The Relationship Between the Obama Administration and NASA

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In 2010, 2011 when Obama is kind of canceling that program and starting to shift things into a more private orientation with NASA. Elon Musk, as you may know, spent years trying to get the US government to listen to him. So he ended up driving a multi-hundred foot rocket on a flatbed truck from Texas to Washington, D.C. And also, of course, there's the capitalist dream of turning everything over to the private industry in order to spur innovation,. There's this long standing sense that NASA hadn't done anything since the Apollo missions; it hadn't moved anywhere.

Paris Marx is joined by Mary-Jane Rubenstein to discuss how ideas that underpinned colonization and Manifest Destiny are now setting the foundation for the billionaire space race and the plan to colonize the cosmos.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is the author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. She’s also a Professor of Religion and Science in Society at Wesleyan University.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

An excerpt of Mary-Jane’s book was published in Metapolis.
Paris wrote about the business behind the billionaire space race and the problem with Starlink.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin recently got a contract to build a moon lander for NASA.
One of Barack Obama’s legacies is pushing for the privatization of space flight.
The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 and Artemis Accords are attempts to unilaterally rewrite space law for US commercial interest.
Catherine L. Newell wrote Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America's Final Frontier.

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