Since the 1950s, space exploration has elicited a range of responses, reflecting its complex and multifaceted impact on our shared understanding of nature and human civilization. While opinions on the efficacy of space travel vary, iconic images of the Earth taken from outer space, such as Earthrise (1968, fig. 1) and The Blue Marble (1972), had profound ontological and epistemological effects. For instance, displaying the world in its “totality,” The Blue Marble catalyzed contrary reactions. For some, the image laid the groundwork for contemporary planetary thinking. [1] People came to see themselves and the Earth as an integrated whole rather than a disjointed collection of individual parts, which naturally inspired an interspecies consciousness that would lead to the global environmental movements of the 1970s. Conversely, for others, the image generated the possibility of seeking a new cosmic home. Having turned the world into a picture, as stated by W. J. T.  Mitchell, enthusiasts of space travel would, from then on, think of the Earth as the simple backdrop of human action. [2] They prioritized expansion and reinforced hegemonic practices in a New Frontier [3] of colonization both on and off planet Earth. 

Argentine artist David Lamelas’s 1969 work titled A Study of Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space is emblematic of these contrary feelings towards space exploration. In the twenty-minute video-performance we see the artist meeting passersbies on the streets of London. The interviews revealed pedestrians' differing views on the importance of the moon landing. Many spoke against it, observing that millions of people on Earth were suffering from starvation and marginalization. Others expressed enthusiasm; feeling awed they boasted about the extent of human innovation. A third group missed the event and had no opinion about what the achievement represented. However, what was captivating about Lamelas’s piece was the fact that the artist took note of how our relationship with space and nature broadened existing definitions of art. Would the landing on the moon open a new universe of “space” to be taken by artists, art, and in particular sculpture in the expanded field? 

Yet, while space exploration presented a visual reconfiguration of the Earth, its impact on our ontological relationship to the planet was not entirely new. Theorist Mary Louise Pratt, in discussing the emergence of planetarity in the eighteenth century, linked this shift to the expansion of European imperialism. [4] Pratt argued that the act of “seeing” the Earth in its totality—often to possess it—emerged alongside the rise of bourgeois identity, the capitalist expansion for raw materials, and the scramble for overseas territories. In this context, space exploration’s visualizations of Earth, culminating in the Apollo missions, are seen as the apotheosis of this historical tendency: the final step in reducing the Earth to an object for human consumption and appropriation.

In line with Pratt, and in considering the larger ontological implications of The Blue Marble, decolonial scholar Rolando Vázquez highlighted the fact that the moon landing represented not a new evolutionary milestone, but rather a culmination: our absolute separation from Earth. This separation, which resulted from the final objectification of the world as a resource, would occasion a sense of "earthlessness," which signified a loss of grounding precedence. Vázquez writes:

On December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 crew took the first photograph of Earth: ‘Blue Marble.’ This photograph accomplishes the Renaissance geographers’ dream of reducing planet Earth to an object of representation; it is a moment in which the anthropocentric gaze achieves, as it were, its historical completion, the absurdity of its totality. The conception of Earth as a prison, the will to emancipate the ‘human’ from Earth, and the reduction of Earth to representation are all expressions of modernity’s world as artifice, its anthropocentrism, and its loss of Earth as relation. ‘Blue Marble’ signifies the transmogrification of Earth into an object of appropriation, representation, consumption, and waste. It signifies the forgetfulness of Earth as grounding precedence. [5]

This separation, resulting from the objectification of the world as a picture, reflected modern civilization’s neglect of our ecosystems and our own humanity. This neglect, a negation of our planetary condition, has led to the classification, appropriation, and consumption of nature, which has been exacerbated by the privatization of resources and the proliferation of images that depict Earth as an object of waste.

Protests and backlash against space exploration have been consistent since the early days of the Space Race. In 1969, civil rights leader Reverend Ralph Abernathy (1926-1990) appeared near the Apollo 11 launch site among hundreds of protesters denouncing the billions spent to land the first man on the moon while Black Americans faced hunger and poverty [6] (fig. 2). Navajo communities also challenged space travel by sending warning messages to moon inhabitants about astronauts colonizing their territory. [7] As they witnessed the rocket launch, Native American scholars famously remarked, “Pity the Indians and the buffalo of outer space.'” [8] This statement expressed their concern about moon inhabitants whose territory was being “regarded as unoccupied land to which powerful governments can lay claim.” [9] For Indigenous, Black, and Global South communities, space programs reinforced the ideologies of terra nullius—the idea of land being “empty” and available for colonization. These critiques underscore the ongoing legacy of colonialism embedded in the very fabric of space exploration, both in its rhetoric and its practices. Still today, and despite these hegemonic attempts at separation and negation, artists have been calling for and even perhaps demanding a “return to Earth.” 

