In October, at a tech conference in Italy, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos predicted that millions of people will be living in space “in the next couple of decades” and “mostly,” he’d said, “because they want to,” because robots will be more cost-effective than humans for doing the actual work in space.

No doubt that’s why my ears perked up when, at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco weeks later, I found an on-stage prediction by Will Bruey, the founder of space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries, so striking. Rather than robots doing the work as Bezos envisioned, Bruey said that within 15 to 20 years, it will be cheaper to send a “working-class human” to orbit for a month than to develop better machines.

In the moment, few in the tech-forward audience seemed taken aback at what many might consider a provocative statement about cost savings. But that raised questions for me – and it has certainly raised questions for others – about who, exactly, will be working among the stars, and under what conditions.

To explore these questions, I spoke this week with Mary-Jane Rubenstein, dean of social sciences and professor of religion and science and technology studies at Wesleyan University. Rubenstein is the author of the book Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse, which director Daniel Kwan used as research for the award-winning 2022 film “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” More recently, she’s been examining the ethics of space expansion.

Rubenstein’s response to Bruey’s prediction cuts to a fundamental issue – which is power imbalance.”Workers already have a hard enough time on Earth paying their bills and keeping themselves safe . . . and insured,” she told me. “And that dependence on our employers only increases dramatically when one is dependent on one’s employer not just for a paycheck and sometimes for health care, but also for basic access, to food and to water – and also to air.”

Her assessment of space as a workplace was pretty direct. While it’s easy to romanticize space as an escape to a pristine frontier where people will float weightlessly among the stars, it’s worth remembering there are no oceans or mountains or chirpy birds in space. It’s “not nice up there,” said Rubenstein. “It is not nice at all.”

But worker protections aren’t Rubenstein’s only concern. There’s also the increasingly contentious question of who owns what in space – a legal gray area that’s becoming more problematic as commercial space operations accelerate.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty established that no nation could claim sovereignty over celestial bodies. The moon, Mars, asteroids – these are supposed to belong to all of humanity. But in 2015, the U.S. passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which says that while you can’t own the moon, you can own whatever you extract from it. Silicon Valley got starry-eyed almost immediately; the law opened the door to commercial exploitation of space resources, even as the rest of the world watched with concern.

Rubenstein offers an analogy: It’s like saying you can’t own a house, but you can own everything inside it. Actually, she corrects herself, saying it’s worse than that. “It’s more like saying you can’t own the house, but you can have the floorboards and the beams. Because the stuff that is in the moon is the moon. There’s no difference between the stuff the moon contains and the moon itself.”

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Companies have been positioning themselves to exploit this framework for some time. AstroForge is pursuing asteroid mining. Interlune wants to extract Helium-3 from the moon. The problem is that these aren’t renewable resources. “Once the U.S. takes [the Helium-3], China can’t get it,” says Rubenstein. “Once China takes it, the U.S. can’t get it.”

The international reaction to that 2015 act was swift. At the 2016 UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) meeting, Russia called the Act a unilateral violation of international law. Belgium warned about global economic imbalances. 

In response, the U.S. in 2020 created the Artemis Accords – bilateral agreements with allied nations that formalized the American interpretation of space law, particularly around resource extraction. Countries worried about being left out of the new space economy signed on. There are now 60 signatories, though notably Russia and China are not among them. 

There is grumbling in the background, though. “This is one of those instances of the U.S. setting rules and then asking other people to join in or be left out,” Rubenstein says. The Accords don’t say resource extraction is explicitly legal – just that it doesn’t constitute the “national appropriation” that the Outer Space Treaty forbids. It’s a careful dance around a fraught issue.

Her proposed solution to addressing it is straightforward if exceedingly unlikely: hand control back to the UN and COPUOS. In the absence of that, she suggests repealing the Wolf Amendment, a 2011 law that essentially bans NASA and other federal agencies from using federal funds to work with China or Chinese-owned companies without explicit FBI certification and Congressional approval.

When people tell Rubenstein that collaboration with China is impossible, she has a ready response: “We’re talking about an industry that is saying things like, ‘It’ll totally be possible to house thousands of people in a space hotel,’ or ‘It’ll be possible within 10 years to ship a million people to Mars, where there’s no air and where the radioactivity will give you cancer in a second and where your blood will boil and your face will fall off. If it’s possible to imagine doing those things, I think it is possible to imagine the U.S. talking to China.”

Rubenstein’s broader concern is about what we’re choosing to do with space. She sees the current approach – turning the moon into what she calls “a cosmic gas station,” mining asteroids, establishing warfare capabilities in orbit – as profoundly misguided.

Science fiction has given us different templates for imagining space, she notes. She divides the genre into three broad categories. First, there’s the “conquest” genre, or stories written “in service of the expansion of a nation-state or the expansion of capital,” treating space as the next frontier to conquer, just as European explorers once viewed new continents.

Then there’s dystopian science fiction, meant as warnings about destructive paths. But here’s where something odd happens: “Some tech companies seem to sort of miss the joke in this dystopian genre and just sort of actualize whatever the warning was,” she says. 

The third strand uses space to imagine alternative societies with different ideas of justice and care –  what Rubenstein calls “speculative fiction” in a “high-tech key,” meaning they use futuristic technological settings as their framework.

When it first became clear which template was dominating actual space development (fully in the conquest category), she got depressed. “This seemed to me a real missed opportunity for extending the values and priorities that we have in this world into those realms that we have previously reserved for thinking in different kinds of ways.”

Rubenstein isn’t expecting dramatic policy shifts anytime soon, but she sees some realistic paths forward. One is tightening environmental regulations for space actors; as she notes, we’re only beginning to understand how rocket emissions and re-entering debris affect the ozone layer we spent decades repairing.

A more promising opportunity, though, is space debris. With more than 40,000 trackable objects now circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, we’re approaching the Kessler effect – a runaway collision scenario that could make orbit unusable for any future launches. “Nobody wants that,” she says. “The U.S. government doesn’t want that. China doesn’t want it. The industry doesn’t want it.” It’s rare to find an issue where every stakeholder’s interests align perfectly, but “space garbage is bad for everybody,” she notes. 

She’s now working on a proposal for an annual conference bringing together academics, NASA representatives, and industry figures to discuss how to approach space “mindfully, ethically, collaboratively.”

Whether anyone will listen is another question. There certainly doesn’t seem to be much motivation to come together on the issue. In fact, back in July of last year, Congress introduced legislation to make the Wolf Amendment permanent, which would entrench restrictions on China cooperation rather than loosen them.

In the background, startup founders are projecting major changes in space within five to ten years, companies are positioning themselves to mine asteroids and the moon, and Bruey’s prediction about blue-collar workers in orbit hangs in the air, unanswered.