astros

Astros: The New Cosmic Cartel Running the World While You’re Busy Scrolling
By Dave’s Foreign Desk, from an undisclosed bar with a view of three different time zones

You’d be forgiven for assuming that “Astros” refers to that baseball team whose 2017 World Series trophy is now used primarily as a paperweight for MLB’s apology letters. But the Astros currently colonising headlines from Lagos to La Paz aren’t stealing signs—they’re stealing futures, one satellite launch at a time, and they wear Patagonia vests instead of pinstripes.

The term has quietly metastasised beyond the ballpark and into the stratosphere, where a loose constellation of private rocketeers, state space agencies, and hedge-fund hobbyists now collectively call themselves “Astros.” Think of them as the G20, but with better marketing departments and existential risk baked in. Their members include Elon Musk’s SpaceX, China’s CNSA, India’s ISRO, the UAE’s freshly-minted Mars fetish, and a smattering of European startups whose business plans read like late-night haikus: “De-orbit junk / monetise the vacuum / profit?”

What unites this global club is a shared conviction that Earth—melting, debt-ridden, TikTok-addled—is basically a pre-game lobby. The real match is in low-Earth orbit and beyond, where mineral rights, broadband monopolies, and nationalist bragging rights sparkle like so much space-kitsch tinsel. If the 20th century was a race to plant flags on the Moon, the 21st is a race to plant Terms of Service.

Consider the numbers. Roughly 7,500 active satellites currently circle overhead, a figure projected to quintuple by decade’s end courtesy of Astros and their mega-constellations. Rwanda—yes, Rwanda—just filed to loft 300,000 mini-fridge-sized birds, presumably so Kigali can dab on slow-pokes still buffering Netflix with mere fiber. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs estimates the orbital economy could hit $1 trillion by 2040, which is economist-speak for “somebody’s buying a second super-yacht, and it isn’t you.”

The geopolitical choreography is deliciously absurd. Washington accuses Beijing of turning space into a “warfighting domain” while quietly green-lighting its own Space Force camo (because nothing says stealth like forest-green in a vacuum). Brussels lectures everyone on orbital debris, then underwrites Airbus Defence so it can fling more satellites into the traffic jam. And Moscow—reduced to hitching rides on SpaceX because its own rockets keep forgetting which way is up—still finds time to threaten “unspecified countermeasures” against any American satellite that looks at it funny. It’s MAD, but make it zero-gravity.

Down on Earth, the collateral damage trickles in like cosmic acid rain. Astronomers now schedule telescope time around Starlink trains photobombing the cosmos. Indigenous radio astronomers in South Africa watch ancestral star stories get drowned out by Musk’s orbital Muzak. And in the Pacific, fishermen trade rumors that the next “big catch” may be a flaming chunk of Chinese booster re-entering over Kiribati—free titanium, if you don’t mind the radiation tan.

Not that the Astros lose sleep. Their risk departments quantify human extinction the way actuaries once tallied fender-benders. Each launch license comes with an acceptable casualty figure—“only” 1 in 10,000 odds of raining hypersonic shrapnel on a suburb. Those odds, helpfully, are still better than your chance of affording a down payment in any suburb.

So what does it mean for the rest of us, the gravity-bound billions who still think “space law” is the plot of a cancelled Netflix series? Basically, we’re tenants on a landlord’s planet, watching the landlord build a penthouse in the sky. The rent is due in data, attention, and whatever mineral rights can be scraped off asteroids before the biosphere files for bankruptcy. If history is any guide, the Astros will write the orbital constitution in the same fine print they use for end-user agreements: “Subject to change without notice. Disputes resolved on the dark side of the Moon.”

In the end, the joke’s on them. Every satellite eventually becomes debris; every empire becomes archaeology. Until then, keep your umbrella handy—those falling rocket parts have a wicked sense of timing. And remember: when the Astros finally auction off the Milky Way, the bidding will start at one Earth, slightly used, some assembly required.