Wealthy White tech oligarchs, backed by billion-dollar government contracts, are leading the Trump administration’s “Golden Age” of space “colonization.”
The American experiment has always been intertwined with the idea of expansion, wealth, power, and access.
By the nation’s founding in 1776, it is estimated the United States claimed nearly 900,000 square miles of territory — land coerced, bartered, and stolen from Native peoples. The U.S. would spend the next several centuries engaged in conquest of the continent, the Americas, and ultimately the global South.
The new frontier for American oligarchs is “space.”
The rapidly expanding private space exploration sector, led by companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, remains overwhelmingly White and male at the executive, engineering, and investor levels. And the astronauts too are overwhelmingly White. Though the historic Artemis II mission sent Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to orbit the moon, the majority of NASA’s recent 10-person astronaut class is White. There are zero Black astronauts — the first time in nearly 40 years.
All men, including one Black astronaut, were also chosen for NASA’s next moon mission, Artemis III.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman defended the selection of the all-male Artemis III crew. The astronauts are “experienced, qualified, and deserve to be celebrated for the mission they have been assigned,” he said in a statement.
Various missions, including within NASA’s Artemis program, aim to return humans to the lunar surface by the end of the decade and establish a long-term presence in the 2030s.
These efforts may appear rooted in sheer curiosity about possible life beyond our planet and a future to benefit humanity, as some space agencies, including NASA, have said.
But some experts say these ambitions are also rooted in financial gain and extraction —mirroring exploitation driven by the greed of colonizers who plundered the Americas and beyond.
The disparities and efforts, along with an ambition of being “first,” raise urgent questions about what some scholars and critics describe as the “colonization” of space.
“Capitalism is driving space exploration right now. The rich, the military-industrial complex,” said Linda Billings, a consultant to NASA’s Astrobiology and Planetary Defense programs.
The United States is on a path to chartering a dangerous course to the cosmos that risks repeating historical patterns that were never fully confronted nor healed, scholars say.
“The extraction is … it’s just endless,” said Ingrid LaFleur, an Afrofuturist who is founder and director of the Afrofuturist Strategies Institute, a research organization. “If you always will see a benefit to colonizing, then you’re never going to see it as something wrong. And this is the problem when you have White hetero men leading the way, because they are at the top of the quote-unquote food chain.”
Among the top five wealthy nations that are leading space exploration efforts, four largely rely on government or state-owned resources, according to an analysis by The Emancipator.
China, Russia, Japan and India rely on state-owned resources for their space ambitions through their respective space agencies: China National Space Administration, Roscosmos, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Indian Space Research Organisation. The European Space Agency (ESA) has 23 member states that give it funding for its missions.
Other countries, including a federation of African nations known as the African Space Agency, also rely on government funding and oversight.
By contrast, the United States’ space exploration dominance largely relies on an almost symbiotic relationship with cash-flush — and often White-led — private companies.
Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar company, SpaceX, and billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, have obtained numerous lucrative government contracts to develop spacecraft for U.S.-led efforts, including the upcoming Artemis III mission set to launch into lower Earth orbit in 2027.
Blue Origin in 2023 was awarded $3.4 billion by NASA to build a spacecraft that will take astronauts to and from the moon, according to NASA. That amount is more than the GDP of Gambia, Lesotho, or Eritrea. In May, NASA announced that it had awarded Blue Origin an additional $188 million to design a landing system to transport rovers for moon missions in the Artemis program. The company could also receive an extra $280.4 million depending on its early performance.
The U.S. Space Force also announced in May that it had awarded SpaceX a more than $4 billion contract to build satellites that can “track and target” what it says are airborne threats from space.
Musk spent more than $270 million on the 2024 election to help return Donald Trump to the White House, including through America PAC, according to FEC filings. Bezos’ billion-dollar company, Amazon, contributed at least $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.
Both men have sought to cultivate relationships with Trump’s administration. Both men were part of the cabal of tech CEOs prominently seated near the stage at the inauguration.
A small group of predominantly White, wealthy business leaders is profiting billions of dollars from space exploration, said Hilding Neilson, an astronomer based at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. Neilson studies the intersection of astronomy, science, and Indigenous knowledge.
“Who’s going to benefit? It’s the Elons, the Jeffs, the weird old White guys who don’t need any more money,” Neilson said. “And they’re gonna benefit even more by paying the people who are working on it even less.”
And recent plans to return humans to the moon are a historical parallel to colonialism, Neilson also said.
“They’re gonna build infrastructure, bring people there, live for a while, go back for a while … then start bringing goods back. … I mean, pick your North American colony. It’s the exact same story,” he said.
International laws, such as the Outer Space Treaty, which is overseen by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), outline measures aimed at preventing a country from dominating space exploration. However, there is debate over the effectiveness and enforceability of those measures — especially as private companies pursue their own space efforts.
There are questions surrounding the intention of frameworks like NASA’s Artemis Accords, which the agency says is aimed at fostering international collaboration in lunar efforts.
The Artemis Accords are also an extension of colonialism, Neilson said.
