Doing things in space, whether remotely or in person, is the culmination of a vast investment of resources and skills from which all humanity could benefit – but what imperialism is doing there threatens the world.

In Cecil Rhodes’ last will and testament, the British Empire’s frontman for most of southern Africa recalled gazing up into the great, sparkling dome of a sub-Saharan night sky and seeing nothing but a missed opportunity:

“I would annex the planets if I could…It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far”. 1

In 2016, little more than a century later, and a decade before becoming the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk announced that his company, SpaceX, planned to raise investment to colonise Mars using reusable rockets. (In a helpful reminder that imperialism is still imperialism wherever it operates, some of its spin-doctors suggest that occupying Mars would provoke less criticism if it were called a “settlement” rather than a “colonisation”). Rhodes was for both, and so is Musk, who backs the US and Israel and Ukraine, but always with an eye on the bottom line.

Since occupying Mars, however labelled, would mean not just getting people there but creating a sustainable environment for them, and because the technology for that is yet to be developed and is incalculably expensive, the hype about space obviously distracts from the main business of making the Earth safe for imperialism. 2

Less obviously, and like much else in space-orientated science fiction, Musk’s Mars fantasy attacks the very idea of home, the collective experience or aspiration of being somewhere familiar to improve and defend it, rather than relocating unless really necessary. The reality of eventual life on the Moon or Mars would probably be a fully mechanised mining operation for extracting rare minerals. If the robots doing the pick and shovel work were unable to repair themselves, they might need a technician who in turn would need the company of at least a few others and either a huge salary or lack of alternative options (solution to the overcrowded prisons of Earth?).

Normalising “freedom” from home, family and workmates is already with us in models of self-reliance or lifestyle enhancement, summed up, for example, in former Conservative employment minister Norman Tebbit’s “On Yer Bike!” advice to jobseekers, in how the holidays of millions are called “getting away from it all”, or in countless novels, films and TV series about footloose adventurers who never do the dishes or put the rubbish out. There are also other enticements; whatever actual extraterrestrial living conditions might be, the default image always reproduces reassuringly Earth-like arrangements more than those strictly necessary for life-support alone. Think about what places look like in estate-agents’ windows. The more undesirable or permanent the new quarters are meant to be, the more they resemble what the vendor calls home.

In the 1970’s one of NASA’s artists drew a giant, hollow torus-shaped structure, imagined to be in orbit somewhere rather than underground, and filled it with white-collar rural/suburban America. Even the semi-serious image of a city on Mars, on the cover of the Penguin edition of a well-researched and playfully skeptical book of that name, features trees, cars, a supermarket called Walmar$, and even a small lake, beach and sailing boat, all in a four-storey subsurface cavern with no pit-props in sight.3

Future imperialism in space could save on counselling, tranquillizers, repression, material incentives or entertaining distractions by having the work done willingly by people cut off from all connections. In our present reality here on Earth, most of us are bound more tightly and happily to people and places than capitalism would prefer. To make ends meet, we make sacrifices where we are before making the bigger sacrifice of moving. Unless imperialism and capitalism are defeated soon, we need not worry about far-distant successors finding a congenial refuge from an ultimately doomed Earth; but if they are defeated, the prospects for humanity may be brighter than we can imagine, and certainly more believable than the fairy tales Elon Musk and his friends tell their potential investors or possibly themselves.

The BBC is a cheerleader for the US space programme, which it represents as conducted on behalf of humanity, in line with Neil Armstrong’s famous declaration when he stepped onto the Moon in 1969. This is easier to do when astronauts from other countries are taking part but this can also – at the commentary below makes clear – expose pro-US/NATO bias.

Once Upon a Time in Space is a BBC TV documentary series that explores the history of human space exploration through personal accounts from astronauts and other individuals involved. It covers the period from the Space Shuttle era to the construction and deployment of the International Space Station and the new wave of lunar exploration, highlighting themes of rivalry, cooperation, and the future of spaceflight.

The series, premiered on BBC Two in October 2025, features four hour-long episodes and is a collaboration with The Open University. Although referred to as Series 1, no follow-up has been announced. Series director James Bluemel wrote a book to accompany the broadcasts, under the same title but with added subtitle “Our Journey into the Unknown”, which refers to the personal testimonies of the astronauts themselves and suggests they travelled far beyond where earlier flights had gone. 4 The series as a whole gives a thoughtful account of US and Russian space programmes, mainly during their collaboration in the (Soviet, later Russian) Mir orbiting space station and later the shared International Space Station (ISS).

Here, I focus mainly on the politics of episode 4 - in the double sense of what was happening in the period referred to and what and how the documentary chooses to represent, misrepresent or ignore.

Friendly relations between astronauts and cosmonauts, both as teams and individuals, are sympathetically documented against a background of loss: above all the de-orbiting of Mir in 2001, the unexpected and horrifyingly visible destruction of space shuttle Columbia and its seven crew members on re-entry in 2003, and the end of the Shuttle programme itself with the final, but safe, return of Atlantis in 2011.

The unnamed and unseen interviewer(s) prompt those who had been involved to say how they felt about their experiences at the time, and sometimes each other, and to reflect back on that time from the present. Cosmonauts and other Russians take Mir as a symbol of a proud era begun in Soviet times. For astronauts and other Americans, closing the Shuttle programme also marked a dramatic and immediately contentious shift from NASA-led (that is, state-led) projects to commercial ones, of which Elon Musk’s SpaceX was and remains the most prominent. Some veterans of the American space programme saw the corporate sidelining of NASA, and therefore temporary dependence on Russian Soyuz rockets (until the private operators were ready to ferry Americans to the ISS), as a blow to national prestige, if a relatively minor one.

