Spacewashing

What is Spacewashing?

The Palestine Space Institute (PSI) has conceptualized spacewashing to explicitly describe the practice of nation states, multinational corporations, and other actors use space activities, space science, and space imaginaries to deflect attention from their role in violence and the overarching militarism that sits as the foundation of the space sector. 

The idea of spacewashing builds on the concept of “rainbow-washing,” an umbrella term used to describe when a state or organization uses social causes—e.g., environmentalism (greenwashing), women’s rights (purplewashing), LGBTQ+ rights (pinkwashing), humanitarian aid (bluewashing)—to “deflect attention from its harmful practices” [1]. In the context of Palestine, NGOs, government bodies, and states employ programs of propaganda and material policies in order to undermine the authority, sovereignty, and the rights to return, resistance, and self-determination of Palestinians.

Spacewashing Tactics

PSI has previously identified three key relationships between space and the military-industrial complex (MIC): economic entanglements, dual-use technological development, and the sociopolitical ideologies underpinning space development [2]. Building on the foundation of “rainbow-washing,” “spacewashing” exposes how corporations, space agencies, and other actors in and beyond the space sector use space activities to obfuscate or provide consent for these relationships between space and the MIC. Spacewashing as an analytical framework reveals how these relationships persist, and challenges the rhetorical power of phrases like “space is for everyone” and “space benefits life on Earth.”

Some examples of spacewashing:

• Misrepresenting economic portfolios: Companies exaggerating space activities, or overstating the “space” side of dual-use development, to the public

• Ideological normalization of genocide, apartheid, occupation: Activities that normalize with occupying entities or propagate positive spins on genocide and imperialist war, often while presenting space as advancing “peace” or “diplomacy”

• Research that creates justifications for or obscure harm: Intellectual approaches that frame space as a depoliticized “liberating” force, without addressing decolonization and justice today

• Combining with rainbow-washing: Actors and researchers framing space activities as advancing broader social justice, humanitarianism, human rights, and environmentalism

These are not separate tactics; they reinforce each other. 

Spacewashing in Palestine 

At PSI, we are implementing this framework to analyse how space is used (by corporations, space agencies, and other entities in and beyond the space sector) to manufacture ideological, cultural, and financial consent for Zionist settler colonialism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Through the PSI Space and MIC database [3], we have exposed deep connections between space activities and genocide, including billions of dollars in expenditures to and by dozens of space actors that are currently facilitating the occupation in Palestine and the genocide in Gaza. 

In the context of Palestine, space technologies and research are directly entangled with:

• surveillance of Palestinian populations

• targeting of civilian infrastructure

• border enforcement and population control

• the normalization of occupation and apartheid

Spacewashing—at multiple levels, from the social and cultural, to the financial and political—functions as an ideological shield that is mobilized to distract from material violence, launder corporate and state responsibility, limit accountability, and rebrand militarism as innovation.

The analytical framework of spacewashing can be applied both now and in future to examine how space development and activities figure into the military-industrial complex, and exert pressure on lesser-known space companies involved in the arms trade. We also pose an important question: how can space be fundamentally reimagined to confront its entanglement with militarism and empire, and to dismantle spacewashing rather than reproduce it? 

References

[1] “Rainbow washing,” Decolonize Palestine. Accessed 12 January 2024. https://decolonizepalestine.com/rainbow-washing/ 

[2] S. El-Shawa, D. M. Persaud, The Palestine Space Institute: Disrupting a Culture of Space Militarism, Colonialism, and Imperialism, 75th International Astronautical Congress, Milan, Italy, 14-18 October 2024. IAC-24,E1,2,5,x82479

[3] "Space and the Military-Industrial Complex: A Database," Palestine Space Institute, March 2024.