Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space - Fred Scharmen

Published in 2021 by Verso, London, UK and New York, NY

272 pages

ISBN: 9781786637352

As a kid, I avidly consumed science fiction films and novels. I remember avidly consuming classic works such as Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth and H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. In fact, to this day, one of my favorite books is a foundational text of science fiction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. While these books sparked my interest in the genre, my attention quickly turned upward to the stars. 

       One of my earliest encounters with space-based science fiction was watching Star Trek reruns and Star Wars. I distinctly remember watching the original Star Wars trilogy with my dad (and yes, much to the chagrin of science fiction gatekeepers and purists, I consider Star Wars to be science-fiction alongside the usual refrains of it being a space fantasy and space opera). I was fascinated by the myriad of planets and species that Luke, Han, and Leia encountered and explored as they joined the Rebels in their fight against the evil Empire. An avid gamer as a kid, I devoted many hours navigating a strange and unfamiliar planet as the starship-wrecked Captain Olimar in the Pikmin series, which I continue to adore to this day. In junior high, I joined my school’s Science Olympiad team, consistently ranking highly in one of my favorite subjects: astronomy. Even in college, I furthered my knowledge of the stars by taking a few astronomy classes. My love of science fiction and the realities of space exploration are deeply interconnected, and I’m certainly not alone. 

       Since A Trip to the Moon filled cinema screens in 1902, science fiction films have exploded in popularity, consistently topping the box office. These stories continue to fascinate and entertain, but they also offer insight into what we believe about humanity and its future. Throughout its history as a genre, science fiction has informed our ideas about the possibilities of scientific progress, the various ways in which society can be organized, and how we encounter the strange and distant Other.

       In his 2022 book Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space, Fred Scharmen (teacher of architecture and urban design at Morgan State University's School of Architecture and Planning and co-founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems) explores how science fiction and philosophy have influenced our understanding of space exploration. By considering the various reasons why humans have desired to explore and settle in space over the past century and a half, Scharmen shows us that the motivations of the current rising privatized aerospace companies have their roots in much older ideas. 

Overview:

       Far before it was proven that humans could travel into space, writers have been pondering the implications of such interstellar travel. Even in the mid-19th century, authors dreamed up alternate worlds, often drawing from the utopian literature of the 16th and 17th centuries. The early science fiction writers were also influenced by the colonial regimes in which they lived, which carried over into their speculative fiction. For some, space was another frontier in which humanity could expand and exploit. For others, it was a vast abyss that challenged our sense of subjectivity. The cosmic visions these authors create in their imaginations often have implications for life down here on Earth. 

       In Scharmen’s book, he interrogates the motivations of various writers, engineers, astronomers, and philosophers for exploring space. In short, Scharmen examines “the roughly 150-year history of the idea that humans could and should live in space, off of Earth, for indefinite—maybe functionally infinite—periods of time” (7). He does so by examining seven eras of speculation about space exploration, often pitting the ideas of a few authors, scientists, and architects against one another. 

Deep Dive: 

       In the first chapter, Scharmen explores the invention of Russian Cosmism as a speculative philosophical system at the end of the 19th century. Founded by mystic philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, Cosmsim posited that humankind was the pinnacle of the evolutionary process and its inevitable teleology is to overcome death through science and technology, infinitely expand into the universe, and utilize its infinite resources. He believed that the eventual goal of humanity would be to become immortal, to raise the dead of every human who has ever existed, and for humanity to expand to other planets in the wake of a dying Sun. While he believed that humanity needed to work toward this “Common Task,” he did not systematically develop these ideas. These concepts, however, can be seen in the works of cosmist scientists and writers, such as Russian-Soviet aerospace engineer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. 

       Thus, Scharmen examines the biography and speculative writing of Tsiolkovsky, which Federov and his philosophy deeply influenced. In his work, Tsiolkovsky developed a form of panpsychism, in which all matter, even individual particles, has a form of consciousness, thus possessing a form of subjectivity. Since, for Tsiolkovsky, humanity has the highest capability for feeling, all particles aspire to become one with humanity. Thus, the best thing for humanity to do is to repurpose every aspect of existence toward human ends to propagate and expand humanity, eliminating lesser life forms so that matter has a greater chance of participating in the human experience.  

       These beliefs are captured in Tsiolkovsky's fiction as well. In his 1920 novel, Beyond the Planet Earth, Tsiolkovsky writes of the meticulous construction of giant floating glass greenhouses, which are then utilized for humans to live in space (thus becoming one of the first examples of space stations in fiction). Humanity unites for this common purpose, as Tsiolkovsky painstakingly lays out the details of its construction and operation. Scharmen contrasts these “glass moons” with the fictional “brick moon” found in Edward Everett Hale’s 1869 short stories, “The Brick Moon” and “Life on the Brick Moon.” 