A few years later, patriotic Americans, facing no credible risk from foreign enemies, were able to invest their passion and dollars for space exploration in an eccentrically ambitious trillionaire, albeit with a degree of uncertainty, while for Russians such dreams have had to be subordinated to countering US-led, multidimensional (and Musk-supported) threats to their national security.

Early in episode four, we are shown a news clip of the newly elected President Putin inspecting a military honour guard. The narrative was that, promising stability and an end to corruption, Putin was a leader with whom the US could collaborate, not least in space. The clip could date from after his first election in 2000 or after his second in 2004.

We might ask – since the documentary does not - what the US was doing around that time to qualify as a nation with which Russia could collaborate. Certainly not by unilaterally withdrawing from the thirty-year-old anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty in 2002, which opened the way to its operating potential launch-sites close to Russia’s borders, bringing targets such as Moscow itself within range of nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missiles. In due course, in 2019, the US likewise withdrew unilaterally from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, which gave it further advantages in tactical (“theatre” or battlefield) missile deployment from Russia’s adjacent neighbours.

Nor did the US offer much appeal as a partner for peaceful co-operation when in 2003 – without the approval of the UN Security Council, and therefore in breach of international law – it led a coalition of allies by invading Iraq in March 2003, an action which in two years cost the lives of nearly 40,000 civilians. One of those allies was Ukraine, which deployed 1,650 troops under US command between August 2003 until the end of 2008. The invasion of Iraq was unprovoked in the sense that it was justified by an outright lie. Contrary to pro-US claims, there was no evidence that Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction which missiles could deliver to London (for example) in 20 minutes. By the time Ukrainian forces left their country for Iraq, the collapse of the invasion’s rationale had become hard to ignore, but Kiev still managed to do so.

Although none of this is mentioned in the documentary, it is highly relevant to it. Several interviewees, from both American and Russian teams, talk up future co-operation but a few Americans appear interested only in “making space American again”. The programme highlights the manned space projects initiated independently by China and India; and one of the veteran Russian cosmonauts, Sergei Zalyotin, looking back to that period and comparing it with the present, observes that whoever controls space controls Earth.

Until about half-an-hour into the fourth episode, there is no hint that its title - Forever Friends – was meant ironically. Up to then, apart from historical milestones like changes of US presidents and the defeat of the USSR, real-world politics are excluded from the main narrative of people floating about and others helping them get to space and back again. Little if anything is shown or explained of what they were there for, apart from eating, drinking, talking, looking out of the window and sometimes mending things. Given what former NASA chief Charles Bolden has said about the thousands of scientific experiments being done on the International Space Station, many with life-saving medical applications (quoted more fully below from an otherwise bellicose article in The Guardian), this is a glaring omission for the BBC to make.

From 31m 56s into the video, however, we’re in 2014 and told that Russia has annexed Crimea. By 36m30s it’s one night in January 2015 and the ISS is flying over Eastern Ukraine where US astronaut Terry Virts says he and one of the cosmonauts, Alexandr Samokutyayev, can see red flashes far below. Virts adds “We were watching Ukrainians being killed by Russians.” The text accompanying this section of the episode reads: “The flashes are explosions from Russian bombs landing in Ukraine: they are watching a war. In that moment, the innocence of space is lost for Terry, as he now fully comprehends the violence of Russia’s assault on its neighbour.” (emphases added in both quotes)

Shortly before this, the programme reports, and illustrates with a film clip from the capital, Sebastopol, that the annexation was widely supported in Crimea. Virts describes his Russian colleagues’ close personal ties with Ukraine and their own strong support for its annexation. Neither Virts nor anyone else in the programme or in the accompanying text or book refers to US involvement in any of this or elsewhere.

This experience within the International Space Station has been weaponised well beyond how the BBC series itself treats it, especially since Russia’s special military operation, what NATO originally called its “full-scale, unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine in 2022 (before dropping the word “unprovoked”). In The Guardian of 23 August 2023, Stephen Walker contributes an article under the grotesque heading of “’It’s like doing an Arctic expedition with German scientists in 1943:’ Life on the International Space Station at a time of war”. (8) Yet, as the article itself makes clear, some in the US space programme, and NASA itself, take a more collaborative view than that favoured by The Guardian:

“…ever since the war began, [the writer is referring to February 2022] the official word from Nasa and the European Space Agency (Esa), as well as from their fellow Canadian and Japanese agencies, has been that [contrary to US/EU sanctions] it is business as usual onboard the ISS.”

According to former NASA chief Charles Bolden, this exemption was because, “The space station exists to make all our lives better on Earth…Over the decades, thousands of experiments have been conducted in the unique conditions of microgravity.” Enthusiastically, Bolden begins listing some of the life-saving results, such as the engineering of protein crystals that, he claims, has helped shape modern cancer vaccine. “The station was originally conceived during the Reagan administration…but proved far too expensive [yet] the Russians knew about space stations: in the Soviet days they had built seven of them, beginning with Salyut 1 back in 1971. Here, then, was a golden opportunity to harness Russian expertise and personnel, and at the same time save billions of dollars.”

In space, it seems, there might after all be room to co-operate for mutual benefit rather than descend into the zero-sum game of power-politics. The possibility of winning a consensus around the positive benefits of collaborating in near-Earth space, on the Moon or elsewhere, depends on deploying the carrot of diplomacy rather than the stick of war. Instead of extending terrestrial strife into space, co-operation learned in space could teach the Earth a lesson.