Over time, the exploration and colonization of space has increasingly taken on the character of an apocalyptic mission – a project less concerned with expanding ‘our’ horizons and better understanding and sustaining ‘our’ cosmic existence, than with finding new spaces for human civilization in the face of Earth’s irreparably catastrophic condition. Emily Ray deconstructs the religious justification for this escapist politics and looks for alternatives.
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The new outer space barons, bolstered by the works of previous generations of space dreamers, are on a mission to make the human species multiplanetary. Their reasons are multiple, but one of the primary concerns driving outer space programs is the fear that the planet will no longer host (human) life: If we do not prepare now, we will have no hope of survival in the future. Space travel and space colonization is conceived as a way to cheat the apocalypse on Earth by means of an escape route: Livable planetary conditions can end, and this will end the lives of many people left behind, but for those who had the foresight to pack and go, and to support the space entrepreneurs, the eternal life of the species is possible in the void.
The new space race walks a parallel path to Evangelical stories of end times, with true believers finding salvation from the turmoil of an Earth subject to intensified military conflicts, resource wars, and the ravages of climate change. They will be spirited away out of this cursed earthly realm into a life in the heavens. Those converted by the fervent calls of outer space proselytizers will find eternal species propagation in heaven as it is no longer possible on earth. The religious tone of outer space plans and policy is not a strained analogy, it is explicit in the US space program.
“Expanding man’s horizons”
David Noble’s “The Religion of Technology” upends the received wisdom that religion was supplanted by the rationalism of the Enlightenment period, and our modern space program is a child of the Enlightenment, not of church doctrine. Noble instead draws lines from medieval Christianity to Evangelicalism in NASA leadership, with the sciences increasingly understood as methods for achieving closeness to God and Godliness. Evangelical leader Billy Graham remained a strong influence on US presidents, starting with Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, a president particularly concerned to improve public education competitiveness in math and science as the space race accelerated. These technologies, argues Noble, were seen as mechanisms to perfect human life in God’s image, a fulfillment of the millenarian yearning for restoration of humans in their original state of perfection before Eve got the munchies.
In 1968, the Apollo 8 Christmas at the Moon transmission includes the astronauts taking turns reading passages from the book of Genesis. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan commemorated the nineteen year anniversary of the Challenger mission explosion with a message of perseverance and unity between science and religion: “It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them…We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”
The quote to conclude the speech is taken from a poem written by an US volunteer in the Royal Canada Airforce who was killed during training in 1941. The space program, its mandate to blast open a new imperial frontier, and its potential for habitation is comingled with apocalyptic visions of touching the face of God and leaving the bonds of the earth for heavenly destiny. Thinking of space flight as a way to touch the face of God resonates with the scripture reading from the Apollo mission and Noble’s claim that Christian apocalypticism is not made anachronistic by the supposed secular humanism of the Enlightenment.
In 2019 at the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, Vice President Mike Pence urged US citizens to not just have faith in “American supremacy” in the global space race, but “that other kind of faith as well.” Pence said: “For as millions of Americans have cherished throughout our long and storied history of exploration by this nation, let’s believe, as the Old Book says, that there’s nowhere we can go from His spirit. If we rise on the wings of the dawn, if we settle on the far side of the sea, even if we “go up to the heavens,” there, His hand will guide us and His right hand will hold us fast.”
Conflating the “good book” with the “Old Testament” aside, Pence calls for maintaining Christian faith in the space program, which is part of, not separate from, God’s sphere of influence. In 2021 at the James Webb space telescope launch, NASA administrator, Bill Nelson, said during the launch broadcast: “It is significant that we had the delays…all the way to today, Christmas day…but it’s also another millennia before that that a shepherd, grazing his sheep would look up at the night sky, he became a poet, and he penned the words, the heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament shows his handiwork. That shepherd, that poet, became king, and those immortal words in Psalm 19 encapsulate the expressions that we have today. The handiwork of God as we peer back in time over thirteen billion years ago, capture the light from the very beginning of the creation…God bless you, and God bless planet Earth.”
Catastropic loss
Nelson roots astronomy and space exploration in Christian history, and while the work has scientific merit, it is ultimately the study of the work of God. Drawing nearer to God is also a way to make oneself the kind of believer who is raptured or survives doomsday to continue to save souls before a final reunion with the face of God, where spaceflight is taking us. Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s “Astrotopia” helps map out the relationship between Christianity and the space program, especially the language of frontier expansion, pioneering, and imperialism as part of the US space program and vision of a future we can only survive to see if we take up “our American initiative, innovative spirit, and hegemonic power to project a future in our own image.”
