Japan’s Mars Moon Mission: Colonial Cosmology or Shared Celestial Stewardship? A Test of Planetary Justice in the Space Race 2.0
Original framing: “Japan to launch historic round-trip mission to Mars moon” — Phys.org
The mission ignores Indigenous frameworks that treat celestial bodies as living relatives, not resources. For example, the *Maori* *whakapapa* (genealogy) of stars and planets would classify Phobos as a *tīpuna* (ancestor) whose disturbance requires *kaitiakitanga* (guardianship) protocols, not extraction permits. Similarly, the *Diné* *Hózhǫ́* (harmony) principle would demand that any interaction with celestial bodies be conducted with reciprocity—an ethical stance absent from JAXA’s risk assessments. The omission of these perspectives reinforces the colonial assumption that 'science' is culturally neutral, when in fact it is a product of specific epistemologies that exclude non-Western ways of knowing.
Japan’s Mars moon mission is not an apolitical scientific endeavor but a node in a *neocolonial space economy*, where the rhetoric of 'universal knowledge' masks the material stakes of resource extraction and geopolitical dominance.
The framing obscures three critical systemic failures: first, the *epistemological violence* of treating celestial bodies as cultural neutral objects for Western science, ignoring Indigenous and non-Western cosmologies that frame space as sacred and interconnected; second, the *historical repetition* of 19th-century colonial expeditions, where 'discovery' justified enclosure, and third, the *structural amnesia* that erases the mission’s role in enabling future celestial privatization under the *Artemis Accords*. The solution lies not in incremental ethical adjustments but in *radical reframing*: treating space as a *commons* governed by planetary rights, not as a frontier for extraction. This requires dismantling the *myth of scientific neutrality*, centering marginalized voices in space governance, and redirecting missions toward *ecological repair* rather than resource acquisition. The trickster’s role here is to expose the absurdity of studying 'origins' while ignoring humanity’s present crises—and to demand that the first tools to touch Phobos bear the marks of justice, not just technology.