Centering space as the future of American dominance implicitly draws upon metaphors of the Final Frontier which posit a new manifest destiny for humanity while extracting marginalized bodies as materials for racial capitalism

Natalie. B Trevino, “The Cosmos is Not Finished”, Western University, 30 October 2020,

The American cosmic order is not a replication of European hegemonic cosmologies, but rather, an evolution of it as part of the project of building the American Nation-State from the Puritans “city on a hill” to Manifest Destiny. Early Puritan conceptions of the New World invoked Biblical language and centered the Puritans of this New World as the Chosen Elect who were carrying out a mission from God. This mission was nothing less than the salvation of humanity. This early self-aggrandizing vision of the American mission was secularized during the events of the American revolution, the constitution of the United States, and westward expansion towards, and engagement with, the Frontier. The Frontier marks a vast political and cultural opportunity to expand geographically as the indigenous peoples and their ways of life are not considered legitimate. American exceptionalism continues to inspire and shape the belief that America is the leader of the free world.

Coloniality, cosmology, and American exceptionalism merge to produce a uniquely American Cosmic Order, in which coloniality are bound to elements of previous Eurocentric cosmic orders. Extractivism defines the relationship between the American culture and nature and normalizes the exploitation of peoples and the expropriation of land. The increasingly feeble and farcical democratic norms of the United States conceal an imperialist agenda that uses the economic imperatives of neoliberal extractivism to steer global economic policy, as well as space policy. Within this legacy, racialized peoples are not assigned the status of Human/Man, because historically in the United States, they were on the other side of the Human/Man and Nature (for exploitation) relationship. The exclusion of these people from the state has become increasingly normalized, which can be seen through policy brutality, the treatment of refugees and migrant workers, and the violence against women. This is what Maldonado-Torres calls the normalization of the conditions of war (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, 2016, 2020). The American Cosmic Order produces and perpetuates state-sanctioned violence and the violence of capitalism, because it requires an “outside” to exploit and abuse as part of the colonial project of the Frontier.

Hierarchy is the central element of this American Cosmic Order that places Human/Man— the exploiter—at the top and tosses racialized people and the natural world to the bottom. This cosmic orientation of death and exploitation maps onto all political policy. Even the policies that shape and motivate space exploration draw on the deeply colonial imagery and logic of the Frontier. The Frontier functions as the colonial imagery to hide Las Rajaduras, those cracks in the colonial construction that reveal Nepantla. Which is the condition of uncertainty that allow for revolutionary change to occur. Nepantla is Low Earth Orbit. Before I examine this theory, I must examine and illuminate the conditions of coloniality in space exploration. The next chapter is a critical analysis of the use of the Frontier by space advocates. I hope that a closer examination of this imagery of the Frontier in space advocacy will allow us to glimpse Las Rajaduras

Chapter 3: The Final Frontier

Here, there be dragons. In fourteen hundred ninety –two

Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

The American frontier is one of the most identifiable tropes of American history and culture. For instances, Westerns are a cultural staple of the United States that have been exported to cinemas worldwide. Many (predominantly white) Americans are culturally comfortable with the imagery of the Western Frontier, because it has been continuously reinforced and celebrated in books, films, political speeches, and other spheres. The Frontier remains one of the most frequently used metaphors for the journey into outer space. The Frontier invokes imagery of vast skies and wild plains. The old Western Frontier represents the grand making of the American nation, where cowboys and ranchers built the towns, mined mountains, and cultivated land to welcome the westward expansion of the American people. This image of the Frontier does not represent the actual history of the US conquest of the continent, but it does accurately convey the ideology of the American conquest. Outer space has become the new Frontier, portrayed as the wild and dangerous expanse that courageous men settle as the latest outpost of Western Civilization. The constant reinforcement of colonial ideology in the American cultural imaginary means that the Frontier feels like the most palpable, immediate, and common-sensical historical analogy for America’s conquest of space. Frequently, space advocates draw on the imagery of the Frontier to excite the American people about space exploration, especially when these ventures are supported by the US government. Space advocates may employ this captivating and inspiring rhetoric to support their function as an interest group that hopes to influence government policy and resource allocation.

In this chapter, I examine the “Frontier” as a colonial trope. Whether it is used as a historical analogy or an ideological articulation, the image of the Frontier indicates and implicates several domains of coloniality. Although space advocates did not single-handedly produce the Final Frontier as a cosmic order of coloniality (government policy and public perception have a role in that development as well), they favour this metaphor as a tactic to influence policy makers and the public. The specialist groups of space advocates are interested in the exploration of space, yet they must generate support for their initiatives from the political realm and public sphere (policymakers and taxpayers). As hegemonic narratives and influential political positions are the easiest methods and manoeuvres for gaining support, space advocates inevitably promote long- and short-term colonial and capitalist projects, such as the nationalistic propaganda of the Apollo project or the exploitation of resources in outer space.

