SpaceX and the Temptation to Flee the Earth

Behind Starship’s feats lies a political theology: space imagined as an escape hatch, never as stewardship.

On October 13, 2024, over the south Texas coast, a seventy-meter object weighing several hundred tons fell back from the sky and came to rest, gently, between the two mechanical arms of a launch tower. For the first time in the history of spaceflight, a rocket stage was “caught” on its return the way you catch a ball. Minutes later, Elon Musk summed up the moment in a single phrase: a big step toward making life “multiplanetary.”

It is that phrase, more than the feat, that interests me. Because spectacle always does rhetorical work: by taking our breath away, it makes everything else seem obvious. We watch Mechazilla’s chopsticks close around the booster and conclude, without noticing, that the rest of the program follows naturally — Mars, the million settlers, the “safeguarding of humanity.” Yet none of that follows naturally. My thesis fits in one line: SpaceX doesn’t merely sell launches, it sells an imaginary — that of space as an exit rather than a thing to be governed. And that imaginary deserves to be taken seriously, which is to say, criticized.

First, give credit

You can only seriously criticize what you first admire. And there is a great deal to admire.

Rocket reuse, long dismissed as an engineer’s fantasy, has become an industrial routine. In 2025, SpaceX carried out 165 orbital launches — close to half of all the planet’s launches and 85% of the satellites placed in orbit. According to the company’s stock prospectus, it alone lofted more than 80% of the total mass sent to orbit that year. Starlink, its internet network, now exceeds ten million subscribers and, with more than ten thousand active craft, is the largest constellation ever deployed. As for NASA, it depends on the Crew Dragon capsule to ferry its astronauts to the Station, and is counting on a version of Starship to set foot on the Moon again. In twenty years, a private company has done what no agency managed to do as fast or as cheaply.

All of this is real. The problem isn’t the performance. It’s the story we build on top of it.

The frontier, that old recycled dream

The story, first of all, is profoundly American. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner published his famous thesis on “the significance of the frontier”: what supposedly forged the national character was not Europe’s inheritance but the moving line of westward conquest — that ever-receding horizon where the individual remakes himself anew. Once the frontier closed, America went looking for others. Space was the latest: “the final frontier,” as Star Trek put it.

Space is not imagined as a domain to be administered, but as an emergency exit.

SpaceX revives this myth unchanged: a virgin elsewhere, a fresh start, a getaway from the constraints — political, ecological, demographic — of the old world. Science fiction, though, has never stopped warning against the fable. In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury showed settlers reproducing on Mars the very violence they thought they were fleeing. Kim Stanley Robinson, after devoting an entire trilogy to terraforming Mars, ended up writing Aurora, a novel whose moral is the inverse of the promise: there is no comfortable planet B, and the dream of exodus is mostly a way of excusing ourselves from repairing what lies under our feet. The frontier is never anything but a mirror: you carry your problems there with you.

An eschatology for billionaires

The second register is deeper, and more unsettling. Musk does not defend Mars as a market, but as a mission of salvation. His formula has recurred for more than a decade: the point would be to preserve “the light of consciousness” in case a war, a hostile artificial intelligence, or an asteroid should snuff out the human mind on Earth. In a long interview with Aeon, he casts himself as a “steward of life,” duty-bound to ensure its continuation. This is, word for word, a secularized eschatology: a narrative of end times and redemption, complete with its ark, its chosen one, and its million saved.

Now, an eschatology has a very concrete political function: it disarms criticism of the present. If the stakes are the survival of the species, who would dare quibble over the means — the concentration of power, the opacity, the public money? Starship’s development has already cost more than $15 billion, and SpaceX’s board has promised Musk a package of shares that only vests if the company reaches trillions in valuation and establishes a Martian colony of at least one million people. The salvation of humanity and the enrichment of one man have become, legally, the same clause.

Let’s be honest, so as not to caricature our own argument: existential risk is not a whim. Thinking about the long-term persistence of conscious life is legitimate, and serious science fiction has always done it. But the idea that you “back up” a species by duplicating it on a lethal world rests on an undemonstrated biological bet — no one knows whether humans can reproduce and live there for the long term. And the political theorist Daniel Deudney, in Dark Skies, recalls what the enthusiasm forgets: autonomous colonies scattered across a solar system with no common authority would not form a reconciled humanity but a new anarchy, heavy with conflict. Exodus doesn’t transcend our divisions; it exports them.

The enclosure of the sky

While we gaze toward Mars, the most tangible transformation — and the least debated — is playing out close to home, in low Earth orbit. The orbit is a commons: a finite, shared space whose use by one party affects all the others. And it is being occupied at a pace that looks very much like an enclosure, those fences that once privatized the English commons.

The figures are dizzying. Between December 2024 and May 2025, Starlink satellites executed 144,404 collision-avoidance maneuvers — roughly one alert every two minutes, day and night, for six months straight; a volume multiplied twenty-two-fold since 2020. The orbital shell around 550 km is now so dense that anyone wanting to climb higher — including the Space Station or Chinese missions — must pass through it. A team of researchers proposed a metric, the “CRASH Clock,” measuring how long until a collision if all maneuvering stopped: it has fallen from 164 days in 2018 to 5.5 days in 2025. Above our heads already float, according to the European Space Agency, some 54,000 objects larger than ten centimeters and more than a hundred million invisible fragments, each fast enough to destroy a spacecraft. The specter of the Kessler syndrome — the chain reaction that would render an orbit unusable for decades — is no longer a textbook hypothesis.

The most striking thing isn’t the technical danger: SpaceX manages its maneuvers with recognized seriousness. It’s the absence of any framework. No binding international standard governs the sharing of orbit, while a single company already holds more active satellites there than all other operators combined, and aims, eventually, for several tens of thousands of craft. We’re told about conquering Mars; what goes unmentioned is that the sky is being privatized without anyone having debated it. Yet the economist Elinor Ostrom demonstrated, Nobel Prize in hand, that a commons can be governed collectively — provided we want to. Near-Earth space is the full-scale test of that lesson.

To govern, or to flee

The real divide, you can see, isn’t Earth versus Mars. It’s between two ways of inhabiting the world: governing it or fleeing it.

You don’t save a species by duplicating it elsewhere; you save it by learning to administer the place where it already lives.

In 1958, in the prologue to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt was already uneasy about this impulse: the launch of Sputnik, she wrote, had been hailed as a first step toward escaping our terrestrial “prison” — as if the Earth, and the mortal condition it imposes, were a cell to break out of. Thirty-six years later, looking at the photograph of Earth taken by Voyager, Carl Sagan drew exactly the opposite lesson: that pale blue dot, lost in a sunbeam, is all we have and all we will have; there is, for now, nowhere to emigrate to.

SpaceX’s rockets are marvels. But a civilization is judged less by its ability to leave than by its willingness to stay and repair. The question each Starship landing quietly poses isn’t when we will flee — it’s whether we will ever be capable of governing what we touch: an orbit, a climate, a planet. The sky isn’t waiting for heroes. It’s waiting for stewards.

Figures current as of June 2026. — Links point to primary and reference sources (regulatory filings, IEEE Spectrum, ESA, BryceTech, Aeon, Aviation Week).

Suggested tags: Space · SpaceX · Philosophy · Commons · Political Ecology