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OPINION: Don’t forget a Nazi engineer helped the U.S. get its first satellite into orbit!
The recent launch of Artemis II has (re)activated the critical theory and oppression studies mindset, this time because billionaire Elon Musk is the mastermind behind the operation.
Journalist Michelle Cyca, an adjunct lecturer at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism, Writing and Media, uses her Native American (Cree) background in The Walrus to consider the “colonial logics” of lunar (and space) exploration’s future.
Cyca enlightens us to what various tribes consider our immediate stellar neighbor (“tipiskâwi-pîsim, night sun” and “Nookomis Dibik-Giizis, the revered Grandmother Moon”), and notes the Navajo Nation has objected to a company offering to deposit “cremated remains” on the moon for a cost of low-five figures — a “’profound desecration’ of a sacred site.”
As previously reported by The Fix, Canada’s Kahnawake Nation wants plans ceased “for the development, militarization and commercialization of the Moon” — indeed, it wants its “Grandmother Moon” totally free of human occupation.
(Canadian academics, too, seem to have a fascination with tying “indigenous knowledge and methodologies” into the study of space.)
Cyca argues it is private industry, not you, that will reap the benefits of the coming $20 billion space mining industry over the next decade.
The moon has long been a shared locus of imagination and significance for Indigenous peoples. With the return of lunar missions, it is now a frontier for industry. Writer Michelle Cyca explores the economic and colonial logics shaping this transformation. https://t.co/oL2FIz9AzD
— The Walrus (@thewalrus) April 1, 2026
In addition, she wrote, the “long and troubled history of space exploration” is something to consider, beginning with Musk:
Musk, who has apocalyptic convictions, has argued humans need to colonize space to survive and recently posted on his social media platform X that SpaceX plans to build a “self-growing city on the Moon” within the next decade. On the same platform, he frequently reposts white supremacists and racist conspiracy theories that mirror his own personal ambitions to father as many white children as possible. Though the Artemis II crew is diverse—including not only the first Canadian but the first Black and female astronauts to travel to the moon—it’s hard to imagine such diversity in Musk’s lunar company town.
MORE: Scholars work at ‘Decolonizing Light’ to combat ‘colonialism in contemporary physics’
Don’t forget, too, that the technology used to launch the first U.S. artificial satellites was developed by Nazi engineer Wernher von Braun, who made use of slave labor from World War II concentration camps.
And while humans might think using the resources of dead rocks (like the moon) is certainly preferable to the continuing exploitation of our own planet, “scientists speculate there could be microbial lifeforms on the moon—our activities there have lingering impacts.”
Cyca also is concerned about the “half a million pounds of trash on the moon and more than 10,000 satellites littering the night sky” and the “nimbus of space garbage already surrounds the Earth, including a red Tesla convertible dumped there by Musk.”
This echoes University of Kansas researchers who three years ago worried about future moon missions’ “deleterious effects on lunar environments” which included “discarded and abandoned spacecraft components” and “flags, golf balls, photographs, [and] religious texts.”
Cyca concludes by saying “in space, it seems, there are abundant opportunities to make the same mistakes again” that we’ve made on Earth. “It’s hard to be excited for the future when it looks so much like the present.”
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