INSIGHT
Bargaining Mars: planetary corporatization, space colonial terrorism, and astrocidal capitalism
Stardate Earth 4.543.000.000 (26 May 2026)
Yarin Eski
This INSIGHT reacts to the announcement by SpaceX that Chun Wang is going be on Starship’s first crewed interplanetary mission to Mars. Sold as an adventurous a two-year journey from the Earth to Mars, entailing a flyby of the Red Planet, it signals something deeper and darker, which is the revival of frontierist colonialism that is more about space exploitation than space exploration.*
"SpaceX announces Starship’s first private human spaceflight to Mars", as the announcement went, informing the public that Chun Wang will be the commander of the first human spaceflight mission to Mars. With announcements of this kind, we are crossing a point that is not just technological but also astropolitical and criminological. Whereas these plans for a privately organized mission to Mars have been presented as a huge historic achievement in commercial spaceflight and a unique step toward making humanity interplanetary, the language involved is actually all too familiar: innovation, exploration, progress, expansion, and the extension of human possibility beyond Earth.
Beneath these celebratory narratives of space and hope, lies a far deeper institutional transformation that deserves serious critique, which is: outer space is increasingly being reframed into the final economic frontier that is open to investment, infrastructure, and future markets. The question is therefore not whether we will reach Mars but what and how institutional logic and astropolitical-economic rationality will decide on the fates of our neighboring planets.
I think it is useful to make a simple yet telling historical comparison. Simple, because history is repeating itself here, where institutional logics and consequences recur in a different setting. I am thinking of the early Atlantic expansion in the late 15th century that was more than just a geographical breakthrough, as it marked a complete rearrangement of power, risk, and responsibility.
Specifically, the 1499 expedition of Alonso de Ojeda is revealing in this regard. Unlike the earlier voyages of Christopher Columbus, Ojeda's expedition was not merely a sovereign undertaking. It also included arrangements between State and private financial interests, upending in what has been referred to as colonial terrorism. Meaning, investors, merchants, and commercial expectations became integrated into colonialism and its mass-harmful consequences. So, what came out of it was not yet a corporation in the modern sense but definitely an early and raw form of capitalist expansion in which exploration itself became entangled with profit expectations.
This transition changed responsibility, as distance made accountability rather diffuse. The investors that funded such expeditions did not have to deal directly with their – often atrocious – consequences. They were, in fact, partially shielded from the colonialist operational realities. Captains and crews operated with a very broad discretionary power in such distant environments beyond immediate oversight. Conrad's Heart of Darkness captures the consequences of such operating very vividly.
So, next to an oceanic space, the Atlantic was also zone of moral and legal abstraction in which justified mass harm to discovered lands and their people became everyday: plundering natural resources, committing genocides against the original inhabitants, including animals, of the discovered lands.
This can be considered indeed as one of the earliest forms of atrocious state-corporate crime where harm was produced not necessarily by individual deviant actors but through legally approved interactions among legitimate organizations that were pursuing normal objectives: making profit for European homelands.
The possible outcomes of contemporary private spaceflight could reveal similar institutional logics and their potential structural mass harms. Companies such as SpaceX should not simply be understood as isolated organizations undertaking technological space projects. They operate as very powerful nodal institutions driven by interplanetary capitalism in which state licensing, private capital, technological capability, and geopolitical ambition converge. So, the issue here is not whether private space activity itself is undesirable or inherently harmful. Nor is it analytically productive to frame particular organizations as presently engaging in criminal conduct. Rather, the concern lies in the institutional architecture that is being assembled around extraterrestrial expansion and the assumptions embedded within it. It altogether reflects and upholds a vicious cycle of planetary corporatization, space colonial terrorism, and astrocidal capitalism.
Much of the discourse surrounding Mars increasingly relies upon concepts such as settlement, colonization, self-sustaining civilization, and expansion, where these terms are construed as neutral descriptions of future possibilities. But that is not the case, at all. They ought to be understood as anticipatory frameworks through which specific corporate and atrocious futures become normalized before they become realized. Language here describes and constitutes such possible realities.
Historically, frontiers, especially colonialist ones, have rarely been empty spaces waiting to be discovered. They instead become administratively imaginable and politically actionable through narratives of covert exploitation that make intervention legitimate before even corresponding legal and ethical structures emerge. Colonial histories have shown over and over again that resource extraction and human slavery begin before governance arrives. And when governance is there, it is put in place to sustain such mass atrocity. So, the concern from a critical space criminological perspective is how outer space is going to be treated in a similar way.
The concept of astrocide could be of use, which should not be interpreted as a direct allegation against any particular organization or actor, nor should it be reduced to a claim of malicious intent but rather that it provides a diagnosis for identifying the structural conditions under which irreversible extraterrestrial harm becomes possible.
I see astrocide emerge in private human spaceflight because 1) technological amplification of human reach, 2) extreme capital-driven acceleration of space expansion, and 3) institutional lag in governance capacity (and otherwise harmful laws enabling astrocidal space colonial terrorism). Under these circumstances, mass atrocious harm does not need to be intentionally undertaken, as in, we do not need extraordinary malice or explicit destructive intentions for astrocide to be inflicted onto celestial bodies and phenomena. In fact, throughout our history large-scale harm often emerges from very ordinary organizational rationalities, such as efficiency, innovation, competition, growth, and strategic ambition, that were operating under conditions of limited oversight and extended reach.
Therefore, one of the most significant parallels between early Atlantic expansion and contemporary space ambitions concerns the effects of extreme distance itself, where it does not simply separate actors geographically but does transform their accountability structures.
To illustrate: in the late 15th century, oceans functioned as spaces of legal uncertainty and moral attenuation at the high seas. Today, outer space is considered in the same way, as questions surrounding extraterrestrial extraction, planetary contamination, environmental modification, and future resource monopolization remain largely unresolved. Perhaps even willingly so, where "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", as US Admiral Grace Hopper famously said.
Even though existing international legal frameworks provide important foundations and direct for responsible space exploration, they remain limited to the scale and speed of contemporary space technological developments and ambitions. Meaning, governance but also policing in outer space of such possible space colonial terrorism is lacking significantly.
From a criminological standpoint, the central issue is about how mass harmful space trajectories become normalized before their consequences materialize. Studies on state-corporate crime have demonstrated that institutional logics naturalize risks while diffusing responsibility long before visible damage even emerges. It then becomes interesting to look at possible astrocidal intent that could be emerging through the institutional logics driving the private space industry, perhaps is even normalized in new space laws that legally diffuse (state-)corporate accountability.
We could then work toward prospective warnings for such emergent astrocidal intent, possibly to be able to avoid mass harm in the future and the retrospective accusation involved then. We then need to be very critical of and careful in constructing regulatory and legal architectures that are capable of establishing limits before irreversible trajectories become actual realities. In this sense, criminalization could (and perhaps should) become anticipatory rather than reactive, foresighting unacceptable futures before institutional systems become too entrenched to regulate effectively.
To conclude, when the earliest corporate Atlantic voyages departed Europe, they were largely understood as exploratory ventures with high expected return on investment. Only now can we see that were institutional turning points that transformed the political and economic organization of the world, in a most atrociously harmful way.
Contemporary private missions, such as the announced one to Mars, may very well come to be interpreted similarly. Not because history repeats itself in simplistic form, but because frontiers repeatedly reveal the recurring problem of how technological reach expands faster than systems of ethical and legal restraint. We ought to embrace astrocide as a possible future outcome, to then re-engineer it back to today's glimmering astrocidal intentions and logics, being able to identify risks before they become irreversible realities.
*The banner image is AI-generated.