As mankind stretches in orbit and beyond, experts are still grappling with how the 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 necessities for the maintenance of human life, such as air and water, are not readily available – there must be fundamental rights agreements to ensure that workers are not exploited not.
- Translating human rights to professional astronauts and other spacecraft is not necessarily straightforward. Experts believe the international community should now start wrestling with it, decades before we have a city on Mars.
- How would the right to free expression work in practice for an abused worker aboard a private space station where an enterprise provides air and life support?
- “In space, we have an opportunity to create a new, holistic system from the beginning, which includes labor protection, which includes political protection … which includes protection for access to resources and oxygen and water,” AJ Link, a research director with Jus Ad Astra, an organization focused on human rights in space, told Axios.
What is happening: The UN Space Convention classifies astronauts as a protected group to be considered as envoys of mankind with rights and protection.
- But rules around the rights of private astronauts in space are not clearly defined in the treaty, and this could complicate things as more companies work to send private citizens into space.
- In theory, countries that give a license to launch companies like SpaceX are responsible for what the companies do in space, which means that people sent to orbit and beyond will be protected by those countries, but it is not tested on a large scale. train.
The plot: While the definition of the rights a worker has outside of the earth may seem premature, experts believe that decisions made now will affect what rights look like in a job for decades to come.
- Jeff Bezos set out his vision of large, private space stations in an orbit that would serve as manufacturing hubs for the industry, thus keeping the kind of polluting work away from the planet.
- Elon Musk’s SpaceX has already made the broad (and unsupported) assertion that Mars is a “free planet and that no terrestrial government has authority or sovereignty over Mars activities” as part of its Starlink beta test agreement.
- “It’s not difficult to imagine a ‘business village’ scenario where employers can exercise incredible leverage over workers by controlling almost every aspect of their existence,” said Ed Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, told Axios. . “It’s tricky to take an outing when the only place to go is the void emptiness on the other side of the airlock.”
The whole picture: “One challenge I face in the investigation of private spaces is that the leaders of space exploration companies will determine the objectives, rules and sanctions that govern the space housing and missions, probably with the maximum profit gain as the goal,” he said. David Colby Reed, a graduate researcher in the Space Enabled research group at the MIT Media Lab, told Axios.
- “It is as usual on earth, but in space such private government becomes total.”
- That control over everyday life and work could create a situation in which ‘it is difficult for a free community of equals to take root’, Reed added.
The conclusion: Sending people to space for the long term today will require difficult conversations about the rights they will have in space and how it will be enforced hundreds to millions of miles from Earth.