Visionaries Against Bureaucrats: How Space Entrepreneurs Remake Political Membership

Who is the enemy of the human future? In the public talk of the best-known space founders, it is stasis: the momentum lost after Apollo, the organisation that cannot move and, in its most politically charged form, the permit, the committee and the rule. The article asks how that opposition reorganises political conflict and what political subject it produces. It analyses 31 public statements by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson (2007–2026; 29 coded, some 128,500 words) through a single-coded, interpretive design combining dimensions of socio-technical imaginaries with van Leeuwen’s categories of legitimation. Two operations organise the discourse. First, it draws a political frontier between visionaries and bureaucrats, sharpest in unscripted interviews and often elicited, presented as a matter of building rather than of partisanship yet landing on deregulatory ground. Second, it hails a community beyond the nation, a multiplanetary humanity, as the future’s rightful heir. That community elects no one and owns nothing: it is offered belonging without a vote, a membership without a demos, by private actors who will own the infrastructures to which it is invited. The sociological interest of space discourse lies on Earth.