Draft:Spacewashing

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Draft:Spacewashing
A mock travel poster for the exoplanet Kepler-186f made by NASA in the same style of travel posters used to advertise colonized lands in the early 20th century.

Spacewashing is a term used to describe how governments, space agencies, and companies draw on public enthusiasm for space exploration and astronomy to shape public opinion, sell products, or distract from harms associated with space colonization and the militarisation of space. The term is modeled on whitewashing, in which an organization's record of harm is obscured behind a curated, positive public image.

Origins and definition

"Spacewashing" (sometimes "starwashing") belongs to a family of "-washing" terms that describe reputation management through association with a culturally sympathetic cause such as Greenwashing (environmentalism), pinkwashing (LGBTQ+ rights), purplewashing (women's rights), and bluewashing (humanitarian aid). Many have argued that space activities are used in a similar way: to manufacture consent for underlying military and economic relationships by presenting space exploration as inherently peaceful and unifying, or the pinnacle of human achievement.[1] The Palestine Space Institute (PSI) identifies three relationships between the space sector and the military–industrial complex that spacewashing works to obscure: financial entanglements between space and defense firms, the dual-use development of space and weapons technology, and the sociopolitical ideologies underpinning space development.[1][2] The concept also applies to how private space companies publicize environmental and sustainability initiatives while their launch and satellite operations cause significant environmental harm.[3][4]

Space geographers and policy scholars have separately traced the underlying tactic historically, arguing that state space programs since the mid-twentieth century have relied on utopian and colonial-era imagery to build public support for space exploration, in ways that obscure the programs' military origins and purposes.[5][6]

The term can also apply to advertisements that invoke space imagery or space technologies to heighten the products importance, prestige, or perceived manufacturing expertise.[7]

NASA

NASA booth at the Space Symposium military and arms convention.
The Artemis II crew puts on a family event for Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado.

Military origins

NASA was established by the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 and was publicly framed as a civilian agency dedicated to peaceful exploration, distinct from the U.S. armed forces' own space and missile programs.[8] In practice, the agency drew heavily on military infrastructure, personnel, and hardware. Its early rocket programs built on ballistic-missile technology developed for the U.S. Army, and many of its first astronauts were recruited from the ranks of military test pilots. Kim McQuaid writes that although NASA was created to develop "America's non-military space effort," the leaders of its most prestigious programs rarely emphasized these overlapping military roots, instead cultivating what McQuaid terms a "human spaceflight culture" oriented around national prestige.[8] NASA's budget, and that of the Apollo program in particular, grew roughly tenfold between 1958 and 1963 amid Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.[8]

Framing space exploration for public support

McQuaid argues that NASA was slow to embrace the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s despite the popularity of NASA-produced photographs of Earth taken from space.[8] Images from NASA's crewed missions were adopted by environmental and countercultural publications, such as the Whole Earth Catalog and material associated with the first Earth Day in 1970, even as the agency's own institutional priorities remained centered on human spaceflight and national prestige rather than environmental or civilian applications.[8] Imagery of space exploration presented as a unifying, peaceful, or planet-saving endeavor is a recurring device used to build public support for space budgets while leaving the underlying military and geopolitical motivations for those budgets unexamined.[1]

Ongoing ties to the defense sector

NASA continues to share contractors, technology, and infrastructure with U.S. military space programs. A public database maintained by the Palestine Space Institute lists financial and technological ties between space agencies, aerospace and defense contractors, and military operations, arguing that these ties are frequently obscured by framing civilian space programs as wholly separate from military ones.[1]

