A brief history of space ethics

Abstract

At the end of the 1950s, a French author wrote the following about innovation: “The passion that lives within the inventor has no relation, of any kind whatsoever, with its consequences. It is his personal reason for living, his own joy and his own suffering. His triumph over the provocative enigmas of nature is essentially personal. Whether this discovery is useful or perilous, fertile or destructive, it is of as little concern to him as the first rain. However, no-one is able to predetermine any of that. The consequences of a technical conquest of mankind are never predictable”⁹. Should we, due to this, rule out any ethical questioning of the engineer’s field of science, through fear of scaring away those men and women who practice science and stifling their passion? Is it enough to hide behind the screen of a so-called neutrality and to leave it to the experts and academics of the ethics committees to decide on the eventual use of discoveries, inventions and innovations? It is not that long ago that the answer to these two questions would have been affirmative, under the pretext that ethics could only slow down the progress of science and that it would therefore be advisable not to be hindered by it. Astronautics was no exception.