As humanity stretches into orbit and beyond, experts still grapple with how rights granted to workers on Earth apply to those living in space.
Why it matters: In order to create businesses and perhaps societies in space – where the biological supplies for sustaining human life, such as air and water, are not readily available – fundamental rights agreements will have to be made to ensure that workers are not exploited.
- Translating human rights to professional astronauts and other space flyers is not necessarily easy. Experts say the international community must grapple with that now, decades before we have a city on Mars.
- How would the right to free speech practically work for an abused employee on board a private space station where a company provides air and livelihoods?
- “In space, we have the ability to create a new, holistic system from the very beginning and that includes labor protection, including political protection … including protection for resource accessibility and oxygen and water,” said AJ Link, a study. director at Jus Ad Astra, an organization that focuses on human rights in space, Axios said.
What is going on: The UN Outer Space Convention classifies astronauts as a protected group to be considered emissaries of humanity with rights and protection.
- But rules about the rights of private astronauts in space are not clearly defined in the treaty, and that could complicate things as more companies work to send private citizens to space.
- In theory, countries that license to launch companies like SpaceX are responsible for what those companies do in space, which means that people who are sent to orbit and will be further protected by those countries, but that’s not widely tested. yet.
The intrigue: While it may seem premature today to determine what rights a worker outside of Earth has, experts say the decisions made now will affect what rights look like in orbit in the coming decades.
- Jeff Bezos has outlined his vision of large, private space stations in orbit that will serve as manufacturing hubs for industry, keeping this kind of polluting work off the planet.
- Elon Musk’s SpaceX has already made the widespread (and unsupported) claim that Mars is a “free planet and that no government on Earth has authority or sovereignty over the activities of Mars” as part of its Starlink beta testing agreement.
- “It’s not difficult to envision a ‘company town’ scenario where employers can exert an incredible influence on employees by controlling almost every aspect of their existence,” said Ed Finn, founder and director of the Center. for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, Axios. . “Organizing a walk-out is tricky when the only place to go is the relentless emptiness on the other side of the airlock.”
The big picture: “One challenge I see for private space exploration is that space exploration company leaders will set the objectives, rules, and sanctions that apply to space dwellings and missions, likely with the aim of maximizing profit,” David Colby Reed, Space Enabled graduate researcher research group at the MIT Media Lab, Axios said.
- “This is business-as-usual on Earth, but in space such a private government is becoming totalizing.”
- That control over both daily life and work could create a situation where “it is difficult for a free society of equals to take root,” added Reed.
It comes down to: Sending people to space for the long term today requires difficult discussions about what rights they will have in space and how they will be enforced hundreds to millions of miles from Earth.