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President-elect Donald Trump listens to Elon Musk explaining planned operations in November 2024, ahead of the sixth test flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket. The US government is one of SpaceX's most major sources of revenue. BRANDON BELL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Analysis<br>Science and technology

space<br>Elon Musk<br>jeff bezos

This article is from our series How to stop the arms trade.

Space: the billionaires’ playground

28 July 2026

Lucian Walkowicz

As tycoons like Elon Musk attempt to seize space for profit, the Earth is being trashed, writes astronomer Lucian Walkowicz .

For years, the wealthy have been telling us that our salvation lies in space.<br>‘There is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multiplanetary’, billionaire Elon Musk has said, claiming that getting to Mars will prevent human extinction, and is therefore as crucial as tackling poverty.<br>Meanwhile, his company’s launches from its ‘Starbase’ have trashed surrounding wildlife areas and displaced longtime residents, while the boss harps on about using its heavy-lift rockets as a high-speed, heavily polluting replacement for commercial air travel, and putting factories on the Moon.<br>Fellow tycoon Jeff Bezos – founder of Amazon, equally notorious for its own ‘humanitarian’ approach – has enthused about housing populations in orbital cylinders and protecting the Earth by taking polluting industries off planet. Meanwhile emissions from his companies’ own deliveries have soared.<br>These supposedly futuristic visions for space have been weaponized to justify a wide array of activities (both on our planet and beyond it), including expanding state surveillance and violence, dispossessing people of their homelands, cluttering low Earth orbit with garbage, plundering the Moon and polluting both our environment and the night sky.<br>While outwardly the likes of Musk and Bezos might advocate for our future in the stars, in reality they are greedily gorging themselves at the trough of profit while simultaneously creating the conditions that may bind humanity to Earth forever.

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Bait and switch<br>Musk in particular has an outsized influence that exemplifies how space narratives have been wielded to justify a vast array of projects on Earth.<br>Before SpaceX had their rapid rate of rocket launches, before they were sending rafts of Starlink satellites into orbit, their main source of press coverage was Elon Musk’s mouth. Born to a wealthy white family in apartheid South Africa, this tycoon substitutes provocation for charisma by making exaggerated assertions and brushing aside details. Drawing on a long history of colonial rhetoric around space, he has managed to harness public attention with his futuristic plans to populate Mars with human settlements.<br>According to Musk, humans moving to Mars isn’t just a possibility; it’s a moral imperative. But a closer look suggests Mars is really a distraction meant to dazzle us while Musk accrues ever more money and power here on Earth.<br>Musk has conjured a litany of planet-killing bogeymen to justify his Mars ambitions – from rogue asteroids to the expansion of the sun several billion years from now – in order to argue that migration to Mars is a must.<br>As for what happens if people get to this radiation-­baked, arid, oxidized hellscape? No problem, Musk will simply nuke the polar ice caps and melt them. No matter that most scientists and engineers cock an eyebrow at these supposed easy fixes, nor even that anyone with common sense knows that nuclear weapons do not make planets more hospitable.<br>Leveraging this allegedly visionary perspective, SpaceX has been able to harness not only the imaginations of the wider public, but of its workforce as well. The company offers a seductive opportunity for people who want to see a science fiction future come to reality. But few in the sector seem to think carefully about which of the many futures depicted in science fiction are actually on offer. Despite numerous reports over the years of gruelling and dangerous working conditions, as well as rampant racist and sexist harassment, SpaceX continues to attract workers with a glimmer of Mars in their eyes.

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Meanwhile, by manufacturing urgency around this goal, Musk has also been able to justify the expansion of SpaceX’s business at breakneck speed. The ‘move fast and break things’ ethos infuses much of the tech industry, but paired with Musk’s pose as global saviour, SpaceX has been able to gain damaging momentum, outpacing regulatory structures around launches, orbital traffic and environmental protections. This drive has allowed Musk to tap a deep vein of wealth via military contracts, stuffing his coffers and elevating him to quasi-statesman status.<br>Greater good or greater greed<br>Take the Starlink...