Billionaires Want to Own Space. And Everything Else

A few years ago, I was invited to take the Canadian Space Agency’s astronaut qualification exam.

This was the result of years spent working at the intersection of engineering, humanitarian crisis response and collective action — years spent believing that science should serve the public good, not private capital.

I applied because I wanted to be part of a program rooted in a vision of shared possibility. A vision that understands science not as conquest, but as care, and space exploration not as spectacle, but as service.

Space exploration should be a collective leap forward, built on equity — not as a footnote, but as a foundation. On a recognition that the stars belong not to a chosen few, but to all of us — if we choose to rise together.

But that meaning is being rewritten.

Today, headlines are dominated by billionaire-led ventures like Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. Their launches are spectacles, wrapped in the language of progress and diversity. They promise inclusive crews, liberation through technology and a future that looks democratic from a distance.

But up close, the picture is different. These ventures are consolidating control over what used to be shared. They are rebranding space — not as a domain of public possibility, but as a playground of private power and profit.

Public-private partnerships are often sold as practical solutions. But in reality, they’re symptoms of a system that starves public institutions while offering private control as the cure.

The Canadian Space Agency has long played a quiet but meaningful role in global space collaboration. From the Canadarm — a critical component in space shuttle missions — to contributions on the International Space Station, Canada became known for publicly funded science and modest, co-operative participation in space. But even that role is now under threat.

The Canadian Space Agency's visibility is fading and its space efforts increasingly hinge on partnerships, especially with NASA, which now orbits around private sector giants like SpaceX.

Canada is a partner in the Artemis program, a high-profile NASA initiative to return to the moon. But Artemis now relies on contractors like SpaceX — exposing a deeper fusion between public infrastructure and billionaire-led enterprise. The result? A quiet erosion of public accountability.

What we are witnessing is not just technological advancement. It is a hostile takeover of infrastructure, imagination and access. And Canada is being pulled into this orbit.

We like to believe our values can’t be bought. But if we continue to cede space to private interests, we’ll lose more than access. We’ll lose the illusion that we ever protected it.

We may not have billionaires like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos leading Canadian missions. But we are silent as space is privatized and a vision lost.

The shift away from public space exploration matters. When public institutions lose ground, so do public values. In the billionaire-led space age, success is measured by virality, capital and spectacle — not by service, scientific integrity or global co-operation.

These ventures often showcase "firsts": the first woman, the first person of colour, the first artist in orbit. But these optics mask a deeper truth — that access to space is narrowing, not expanding.

Supporters often argue that these missions “inspire the next generation.” But inspiration without access is just spectacle. Real progress means changing who controls the mission — not just who appears in the photo.

Lauren Sánchez said that seeing Earth from space made her want to protect it — while standing next to her fiancé Jeff Bezos, a man whose $215-billion fortune comes from Amazon, which is daily damaging the planet. The 11-minute trip with celebrities like Katy Perry was with Blue Origin, Bezos’ space tourism company. The event was not a declaration of stewardship. It was a broadcast of contradiction.

This critique isn’t about individuals. It’s about systems. The issue isn’t simply that billionaires go to space — it’s that their wealth buys the launch pad, the story and the future.

Only those with capital, elite connections or branding power make it to the launch pad.

Billionaire ventures are redefining the purpose of space. No longer about advancing humanity or deepening scientific knowledge, space is now a platform for entertainment, personal mythmaking and private conquest. When Bezos emerged from his suborbital flight and thanked Amazon customers and employees for funding his trip, it wasn’t satire — it was strategy.

These projects are framed as benevolent. But they are not acts of generosity — they are acts of narrative control. Billionaire philanthropy often enters where public investment has been deliberately starved. The same elites funding rocket programs also fight tax reform, oppose wealth redistribution and benefit from austerity. Their space programs let them play hero while continuing to extract.

This ideology is creeping into education and public policy. Canadian school programs like Let’s Talk Science have partnered with the the Canadian Space Agency and aerospace firm MDA to bring science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning to classrooms — but also to advance private sector agendas in youth outreach.

The narrative used to be that if you want to go to space, you need to develop skills that are important to the mission and pursue the dream. Now it’s that you need to align with a billionaire.

That’s a dangerous message for the next generation.

In 2017, I applied for the Canadian Space Agency’s astronaut recruitment process. I wasn’t selected — and I didn’t see any other racialized women in the final short list of 32. There was no public reflection on what that absence meant. No pause to ask why. That silence speaks louder than any mission statement.

Watching Sánchez and her entourage experience space as tourism only reinforced what I already knew: that my years of work in places the world abandoned — from global crisis zones to frontline climate action — meant nothing in a system ruled by spectacle, not service.

Those of us who arrive through duty, not branding, were never meant to be part of their story.

This isn’t just about who goes to space. It’s about who defines the future.

These ventures don’t just advance technology — they entrench capitalist logics. Their timelines are driven by competition, not co-operation. Their ethics serve investors, not ecosystems. And their visions for the future reproduce the hierarchies of the present.

When billionaires control the missions, the messaging and the machinery, they also control the story. Space becomes another frontier of inequality — a place where the rich don’t just get to go, but get to decide what values count, what futures get funded and whose dreams matter.

In this new world, the public is reduced to spectators, cheering while our institutions are gutted and our imagination outsourced.

Canada has a choice. We can continue to drift deeper into a privatized model of exploration. Or we can reassert a public vision of the future — one grounded in equity, science and shared access.

That means reinvesting in the Canadian Space Agency — not as it exists now, tethered to U.S. private sector priorities, but as a revitalized public agency. One that puts curiosity, co-operation and community back at the centre of exploration.

The Canadian Space Agency continues to support meaningful scientific initiatives. But its public mandate is increasingly constrained by policy choices that prioritize private sector alignment over institutional independence. This isn’t a failure of its staff — it’s a failure of political will.

The power of space was never in who got there first. It was in who got to dream.

We still have time to reverse course. But the public future will not be handed back to us through partnerships or polite requests. It must be seized — by those willing to name what’s been stolen, refuse the terms of billionaire progress and fight for something far more radical: a world where futures aren’t bought and dreaming isn’t a luxury.

Because if we don’t reclaim space — as vision, as institution, as collective right — they won’t just sell us the stars. They’ll sell us the silence that follows.