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With SpaceX's Starship having finished it's static fire tests they will soon be gearing up for the first orbital launch. So far, space travel and industry have avoided getting polarized (although Musk has gotten some frankly ridiculous hit pieces for the whole Ukraine Starlink fiasco), but I don't expect this to continue as it gets cheaper and easier to sent things to and from space.
If you look at the cost per metric ton for space travel right now, it's around $11.3 million/ton. That means that if you want to get a ton of material into space, you're shelling out quite a bit. This limits space endeavours to major governments or multinational corporations for the most part.
According to Musk, Starship will be able to lower the cost to only $20,000 per metric ton to get into space. This is multiple orders of magnitude in terms of cost reduction. Now I'm not super optimistic this number will be hit anytime soon, but if it is, it will enter us into a new era when it comes to space and technology.
My question is - how does this play into the Culture War? Musk has been increasingly right-coded, but it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left. On top of this, there's a strong nationalist angle if we can get and maintain an edge on Russia/China in space industry.
I'm curious if anyone else has more fleshed out ideas on this topic, in terms of how space industry will affect the Culture War. Or do most of y'all think this is a non-starter and nobody will care about space in 5-10 years?
Has space and moon shots always been left coded? Maybe I'm not old enough for that.
I see no reason the derangement that has devoured every other unalloyed good in our society won't devour cheaper space launches. And I don't even think it takes novel rhetorical arguments to derange it. There are plenty of rhetorical weapons already created to alienate the left from space industry, and turn low information voters in blue dominated areas into an activated political enemy to SpaceX.
Why invest billions into space when minority patron group still suffered inequity?
Space industry is just a reflection of toxic masculinity and it's need to conquer and master
"Ecological" arguments about how it's immortal to "pollute space"
SpaceX has a "toxic" work culture, and/or discriminatory "merit based" recruitment.
Just regular old sneering and "Elon Man Bad".
And I'm sure you'll be able to follow the money right back to ULA, same as you could follow the unfounded attacks on mandate and lockdown skeptics right back to Pfizer.
Whitey on the Moon, a 1970 (!) spoken word poem which featured in the 2018 movie "First Man", shows that such ideas were already present and don't need to be extrapolated from first principles.
At least according to this article, there was at least some opposition to the original moon program from the civil rights movement. The most famous congressional NASA/space program opponent, William Proxmire, seems to have been a somewhat libertarian-ish Democrat, from his Wikipedia description. OTOH Murray Rothbard also bashed the space program, such as in here.
I don't think that pro-space-program/anti-space-program is something that is immediately returnable to left-right scale. It appeals to a certain variety of nationalism-tinged technophiliac small-p progressive thinking that has adherents both on the left and the right, though with different areas of emphasis.
It's impossible to know for sure, but I think if President Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, the US would not have put men on the moon in the 1960s. Or 1970s. Perhaps not ever (so far).
Kennedy's martyrdom made the Apollo program a political third rail, so pretty much anybody with the potential power to cut its funding kept their mouth shut until the first successful landing. But nobody spends hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars without a lot of people wanting that money to be spent on something else that they think is more important.
US would probably have still felt it necessary to not let the Soviets get all the space-related achievements for only themselves tbh.
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