Virginia Tech PhD Candidate Demands that the United States Stop Sending Humans to Space

Space is the final frontier for the west to conquer

Virginia PhD candidate Savannah Mandel believes that human space travel represents an “imperialist mindset.”

Mandel is an “outer space anthropologist” who authored “Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration” a book where she contends that “rushing to send more humans to space […] mirrors an imperialist mindset that harms Earth’s humanity and environment.”

Mandel claims the space industry is “highly bureaucratic, highly politicized, and highly technical,” and the more she learned about the space spector she started to question the value of space travel. 

She desires a “systemic change” in space travel, which consists of the inclusion of more social scientists” at NASA and other institutions dealing with space travel. 

Mandel noted that when she worked at Spaceport America she would “list all the pop stars going on Virgin Galactic flights.” However, she highlighted the “poverty statistics for the local area.”

“It was such a stark contrast,” she observed. “When I went to [Washington] D.C., and started working in space policy and science writing, I saw how militarized space exploration was and how colonial the rhetoric was around it.”

In an article, Mandel said the following about space travel:

One of the biggest concerns I have is rising interest in resource extraction, such as space mining. My dissertation focuses on how resources gained from space mining will be moderated, managed, and dispersed when they get back to Earth. Will further wealth disparities be created because of the mining of these resources? If only the wealthy have access to space, are they going to get richer from these resources while others don’t have access to them at all?

Another issue is who gets a voice in discussions about space. Is human space exploration a global conversation or a local one? When we set up colonies, what do they represent? Will they be a way of establishing territory and ownership over land, and what are the consequences of that? There are a lot of ethical questions to consider about how human space exploration affects those left on Earth.

The mindset Mandel manifests here is typical of most leftists in the American university system. Space travel is one of the last expressions of the European desire to conquer a new frontier. It is our destiny to eventually leave Earth and conquer the stars. However, the cultural stagnation that has been brought about by governing institutions and the broader culture in the last 80 years has limited our potential,

For mankind to truly reach the stars and carve out new territory in space, we must categorically reject the anti-white mentality that the Civil Rights Revolution has fostered in the political, business, and cultural spaces. We must champion the very Western spirit of exploration and pushing new limits. The way to do that is by completely dismantling the anti-white regime in DC.