An Explosion at the Dawn of the Universe: An Introductory Lesson for Those Who Have Never Looked at the Sky

An Explosion at the Dawn of the Universe: An Introductory Lesson for Those Who Have Never Looked at the Sky

To look far is to look into the past; whoever learns to look at the past properly sees the present differently too.

Introduction: Why is the sky our business?

Dear Young Comrades,

In this piece we start from a news story and look for answers to the most basic questions about the sky. First we will describe the possible supernova James Webb caught at the dawn of the universe; then we will open up the following questions one by one. Why does the sky matter to someone with a class vision? Because throughout history knowledge of the sky has been bound up with the question of who holds the calendar, the harvest and navigation, and today orbits and data; whoever does not know the sky surrenders to those who hold that knowledge. Why must we observe the past in order to look at the future? Because looking far with a telescope is looking into the past; by reading in the past the birth and death of other stars, the climate history of Venus and Mars and the expansion of the universe, we calculate the future of our Sun, our Earth and the universe. Just as a class that does not know its history cannot build its future, a species that does not look at its past cannot see its future. How, and on what, does the world spend these budgets? More than half of states' space spending is now military; and the money the world spends on weapons is more than forty times all civil space budgets put together. Isn't so much money for space wasteful while people are hungry? We think the anger behind this objection is justified; but we will show with figures that its target is wrong: the cause of hunger is not the telescope, but property, distribution and weapons. We build all of this like an introductory lesson given to a class that knows nothing of the sky: the age of the universe and theories of its formation, the telescopes in space, what the Soviets and NASA achieved, the efforts of other countries, why the billionaires have set their sights on the sky. And at the end we return to the pale blue dot Voyager 1 photographed, to explain why looking at the sky still matters.

First, briefly: What are we covering in this piece?

In the second week of October a small but exciting piece of news reached the world of astronomy. The James Webb Space Telescope caught the light of a star that exploded when the universe was only about 1.2 billion years old. The object's name is AT 2026abck. Its light travelled about 12.6 billion years to reach us. What makes it special is not only its distance: the explosion had happened, in its own time, only 4 to 10 days earlier; in other words, the telescope saw the death of a star almost at its first moment. What is more, this stellar death is hotter and brighter than its counterparts we know in the nearby universe. Why this is so is not yet known. That is why the word "possible" sits at the start of the story: the spectrum that would confirm the classification has not yet been taken.

We will use this news as a pretext. Because news like this is usually read in one of two ways: either people say "wow" and move on, or they reject it angrily with "while there is hunger in the world". We propose a third way: every sentence built about the sky without knowing the sky is incomplete. That is why most of this piece is built like an introductory lesson given to a class that knows nothing of the sky:

• The news itself: What is AT 2026abck, how was it found, why did it surprise, what does supernova mean?
• The age of the universe and theories of its formation: How do we know 13.8 billion years, what is the Big Bang, what are its rival theories, which questions are open today?
• Observing the past, seeing the future: How do we read the future of the Sun by looking at other stars, and the future of the Earth by looking at Venus and Mars?
• Our eyes in space: Hubble, James Webb, Chandra, Gaia, Euclid, TESS and Roman, which we described in early September in our piece on the Roman telescope; why was each sent, what was it meant to do, what state is it in today?
• The Soviets and NASA: From Sputnik to Artemis, the steps the two systems took into the sky and their counterparts today.
• Other countries: What are China, Europe, India, Japan and Turkey working towards?
• Budgets: How much does the world spend on space, and how; how much does the same world spend on weapons?
• "Isn't so much money for space wasteful while people are hungry?": The justified side of the objection, its wrong target and its right target.
• The billionaires: Why have Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos set their sights on the sky; why does 2026's biggest stock market flotation belong to a rocket company?
• The sky for a class vision: From the priests' calendar to the companies' orbits, in whose hands has knowledge of the sky been throughout history?
• And at the end: The photograph Voyager 1 took in 1990. The photograph in which the Earth appears as a pale blue dot, smaller than a pixel, hanging in a sunbeam. From there we will explain why looking at the sky still matters.

This piece builds on our Roman piece in September and our piece on the space race from Sputnik to Starlink in early October. In those pieces we talked about the science budget, the spy satellite mirror and the enclosure of the sky. Here we take a step back and start from the basics; because to be able to say that the sky is a commons, we first need to know that sky.

---

The news: A stellar death a few days old at the dawn of the universe

What was found?

