At the beginning of May 2025, Elon Musk announced plans to step back from his leading role in Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk is now focused on another strategy for saving humanity – abandoning Earth and colonising Mars. In an interview with Fox News, he stated that, ‘Mars is life insurance for life collectively […] The sun is gradually expanding, and so we do at some point need to be a multi-planet civilisation because Earth will be incinerated’. However, with the threat from the sun’s expansion not set to engulf us for another 7.59 billion years, it seems that Musk’s plans for humans to land on Mars as early as 2029 is perhaps motivated by additional factors. In December 2024, Forbes reported that Musk’s astronautics company Space Exploration Technologies (better known as SpaceX), was worth $350 billion and rising. Musk owns an estimated forty-two per cent stake.
On 14 April 2025, the all-female crew of Jess Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket safely returned to Earth after an eleven-minute flight. With the space tourism industry still in its infancy, Bezos appears intent on gaining visibility in an arena so frequently occupied by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Blue Origin passengers like Katy Perry and Gayle King garnered plenty of media attention. Speaking from the viewing platform, spectator Khloé Kardashian told the cameras, ‘Whatever you dream of is in our reach, especially in today’s day and age. Dream big, wish for the stars – and one day, you could maybe be amongst them.’ The mission took place only two months after Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp, announced plans to lay off around 1,400 employees – or ten per cent of its work force. In a memo to staff, Limp stated it was, ‘clear that the makeup of our organisation must change’ to meet present priorities.
It may be appealing to consider space exploration as an egalitarian venture – after all, what life forms will our settlements on distant planets displace? Doesn’t expanding our horizons stand to benefit all and harm very few? Pippa Goldschmidt’s Night Vision reminds us that capitalist colonisation does not exist in a vacuum, even if it occurs on another planet. Goldschmidt’s long essay, published by Broken Sleep Books, fuses personal experience, scientific history and speculative imagining to present a rousing call to action. Night Vision explores space as a location of potential capital where commerce is being developed whilst taking care to foreground our own intimate connection with the Universe (Goldschmidt’s background in both physics and astronomy make her well-qualified in such matters). It asserts that, ‘to look at the stars is no longer passive, it is an active, political act’ (p. 38). Amidst a capitalist world which can appear to only be looking ahead, Night Vision is unwavering in its presentation of colonisation as inextricably intertwined with the progression of civilisation beyond Earth.
In a poignant passage, Goldschmidt details the history of the French Space Agency CNES’s space station at Kourou in French Guiana, including a 2017 occupation of the station by Guianese people who protested the contrast between the well-funded rocket launch site and the lack of roads, schools and medical facilities for the local community. She writes: ‘French Guiana is a territory that is simultaneously situated in the colonial slave-owning past as well as the space-hopping future’ (p. 45). In another, Goldschmidt makes clear that whilst rocket ships are presented to us as technology of the future, the metals from which they’re constructed must be dug out from deep below the surface of the Earth. She describes a 2012 strike for better pay and conditions by workers of the Marikana mine in South Africa: ‘While mining for platinum, a metal used as a catalyst in rocket engines, they [the workers] were routinely exposed to dangerous conditions […] and were poorly paid. During that strike, 34 miners were shot dead by police’ (p. 34). Night Vision stands firm on the notion that we are all implicated in the connective strands which bind the marginalisations of the past and present to the potential for their replication in an intergalactic future.
Yet, it is this human implication which also imbues Night Vision with a distinct sense of hope. Goldschmidt’s narrative presents space exploration as deeply embedded in the story of human experience. By interweaving key moments in the history of astronomical discovery with recollections from own life, Goldschmidt offers empathy and understanding as alternatives to objectivity and passivity. From a child’s hands rifling through the pages of an encyclopaedia, to freezing fingers fumbling with a telescope dial; from spinning on the roof of a physics department and watching the stars move in reverse, to realising you were a stranger to the boy you loved – Night Vision reminds us that no matter how infinite the Universe, we and everything in it are all part of the same story. Goldschmidt’s ethos echoes that of another great writer and imaginer, Ursula K. Le Guin. In her influential essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Le Guin redefines technology and science as a cultural carrier bag, rather than weapon of domination. Le Guin states: ‘It is the story that makes the difference […] and still the story isn’t over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.’
Hope is not lost, and the story is not over. As part of the story, we can influence the way in which our doing, thinking, and making is shared with generations to come. As Goldschmidt writes: ‘We need to reclaim gazing at the night sky’ (p. 38). At only forty-eight pages, Night Vision is essential reading for those of us who plan to keep on existing in this world – at least for a little while longer.
Night Vision is published by Broken Sleep Books
