John F Kennedy once called space-faring “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which Man has ever embarked”. We go to space because, he said – like George Mallory said of his reason to conquer Everest – “it is there.”

While it is truer to say that the race for space between Washington and Moscow was driven as much by cold war competition as by humanity’s pioneering spirit and the imperatives of scientific exploration, billions of ordinary people around the world recognized as much at the time and still were able to marvel at our species’ accomplishments in the heavens regardless of the flag under which they were achieved, from Sputnik to the moon landing.

And today, many more billions remain transfixed by the idea of the final frontier: they watch, spellbound, the live online footage from SpaceX’s reusable-rocket launches that are set to revolutionise space travel; pictures sent home by Martian-rover robot geologists; and black-and-white imagery from a spacecraft landing on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, an object roughly 500m kilometres away and hurtling through space about 40 times faster than a speeding bullet – perhaps the hardest manoeuvre ever attempted by humanity.

There is, however, also a cynical, “anti-space” ideology emerging, especially on some parts of the left. These space-critical partisans view the endeavour as a dangerous fantasy that distracts from the need to fix this world while delivering yet another source of carbon pollution and “extractivism”.

They think that space-faring is an illusion that imagines we are free to trash this planet so long as there are other planets we can head off to. Off-world colonisation and space mining come in for especial opprobrium and are now cast as “neocolonial” (even if it is dead rocks that would be occupied this time, rather than the territories and bodies of other living humans). The geography professor Deondre Smiles is typical of this new critique, writing in a recent article that “a scientific venture such as space exploration does not exist in a vacuum, but instead draws from settler colonialism.” The Cambridge political scientist Alina Utrata meanwhile tells us that space-faring is imperialist and extractivist, finding “root in the exact colonial logics that have justified settler genocide for centuries”.

And even as thousands of people cheer on SpaceX reusable-rocket trials – which aim to slash the eye-wateringly expensive cost per kilo (or pound) of going to space, many others, also in their thousands, sneer at how “every rocket he launches explodes”. Part of this is an understandable, if simplistic, reaction to Elon Musk’s far-right posting habits.

Whatever subject the billionaire is excited about, too many progressives – often just as extremely online as Musk – can respond only with mocking scorn, regardless of the subject’s merits. (The snark also just wildly misunderstands what the purpose of these test launches is. When we push at the boundaries of what is currently technologically possible, and development of cheap access to space is very much at that frontier, we fail often – and by design. The aim of these failures is to find the weak points, learn what went wrong, and then improve. SpaceX in particular uses a fast iteration model – build, test, fail, fix, refine, repeat.)

However, beneath the social-media clout-chasing cynicism and careerist academic-niche building, there is a more serious critique from many progressives that underlies it, often tied to environmental and social concerns. Space-faring is a Peter Pan fantasy that imagines we can escape the human condition, these figures say, a colossally expensive distraction from terrestrial........

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