History of a notion. On September 8, the director of the aerospace firm SpaceX, Elon Musk, announced that its Starship rocket models would be ready to make their first flights to the planet Mars in 2026. “Making life multiplanetary is fundamentally a question of the cost of transporting tons of materials to Mars”specified the businessman on the social network X, of which he is the owner. In April, during a speech from his production base in Boca Chica, Texas, he reaffirmed his desire to send there “a thousand ships” within twenty years. Behind the grandiose project of colonizing the Red Planet, it is the industrial success of its space launcher which is at stake, and through it the future of new space.
This term, introduced at the end of the 2000s, became established in the 2010s to designate new forms of the spatial economy. Also called “space 2.0” or “entrepreneurial space”, it designates an astronautical sector still in the making. Where the old space agencies of the Cold War pursued essentially political or military aims, this one would be on the verge of giving birth to an economically profitable private sector. Organized around new industrial methods for manufacturing reusable satellites and rockets, it would open the way to the future for humanity.
If we can doubt that space tourism, and its expensive orbital flight journeys, will ever become more widespread, on the other hand, the project of sending into low orbit (at less than 2,000 kilometers of altitude) tens of thousands of observation or telecommunications satellites and nanosatellites could soon affect a large part of the planet’s inhabitants. It is also starting to materialize before our eyes: Starlink, the first Internet access provider from space, is already deploying imposing trains of satellites easily discernible with the naked eye.
« Astrocapitalisme »
Some social science researchers working on these phenomena, observed mainly in the United States, nevertheless contest the relevance of the notion of new space. Rather than using this term coined not without complacency by its actors themselves, they prefer to use the more critical term “astrocapitalism”. The technologies of space conquest, in fact, have always linked industrial innovation to a form of institutional organization closely associating economic and political interests.
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