Seen from space, slavery can be eradicated

One of my favorite space stories is about slavery.

Maxar is the company that developed a high-definition satellite imagery system that generates photographs with 30 cm class resolution. Beyond the military, who do you think might need this level of imaging detail? A journalist with the Associated Press, for instance. In 2015, Martha Mendoza was investigating slavery in the seas of Southeast Asia, where it was essentially an open secret. It worked liked this: ruthless fish merchants hired men from Myanmar with short-term contracts for deep sea fishing, and then forced them to stay on board for years, in some cases even decades. But what was missing was the “smoking gun.”

So Mendoza reached out to Maxar and the company managed to take a high resolution photograph capturing the image of a cargo vessel loading fish offshore from ships full of slaves. Thanks to this picture, and the investigations that followed, the Indonesian navy succeeded in freeing 2,000 people from slavery and Mendoza won her second Pulitzer Prize.

Just a few years ago, the most reliable estimates projected that the space economy would be worth one trillion dollars by 2040. Today the World Economic Forum and McKinsey  are predicting that the figure will hit 1.8 trillion by 2035, an annual growth rate of 9%.

What makes this possible is the democratization of space, a process which sees more and more countries and private citizens involved. We shouldn’t stop it, we should regulate it instead.

These are exhilarating times for us space professionals. Just think of lunar exploration. Yes, it’s true that since the Apollo project ended, no human has set foot on the Moon. But it’s also true that there’s a proliferation in the number of countries with the know how to send a probe to the lunar surface, with China, India and Japan leading the way in successful launches, Israel with one failed attempt; and South Korea has launched a lunar orbiter.

In this new phase, countries are more often collaborating than competing with one another. For example, forty countries are joining forces with the Americans on Artemis, a project with the mission to send humans back to the Moon. And a dozen are working together on the Russian-Chinese International Lunar Research Station.

Meanwhile, private individuals are making headway too.  Just look at Elon Musk, who may even be able to establish a monopoly, or so some fear.  In fact, to send 42,000 satellites into orbit, Musk launched 50 at a time once or twice a day, completing his Starlink constellation. And since he controls four launch sites, he can contract out to other private companies like Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos, who’s working to finalize his 3,200-satellite Kuiper constellation.

Private individuals and governments collaborate today in ways we’ve never seen before. If NASA can send humans into space again without turning to foreign space agencies, it’s thanks to the Crew Dragon developed by Elon Musk’s Space X and an innovative contract. This agreement guarantees Musk 12 missions, but only after he develops the space capsule. This allows Musk to source the financing he needs to adopt a fly-fix-fly strategy: testing a prototype, figuring out what’s wrong with it, fixing the defects and trying again. What would happen if American taxpayers had to foot the bill for all these failed attempts? 

But the problem that’s emerging, especially in low orbit, is space congestion and space debris, so much that it could prevent future launches. Some are calling for a moratorium, but that would mean sacrificing all the potential benefits of the democratization of space. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 states that space a common good, freely accessible to all countries to use for pacific purposes, regardless of their economic, technological or social level. So it would be illogical to block the expansion of the space economy when even developing countries are starting to play a prominent role.

When the first automobiles started causing traffic jams on the few roads that were drivable, and crashing because there was nothing regulating traffic flow, we didn’t stop manufacturing cars. We came up with the rules of the road.

Originally published in Fortune Italia