Following Lamelas's provocation, contemporary artists have continued to propose intersectional views that ground our thinking and connect us to the urgent realities of people. Artists such as Nuotama Bodomo (Ghana, b. 1988), Oscar Santillán (Ecuador, b. 1980), and Simón Vega (El Salvador, b. 1972), explore science fiction counter-narratives that emphasize solidarity, interspecies alliances, and ancestral connections. In imagining alternatives to outer space travel, these artists have emphasized the necessity of deconstructing colonizing ideologies by offering images for re-territorialization, new temporalities, and recognition of all human and non-human actants that live and thrive on our planet. They argue for a “return to Earth,” meaning a search for earthliness and grounding precedence that delineates the intertwinement and complexity of living that our planet enables. 

In 1964, just before Zambia’s independence from Britain, teacher and activist Edward Mukuka Nkoloso led Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research, and Philosophy. The Afronauts, a term coined by Nkoloso, described African women and men occupying humanity’s shared spaces with their own technologies and claims to belonging. [10] For filmmaker Nuotama Bodomo, the 2014 short film titled Afronauts, while "based on true events," presented the story of the Zambian Space Program as a piece of speculative fiction, exploring the broader implications of sending Black bodies into space against the backdrop of 1960s African independence movements. The film illustrated the dreams started by Nkoloso and continued by Bodomo, who created possibilities for reclaiming stories, defending territories, and asserting the very possibility of people of African descent to justly occupy spaces on Earth and in outer space, as well as in science and technology. The film centered on the female character of Matha, a young 19-year old woman who Mukuka Nkoloso believed was to be the first person to land on the moon (fig. 3). The characters in the film, especially that of Matha, enacted the urgency to ascertain Black technological futures underscoring that these are different to existing techno-scientific paradigms devoted to oppression and accumulation. 

The first moon landing in 1968 was often compared to the discovery of America, suggesting that the reach and complexity of setting foot on a New Frontier paralleled the historical changes wrought by Christopher Columbus. This comparison, veiled as a celebration of Western technological prowess, instead reinforced tropes and ideologies of colonization. “Deserted” or remote landscapes, for example, were replicated by moon photography echoing ideas of terra nullius. In fact, imagining of space exploration is not completely extraterrestrial but deeply earthbound. Icelandic, Amazonian, or Navajo territories are examples of places used by NASA and other space programs to test and replicate the “extreme” conditions of outer space travel.

Ecuadorian artist Oscar Santillán’s installation Chewing Gum Codex (2020) exposes and reconsiders such colonial relationships. Santillán’s work follows Neil Armstrong’s 1976 training expedition into the Cueva de los Tayos in Ecuador (fig. 5). [11] Through archival research, Santillán identifies a soldier named Francisco Guamán (to the right of Armstrong) who, along with other members of the Shuar people, guided the astronaut through the cave and into the center of the Earth. The artist discovered that Guamán’s family had preserved a piece of bubblegum discarded by Armstrong. Using this finding, the artist proceeded to extract Armstrong’s DNA from the petrified gum and inserted it into the genome of plants, which were planted and nurtured on the surface of the artwork. Santillán explains that the Chewing Gum Codex suggested the possibility of an interspecies astronaut as a plausible way for long-term space travel. In other words, in the future, Mr. Armstrong could return to outer space, this time, however, traveling inside plants.” [12] By contesting the condition of space travel and reimagining vocabularies that subvert the narratives of New Frontier colonization, the artist’s poetic imaginary created the possibility of challenging the anthropocentric framework of interplanetary exploration, while offering a vision of multispecies space-time travel that humorously addressed the story of technological dispossession and occupation.

