astrochimp,” who was forced to enter space on January 31, 1961. He survived, but upon his death in 1983, his body was turned over to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology for necropsy with a plan to have his corpse stuffed and placed on display at the Smithsonian. The Soviet Union planned to do the same thing with space dogs Belka and Strelka. This plan was abandoned after negative public reaction.

In case you don’t know the basics of animal rights, here they are:

• No experiments on animals

• No breeding and killing animals for food, clothes, or medicine

• No use of animals for hard labor

• No selective breeding for any reason other than the benefit of the animal

• No hunting

• No zoos or use of animals in entertainment

Manned space exploration has already included almost all of these abuses in its treatment of our animal friends.

It is important to acknowledge that traditional indigenous peoples live within hunting/gathering societies not party to Western exploitative animal treatment, abuse, and diets.

2. Contamination!

Manned space exploration has embraced the notion of studying the stars, moons, and planets with a ravenous desire to kill the subject, to catch, embalm, and dissect everything. To hunt and catalog without any reflection on the damages.

Look at the way the moon has been treated by National Space Administrations. After the Apollo programs headed back to earth, the orbital craft was sent to the surface of the moon for what were called “intentional crashes.” The idea was to study the seismic data from the destruction. Fifty- four space vehicles totaling almost 200,000 kilograms have been crashed on the moon. This shouldn’t pose a contamination problem for the earth’s moon, because it is assumed to be lifeless.

But Mars, on the other hand, has a much more disgraceful history. The 1976 Viking landers 1 and 2 may have detected life on the surface, but the results are disputed and not widely accepted. Today, over fifteen man-made spacecraft, probes, and testing platforms have been crashed onto the surface of an entire world. Fifteen spacecraft carrying Earth-born microorganisms. This means that we are destroying our own ability to study life on Mars, which also means we could be following the path of Victorian germ warfare. But unlike the Victorians, NASA knows these facts and has decided to ignore or set aside their own guidelines.

There are over 15 manmade objects on Mars with a mass of over 10,000 kilograms of toxins and contaminants. A gift from mankind.

Additionally, it is impossible to completely sterilize spacecraft leaving Earth.

When humans travel in those spacecraft, contamination is almost certain. Beyond contamination, ethical questions must also be considered about human intervention and research of potential alien life.

- McKay

As we speak, humans plan on sending thermally tipped nuclear-powered torpedoes to Europa, one of the moons of Saturn. These torpedoes will penetrate the ice shell of pristine alien oceans to search for life and kill it, either directly or incidentally.

Robotic spacecraft to Mars are required to be sterilized, to have at most 300,000 spores on the exterior of the craft—and more thoroughly sterilized if they contact “special regions” containing water, as otherwise there is a risk of contaminating not only the life-detection experiments but possibly the planet itself.

We do not know enough about what life is, what life could be on other worlds, to even consider these genocidal risks. History has shown us that the introduction of germs/bacteria/viruses proved deadly to the indigenous populations of the Americas. Or the reverse: in the classic book War of the Worlds, Orson Welles describes how humans are saved because Martians don’t have immunity to our diseases.

It is impossible to sterilize human missions to this level, as humans are host to typically a hundred trillion microorganisms of thousands of species of the human microbiome, and these cannot be removed while preserving the life of the human. Containment seems the only option, but it is a major challenge in the event of a hard landing (i.e. crash). There have been several planetary workshops on this issue, but with no final guidelines for a way forward yet. Human explorers would also be vulnerable to back contamination to Earth if they become carriers of microorganisms.

This is not the path to discovery, but the path to colonization, genocide, and ecocide. A human path to freeing land of pesky indigenous life-forms, regardless of whether we acknowledge them or their right to existence.

This is the study of what you are destroying by studying it

1. Space is only for white men. Space exploration is founded upon racism, white supremacy, and sexism.

“What do I look like, living in Watts, in the projects, sitting in a living room that really doesn’t have too much of anything, looking at the launching of a missile to orbit a man around space, and ... I’ll hear a police siren and ... I’ll go outside and I’ll see him going down the street and I’ll look away because it’s no big thing, this happens every day, and then I can look down a little further and see kids playing around trash cans, because that’s all they have . The reality of being poor is in you. And a space race has to be the last thing on your mind. You’re too concerned . and the word is ‘hustling’ . you’re too concerned with just trying to make enough to live.”

- Professor Johnnie Scott

“You know,” said the professor, “there are no black astronauts.”

“Of course not.”

“Any Jewish astronauts?” “I doubt it.”

