The radical history of space exploration from the Russian Cosmists to Elon Musk

Many societies have imagined going to live in space. What they want to do once they get up there - whether conquering the unknown, establishing space "colonies," privatising the moon's resources - reveals more than expected. In this fascinating radical history of space exploration, Fred Scharmen shows that often science and fiction have combined in the imagined dreams of life in outer space, but these visions have real implications for life back on earth.

For the Russian Cosmists of the 1890s space was a place to pursue human perfection away from the Earth. For others, such as Wernher Von Braun, it was an engineering task that combined, in the Space Race, the Cold War, and during World War II, with destructive geopolitics. Arthur C Clark in his speculative books offered an alternative vision of wonder that is indifferent to human interaction. Meanwhile NASA planned and managed the space station like an earthbound corporation. Today, the market has arrived into outer space and exploration is the plaything of superrich technology billionaires, who plan to privatise the mineral wealth for themselves. Are other worlds really possible?

Bringing these figures and ideas together reveals a completely different story of our relationship with outer space, as well as the dangers of our current direction of extractive capitalism and colonisation.

"The inhabitants of the red planet zoom around in a hyperloop and their leader is called - yes, really - The Elon. This, along with an insane amount of other brilliant nuggets, features in Scharmen's lively history of space exploration as a colonial and, ultimately, architectural project." - Financial Times

"Scharmen pulls off the delicate balancing act between the specific and the general with a skill that never lets the reader see the effort that goes into it." - Science Fiction Studies

"By touching on the development of contrasting views of how practical space flight was developed across seven distinct time periods, Scharmen lays the threads of how we got here out in perfect clarity." - Architect's Newspaper