Oligarchs in Bed with Autocrats Would Kill the Prospects for Liberalism in Space

Neither Elon Musk nor the Chinese government should get to steer space policy

The UnPopulist illustration

In the 1990s, triumphalism about a market-based liberal democracy dovetailed with optimism about space as an emerging arena of freedom and opportunity. Satellite technology offered new options for communication and observation; TV dishes were sprouting up in inner cities and remote villages, and satellite photography was becoming commercially available for use by environmental and human-rights monitors, not just intelligence agencies. Orbital tourism was seen as a near-term prospect, and beyond that loomed asteroid mining and satellites that beamed solar power to Earth. Human colonies on the moon or Mars, or at gravitationally balanced Lagrange Points in space, were in-our-lifetimes possibilities; and they could be expected to be freedom-loving societies, in keeping with trends on Earth but more so, boosted by their remove from established authorities and their onerous regulatory burdens.

To quote one optimistic writer of the time:

Why should humans go to Mars? One reason is that the job market there looks pretty good. Martian society will experience a chronic shortage of labor, due to the small size of its initial population and the high cost of transportation from Earth. Hence, wages will be high, career opportunities will abound, and innovation will be rewarded. Paperwork, bureaucracy, and the quest for purely formal credentials will be kept to a minimum. Such are the exigencies of life on a harsh frontier.

That was me, writing for the libertarian magazine Reason in a 1997 double-review of The Case for Mars and Mining the Sky, two books that reflected a space-as-liberatory viewpoint.

Another article I wrote for Reason, in 1998, sketched out a way extraterrestrial property rights might develop and function, with governments recognizing property claims based on human or robotic exploration—a kind of Lockean proviso for the space age. Anticipating objections that the celestial might become “dominated by some narrow economic elite,” I countered that “space is likely to prove hostile to concentrations of economic power. The territories and resources involved are vast; the markets are new and unpredictable. A company owning a dozen asteroids may find that it is just a bit player in the larger scene.” I imagined competitive capitalism not just flourishing in space but also helping shake up “entrenched terrestrial industries.”

Along with other space optimists, I was wrong.

Space Tsars

In 2025, a good deal of space activity is in fact dominated by a narrow economic elite, epitomized by Elon Musk, whose dual role as CEO of SpaceX and de facto leader of the U.S. DOGE Service has given him extraordinary sway over U.S. commercial and governmental exploration and utilization of space. Musk’s role in the Trump White House and his leadership of SpaceX represents a conflict of interest—the space company has vast contracts with NASA and other agencies, and is subject to regulation by them. Yet Musk and SpaceX personnel assigned to DOGE are in a position to wreak havoc over those same agencies’ budgets and workforces. In other words, the very entity that is being regulated has itself taken over the regulators. But even a smaller episode in mid-February, when DOGE distributed classified information about the staff and budget of the National Reconnaissance Office (which runs the nation’s spy satellites), highlighted that even a seemingly inadvertent move by DOGE can negatively affect federal agencies.

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation raises other concerns about the concentration of space power:

• Starlink is involved in Ukraine’s defense, but it could be taken away by Musk or the Trump White House as a point of leverage against the country.

• Starlink may obtain a government contract for upgrading air traffic control that ought to go to its competitor, even as DOGE takes it upon itself to scrutinize the Federal Aviation Administration.

• Starlink satellites cause streaks on images taken by telescopes, spurring concern by astronomers, but any regulator seeking to address that would run the risk of offending Musk and friends.

One might suppose, or hope, that Musk’s current degree of influence is a fluke and not representative of future prospects in space. But the overall picture does not resemble the wide-open space industry of my 1990s imaginings. Billionaires have been prominent figures in founding and running companies (including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic), and longtime contracting behemoths such as Lockheed Martin remain central players, with only occasional wins by entrepreneurial upstarts (though the recent moon landing by Blue Ghost, a probe of mid-sized Firefly Aerospace, was encouraging).

Interplanetary Illiberalism

Globally, the list of major spacefaring nations—China and Russia preeminent alongside the U.S., with India, a country in an advanced stage of democratic backsliding, Japan, and the European Union in a second tier—does not inspire confidence that space policies and practices will be shaped with particular concern for liberal and democratic values.

One can easily imagine a future in which authoritarian nations—or ones experiencing democratic backsliding—divide space into spheres of influence, much as they are prone to do on Earth. Perhaps they would designate particular celestial territories, orbits, or activities as the rightful province of one power or another. A private-sector space economy might fit into this crabbed scenario, but it might be dominated by well-connected companies that are willing to toe an autocratic line.

Instead, non-domination should be a guiding principle of U.S. space policy. That could take various forms: designing markets with the lowest possible barriers to entry so that large companies can’t exclude smaller competitors; free-speech protections for space-based communications; negotiations with foreign powers with an eye toward preventing vast territorial claims and locked-in privileges by countries or companies.

Currently, things don’t look promising.

Musk’s Mars Misadventure

NASA’s Artemis program, which started during the first Trump administration, is aimed at getting Americans back to the moon—and is motivated in significant part by the possibility that China will send people there in the next few years. But Trump’s recent promise to “plant the American flag on the planet Mars” suggests he is embracing Musk’s preference for de-emphasizing lunar exploration in favor of a push to the red planet. If so, future decisions about policies on the moon will likely be dominated by China.

But on another matter, there have long been tensions between advocates of space colonization and the space science community, with many in the latter camp often seeing manned space missions as a waste of money that could be better spent on robotic missions and ground-based astronomy. Some possible projects, such as building radio telescopes on the far side of the moon, could benefit science while advancing human settlement. But if the scientific community at large has lost political influence, as seems to be the case amid the current budget cuts to federal science agencies, we should expect that scientific priorities (as opposed to engineering ones) will not be high on the U.S. space policy agenda. For example, Musk’s thoughts on warming up Mars to restore its ancient oceans—perhaps with nuclear weapons—have drawn criticism as detached from scientific reality; the oceans would evaporate in the absence of a restored magnetic field.

In recent years, critics have pointed to various problems and limits of an expanding human presence in space, with Musk’s ideas coming under particular scrutiny. As the headline of an Atlantic article by science writer Shannon Stirone puts it: “Mars Is a Hellhole.” Stirone points out the difficulty of maintaining a human presence on the red planet, arguing that it cannot plausibly serve as a refuge for humanity in the event of cataclysm on Earth—a prospect Musk offers as a key reason for settlement there. (Robert Zubrin, longtime Mars advocate, thinks that that prospect is a distraction, as a Mars settlement wouldn’t survive without Earth.)

Liberal Space Pipe-Dreams

My and others’ earlier expectations that future space colonies would embrace liberal values gave inadequate thought to why such a rosy scenario was unlikely: the inability of people in a space colony to readily leave if they don’t like how things are being run. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, a book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, argues that space colonies are likely to function much like company towns, with a single employer exerting vast control over residents’ lives. They imagine, whimsically, a Musk-built Mars city called “Muskow,” which holds monopoly power over its inhabitants’ housing, food, and oxygen.

Whatever form the space future may take—on the moon, Mars, or elsewhere—that future shouldn’t be decided by a handful of autocrats and oligarchs. Democratic and market processes are no less important in space than on Earth; and no less imperiled.

© The UnPopulist, 2025

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.

We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.