Global Powers Race to Colonise Space While Earth Still Can’t Fix Its Plumbing
SPACE—THE FINAL FRONTIER that no one on Earth can afford to ignore anymore, mainly because the bill just landed in everyone’s mailbox. While your local council still can’t fill a pothole without three feasibility studies, twelve nations are presently arguing over who gets to park a titanium Winnebago on the dark side of the Moon. The irony, of course, is delicious: humanity finally unites—around a 384,400-kilometre real-estate dispute.
Take Luxembourg. Once famous for banking secrecy and a military that could fit in a minibus, it is now the Delaware of asteroid-mining shell companies. The Grand Duchy cheerfully hands out zero-gravity letters of marque to any startup that can spell “platinum group metals,” proving that when the going gets weird, the weird incorporate offshore. Meanwhile, China’s Tiangong station passes overhead every 90 minutes, politely waving at the International Space Station like a neighbour who definitely did not install the fence three centimetres onto your side of the orbit. The ISS itself—built as a monument to post-Cold-War hand-holding—now creaks louder than the UN Security Council on a Friday night. Moscow keeps threatening to detach its modules and go home, apparently unaware that “home” is currently under sanctions and on fire.
Across the Atlantic, Washington has rediscovered the romance of space, provided the romance can be monetised by three venture capitalists and streamed on a subscription service. NASA, once the swaggering quarterback of the cosmos, now rents rides from Elon Musk like a divorced dad borrowing his kid’s convertible. For a modest $55 million per seat, astronauts can enjoy touchscreen displays, panoramic windows, and the existential dread of realising their life-support software was last updated by an intern on a J-1 visa.
Not to be outdone, India’s ISRO launched 104 satellites on a single rocket—an achievement the Indian media celebrated as “cost-effective,” which is bureaucratic for “we did it for less than the catering budget of a mid-tier Hollywood divorce.” Downrange, New Zealand cheerily fires Electron rockets from a sheep paddock, because nothing says “spacefaring nation” quite like booster separation directly above confused livestock.
The Europeans, ever the designated drivers of geopolitics, contribute the Ariane 6 and a lingering sense of guilt about colonialism. Brussels insists its space programme is purely civilian, a claim undercut by the fact that the Galileo navigation system mysteriously loses signal whenever a certain unnamed superpower’s aircraft carrier enters the Med. France maintains its own military space command, ostensibly to protect French Guiana but mostly to ensure the baguettes on future Martian outposts are up to code.
Of course, the real action isn’t in government press releases; it’s in the boardrooms where men in Patagonia vests discuss turning the Moon into a data centre cooled by perpetual night. The pitch decks promise “limitless resources,” which is venture-capital for “we haven’t figured out the labour laws yet.” Should the workers object, management can simply remind them that unions are notoriously difficult to organise in a vacuum.
All of this cosmic ambition unfolds while 735 million Earthlings still lack adequate sanitation. The juxtaposition is not lost on anyone—except, perhaps, the marketing departments tweeting inspirational quotes about “looking up” from countries where looking down reveals open sewers. Still, the optimists insist space is our species’ great unifier. After all, nothing brings people together like the prospect of mutually assured de-orbiting.
So the rockets keep leaving, carrying flags, fungi, and the occasional billionaire who read too much Heinlein in prep school. Up there, against the black, the absurdities of terrestrial politics shrink to a silent, glittering irony: the same species that can’t share a subway pole now wants to timeshare Olympus Mons. Whether we become a multi-planetary civilisation or simply litter the void with subpoenas and discarded booster stages remains an open question—one best observed from a safe distance, preferably with a stiff drink and a sturdy roof.