A team led by Ming-Yang Zhuang of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) reported a "transient" in a preprint uploaded to arXiv on 29 September 2026 (2609.38373). In astronomy a "transient" is a point of light that is not there one day, then appears and fades over time. The news was announced by Phys.org and reported in detail by Universe Magazine and Daily Galaxy.

This is how it unfolded:

• James Webb's programme called NEXUS re-images the same region of the sky about every two months. That is exactly the aim: to catch what changes.
• In images dated 28 May 2026 there is nothing at that point.
• 71 days later, a new light appears at the same point; its brightness has increased by more than 3.6 times.
• The light comes from inside an actively star-forming galaxy. The galaxy's redshift is 5.017. This number means the light set out when the universe was about 1.2 billion years old.
• The images were taken with Webb's near-infrared camera, NIRCam, through three separate filters.

There is a small but important detail here: most supernovae this distant can be seen thanks to the gravity of a massive galaxy cluster in between magnifying the light like a lens (gravitational lensing). AT 2026abck, however, was seen without the help of a lens. Webb has so far detected more than 200 possible supernovae with redshifts up to 6; but there is only one supernova above redshift 5 confirmed by spectrum: SN Eos (z = 5.133). And that one could be seen magnified about 30 times by the MACS J1931.8-2635 cluster in front of it. AT 2026abck is a dawn explosion seen without a magnifying glass.

What do the numbers tell us?

According to the team's models, the physical properties of this point of light are as follows:

Property	AT 2026abck	Everyday comparison
Temperature	~17,000 K	The Sun's surface ~5,800 K; about three times as hot
Radius	~46 astronomical units	Neptune's distance from the Sun ~30 AU; the fireball is larger than Neptune's orbit
Luminosity	~3 × 10⁴³ erg/s	About 8 billion times the Sun (our own calculation)
Time since the explosion	4–10 days (in the galaxy's own time)	The "first week" of a stellar death
Host galaxy	~6 billion solar masses, 14–21 solar masses of stars formed per year	The Milky Way today forms only a few solar masses of stars per year
Proportion of heavy elements (metallicity)	~30 per cent of the Sun's	The early universe: material not yet much "cooked"

Source: Daily Galaxy, Universe Magazine. The comparison of luminosity with the Sun is our own rough calculation.

There is also a lovely lesson about time. The 71 days are the time that passed on our calendar. As the universe expands, the waves of light are stretched; and the clocks in that distant galaxy also appear to us to have slowed down. For a source at redshift 5 this slowing is about six times. So our 71 days correspond to about 12 days on that galaxy's own clock. We can see that the universe is expanding even by looking at the calendar of a stellar death.

What is a supernova?

Briefly, for those who know nothing of the sky: stars shine by converting hydrogen into helium in their cores, and helium into heavier elements. It is a balancing act: gravity wants to crush the star inwards, while the pressure produced by the reactions in the core pushes outwards.

There are two main ways to die:

• Core collapse (Type II): Stars more than about eight times the mass of the Sun form an iron core when they reach the end of their fuel. No energy can be obtained from iron. The pressure is cut off, the core collapses within seconds, and the outer layers are hurled into space by a terrible shock wave. What remains is a neutron star or a black hole.
• White dwarf explosion (Type Ia): If the white dwarf left from the ashes of a medium-mass star like the Sun steals matter from a companion and exceeds a certain mass limit, it turns into a thermonuclear bomb. These explosions are always roughly the same brightness; that is why astronomers use them as "standard candles", that is, for measuring distances. In 1998 it was precisely through these explosions that the acceleration of the universe's expansion, and the existence of dark energy, were understood.

AT 2026abck is thought not to be a Type Ia: too hot, too bright in the ultraviolet, too powerful early on. Because it is far from the centre of its galaxy (3,600–4,200 light years from the centre), explanations such as the central black hole tearing a star apart or a flare from an active galactic nucleus are also considered weak.

Why is it surprising?

The team compared AT 2026abck with 34 Type II supernovae well observed in the nearby universe. None stayed above 15,000 K after the sixth day; none reached this brightness on the fourth day. In the team's words, the object is "hotter and brighter" than normal Type II supernovae at similar phases. So an additional energy source must have mixed into an ordinary stellar death.

Two explanations are on the table:

• The first possibility: This is the core collapse of a giant star that spewed dense gas into its surroundings before dying. The shock wave hits that gas and produces extra light. Or the star's very inflated outer layers give off extra light as they heat up with the first shock and cool down.
• The second possibility: This is a much rarer superluminous supernova, and the telescope caught it while it was still climbing to its peak.