The black man grunted. They would not need to mention Mexicans or Puerto Ricans

“Look,” said the black professor,” do they have any awareness of how the money they spent could have been used?”

- Professor Johnnie Scott

African-Americans didn’t watch the launches. You had civil rights leaders who were actively protesting during the “ticker tape parades” for returning astronauts — they disrupted parades in Manhattan, for instance, to try to draw attention to poor housing conditions.

- Neil M Maher

With a quick Internet search, it’s apparent that there are numerous space- related conventions and gatherings across the U.S. and Europe planned to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the lunar landings. Here, then, are the names of these events and a survey of speakers and committee chairs:

The 35th Space Symposium -Colorado Springs, CO

Speaker roster: 156 speakers 21 are people of color

That’s 13.4%

The Space Forum -Luxembourg

2019 speakers comprise 18 white men, 1 white woman, and 1 man of color Previous speakers show 68 white men, 11 white women, and 4 people of color

SpaceCom - Houston, TX

Lists its advisory committee as 27 white men, 4 white women, 3 men of color, and 2 women of color

Space Tech - Long Beach, CA

Speakers for 2019 include 34 white men, 5 white women, 3 men of color, 2 women of color, and 1 African-American woman

International Space Development Conference - Arlington, VA

The National Space Society list features 13 white men and 3 white women

Starmus V - Zurich, Switzerland

“The fifth edition of Starmus is back to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the man’s First Step on the Moon.

Starmus V features top scientists, legendary astronauts and cutting-edge art, discussion panels, round tables, debates, amazing performances and concerts, and much more.”

Starmus V lists a speaker roster of 42 white men, 12 white women, 2 men of color, and 2 women of color.

Looking at these conventions, it would appear that Space Inc. doesn’t include any African-American men as invitees or guest speakers. Almost as if space was reserved for white people. Almost as if human space travel was going to replicate institutional racism, white supremacy, and in-your-face tokenism into the stars and galaxies.

Space is only for white people! Specifically, white men, and even more, so white male billionaires.

This fact carries all the hallmarks of white supremacy, racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, and speciesism. A patriarchal system crushing all of us under capitalism, police, and military dogma. Old white men sitting around deciding future courses for their money, investments, brands, and heirs.

Space colonization is an extension of Manifest Destiny, the so-called opening of the West and the accompanying “Indian problem,” which became the blueprint for Nazi death camps and ethnic cleansing. This same thought pattern will lead to dreams of invading Mars. The first step toward the conquest of outer space was when these men surrendered to the US at the end of WWII. These scientists/engineers were Nazis. They wore SS uniforms! These men used slave labor and children’s labor in the construction of the V2 rockets.

The Victory and Vengeance rockets were constructed in concentration camps, built by German communists, French resistance fighters, Polish Home Army POWs, Russian POWs and Czechs, who would be tortured and executed, but would still manage to sabotage these spaceships. Russian POWs would urinate on delicate electronics. The French resistance prisoners would replace working parts with known defective parts and leave screws loose during assembly. Hundreds were hung for this sabotage.

These spaceships were constructed by a self-proclaimed “master race” of white men who wanted to own the future of humanity.

Men today of destiny and fortune--4 billionaires: Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk--hold the same dream of owning the stars.

The same dream the Nazis had: to commodify the planets, moons, and asteroids, and become historical figures known for something more than their collective wealth. A wealth stolen from exploited workers and resources extracted from indigenous peoples’ land.

Their goal is the conquest of outer space, and thus, the conquest of the very future of humanity.

Don’t let them leave!

0. Wernher Von Braun and the other Nazis

Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun (March 23, 1912 - June 16, 1977) Was a Nazi and a member of the SS. The Schutzstaffel (SS), in case you’ve forgotten, was charged with the murder of political and racial enemies of Nazi Germany. The SS considered themselves the racial elite of the Nazi future, and ran the death camps, where millions of people were be killed and millions more tortured and maimed.

Von Braun would build the V-2 rockets for Nazi Germany, basically spacecraft loaded with explosives and launched at England and Europe. He would surrender to the US army and become a US citizen, where Von Braun and the V-2 technology would find their way to Huntsville, AL, and build the Redstone missile platform with the capability of carrying 7,000 pound nuclear weapons, or--after the Soviet advance--a man into space. The Redstone rockets would become the Jupiter rocket--would become Mercury rockets--would become Gemini--and ending in the Saturn V, which would deliver US astronauts to the moon in 1969.