       In Hale’s story, a set of entrepreneurs propose to build and launch a satellite made of brick into space. Faced with financial difficulties and the ongoing Civil War, the moon takes longer to complete than anticipated, as the laborers move their families and livestock into the interior sections of the brick moon. One spring, the mechanism designed to launch the moon into space accidentally triggers, launching the brick satellite into orbit. Miraculously, most of the inhabitants survive and, supplied with the food and water that was brought aboard, they find that they can survive indefinitely in the brick moon. While both are stories about life away from Earth, Scharmen contrasts these tales as one of meticulous utilitarianism to solely benefit a singular goal of humanity (Tsiolkovsky) and one of radical contingency, opportunistic accidents, and the proliferation of endless possibility (Hale) (38). 

       This Cosmism had ripple effects in literature, as authors sought to open up the teleological imaginations of Tsiolkovsky and Federov. In Chapter Two, Scharmen proceeds to analyze the life and work of two such thinkers: J.D. Bernal and Alexander Bogdanov. He argues that these authors (especially Bogdanov’s science fiction novel, Red Star, which is about a communist society on Mars) sought progress in dialectical materialist terms instead of a linear, evolutionist, and teleological frame. Spontaneity, contradiction, and contingency are the primary movers of history in Bernal’s and Bogdanov’s fiction, which serve as a pointed critique of the older cosmism that places primary importance on hierarchy and the leveling of difference. 

       While the Cosmists of the 19th century saw space as the frontier in which human perfection could be refined away from the messiness and confines of Earth, the declining empires of the mid-twentieth century saw the opportunity to use the cosmos to secure national interests against perceived enemies. This is exemplified by the colonial aspirations of Wernher von Braun, as Scharmen traces the imperialist impulses of space exploration in the third chapter. A former Nazi rocket designer and active war criminal during the Third Reich, von Braun was clandestinely recruited after the war by the United States as part of Operation Paperclip to design rockets for their military and space programs during the Cold War. 

      During WWII, von Braun helped design the V-2 for the Nazis, which was the world’s first long-range ballistic missile. He later used this knowledge to advance within the American aerospace bureaucracy to become the head of the Marshall Space Flight Center. In this role, he was the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo rockets to the Moon. Von Braun firmly believed that rockets would be used for human space exploration and that crewed space stations would be essential to this vision. He was also convinced that another war was inevitable and used this fear of the Soviet Union to further his career. These ideas were popularized amid the wave of science fiction films that began to capture the American imagination, and von Braun also worked with Walt Disney on a series of promotional videos to promote his vision for space exploration. 

       While many like Wenher von Braun saw the vastness of space as a way to expand outward, others viewed it as a chance to look inward. Here within the human subject, a vast world of weirdness was already waiting to be uncovered by authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, who is the focus of Chapter Four. Scharmen writes, “Whereas earlier proposals for the inhabitation of space and advancement of life on the Earth were about extensivity—the imperative to spread out as much as possible on the planet’s surface, and into outer space—Clarke seems more interested in intensivity—the urge to go inward into the strangeness that’s already present” (112). The embrace of strangeness and mystery serves as a counter to the colonialist and expansionist motivation for space exploration. By reminding us of our own Otherness and that we are also a part of the cosmos, authors such as Clarke, Sagan, Cousteau, and the Strugatskys offer an alternative way of living that prioritizes the care of all beings. 

       Yet, this hopeful optimism was not to last. In Chapter Five, Scharmen traces the pessimistic turn of the 1970s through the films Blade Runner, Logan’s Run, and Soylent Green. For Scharmen, these films served as a reaction to the utopian potentialities of space exploration that were explored in previous decades and embodied in the life and work of Gerard O’Neill. O’Neill, like Clarke and Tsiolkovsky, sought to bridge the gap between speculative fiction and astrophysics, as he believed that every corner of the cosmos could be utilized for humanity’s betterment. As Scharmen writes, “Despite O’Neill’s misgivings about governments and freedom, his system is one where the state comes first, the corporations second, and, as we see in the many critiques of this worldview in science fiction, the individual human comes last” (146). As such, Blade Runner, Logan’s Run, and Soylent Green serve as critiques of the unfettered technological growth that those like O’Neill champion, especially when they are not tempered by virtues such as justice. Scharmen frames this expansionist, utopian vision against Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish universe, as she critiques the exploitative utilization of the cosmos. 

       In Chapter Six, Scharmen turns his attention toward NASA and the production of images, both hidden and visible. He charts the complicated history of NASA’s self-image from the Cold War to the present. He writes, “NASA depends on (and produces) a complex set of systems—technical, social, and political—and it also depends on images that make this complexity legible, sensible, and comprehensible” (156). This balance between fact and fiction turned out to be impossible to mediate, which contributed to the post-Apollo disillusionment with NASA. 