“It behaves very much under this idea of claims, and building claims for resource extraction. Whether it’s a gold rush in the Yukon, or Alaska, or California in the 1800s, it’s very much the exact same way,” Neilson said. “Except that I can’t go out there and start digging a hole. I need to go through the rich.”
The Emancipator reached out to NASA, Blue Origin and SpaceX for comment but has not received a response.
The U.S. and other countries, as well as private companies, are using colonialistic terms and metaphors in their framing of space exploration — despite condemnation from the international space community.
President Trump has said the U.S. will “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars.”
Musk pushed a vision of a Mars “colony” of 1 million people who would go into heavy debt for passage to the planet and work it off through what scholars say is a form of indentured servitude.
“Needs to be such that anyone can go if they want, with loans available for those who don’t have money,” Musk posted on X. When a user replied to the post, “Work off the loans?”, Musk responded, “Yes. There will be a lot of jobs on Mars!”
Hundreds of thousands of White Europeans voluntarily and involuntarily came to overseas colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, like the British colonies that formed the United States. Their passage paid by wealthy landowners, they were forced to work off their indenture and promised land and riches if they did. Many of these White people didn’t survive the voyage or the hard years of labor.
Musk also said if Mars can be colonized, “we can almost certainly colonize the whole Solar System.”
Musk and his peers consider the colonization of space to be their destiny.
“It is very Western, and very, masculine,” Billings said. “That this is our destiny, and destiny is a religious concept. Manifest Destiny goes back hundreds of years to European popes who told the Portuguese and the Spanish, go forth and explore and exploit and convert the heathens or kill them … there are many companies that are very interested in exploiting resources in outer space.”
Manifest Destiny was further popularized in the 1800s when the U.S. government encouraged newcomers, many of them White settlers, to spread westward — colonizing indigenous communities.
Current views of space exploration, including using colonial metaphors and terms, must change if we don’t want to repeat the past, some astronomers and scholars say.
Former NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr., the first Black man confirmed by the Senate to lead the agency, pushed back against using colonial terms in space exploration.
“We should not be using colonization with reference to space exploration at all. I strongly object to the use of that word,” Bolden told The Emancipator. “It connotes something that you and I both know exactly what people mean when they say that, and that’s not why we go to space. That’s not why we explore.”
A first step is to stop using terms tied to colonialism, said J.C. Holbrook, who works with the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom.
“As we go into space and as we live in space, there must be another way of thinking about this other than conquering and taking over. To me, it points to a lack of imagination,” Holbrook said.
The historic colonization of people, particularly communities of color, not only included land and resources but also the mining of ancestral knowledge of the cosmos.
People around the world have held relationships with the stars for millennia. Many used celestial bodies for farming, calendar systems, and as an ancient GPS to sail the seas.
West African cultures, including the Dogon people, possessed detailed knowledge of the stars and linked celestial bodies to seasons. Groups including the Kru, Fante, and Ga-Adangbe peoples held advanced star navigation methods and knowledge of ocean currents. When captured by colonizers, their knowledge was violently exploited. Enslaved mariners were forced to use their astronomical and maritime expertise to steer human cargo to foreign shores.
Numerous ethnic groups across Asia, including in China, used celestial maps to track stars. The Chinese believed that what happened in the heavens reflected or influenced what occurred on Earth. Ancient Egyptians observed the skies, creating systems to mark days and building the pyramids with precision that aligned with the Sun’s movement.
Astronomers and archaeologists even believe the famous Stonehenge in England was created by ancient peoples to align with and track the sun’s movement.
Indigenous groups in the Pacific, including Polynesians, held advanced ocean and celestial navigation systems, such as star maps, that were exploited by colonizers. For the Mi’kmaq people, an Indigenous group in Eastern Canada, the moon is sacred and viewed as kin, according to Neilson. He is Mi’kmaq and a member of the Qalipu First Nation on the island of Newfoundland.
“That kin can be sometimes referred to as a grandparent,” Neilson said.
Human knowledge and ancestral connections with the cosmos were not only exploited by colonizers, but damaged or destroyed from the 15th to the 18th centuries, scholars say. The Incan peoples’ stone structures and intricate cosmology-linked calendars were destroyed by the Spaniards when they invaded South America. Astronomical almanacs on bark paper, known as codices, used by the Mayan people, were burned by the Spaniards when they invaded Central America.
“It’s something that you could look up … like calendar tables and planting cycles, weather prediction … they just burned them,” Holbrook, who studies astronomy in culture, said, adding that very few survived. “They destroyed so many generations of sky knowledge.”
LaFleur and other scholars say embracing ancestral connections to the stars will be key if humanity wants to expand into space without repeating historical patterns of exploitation and colonization.
“We really need to go back to our spiritual traditions and really think about our ancient ancestors … what was that relationship that they had to space? And how can we integrate that into our movement?” LaFleur said. “Creating a deeper, more ancestral relationship to the cosmos will help mitigate whatever dream that they [power-hungry racists] have that subjugates us.”
