A Techno-Economic History of the Conquest of Space: Prometheus Among the Stars

With the emergence of the space economy, space companies have gained a power and influence that was completely unimaginable only ten years ago, but above all they seem to have reached a level of operational autonomy reminiscent of the privileged companies of the first phase of the expansion of the European economy, during the age of mercantilism. The companies that play the oceans of space nowadays do not seem so different from the ones that dominated the seas of early modernity. Perhaps the only real horizon of the great capitalist enterprises is to conquer ever more distant destinations, to make space a prime location for the creation of value. A history, of which the conquest of space represents an epochal epilogue. The only certainty that can accompany us in this leap into a sometimes-inscrutable future is that the theme of freedom will be the central issue in the conquest of space. Grappling with the danger of being crushed by the necessity of technological rationality or the opportunity to be freed from the limits, constraints of time and biology, free economic activity will know possibilities like never before. Within the techno-economic paradigm of space, the Prometheus set free by the Industrial Revolution takes all its potential to the extreme, but this prospect is not destined to know an Epimetheus that will mitigate its iconoclastic and innovative impetus, without overwhelming and cutting every constraint to its disruptive force. The evolution of the space economy presents itself as a sort of kaleidoscope through which economic science may be interpreted, even at the risk that the new scenarios of the future may be contradicted, transformed, renewed and – we cannot discount such a possibility- denied. This work is intended as an effort to make the new horizons that space is opening up more familiar, because, sometimes, it can be observed not only through a telescope, but with a kaleidoscope made of the lenses and mirrors of economic history.