Is Space Exploration a Necessity or an Indulgence?
In 1970, the same year Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon, the American musician Gil Scott‑Heron wrote Whitey on the Moon. He reminded his listeners that while a rocket landed on the lunar surface, people in black communities in the US could not afford a doctor or basic housing. Decades later, NASA’s Artemis program announces that it is “setting humanity on a sustainable course to the Moon” and “to create a safe and transparent environment … for all of humanity to enjoy.” This juxtaposition will manifest itself throughout this essay, as the gap between the universalist rhetoric of space exploration and the unmet needs of human beings on Earth has not closed. It has only grown more conspicuous.
Space exploration, as currently conceived, is an indulgence. It is not because space exploration lacks value, but because it’s built upon pseudo-universal claims. The current space exploration narrative rests on a defective philosophical structure: the necessity claim is circular, the authorization speaking for humanity is fictitious, and the cognitive framework of substance ontology fails for complex and irreversible systems. When a project's necessity rests on such defective arguments, the claim to necessity collapses. The burden of proof lies with whoever asserts universal necessity; when that burden cannot be discharged, the activity defaults into indulgence. What remains is something we pursue because we want to, not because it is essential. It can become a genuine necessity, something people must have in order to live properly, but only through an epistemological transformation that has not yet occurred.
Current declaration of the necessity of space exploration is based on circular justification. The 2020 US National Space Policy speaks of “human expansion into the solar system.” The Artemis Accords define their era as one of “human expansion throughout the solar system.” In these texts, expansion is not a means to an end but the end itself, the defining marker of civilizational progress that makes the necessity of space exploration asserted as self‑evident.
This is a textbook case circular reasoning: expansion is assumed good, so space (the next frontier) is deemed necessary, yet the premise that civilization must continuously expand is never independently justified; it is taken as an axiom. More precisely, it commits what David Hume identified as the is‑ought fallacy (Hume 469): no normative obligation (“we must expand”) can be derived from a descriptive fact (“we happen to have a tendency to expand”) without an independent normative premise.
This circularity is not simply a logical slip but an example of how paradigms operate. Thomas Kuhn argues that a paradigm determines what counts as a legitimate problem and what counts as an acceptable solution. The current space paradigm treats expansion as a self‑justifying good, and therefore never asks whether expansion might not be a necessity but a luxury under specific conditions. As Thomas Kuhn notes, paradigms dictate what we perceive (Kuhn 111). The current paradigm trains us to view celestial bodies merely as "things to be extracted"; a different paradigm might see them as "systems to be understood." The circular justification of "we want to expand, therefore we must expand" persists not because it is logically sound, but because the paradigm immunizes its core assumptions from challenge. In Kuhn's terms, what appears as a universal necessity is a paradigm‑dependent assertion, not a paradigm‑independent truth.
The second defect concerns the claimant. NASA says the Artemis program benefits "for all humankind" (The Artemis Accords, §1). SpaceX says Mars colonization is the “the road to making humanity multiplanetary” . These statements presuppose a representative relationship: someone is speaking on behalf of the whole human species.
But who has authorized this representation? The Artemis Accords are bilateral agreements between the United States and its allied nations, with China, Russia, and most of Africa and Latin America countries unincluded. In fact, NASA's budget is decided by the US Congress, serving mostly for the benefits of US citizens regardless of how it is declared. Similarly, SpaceX is a private company whose decisions are made by Elon Musk and its shareholders. The general public is not stakeholders. None of these actors has received a democratic mandate from the global population to speak for all of humanity. Their claim to universality is rhetorical instead of factual. This is what makes the authorization fictitious: the universal "we" that appears in space discourse does not exist as a decision‑maker. It is a phantom. The fact that GPS and satellite communications benefit everyone without authorization does not exempt the claim of universal necessity. Just because a project happens to help everyone doesn't mean it is qualified to claim to be a necessity for everyone.
The third and deepest defect is epistemological. Current space exploration operates within what philosophers call substance ontology: the view that the world is made up of independently existing objects that exist first and then enter into relations. From this perspective, the Moon can be a collection of water ice waiting to be extracted and Mars is a territory to be settled. But if we see the Moon not as a resource depot but as a system of gravitational, thermal, and other relations that we do not yet fully understand, we are entering an alternative perspective: relational ontology. Here, relations are not external links between pre-existing entities; they constitute the entities themselves. A relational ontology believes that since we do not understand the network, we cannot predict the consequences of intervening in it, as any intervention will irreversibly alter those relations.
To see the difference, consider the following scenario. Before deciding to extract water ice from the lunar south pole, a substance ontology asks only if there is water ice that we can extract from. A relational ontology, by contrast, would first ask what role this water ice plays in the Moon's geological and thermal systems and consider whether its removal would alter the heat exchange on Moon. Since we usually lack the knowledge to assess such consequences, irreversible extraction would violate our responsibility toward our own ignorance. This is not an abstract philosophical dispute but a practical constraint on responsible action.
