Fifty four years ago NASA landed human astronauts on the Moon, with a mission of world peace and unity. The event held immense promise for progress in the 21st century.
I believed in that dream.
I was five years old and distinctly remember watching the news coverage. And then looking out my bedroom window at the Moon and realizing that people were up there, right at that moment.
It made a powerful impact on me.
Little did I know that at that same moment, the forces of barbarism and division and oligarchy were already busy undermining everything which had made that event possible.
At that very moment, the 21st century we could have had was already unraveling.
It took many decades for the assault to reach full fruition. Barely 12 years later, as neoliberal President Ronald Reagan took office on a platform of tax and service cutting, the US space program was moribund, starved of funding, and with the exception of a few interplanetary robotic probes, limited to low Earth orbit.
The last of the great NASA rockets based on Space Shuttle tech will theoretically once again launch astronauts to the moon next year, or the year after that, or the year after that. With the final flight scheduled for 2029, sixty years after the first Moon landing. The Artemis rocket will get to Lunar orbit, but NASA is now dependent on private Lunar landers from SpaceX or Blue Origin to get down to the Moon's surface.
(And yes, the SpaceX Starship system may exceed the capacity of the NASA rockets, at a fraction of the cost. But under the control of an erratic, unstable centibillionaire who doesn't believe in democracy).
Our night skies are now crowded with thousands of private communications satellites in constellations such as Starlink, that threaten earthbound astronomy in both the visible and radio bands.
Governance of space is so haphazard that we risk Kessler Syndrome, a condition under which low Earth orbit (LEO) is so crowded with satellites and space junk that further launches become unsafe or impossible.
Like climate change, Kessler Syndrome is a collective action problem, or tragedy of the commons. Caused by the externalities of routine space launches, which are costs imposed on the collective and not borne by any individual actor.
There is no serious plan to clean up low Earth orbit, as we prepare for yet another escalation of the tempo of space launches by major corporations and governments, including launches for space tourism.
The libertarians / feudalists now in charge of our space future aren't treating this threat any more seriously than they have treated climate change. And--the number of future launches planned will potentially worsen climate change.
July 20, 1969 was a great moment in world history. But we were far ahead of our skis, lacking the maturity and cooperation that could handle the implications of becoming a global spacefaring civilization.
Turns out rocketry and physics weren't the most important disciplines for space travel, after all. The most important technology we should have been pursuing to unleash our potential in the 21st century was controlling the corrupting, totalitarian influence of private wealth.
We failed. And that may cost us everything. Including our future in space.
Sean Prophet 