However, space travel is not only founded on the dispossession and colonization of Indigenous land and resources of the Global South but has also been problematic for its militaristic dimensions. In the context of the Cold War, space missions were as much about scientific advancement as they were about military supremacy. The Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union served as a front for the development of technologies that were later used for surveillance, missile defense systems, and other militarized functions. The much-untold story of weaponized space technologies has been addressed by Salvadoran artist Simón Vega since the late 1990s. [13] Unlike the utopian space travel depicted in science fiction narratives, Vega’s investigation reveals and denounces how the enterprise served as a justification for developing war technologies that were subsequently tested in El Salvador during the Cold War. Using repurposed materials, Vega constructs spacecraft and space stations such as Tropical Mercury Capsule Crash Landing (2015) and Tropical Space Hostel (2019), to interrogate the violence of technological progress, underscoring the precarity of communities in the Global South who were caught in the crossfire of global power struggles. To illustrate the ongoing effects of this violence, Tropical Space Hostel is a sculptural object based on a specially designed capsule for a space hotel developed by the Russian Space Agency. [14] In fact, this series focuses not on the past of interplanetary travel but on its future—particularly on space tourism which echoes the tourist economy on Earth. The ruination of the spaceships evident in Vega’s staged photographs highlights the devastation of the landscape and the detritus of failed ideologies of progress and symbolizes the destruction wrought by global power struggles and the colonizing impulses of both past and future space explorations.

The idea of interplanetary travel as a form of colonization is not limited to the historical context of the Space Race but is still relevant today. As artists like Vega, Santillán, and Bodomo highlight, the struggles over space are inextricably linked to questions of sovereignty, identity, and justice on Earth. The “return to Earth” that these artists propose is, therefore, not merely a nostalgic longing for a simpler time; it is a call to ground our imaginations in the pressing realities of environmental degradation, social inequality, and colonial legacies. In proposing alternative approaches to planetarity, these and other artists have emphasized the necessity of deconstructing the enthusiasm for New Frontier colonization whether in outer space or on Earth. This is why, following philosopher Kelly Oliver’s study on the contradictory ideologies of space exploration, a return to Earth, as delineated above, entails asking: “How do we share the Earth with those with whom we do not share the world?” [15] This question elucidates our shared responsibility, ethics, structures of care, and our efforts to repair broken relationships with the world and with each other. In this sense, artistic imaginaries can and should continue to assert forms of re-existence based on groundedness to Earth, rootedness in interdependence, and mutual accountability about the ways in which we get to see and “imagine” worlds within the Earth. 

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[1] Amy Elias, and Christian Moraru, The Planetary Turn : Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Northwestern University Press, 2015). xii.

[2] W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Benjamin Lazier, “Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 602–30.

[3] New Frontier is a term coined by U.S. President John F. Kennedy in his acceptance speech in 1960 to describe his administration’s domestic and foreign policies, including the space program.

[4] Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 7.

[5] Rolando Vázquez, “Precedence, Earth and the Anthropocene: Decolonizing Design,” Design Philosophy Papers (2017); 4.

[6] Eric Niler, “Why Civil Rights Activists Protested the Moon Landing” History, July 11, 2019, https://www.history.com/news/apollo-11-moonlanding-launch-protests.

[7] M. Jane Young, “‘Pity the Indians of Outer Space’: Native American Views of the Space Program,” Western Folklore 46, no. 4 (1987): 269–79.

[8] Young, “‘Pity the Indians’,” 271.

[9] Ibid, 272.

[10] See: Namwali Serpell, “The Zambian ‘Afronaut’ Who Wanted to Join the Space Race,” The New Yorker, March 11, 2017, www.newyorker.com/culture/culturedesk/the-zambian-afronaut-who-wanted-to-join-thespace-race; Alexis C. Madrigal, “Old, Weird Tech: The Zambian Space Cult of the 1960s,” The Atlantic, October 21, 2010, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/old-weird-tech-the-zambian-space-cult-of-the-1960s/64945; Tom Wolfe, “Columbus and the Moon,” The New York Times, July 20,1979.

[11] Jean West, “Neil Armstrong’s giant leap in Ecuador with a Scots engineer,” The Sunday Times, June 30, 2019, https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/neil-armstrongs-giant-leap-in-ecuador-with-a-scots-engineer-lwrt0gfvl.

[12] “Chewing Gum Codex,” studio ANTIMUNDO, 2020, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/532b1bcfe4b0b4a63cc3c506/t/60f1f092273591271fd24f3d/1626468580515/CHEWING+GUM+CODEX+%282020%29+-+Oscar+Santillan.pdf.

[13] Kency Cornejo, “Decolonial Futures: Ancestral Border Crossers, Time Machines, and Space Travel in Salvadoran Art,” in Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, ed. Robb Hernandez, Tyler Stallings, and Joanna Szupinska-Myers (UCR ARTSblock, 2017), 23. 

[14] Justin Catanoso, “France seeks EU okay to fund biomass plants, burn Amazon forest to power Spaceport,” February 23, 2023, https://news.mongabay.com/2023/02/france-seeks-eu-okay-to-fund-biomass-plants-burn-amazon-forest-to-power-spaceport.

[15] Oliver, Earth and World, 3.