Yesterday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the U.S., so I’ve been thinking this week about the challenges of protest and dissent. Protesting injustice can be dangerous, even potentially deadly work; this was true during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and it’s true today. Naturally, this makes me wonder what kinds of extra challenges protestors would face in space.
There’s a moderately apocryphal story about a supposed labor strike on the Skylab space station back in December 1973. The Skylab 4 crew— made up of three rookie astronauts— had been working nonstop for six weeks of sixteen-hour days, scheduled to the minute by NASA, with no time to rest. The story, as told by certain media outlets, is that the exhausted crew staged a work stoppage by turning off their radio and taking an unscheduled day off. The Skylab crew and NASA dispute this, noting that the crew members had simply decided to take a scheduled day of rest, and that the radio outage was just a technical glitch. Regardless of the details, NASA and the Skylab 4 crew adjusted the astronauts’ schedule after that to include more flexibility and uninterrupted breaks.
Not exactly a mutiny, despite the breathless headlines. But it does illuminate something interesting about space as a workplace: If astronauts in space don’t want to do as they’re told by mission control on the ground, there’s not much their Earthbound bosses can do about it. (Not at the time, anyway; none of the Skylab 4 astronauts ever flew to space again.)
That’s just about the only benefit you can find for protesting in space rather on Earth, though. Things would get much more precarious for workers or activists in a space settlement trying to protest against whoever controls the life support (say, the corporation or government in charge of running the habitat). Anyone hoping to violently quash such a protest wouldn’t need firehoses or dogs; all they’d have to do to “pacify the mob” would be to turn down the oxygen a bit.
The success of strikes and protests also depend on public goodwill. As I write this, nurses and ambulance staff are striking in the UK, and nurses are also on strike in New York City. These medical workers are fighting to improve patient safety through better staffing, but because their work is so essential, the strikers have been accused of putting lives at risk. It’s easy to imagine parallel scenarios in a space settlement: suppose the worker responsible for maintaining the life support system in a habitat on Mars or the Moon decide to go on strike. How will they balance their right to strike with the importance of keeping the air, heat, and water running? How will they garner support from residents of the settlement who just want to get to work on time (while breathing)?
There’s an interesting book on this topic called Dissent, Revolution and Liberty Beyond Earth, edited by astrobiologist Charles Cockell. In his own contributed chapter, Cockell proposes intentionally designing space infrastructure to be resistant to damage from sabotage or rioting, like building modular habits or redundant life support systems. But besides these engineering solutions (we physical scientists loooove coming up with tech solutions to social problems), Cockell also emphasizes the importance of preserving nonviolent outlets for dissent, like a free press.
These suggestions would be useful for protecting the settlement’s physical safety from violent disobedience. But how will we protect the rights of the protesters in a space habitat? Or will fear of the vacuum outside, and the knowledge of the vulnerability of their tiny bubble of air and heat, turn the population against the marginalized and exploited members of their population?
Upcoming Events
I’ll be in Leeds, UK this Saturday, Jan 21 for a panel called “Is It Time for Planet B? A Discussion about Human Exploration and Responsibility”, hosted by NoRCEL’s Blue Earth Project. I’ll be joined by Kathryn Denning, Jack Lissauer, Martin Rees, Anders Sandberg, and Christ Thomas. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hi! Otherwise, you can register to watch free online at https://norcel.net/bep/bep2023/.
I’m also really looking forward to this year’s Space Science in Context online conference on Jan 26! I won’t be presenting, but the list of invited speakers and posters looks amaaazing. Registration is free, and open now.