Space imagery and frontier mythology

Scholars of visual culture and religious studies have argued that the imagery used to popularize American space exploration draws deliberately on the iconography and rhetoric of 19th-century continental expansion, linking space exploration to a longer national mythology of frontier settlement. The style and usage of telescope images and artist concepts of space can constitute spacewashing when used as a vehicle for nationalistic or space expansionist agendas. Art historian Elizabeth Kessler, in Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime (2012), shows that the Hubble Space Telescope's celebrated deep-space photographs are not neutral records of raw data but the product of deliberate aesthetic choices. Astronomers on the Hubble Heritage Project assigned color, adjusted contrast, and framed compositions in ways that echoed 19th-century American landscape painting and photography of the western United States, recycling the visual language of the frontier sublime and westward expansion for the "final frontier" of space.[9] Religious studies scholar Catherine Newell, in Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America's Final Frontier (2019), traces a related dynamic in the earlier, mid-20th-century popularization of the U.S. space program, examining how space artist Chesley Bonestell and rocket engineer Wernher von Braun (developer of Nazi missile program before joining NASA) used popular magazine features, television, and theme-parks to cast American expansion into space as both a natural continuation of the frontier and a divinely sanctioned mission.[10]

Green river formation.
Pillars of creation.
A comparison between the style of Thomas Moran painting the Grand Canyon and the Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 3372.

Advertising

Beyond state space agencies, private companies have long used the prestige and popular appeal of crewed spaceflight to market consumer products, a practice that communication researcher Matthew Cikovic has analyzed under the term "spacewashing" in advertising.[7]

Advertisements for Tang (drink mix) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s commonly emphasized its usage in the Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab programs to sell the drink on Earth. Magazine ads showed the space station or astronauts on the moon with slogans like "In a great space station, 12 hungry men will probably start breakfast with Tang" and "This morning, he will drink Tang."[7] Similar advertising tactics were used for Pillsbury's Space Food Sticks, an early energy bar used on the Apollo missions.[7] These types of ads were often gendered and nationalistic, showing young boys in future roles in the US space program, which linked the consumption of what were effectively military rations to heroic national service.[7]

More recent examples of space-themed advertising and public-relations imagery include NASA's own "Visions of the Future" poster series, produced by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which depicts fictional tourist destinations on exoplanets and elsewhere in the Solar System in the visual style of early-20th-century travel posters historically used to advertise colonized lands.[11]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d "Spacewashing". Palestine Space Institute. 2026. Retrieved 2026-08-18.
  2. ^ Mohanty, Susmita (2025-10-30). "Seventy-five years on, the International Astronautical Congress needs a grand reset". Friends of Europe. Retrieved 2026-08-14.
  3. ^ Yingling, Marissa E. (2026-08-12). "'Starwashing': How space companies use the greenwashing playbook while engaging in environmentally damaging practices". The Conversation. Retrieved 2026-08-18.
  4. ^ Gatti, Emma (2024-03-10). "Space Nuggets 10/2024 - The first case of Space Washing?". SpaceWatch.GLOBAL. Retrieved 2026-08-19.
  5. ^ Deudney, Daniel (2020). Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity. Oxford: Oxford University Press USA - OSO. ISBN 978-0-19-090334-3.
  6. ^ Bednar, Danny (2020-07-20). "The Geography of Space Exploration: Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Book Review)". Curious. Retrieved 2026-08-14.
  7. ^ a b c d e Cikovic, Matthew (2022). "Blast off to breakfast: Spacewashing in advertising". AEJMC Midwinter Conference. University of Oklahoma.
  8. ^ a b c d e McQuaid, Kim (2006). "Selling the Space Age: NASA and Earth's Environment, 1958-1990". Environment and History. 12 (2): 127–163. Bibcode:2006EnHis..12..127M. doi:10.3197/096734006776680245.
  9. ^ Kessler, Elizabeth (2012). Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-7957-7.
  10. ^ Newell, Catherine (2019). Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America's Final Frontier. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-4556-7.
  11. ^ Goods, Dan (2020). "Visions of the Future". Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Category:Anti-war movement Category:Military–industrial complex Category:Propaganda Category:Public relations terminology Category:Deception Category:Environmental social science concepts Category:Military globalization Category:Space applications Category:Space warfare Category:Politics of outer space Category:Space colonization Category:Space law Category:Space exploration Category:Space policy

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