More than becoming the leader in space travel, the US wants to be the leader in establishing permanent habitation on planets, celestial bodies, and, following O’Neill’s dreams run through Jeff Bezos’ fantasies, living in spacecrafts in the vacuum. Bezos and that other space baron, Elon Musk, do not agree on a vision for living off-world, with Bezos more committed to salvaging life on Earth than is Musk. They seem to agree, however, the conditions on Earth present a critical threat to the most precious resource in the universe: human consciousness. If the world ended on Earth, or at least the end of the world for humans, the greatest source of intelligence in the known universe will be snuffed out, which is meant to cause a shudder of universal recognition that this is a tragedy beyond reckoning, a tragedy beyond individual lives, human suffering, even beyond the need for humans to exist to recognize the enormity of this loss.
This loss will somehow register as catastrophic in more-than-human minds. Fear of apocalypse is embedded in outer space pursuits not only as religious and secular versions but as a synthesis. The urgency to become multiplanetary in the face of apocalyptic predictions and worsening Earth conditions is part of the same apocalyptic mood during the height of the cold war and the threat of nuclear destruction on a planetary scale. Those who survive underground will surely step into an irradiated world, mutating into something other than what went into the bunker, bomb shelter, or basement. The atomic era ripped open the new possibility of total destruction, of vulnerability even to those who could afford to hide out and ride out. As Joseph Masco points out, suddenly everyone lives in worrying proximity to a nuclear target, and meanwhile the oil spills, plumes of industrial smoke, and carbon emissions continue to accumulate.
Is there an after?
Gabrielle Schwab describes this as the post nuclear subjectivity, we are all touched by and living as irradiated subjects, dusted with radioactive radionuclides as a condition of living on the planet, making radioactivity an “undead materiality” and a “haunting from the future” (Schwab 2020). How do we imagine our own extinction, she asks, without “sensationalizing apocalypticism”? (Schwab 2020). The new space race often does just that: It conjures apocalyptic events, crises, and unfolding hellscapes that must be addressed through eco-managerialism, Timothy Luke’s theory that brings Michel Foucault’s governmentality into environmental management to support sustainable degradation.
Environmentality entails generating enough of and the right “eco-knowledge” to manage the means and production of life, the charge of states especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with states increasingly functioning as environmental management agencies (Luke 1995). Managing the powers over life in a capitalist system requires “sustainable degradation,” a rework of sustainable development that accounts for the second contradiction of capitalism put forward by James O’Connor, in which capitalism must reproduce a “second nature” as a supplemental natural resource stock that is perpetually underproducing. As such, we are only ever sustaining the conditions that degrade planetary life, we sustain a long walk towards the end where the apocalyptic present stretches into infinity, the final reckoning can always be put off by another intervention, while the doomsday preppers and outer space alarmists marshal resources to live post-apocalyptically, should the day finally arrive.
Jenny Stuemer’s excellent piece in the “Politics of Apocalypse” dossier asks,” What if we viewed apocalypse not simply as a mythical event that might befall us in the near or far future, but as a lived reality that has been happening and is happening all along?” The space race is one proposed solution to the prospect of extinction associated with climate or warfare apocalypse, and it takes on the view that apocalypse is an event to guard against, rather than the present context with no foreseeable end. Jean-Luc Nancy, reflecting on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima, asks, “But the ‘after’ we are speaking of here stems on the contrary not from succession but from rupture, and less from anticipation than from suspense, even stupor. It is an ‘after’ that means: Is there an after? Is there anything that follows? Are we still headed somewhere?” (Nancy 2015). A response comes later in the text: “What Fukushima adds to Hiroshima is that threat of an apocalypse that opens onto nothing, onto the negation of the apocalypse itself” (Nancy 2015). Perhaps re-reading apocalypse as a genre in the way Stuemer suggests creates an opening where Nancy sees a closure, apocalypse not as a specific event or a moment in a succession of events, but apocalypse as a revelation about our present, with an uncertain future. We are certainly going to be spacefaring and possibly space-dwelling in the future, but we do not have to do so as an escape from the end, nor as a techno-optimistic fantasy. What else, what else?