In the Soviet Union, scientists would enhance Von Braun’s rockets by adding a second stage and thus create the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Von Braun was the director of NASA for ten years.

Wernher was not just a Nazi, but an SS member with the rank of Major. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the FBI[1] got around to investigating Nazi party members living in the United States and working for NASA.

But Von Braun was dead by then.

Before he died, Von Braun was:

• The first director of NASA from 1960-1970: TEN FUCKING YEARS!

• Time magazine’s person of the year in 1958, called the “Missile Man”

And would develop:

• Orbital missile platforms

• Space stations

• Redstone rockets

• Saturn V rocket and spacecraft

• ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missiles)

• A4/V2 spacecraft and bombs

• Apollo program, which landed white American men on the moon

• Space camp, which was a summer camp for kids who want to be astronauts

• National Space Institute. Von Braun was the founder, first president, and chairman.

From 1934-1943, Von Braun rose from private to second lieutenant to first lieutenant to captain and finally major within the SS.

Von Braun was a Nazi and built the world’s first spacecraft in concentration camps with French Resistance fighters, Russian POWs, and children as slave labor from Buchenwald and Mittelwerk. These were concentration camps where between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed. The attacks from V-2s resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel. We highly recommend two books on this subject: Planet Dora by Yves Beon and Dora by Jean Michel. Both writers were survivors of the Nazi space program and death camps.

Von Braun denied ever having visited the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp itself, where 20,000 died from illness, beatings, starvation and hangings. 200 people or more were hanged for sabotaging these missiles.

Human space exploration was invented by Nazis!

Human space exploration was invented by Nazis in concentration camps!

At the end of the war, Von Braun and 157 of his fellow Nazi engineers and scientists defected to the US Army as part of Operation Paperclip. They did this not because of any love of freedom but because of a hatred of communists, having fought against them in the streets in the 1930s.

In the USA, these men would have their Nazi pasts carefully whitewashed and would devote the next 30 years to building missiles, rockets, weapons, and spacecraft. Von Braun would work with Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson to advance his visions of manned space flight and conquest. Just as he had earlier worked with Hitler and Himmler.

Von Braun would become a television favorite as he talked of missions to the moon and Mars. He would head NASA and the Apollo astronauts would ride upon rocket engines and spaceships that he and his Nazi elite had built.

He would be celebrated by Walt Disney, who himself had flirted with Nazism before the war and who also held totalitarian/fascist dreams. Together, Von Braun and Disney would create television shows and films depicting a white manifest destiny to the stars: the conquest of outer space, colonies on Mars, space stations and bases on the Moon.

An Aryan dream birthed 70 years earlier in pre-Nazi germany. They were inspired by Frau im mond, a 1929 film directed by Fritz Lang. The film, which featured the original 10,9,8, countdown sequence, depicted businessmen and scientists building rocket ships to search for gold on the dark side of the moon. Lang would later have to flee Germany to avoid being sent to the concentration camps. The very first flight-ready V2 spacecraft missile carried a painted logo for Frau im mond on the tail section fuselage.

This Nazi/United States shared dream of world domination, which used weapons platforms to reach the stars, to build rockets, and hold the world hostage for the next 85 years of terror and threats. This nightmare continued through Cold Wars and the Space Race. And what better way to control the earth but from space--and space-based weapons platforms--and the convenient propaganda of television.

These men with the right stuff peacefully touching the moon. For all of mankind. All of the right kind of mankind. No, not the Vietnamese people, not poor people or black and brown people, but, you know, Mankind.

Propagating their hatred for the Soviet Union and believing in some master race who would be the first to set foot on Mars!

But it all began with NASA, the Nazis, and the Apollo space program landing white men on the moon.

Cue Gil Scott Heron’s song, “Whitey on the Moon”

Surrendering to the allies at the end of the war along with Von Braun were:

• Kurt H. Debus, also a Nazi party member, a ranking SS officer, as well as the SA, or Sturmabteilung. Debus would become the first director of NASA Launch Operations, which would become the Kennedy Space Center.

• Walter Dornberger, Major General was the leader of both the V1 and the V2 rocket bombs production, and recruited Von Braun before WWII. After the war, Dornberger was held for over two years facing war crimes charges in relation to slave labor/concentration camps. He was released under Operation Paperclip, which brought all these Nazis to the US. Dornberger worked at Bell Aerospace building helicopters for the war against the Vietnamese people. When NASA was formed as a civilian space agency, it was Dornberger whom the US military named as the Director of Oversight Committee, which meant that NASA would be under military control. He famously said, “Gentlemen, I did not come to this country to lose the third world war. I have already lost two.”

