Space advocacy

• 1. Introduction

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  Space advocacy names a cause that is both practical and philosophical: supporting human activity beyond Earth's atmosphere. The range of goals spans orbital flight, commercialization, exploration, and full-scale colonization of other worlds. What draws so many different people and organizations to this cause, and how did a handful of early thinkers in the 1920s create a movement that now includes political action committees, universities, and interstellar research foundations? The answers reach from the reading rooms of Weimar-era Germany to the halls of the United States Congress, and they are more contested than any rocket launch might suggest.

• 2. Origins and Early Visionaries

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  The first space advocacy groups took shape in the 1920s, formed primarily by members of the Russian, American, British, and German scientific communities. These early thinkers did not wait for governments to come to them. Starting in the 1930s, they began presenting their plans for a future in space directly to their respective governments and to the public.

  The movement gained popular momentum through an unlikely partnership of art and engineering. Chesley Bonestell produced influential illustrations based on designs by Wernher von Braun, and those images appeared in works like The Conquest of Space in 1949. The case for space spread further through a series of articles titled "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!" published in Colliers magazine between 1952 and 1954.

  Television carried the vision into living rooms. Walt Disney aired "Man in Space" and "Man and the Moon" in 1955, followed by "Mars and Beyond" in 1957. By the time NASA existed, the idea that humanity belonged in space had already been planted in the public imagination by artists, writers, and scientists working largely outside government structures.

• 3. Two Competing Paradigms

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  Daniel Deudney's book Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity identified a fault line running through space advocacy that most enthusiasts prefer not to discuss. Deudney described two distinct paradigms. The Braun-Tsiolkovsky paradigm focuses on migration and the militarization of space. The Clarke-Sagan paradigm instead emphasizes exploration.

  Mark Hopkins of the National Space Society offered a different framing. He acknowledged that each space organization carries different priorities and short-term objectives. Despite that diversity, Hopkins argued that all organizations share the same ultimate goal: building space settlements.

  The Space Exploration Alliance, formed in 2004 when most of the leading US non-profit space organizations joined together, was created specifically to "advocate for the exploration and development of outer space" to members of Congress. Its annual Legislative Blitz encourages every space enthusiast to call, email, or personally visit their Congressperson's office, translating an abstract vision into a concrete political act.

• 4. Decolonizing the Final Frontier

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  Not everyone agrees that the dominant traditions of space advocacy point in a healthy direction. Critics associated with organizations like the JustSpace Alliance, connected to astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz, and the IAU's Inclusive Astronomy project argue that the movement has inherited troubling assumptions from terrestrial history.

  An event called Decolonizing Mars, held as an unconference in 2018, brought these questions into focus. Advocates for a more inclusive spaceflight culture question the decision-making behind colonial space policy, examining labor and land exploitation through a postcolonial lens. The "New Frontier" slogan used in some private and state-funded advocacy has been criticized for applying settler colonialism and the manifest destiny ideology to outer space.

  Joon Yun has argued that framing space as a solution to global problems like pollution is itself an imperialist narrative. International space law has declared space the "province of all mankind," but critics contend that this declaration, while securing some rights for non-spacefaring countries, still falls short of genuinely equitable access. The question of who gets to be in space, and on whose terms, has been present since the beginning of spaceflight.

• 5. Organizations and Their Work

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  The British Interplanetary Society, founded in 1933, is among the oldest still-active groups, running technical studies since the 1930s and completing a detailed study for an interstellar probe called Daedalus in the 1970s. The Planetary Society, founded in 1980 in the United States, has pursued the search for near-Earth objects and extraterrestrial life, and once launched a spacecraft called Cosmos 1. The SETI Institute, founded in 1984, runs ongoing searches for extraterrestrial intelligent life.

  Political organizing has grown more sophisticated over time. SpacePAC, founded in 2014, operates as a political action committee explicitly committed to electing pro-space candidates to office. Penny4NASA, founded in 2012, advocates for raising the NASA budget to one penny of every federal tax dollar, or one percent of the total budget.

  On the theoretical end, groups like the Living Universe Foundation plan the colonization of the entire galaxy, while the Mars Foundation's Mars Homestead Project focuses on the more immediate challenge of building a first habitat on Mars using local materials. Build the Enterprise theorizes constructing a spaceship resembling the USS Enterprise from Star Trek using technology available within the next two decades, a proposal that illustrates just how wide the spectrum of space advocacy actually runs.