       Finally, in Chapter Seven: Scharmen analyses the emergence of the New Space phenomenon through its two most (in)famous forerunners: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. It is often touted that we are now in a New Space Race. This space race, however, has been largely privatized by billionaires with colonialist ambitions. Scharmen argues that the philosophies driving Bezos and Musk are nothing new: Musk is following von Braun’s paradigm of an existential danger from which we must escape (even imagining threats of WWIII), while Bezos is following in the extractionist and spacefaring fantasies of O’Neill (200). As such, Bezos slowly constructing a systematic structure to support space exploration for the sake of mining minerals for profit, while Musk is essentially winging it in the typical Silicon Valley “break things” model, thrilling and frightening investors with increasingly paranoid predictions. 

       This balance is difficult to maintain, as Scharmen writes, “The new generation of private spaceflight and space mining companies is trying to maintain a complicated relationship with the different audiences to whom they are signaling. They need to build support by telling idealists and visionaries that everything will change and get better, but they also need to reassure investors and government that everything will stay basically the way it already is” (210). Instead of investing in infrastructure or solving global poverty, these billionaires funnel billions of dollars into their spacefaring projects as a side hobby, signaling that space exploration will foreseeably be out of the reach of the average person, remaining instead in the exclusive purview of the rich and powerful. 

Commendations:

       There are several vital strengths to Scharmen’s analysis. By examining the connections between literature and space exploration, Scharmen brilliantly illustrates how fiction can impact and shape reality. He points out that the fantastical visions and worlds of science fiction have been deeply intertwined with the development of space exploration. The book is structured around paired sets of writers, engineers, and rocket scientists, as Scharmen pits their philosophical presuppositions against one another in a novel and productive way. His account gives a unique perspective on the history of space exploration as he connects both fiction and science through the analysis of science fiction literature and the work of engineers and rocket scientists from the mid-19th century to the present day. Through his examination of seven periods of space exploration, Scharmen provides the reader with a great overview of the intersection between the science and literature of space travel. 

       Additionally, through his political history, Scharmen astutely notes the connections between space exploration, colonialism, and the forces of capitalism. He gives us the necessary background into the history of how we have imagined life in outer space before giving us a projection of where we are headed in the face of the privatization of space. Utilizing his background in architecture, Scharmen illuminates the colonial contours of space travel and exploration and the infrastructure (both physical and ideological) that supports these projects.

       The last several chapters are the strongest, as the chapter on the image-making, propaganda, and architecture of NASA allows Scharmen’s expertise in architectural history to truly shine. He ultimately argues that no matter how much speculation we make about our capabilities to live in and explore space, it cannot replicate our current ideal conditions to sustain life here on Earth. Scharmen injects a dose of realism into the techno-utopic impulse that can easily overwhelm discourses around space exploration and settlement.

Critique:

       On the other hand, there are a few shortcomings to this work. While the content of the book is largely intriguing, the writing can be dense at times. While organized in roughly chronological order, the book reads more like an extended literature review than a fully fleshed-out original argument. Scharmen’s commitment to dedicating each chapter to one or two figures, while giving the reader a detailed case study, also limits the scope of Scharmen’s argument, as the views of each figure are at times extrapolated as representative of the attitudes of larger society. As such, this framework can occasionally lead to overly reductionist lines of critique.

       Additionally, while the book is undoubtedly interesting as an intermittent examination of the consistent attitudes toward space exploration over the centuries in the face of changing technology, it is not always the most entertaining of reads. Science fiction lovers will undoubtedly find several interesting connections between literature and real scientific advancements, but might also find some of the more mystical, theological, and historical context to be a bit dry throughout Scharmen’s account. 

       On the other hand, while those who are die-hard space fanatics will likely find several nuggets of interesting facts, they might not find much new information within Scharmen’s account, while also likely rejecting some of his more speculative prognoses of the future of space exploration. While I wholeheartedly agree with Sharmen’s more skeptical and realist approach to the settlement of space, his analysis was not quite as radical as might otherwise be expected. His critique of Bezos and Musk at the end of the book, while accurate, was also somewhat milquetoast and overly gentle, which was somewhat surprising. The privatization of space, far from making space more accessible, instead puts it in the hands of fewer, more wealthy people who plan to use it to further their wealth. 

Conclusion: 

Overall, Space Forces is an insightful examination of the history and future of space exploration. By illuminating the connections between science fiction and aerospace engineering, Scharmen brilliantly shows how the scramble for space has its roots in colonial, expansionist ideology. He also illustrates the current privatization of the aerospace industry’s dependence on wealth extraction, government subsidies, and the monopolization of scarce resources to reproduce itself. While it can be dry reading at times, Scharmen’s intervention is a much-needed cooling dose of reality for those who are myopically ambitious about the New Space Race. By showing us how humans have imagined outer space and the motivations for space travel over the centuries, Scharmen demystifies the seductive promises of Silicon Valley and shows how, if we do not address the problems we face on Earth, we will undoubtedly reproduce them beyond our planet as well.