This relational perspective also exposes the limits of the current legal framework for space resource extraction, which traces directly to John Locke's theory of property. In Two Treatises of Government, Locke argues that by mixing one's labor with a natural object, one removes it from the common state and makes it one's own—all under a crucial condition: "where there is enough, and as good left in common for others" (Locke §27). The U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 applies this Lockean logic to the cosmos: the universe is vast, therefore extraction of resource is legal. Yet Locke himself assumed a world of abundance, whereas in the case of lunar water ice or asteroid mining, no one has the ability to decide what quantity counts as enough, and who are the "others"—future generations, or other civilizations that may yet emerge. On a celestial body with finite, non-renewable resources, there is no mechanism to adjudicate whether "as good left" remains true after irreversible extraction. The Lockean framework, designed for the English countryside, self-destructs when considered in the solar system.
The Artemis Accords of 2020 show this collapse in legal form. They claim to establish a "responsible international framework" for space exploration (Artemis Accords, preamble) while affirming that "the extraction of space resources does not inherently constitute national appropriation” (Artemis Accords, §10), meaning that one can own what is extracted without owning the source body. There are established safety zones, exclusionary areas that legally codify first‑mover advantage and undermine the "common heritage" principle the Accords rhetorically endorse. But on a finite celestial body, effective ownership of extracted resources is indistinguishable from appropriation of the site.
Yet not all space activities fit this diagnosis. Planetary defense monitoring, solar physics research, and basic life sciences conducted on the International Space Station operate under understanding and protection, a different logic from extraction and control. These activities already embody, in an embryonic form, the relational approach this essay advocates for. Yet the problem is not that such activities do not exist, but that they remain marginalized within the dominant narrative.
Though as argued above, space exploration is an indulgence under current circumstances, I believe it could become a necessity under specific epistemological transformation which has not occurred yet. The major component is a shift in the cognitive framework from substance ontology to relational ontology for decisions involving irreversible intervention into complex systems. Relational ontology has greater predictive power in precisely the systems (ecological, climatic, geological) that space intervention would affect, shown by cases like the Yellowstone wolf case, triggering a catastrophic trophic cascade. The converse is equally instructive: when wolves were reintroduced in 1995, ecologists working within a relational framework correctly predicted the recovery: restored vegetation, stabilized hydrology, returning species. The same framework that failed at elimination succeeded at prediction. Admittedly, ecological systems and inorganic celestial bodies differ in important respects. Yet the underlying lesson, treating a complex system as a collection of independent entities leads to systematic underestimation of intervention consequences, applies across both domains. Once we adopt a relational framework, the primary question shifts from "what can we extract?" to "what are the relations we are about to enter, and how will our intervention irreversibly alter them?"
In a relational framework, the necessity of space exploration would derive from two independent, non‑circular normative sources. Firstly, negative obligation, which is the moral risk of inaction. Hans Jonas, in The Imperative of Responsibility, argues that where technological power enables irreversible consequences, inaction is itself a choice requiring justification."In your present choices, include the future wholeness of Man among the objects of your will.” (Jonas 11) This imperative can be applied to space matters, as technological capacity creates an obligation to act and to understand before acting irreversibly. Activities like planetary defense already have the quality of a necessity as it does not depend on any expansionist premise but serves for the minimum requirement of civilizational survival. They are targeted, reversible in principle, and responsive to a demonstrable threat, meeting Jonas’s standard. In contrast, activities including Mars colonization and industrial‑scale lunar mining do not. They are not responses to identified threats, but are proactive and irreversible interventions into systems we do not understand yet. Secondly, positive obligation, which is the duty of epistemic maturity. As the only known species capable of interplanetary cognition, humanity has an obligation to understand its place in the cosmos. But the content of this obligation is understanding relations, not extracting resources; to learn, not to take.
Based on these two obligations, three shifts are needed. Firstly, an environmental paradigm shift: the 20th century saw science move from extraction to preservation, like the UN Biodiversity Convention (1992). Space exploration is at a similarly early, still‑reformable stage. Secondly, addition of legal precedents: the 1967 Outer Space Treaty's "province of all mankind" has no enforceable content, while the Dutch Urgenda case (2019) shows future generations' interests can be legally binding. Thirdly, epistemic pluralism: Harding's "strong objectivity" requires incorporating excluded perspectives, as Bolivia's 2010 Earth Mother Law proves relational ontology can be institutionalized.
At its current dominant form, space exploration is an indulgence, not morally but philosophically. Its claim to universal necessity is circular, its authorization is fictitious, and its epistemological framework is a documented failure mode. It is precisely in this complex and irreversible system that it proposes to act. Therefore, until the above conditions are substantively met, any large-scale space action cannot reach the threshold of universal human needs. Yet this is not a call to stop exploring space, but a demand that it must respect its own universalist claims. Whether the Artemis generation marks the maturity of civilization or a rehearsal of the old expansionist script will not be determined by the power of our rockets, but by whether we have the epistemological honesty to confront the question of authority before acting irreversibly. Without that honesty, space exploration remains an indulgence.
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