Editorial

Off-Earth is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Luxembourg Center for Architecture (LUCA) following “Down to Earth,” the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Francelle Cane and Marija Marić. It features contributions by Megan Eardley, Ana María Gómez López, Thandi Loewenson, Bethany Rigby, Rory Rowan, and Fred Scharmen.

From the development of human settlements on the Moon to the mining of rare minerals and metals on asteroids, contemporary imaginaries of extraction-driven growth quite literally transcend the boundaries of Earth. Alongside ambitious promises of infinite resources, techno-utopian visions of futuristic space settlements, and neo-colonial ambitions of outer-planetary land grabs, space—and the Moon in particular—has become the latest resource frontier. A triumph of technological solutionism, space mining has not only become the latest greenwashing paradigm for mining and technology industries, but also an important domain of financial investment and speculation, as well as of political rhetoric. It has also emerged as a field for the political renegotiation of human life beyond Earth, from the conditions of human labor to the racialized and gendered histories of bodily standards.

Although anthropocentric conceptions of the Moon have fluctuated for centuries, the development of new imaginaries of the Moon has accelerated over the last decade, building upon the narratives and urgencies of resource crises on Earth. Following the first Apollo lunar landings in the 1960s, which allowed for the first material examinations of the Moon’s soil, technological progress and the close-up view it enables has radically changed perceptions of Earth’s largest natural satellite. Contemporary discourse on space mining departs from the vague definitions of “planetary commons” developed in international legal frameworks of the 1960s, instead focusing on private companies’ visions and their associated financial prospects. Constructed as both void space and resource-rich, the Moon today has been effectively represented not only as a new “outer-planetary mine,” but also as a “gas station” for dreams of extraction that extend beyond, out towards Mars and further into space.1

The shift of mineral exploitation from an exhausted Earth to its “invisible” hinterlands—the Moon, celestial bodies, and, eventually, other planets—throws into question how this new iteration of the space race, grounded as it is in the promise of infinite resources, diverges from the existing extractivist logic of capitalism and its destructive environmental and social effects on Earth. However, the materialities of space mining—its logistics, infrastructures, citizens, and workers—exist in relation to and impact existing geopolitical power hierarchies on Earth. The ongoing privatization of space will likely not only affect the current status of extraterrestrial bodies as a form of outer-planetary commons, but also the way the commons is seen, treated, and valued here on Earth. A first step towards moving beyond the optics of the Anthropocene in outer space might be to adopt the perspective of what Oxana Timofeeva describes as “cosmic solidarity,” and to recognize the cosmos as “neither a master nor a slave but rather a comrade.”2