Mars Colonisation Debates
Who Actually Gets to Decide Whether We Go to Mars?
The most consequential governance question of the 21st century may be one that almost no democratic institution is currently equipped to answer.
The Idea
Most debates about Mars colonisation get stuck on the engineering — radiation shielding, terraforming timelines, closed-loop life support. These are genuinely hard problems, and they make for compelling press releases. But there is a prior question that rarely gets the same airtime: who has the authority to make this decision at all? The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which remains the foundational document of international space law, declares that outer space is 'the province of all mankind' and cannot be claimed by any nation. What it does not clearly address is private entities — companies, not countries — establishing permanent settlements. SpaceX is not a signatory to anything. Nor is any future Mars colony. This creates a genuinely novel governance vacuum. A Mars settlement started by a private corporation would operate beyond the jurisdiction of any existing state, yet would carry the cultural, ethical, and political DNA of whoever funded and designed it. Elon Musk has said publicly that he envisions Mars as a 'self-governing' entity — but self-governing according to whose initial rules, written by whom, and enforced how? The philosopher Elizabeth Brake has a useful frame here: colonisation is not just a logistical act, it is a constitutional one. The decisions made in the first decade of any permanent settlement — about property, labour, reproduction, resource access — tend to calcify into founding myths that are extraordinarily difficult to revise later. We have seen this dynamic play out repeatedly on Earth. The question isn't whether humans can get to Mars. It's whether we can agree on what kind of society we're sending.
In the World
In 2020, SpaceX quietly updated the terms of service for its Starlink satellite internet product. Buried in the legal text was a clause stating that for services provided on Mars, users agree that disputes will be resolved by 'self-governing principles' established at the time — explicitly rejecting the jurisdiction of any Earth-based government or legal system. The clause was widely mocked as science fiction bravado. Legal scholars were less dismissive. Several noted that it was a serious, if premature, attempt to establish a precedent: that a private company could unilaterally declare the legal framework for a planetary settlement before that settlement exists, and before any international body had weighed in. The precedent it most closely resembles is not a space treaty. It is the early charters of colonial trading companies — the British East India Company, the Dutch VOC — which were granted broad autonomous authority to govern territory in the name of commerce. Those arrangements did not end especially well for the people who eventually lived under them. None of this means Mars colonisation is inherently sinister. But the Starlink clause revealed something important: the governance architecture of Mars is already being drafted, not in the halls of the UN or in academic philosophy seminars, but in the terms and conditions that almost nobody reads. By the time democratic institutions catch up — if they do — the foundational choices may already have been made.
Why It Matters
This isn't an abstract future problem. The legal and ethical frameworks being sketched out now will shape what Mars actually becomes — and they will do so in ways that are hard to reverse once people are living and dying under them. There is also a mirror effect worth sitting with. The Mars debate forces us to articulate something we usually take for granted: what we actually think legitimate governance looks like. Is it democratic election? Founding charter? Consent of the governed? These sound like settled questions until you have to apply them to a settlement of 500 people, 200 million kilometres from Earth, entirely dependent on a single corporation for oxygen. More immediately, the companies and governments racing toward Mars are making real resource allocations — engineering talent, capital, political will — that come at the cost of other priorities. Whether or not you ever care about going to Mars, understanding who is driving this decision, and on what basis, is exactly the kind of civic literacy that the next decade is going to demand of all of us.
A Question to Ponder
If you were tasked with writing the first ten rules of a Mars settlement — not the technical ones, but the social and political ones — what would you put on the list, and who would you want in the room when you wrote them?
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