• Arthur Rudolph was a rocket engineer who became operations director for V2 missile production and the project director of the Saturn V. He would later choose to be deported rather than face trial for war crimes.

• Magnus von Braun, the younger brother of Werhner and a dedicated Nazi. He also surrendered to the US and worked on the Saturn V through the main contractor, Chrysler. Magnus has repeatedly been accused of beating and torturing slave laborers who worked on the V2 at Mittelbau/Dora.

• Of 1600 Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians secretly brought to the US during Operation Paperclip, 130 would work directly with von Braun, the US military, and the organization that became NASA.

Famous Black Astronauts, People Of Color & Women

Both Woodstock and the moon landings happened in 1969. Both were largely ignored by people of color.

Dorothy Vaughan As the head of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) segregated West Area Computing Unit from 1949 until 1958, Vaughan was a respected mathematician and NASA’s first African- American manager.

Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectory for America’s first manned trip to space with Alan Shepherd in 1961 and did all the calculations for the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.

Annie Easley worked for over 30 years at NASA, having “more good memories than bad.” She was clear-eyed about the racial discrimination she experienced. She related a story of being photographed, along with her co-workers, for NASA promotional photographs. She was humiliated to find that, no matter where the photos were used, she was cut out.

Mary Winston Jackson, Eunice Gray Smith, Kathryn Peddrew, Miriam Daniel Mann, and Christine Darden all worked for the state to get white men into space and to the moon, all faced incredible, racism, sexism, and discrimination and lack of career opportunities or recognition.

Cuban cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez. First man of African descent aboard Soyuz 38 in 1980.

Valentina Tereshkova The first woman in space and Soviet cosmonaut. She flew in 1963, a full 20 years before the US bothered to add women to NASA.

Edward Joseph (Ed) Dwight Jr. (born September 9, 1933) is an African- American sculptor and former test pilot who was the first African American to be trained as an astronaut. Selected as the first African-American astronaut candidate in 1961; resigned from the Air Force in 1966 after government officials created a threatening atmosphere and racist harassment from fellow astronauts (the same men who would later be lauded as heroes after landing on the moon)

Robert Henry Lawrence Jr, First African-American astronaut; selected for astronaut training in 1967 for the MOL program; killed in an aircraft accident

Mae Jemison the first African American woman in space in 1992.

Jeanette J. Epps On January 5, 2016 NASA announced that Epps would become the first African-American space station crew member when she launched on her would-be first spaceflight in May 2018, as a flight engineer on Expedition 56, remaining on board for Expedition 57. On January 16, 2018, NASA announced that Epps had been replaced by her backup, Serena M. Aunon-Chancellor, due to unknown reasons, and this situation has sparked media attention.

Rodolfo Neri Vela the first Mexican in space in 1985.

Guion Stewart Bluford, Jr. First African-American in space in 1983, a full 20 years after the Soviets had sent a man of African descent into space.

Frederick D. Gregory was the first African American to be allowed to pilot and command a shuttle mission in 2005.

Ellen Ochoa First female Hispanic astronaut 1993,1994, 1999, 2002.

Joseph M. Acaba First Puerto Rican astronaut, 2009.

Liu Yang, China’s first woman astronaut, June 2012.

The Russian space program has also hosted international cosmonauts. Helen Sharman from the United Kingdom (1991), Claudie Haignere from France (1996 and 2001), Anousheh Ansari from Iran (2006), Yi So-yeon of South Korea (2008) and Samantha Cristoforetti from Italy (2014)

Christa McAuliffe and mission specialist Judith Resnik became the first woman to die on a space mission when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded due to NASA incompetence and deadline pressures.

Ronald McNair was an African-American man was also killed in the Challenger explosion.

The 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster killed the crew during re-entry, including mission specialists Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Bernard A. Harris Jr.

The first person in space was not an American as NASA would love for us to believe, but a Russian, Yuri Gagarin, who within the decade would be killed in a jet crash. He died after vocally criticizing the Soviet space program and perhaps throwing a drink in the leader of the Soviet Union’s face.

And of course the first Spanish astronaut: Luis Carrero Blanco flying aboard a Dodge Dart, 1973.

Disclaimer:

The Mercury 13 women and the women aviators who broke ground for women to be recognized and considered for NASA astronaut training have been purposely left out of this paper. These narratives have been omitted because celebrating women getting a seat in the spacecraft endorses humankind’s trespass into the stars.

[1] This paper in no way accepts or condones FBI practices, or the FBI itself.