How to explore space, ethically

Space is on a roll… at least if we are to believe how much interest shown the media have shown for Thomas Pes­quet and the ‘space bar­ons’ that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Bran­son have become. Per­haps this suc­cess is an oppor­tun­ity to ask ourselves what the eth­ic­al rules of space explor­a­tion should be. Because, if the big play­ers in the sec­tor do not ask them­selves these ques­tions, they can­not ignore them if soci­ety has already made them.

As a civil­isa­tion, we are becom­ing increas­ingly con­cerned – and not without reas­on – about the future of our plan­et. As such, is it reas­on­able to com­mit tech­nic­al, sci­entif­ic, and eco­nom­ic resources to the explor­a­tion of out­er space? Rather than dream­ing of dis­tant worlds, ima­gin­ing them as refuges for our spe­cies and thus risk­ing for­get­ting our Earth, should we not con­cen­trate on the lat­ter, in order to care for it, pre­serve it and thus ensure our survival?

At the same time, we can ques­tion the way we con­duct our explor­a­tion mis­sions and their effects. Based on sixty years of exper­i­ence, since the launch of Sput­nik, COSPAR, the Com­mit­tee on Space Research cre­ated in 1958, defined a set of rules and pro­ced­ures to pre­serve loc­a­tions where we place our probes and astro­mo­biles. While we must first and fore­most avoid con­tam­in­at­ing the sites where we are look­ing for traces of extra-ter­restri­al life with ter­restri­al organ­isms, the aim is more gen­er­ally to reduce the pol­lu­tion and deteri­or­a­tion of these envir­on­ments, which we still know only very imper­fectly, to a minimum.

Cer­tainly, the meas­ures taken con­sist of very thor­ough ster­il­isa­tion oper­a­tions. But they also push for avoid­ance man­oeuvres for ves­sels arriv­ing at their des­tin­a­tion, with the goal of pre­serving land­ing sites and celes­ti­al bod­ies. Sim­il­arly, we must be care­ful not to endanger life on Earth, and there­fore ourselves, when we bring back samples from anoth­er plan­et. This con­cern, dat­ing back to the time of Apollo mis­sions to the Moon, will be very top­ic­al when we return samples from Mars in a few years’ time; some­thing that has taken on a more threat­en­ing dimen­sion with the cur­rent glob­al pandemic.

COSPAR’s plan­et­ary pro­tec­tion meas­ures con­stantly evolve, both on the plan­ets to be explored and on Earth – as they do so they become more com­plic­ated. Bey­ond the frame­work of these very con­crete pro­tec­tion meas­ures, is the ques­tion of the right we have (or claim) to explore the uni­verse, to trans­port or simply to trans­mit ele­ments of our nature and products of our cul­ture in space. So far, no rule or law exists on this sub­ject… and we are prob­ably not yet ready to make it the sub­ject of a pub­lic debate!

Finally, without claim­ing to be exhaust­ive, it is appro­pri­ate to add a last ques­tion: that of the inev­it­able shift that will occur between the explor­a­tion phase and the exploit­a­tion phase. There is no lack of examples in the his­tory of our spe­cies where the first phase (explor­a­tion) was inter­rup­ted or botched by a rush to start the second (exploit­a­tion). Even if they are often described as ‘colossal’ or ‘uto­pi­an’, Mars col­on­isa­tion pro­jects bloom­ing on our screens and in the present­a­tions of stake­hold­ers in ‘New Space’ are no less wor­ry­ing because they seem to dis­miss or even ignore the sci­entif­ic research that has yet to be car­ried out on the red planet.

There is no doubt that these ques­tions are part of the eth­ics of space, like sim­il­ar approaches in all fields of human activ­ity, in par­tic­u­lar those con­cern­ing human beings and their envir­on­ments. Space eth­ics con­cerns above all the play­ers, wheth­er they are “his­tor­ic­al” (States, space agen­cies, research organ­isa­tions) or “new”. Admit­tedly, few of these organ­isa­tions and struc­tures have estab­lished real eth­ic­al “pro­ced­ures”: CNES, the French space agency, is cur­rently the only agency to have an intern­al eth­ic­al expert (myself); UNESCO ended up dis­solv­ing the group that was inter­ested in space activ­it­ies with­in COMEST (the World Com­mis­sion on the Eth­ics of Sci­entif­ic Know­ledge and Tech­no­logy). How­ever, aca­dem­ics who are begin­ning to take an interest in the eth­ics of space find its roots in the devel­op­ment of space law, as early as the middle of the 20th Cen­tury and even before the launch of the first Sput­nik. It inspires and is inspired by the prin­ciples of free access to space, non-appro­pri­ation and cooper­a­tion based on the Space Treaty (1967) and the Moon Agree­ment (1979) drawn up by the United Nations.

It is in the light of this leg­al cor­pus that cur­rent issues such as the man­age­ment of debris around the Earth and the envis­aged appro­pri­ation of space resources by private com­pan­ies must be addressed. Form­ally, space is not for sale: it is con­sidered by law as a com­mon good, like the sea, or even as a com­mon her­it­age, as is the Ant­arc­tic. But who can police space effect­ively? Who will the guar­an­tee the applic­a­tion of space law? And con­sequently the same doubt arises with regard to debris around the Earth: the absence of bind­ing reg­u­la­tions and mon­it­or­ing dif­fi­culties, mean that respons­ib­il­ity and man­age­ment rest solely on the stake­hold­ers and their good­will. In view of the situ­ation around the Earth, will this suffice?

One thing is clear: for humans, space has always been a screen onto which they have pro­jec­ted their dreams, their hopes and their fears, to the point of identi­fy­ing it with the homes for their gods or with a prom­ised para­dise. And we con­tin­ue to do so, for example, when we dream of a back-up plan­et, a ‘Plan­et B’. But space, over the past sixty years, has also become a mir­ror of our human­ity; its activ­it­ies, suc­cesses, and fail­ures. We are devel­op­ing highly advanced levels of cooper­a­tion, such as that which has enabled the con­struc­tion and man­age­ment of the inter­na­tion­al space sta­tion. We are also con­duct­ing com­pet­i­tions in which its tech­nic­al nature does not con­ceal the issues of nation­al sov­er­eignty and eco­nom­ic dom­in­a­tion. Why should we be sur­prised? Space is above all a human endeavour.

There­fore, we should not expect to find solu­tions to our ter­restri­al and human prob­lems in space: “Help your­self, and the sky will help you”, pop­u­lar wis­dom tells us, and not without reas­on. It would be fool­ish to pre­tend that we can do without space, giv­en that in the space of a few dec­ades our human­ity has not only developed a depend­ence on it that is almost dis­turb­ing, but has also been shaped by its dis­cov­ery and the begin­ning of its use.

Like­wise, to claim to have ended its explor­a­tion would deny the very essence of our nature, of our human con­di­tion, which is based, in part, on curi­os­ity, a thirst for know­ledge, and our ima­gin­a­tion. At the same time, we must be reas­on­able in our choices, mak­ing them accord­ing to our means and our needs, both indi­vidu­ally and col­lect­ively. Space has finally provided us with shock­ing images of the sin­gu­lar­ity of our spe­cies. “Look at this little dot again. This is it. This is our home. That’s us,” Carl Sagan wrote as he con­tem­plated an image of our plan­et taken from deep space. Today, this obser­va­tion has all the mak­ings of a challenge.