So I recognize fully that our listeners here might be like, come on, God has nothing to do with this.

This is a totally secular space industry.

Yeah, sure, Mike Pence and Donald Trump referred to God, but like they don't mean it.

What I want to encourage everybody to consider is that they didn't mean it in the 15th and 16th centuries either.

That the God language has always been when it comes to this kind of imperialism,

a means of making people feel better about the conquest that they are about to undertake. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Mary Jane Rubinstein.

Mary Jane is the author of Astrotopia,

The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race and a professor of religion and science

in society at Wesleyan University. Now in the past few years, we've obviously seen this

billionaire space race heating up as Jeff Bezos has launched himself, not so much into space,

but at least, you know, up in the air and has been doing

that to some other people as well. And Elon Musk, you know, continues to charge forward with

SpaceX and his larger kind of Starlink project. Recently, we saw the Starship rocket explode after

an attempted launch. And we also saw Jeff Bezos's company, Blue Origin, get a contract for a moon lander

from NASA worth over $3 billion. Now, we know that this private space race is, you know,

not just because there are these billionaires funding it, but also because there's been a conscious

decision by the government, especially in the United States, to start to privatize the activities

of space and of NASA in particular so that instead of having the public agency doing so much

of these things, that instead it is kind of serving as a contracting body for private

companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX. And that is the reason why these billionaires are

becoming the face of,

you know, the future or humanity's future in space instead of kind of national space agencies

...