An American Empire on Mars?

     Are there plans under way to turn Mars into what India once was for the British raj -- the jewel in the crown of an interplanetary empire? Or will there be a more sinister form of corporate domination that flashes a company logo instead of the flag of a nation?  On the one hand, NASA includes foreign astronauts in missions to what is optimistically called the International Space Station.  But on the other hand, the Obama administration has given its blessing to the corporate ownership of space, not merely through Space Dragon and other privately-produced launch vehicles, but also through plans for a privately-owned "Space hotel" that will charge future travelers a million dollars a night for accommodations.  Too wild to take seriously?  Over ten nations have already made reservations for the Bigelow Space Hotel.  

      Significantly, Obama is pushing plans to allow corporations to lay claim to asteroids and mine them as private property.  Given the bankruptcy of government projects such as Bush’s back-to-the-Moon push and Obama’s aborted human mission to Mars, are we destined to witness an expansion of capitalistic exploitation of off=world resources under the umbrella of a token US government presence that will actively discourage competition from other places on Earth?  Peter Hyams’s vision of space mining in the forward-looking film Outland focuses on a Jovian moon where a giant corporation, under the aegis of a league of industrialized nations, extracts ores through gruesome practices that call for the intervention of a lone, embattled federal marshal intent on preserving some scale of human value.  This may not be far from the truth if laissez faire economic practices are allowed to flourish unsupervised and uncontrolled.  In the Chemical Corridor of Louisiana, where I used to live,  plants were sealed off by private security armies that would not allow local police or fire departments past their gates. 

          So far, the greed for gold, platinum, titanium, and rare earth minerals is so great that governments – notably our own – have done little to even hint that capitalism will not have a free hand in our solar system.  Historical precedent suggests that this is a suicidal course to follow.  There is one asteroid that is estimated to contain a greater supply of gold and other precious metals than the entire supply now on the surface of this planet.  The best known example in our past of such an influx was that of fifteenth century Spain, where instead of leading to universal prosperity, the overflow of riches promptly sunk a thriving economy into massive poverty, to the advantage of a small class of unproductive hidalgos. 

     Such a super-rich class, already being produced by the burgeoning wealth gap in our society, is already licking its lips at the possibility of obtaining huge land grants on Mars for their personal advantage.  Be assured that if Mars is settled, it will not be by humble homesteaders like the Great Plains or the Old West, for the good reason that individuals will not be able to simply stock a Conestoga and join the wagon train to lay out stakes to their allotted acres.  On Mars, billionaires are in the process of buying up all those claims for pennies on the dollar, and settlers will only be admitted as peons – the space age equivalent of Walmart employees. In fact, the bloated accounts of the Walton family make it a potential player in the upcoming land grab of all times. 

          So far, the United Nations has pretty much kept its head in the sand on these issues.  But it is time they started to look skyward and to arrange for Earth’s expansion into space to be preserved from the pressures of short-term greed and sheer imperialism.  It is imperative that an effort be made to establish that, like Antarctica, other bodies in the solar system should be maintained as a common heritage subject to the oversight of international law, with consideration for all of humanity, and not just corporations disguised as individuals or oligarchs disguised as companies.