Working on Earthly Escape: Exploring the Systems-Psychodynamics of Spacefaring Organisationss

From climate catastrophes and looming depletion of critical resources to radical uncertainties about AI, the world is facing a range of planetary pressures that increasingly challenge Earth’s long-term habitability. Within this context, and often associated with figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, so-called “spacefaring” initiatives propose extending the human future beyond Earth. Although often seen as distant future projects with highly speculative scientific and technological grounding, despite their ambitious promises, these “exit projects” are already manifesting in new organizations and new types of work that explore various ways of going extraterrestrial.

Spacefaring companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX are investing heavily in technological innovation, R&D activities such as developing prototypes and future scenarios, and corporate visioning and storytelling to legitimize and finance the idea of earthly exit. This paper explores newly emerging spacefaring organizations, and the spacefaring field more broadly, from a systems-psychodynamic perspective. It is less interested in their technical viability and more in their emotional meanings, i.e. how they play a role in managing the collective emotions evoked by the confrontation with planetary risks.

The paper explores how, as anxieties about climate breakdown, resource scarcity, and civilizational vulnerability intensify, spacefaring organizations play an emotionally comforting role by pushing wishful techno-solutionist imaginaries. These imaginaries can be understood as fantasy structures regulating collective uncertainty, fear and powerlessness. In this way, the work of spacefaring organizations extends beyond the technical realm and becomes an important – yet ultimately questionable – temporary container for ecological anxiety.

Theoretically, the paper draws on systems-psychodynamic thinking on escapism and social defenses against collective anxiety. Empirically, it draws on an exploratory desk study of the “frontstage” of leading spacefaring organizations, analyzing publicly available online material, including corporate communications, promotional content, interviews, and public presentations. By foregrounding the affective and psychodynamic dimensions of spacefaring work, it seeks to contribute to debates on ecological crisis, societal transition, and how critical risk is emotionally negotiated at the collective level.