INSIGHT
Astroconsumerism, Nuclear Astropolitics, & Locked-In Earth
Stardate Earth 4.543.000.000 (18 April 2025)
Yarin Eski
This INSIGHT reacts to a podcast discussion on nuclear anti-satellite weapons that highlighted fears of satellite disruption while overlooking the far greater risk of orbital debris and the Kessler syndrome. It critiques a consumerist-security governmentality that prioritizes keeping our platform capitalist societies running over preserving space as a long-term habitable environment.*
Last week I listened to the discussion in The Times “The General & The Journalist” podcast with US Space Command General Stephen Whiting. It was, for several reasons, striking: the Russian government might be militarizing our orbit with nuclear anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons to mass-destroy satellite networks, heavily affecting our daily life on Earth. For me, it was even more striking for what it leaves out and does not take seriously. The episode focuses almost entirely on the loss of satellite capabilities like GPS, communications, and military infrastructure. Meanwhile, the far more consequential risk of large-scale orbital debris is reduced to something negligible. I think that is not accidental because some risks fit the story and others break it.
The thing is, a nuclear detonation in orbit would not simply disable satellites but could trigger the Kessler syndrome, a cascading chain reaction that could make near-Earth space unusable for decades or even centuries. This is not just disruption but an existential, planetary closure and a structural loss of access to outer space. No more looking outward, no more meaningful space exploration, and no reliable planetary defense against asteroids (like the one that killed the dinosaurs). Indeed, we would be locked in. For some reason, this was treated as secondary and thus as not the number one priority. This is telling as it shows what seems to dominate in the US consumerist military-security complex, which are the risks to continuity: GPS outages, interrupted communications, and degraded military capability, for example. In other words, there are mainly concerns over threats to the smooth functioning of consumer capitalism. So, the nightmare scenario in the military leadership mindset is not that we lose the sky but that we lose the signal.
It starts to sound like it matters more that we can track an Amazon package, watch where our Uber is, keep Netflix streaming, keep high-frequency trading in sync, keep supply chains running just-in-time than that we preserve the long-term viability of space as an environment at all.
Space criminologists have pointed out before how this space weaponization reflects colonialist tendencies. What the podcast’s fearmongering over nuclear space weaponization reflects more specifically is the omnipresent consumerist ideology. Or, as Slavoj Ε½iΕΎek refers to it, the sublime object of ideology where consumerist ideology does not hide things but it organizes our day-to-day reality through a fantasy. And here, the fantasy extends into space in the minds of the podcast hosts and guest. They – and the space industry more broadly – dread the idea of a space-enabled halt to our fully connected, always-on world where we are globally connected yet multipolarizing through platform capitalism. Our on-demand and just-in-time societies and politics simply have to keep functioning and as such, everything is filtered through that requirement, including our nuclear fears.
Within that frame, mass orbital debris on a catastrophic scale is almost impossible to think through properly. Because it suggests something much worse than disruption, namely, that the system and its ideology by trying to secure and expand itself could actually destroy the very conditions that make it possible. From a postcolonial angle, this is not surprising. Space is treated as a frontier, an extension of the same expansionist logic that shaped earlier colonial projects. It is there to be used, controlled, and competed over. So, the language used in the podcast about “holding satellites at risk” already assumes a battlefield, not a shared environment. Not only does that sit quite uneasily with the Outer Space Treaty, which formally frames space as a common good; that idea is rather rhetorical. What actually structures behavior and governmentality here is competition, militarization, and economic extraction via and in space.
In effect, you get a consumer society projected into orbit, giving in to the sublime ideology of astroconsumerism where space emerges as just another site to keep the consumption machine of supply and demand running. It further enables and amplifies logistics, platforms, financial systems, and military coordination. Space’s value is instrumental and its fragility is, as we’ve seen before, secondary and perhaps even expendable. It would explain why in the podcast scenarios like a “space Pearl Harbor” are framed in terms of shock and awe, making space a site of cascading nuclear retaliation. The real problem is then framed as who hits first but not as what happens if the shared orbital environment itself becomes unusable.
Such astroconsumerism that intertwines with space expansionism, and thus sustains earthly colonial thinking off-Earth, feeds not only into the blindness toward space nukes causing more space debris and enabling the Kessler syndrome; it is also the very thinking that drives geopolitical wars that space-enabled powers are waging over our planet's resources, which we need to keep consumer society running. Therefore, the biggest threat might not be a single act by Russia, China, or anyone else up there and with space nukes. No, it might be the cumulative effect of how all spacefaring powers operate within the same finite orbital space, while pretending it is effectively limitless. It is not only the prospect of nuclear weapons in orbit but the framework through which this prospect is understood that privileges short-term functionality, control, and continuity over long-term constraints.
What was missing from the interview is the one question that actually cuts through all of this: “What if we make space unusable ourselves?” Because locking in Earth due to nuclear ASATs is not temporary. It is not a setback but a condition, or put more strongly, a disruption you do not recover from soon and maybe never. That is a horizon you close to all humankind.
*This text is based on an earlier and shorter version of it. The banner image is AI-generated.