As soon as the analysis of American space exploration is expanded beyond the “modern nation-state,” the conditions of space exploration reveal a more complex colonial structure. Although the accounts that contextualize the history of space exploration within the boundaries of the nation-state are not wrong, their analysis is simply incomplete. The United States’ project of nation-building in the twentieth century did not develop wholly internally. Following the end of World War Two, the United States developed in competition with the Soviet Union, which was fuelled by an ideological war that lasted for nearly half a century. Yet, the use of the colonial metaphor—the Frontier—did not develop in tandem with the technology required to enter space (as it had a long history starting with John Wilkins, who offered a fictional account of what would happen if Columbus reached the Moon in his 1638 work The Discovery of the World in the Moone). Although the Frontier is the exemplary metaphor for the connection between coloniality and space exploration, Human/Man’s orientation towards space has been colonial for over five-hundred years. This colonial orientation towards the cosmos developed alongside the modern world and reveals two major aspects of coloniality in relation to the cosmos: the nature of Human/Man and the function of Nature.

The Frontier metaphor possesses enormous symbolic power and resonance. This is even why the United States government once commissioned a study on railways in the frontier to determine the benefits of space exploration (Mazlish, 1965, p. 28). The purpose of “the Frontier”— as a constantly-reinforced hegemonic metaphor—has more to do with its cultural significance than its historical accuracy. As the historian Patricia Limerick writes, “[t]he metaphors and comparisons and analogies that a group choose do in fact carry a lot of meaning and can indeed control actual behavior. The metaphor you choose guides your decisions—it makes some alternatives seem logical and necessary, while it makes other alternatives nearly invisible” (1992, p. 148). Limerick suggests that the Frontier metaphor is often used to determine whether certain possibilities—positive and negative—are either viable or unrealistic. Gloria Anzaldúa makes a similar point about metaphor: “metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit” (Anzaldúa, 1986, p. 123). In the case of the Frontier, these concretized possibilities are determined by the spirit—and logic—of coloniality. Limerick continues:

The pattern of comparing space to the frontier is not a light or trivial matter – that, in other words, thought, behavior, and especially appraisal of what options are available, are all limited by a misused metaphor. And on the other side, the space community’s thinking, and sense of options and alternatives, could gain new force and new range, with a properly used metaphor. (1992, p. 250)

I do not know about Limerick’s suggestions for a “properly used metaphor,” yet it is undoubtedly the cause that the Frontier metaphor does not celebrate the possibilities of human life in space. On the contrary, it relies on the What Has Been to produce the Not Yet.

Yet, the impact of coloniality on space advocacy and exploration cannot be reduced solely to the Frontier metaphor. This is simply a framing that advocates use to justify space exploration that caters to anxieties about resource scarcity, overpopulation, the “decline of Western Civilization.” In this sense, life in outer space becomes a promise of our survival. This is where the Puritan American advocates draw on the form of the Puritan salvation narrative—secularized within the capitalist economy in the United States through extractivist and dehumanizing practices—to promise the survival (and salvation) of the whole world through American Exceptionalism. Space exploration is offered as solution to these problems, which have become so naturalized that these advocates do not realize that the problem of resource scarcity is a consequence of capitalism rather than a genuine lack of resources. According to Robert Zubrin, space exploration will lead to a “revitalization” of a Western Civilization that has stagnated since the closing of the western frontier (1996). The more contemporary example of Elon Musk’s plan to “save mankind” posits space colonization as, “backup plan” that reinforces and perpetuates that an “Outside” will lead to a new prosperous era of capitalism and the salvation of the human species (Bainbridge, 1991a; Musk, 2017; O'Neill, 1977, 1981)

In this chapter, I will take a closer look at the Frontier metaphor in search of las Rajaduras— the cracks in the cosmic order of coloniality—that may lead to many other ways of relating to space, other humans, and earthly nature. Only by understanding the real purpose of these ideas and the practices they legitimate—Human/Man, Nature, Peace, and Modernity—can we finally move beyond their limitations and violence. The normalized violence of the Frontier metaphor perpetuated colonial violence, as it valorizes and celebrates the genocide and epistemicide of the Americas by European powers. Just as every cosmic order establishes “humanness,” the Final Frontier establishes Human/Man as the only possible mode of human existence. The Human/Man is the “I conquer” and the “I think” who forces nature to become nothing more than the raw materials for capitalist production. Populations that do not fit the definition of Human/Man are forced into extractivist labor, because, in the cosmic order of coloniality, they are closer to the raw materials needed for the fires of capital than the Human/Man. The Final Frontier—the Cosmic Order of Coloniality—is the current American cosmic order, which propels the violence of coloniality into the future in space.