Testing the two possibilities is simple: an ordinary Type II should fade quickly in the ultraviolet; a superluminous supernova should go on brightening for a while longer. As the team says, the definitive answer will come from a rapid follow-up observation with Webb's spectrograph, NIRSpec. By the time you read this piece, that observation may have been made or be about to be made.

Why does this matter?

The death of a star is the universe's chemistry laboratory. Just after the Big Bang there was almost nothing in the universe but hydrogen and helium. The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the oxygen we breathe were cooked inside stars and scattered into space by their deaths. To put it in the idea Carl Sagan loved: we are made of star stuff. Understanding how stars died at the dawn of the universe means understanding when, how fast and under what conditions this chemistry began. In an environment where heavy elements were still scarce, stars may have died larger, hotter and more violently. AT 2026abck may be a sign of this; or it may not. Science closes the distance between "may be" and "was" through measurement.

There is also a lesson in method: this discovery came not from a single lucky glance but from patiently repeated observation. Had there not been a programme looking at the same sky every two months, the difference between the emptiness of 28 May and the light 71 days later would never have been seen. Scientific knowledge, like social knowledge, is produced by accumulating, comparing and being patient.

---

An introduction to the sky: Light, distance, time

We have understood the news; now let us take a step back. The whole logic of astronomy rests on a single fact: the speed of light is finite. About 300 thousand kilometres a second. Very fast, but not infinite.

• The Moon's light reaches us in 1.3 seconds. When you look at the Moon, you see the Moon of a second ago.
• The Sun's light arrives in 8 minutes and 20 seconds. If the Sun went out right now, we would not know for eight minutes.
• The light of most of the stars you see at night set out tens or hundreds of years ago.
• The faint light of the Andromeda galaxy, visible to the naked eye, set out 2.5 million years ago, when the ancestors of the human species were still walking the African savannahs.
• The light of AT 2026abck set out 12.6 billion years ago. The Earth did not exist then; the Sun did not exist; the Milky Way was not as it is today.

That is why the telescope is a time machine. Whoever looks far looks into the past. And the farther you look, the younger the universe you see.

The second basic concept is redshift. Because the universe is expanding, the waves of light coming from distant galaxies are stretched along the way; blue light shifts to red, and red light to infrared. The greater the shift, the longer the light has travelled. That is why the oldest light in the universe is no longer visible light but infrared. That is why James Webb was designed to work in the infrared: the dawn of the universe now shines in a colour our eyes cannot see.

---

How old is the universe, and how do we know?

13.8 billion years

Today's best measurement gives the age of the universe as about 13.8 billion years (13.787 billion years, plus or minus 20 million years, according to the 2018 results of the European Space Agency's Planck satellite). For comparison: the Sun and the Earth are about 4.6 billion years old; that is, about a third of the age of the universe. Homo sapiens is about 300 thousand years old. The invention of writing is 5 thousand years old.

This number is not a belief but a point where three independent measurements meet:

• The universe is expanding. In 1929 Edwin Hubble showed that distant galaxies are moving away from us, and the farther away they are, the faster they recede. If you run the film backwards, you conclude that everything was once in a very compressed and hot state.
• The universe has a "baby photo". About 380 thousand years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough for light to travel freely. That first free light still comes from every direction today; stretched by the expansion, it has become microwaves, only 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. It is called the cosmic microwave background radiation. In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found it by accident, as an unexplained "hiss" in their antenna. A small part of the snow seen on old televisions tuned to a channel with no broadcast is this radiation.
• The proportions of light elements match. The proportions of hydrogen, helium and lithium expected to have formed in the universe's first three minutes match the proportions observed.

The Big Bang: Not an explosion, but an expansion

The name is misleading. The "Big Bang" is not a bomb exploding at a point in empty space; it is space itself beginning to expand from a hot, dense state. The explosion has no "outside" and no "centre". The name itself comes from an expression the English astronomer Fred Hoyle, who disliked the theory, used mockingly on a radio programme in 1949. History sometimes makes the names given by rivals stick.

The theory's roots are interesting, and intertwined with the century of class struggle and revolutions:

• 1922: Alexander Friedmann. Working in Petrograd in the midst of civil war and famine, this Soviet mathematician showed that Einstein's equations predicted a universe that was not static but expanding or contracting. Einstein at first thought this was mistaken, then accepted it. Friedmann died of typhoid in 1925, at the age of 37.
• 1927: Georges Lemaître. A Belgian priest and physicist linked the idea of the expanding universe to observational data and proposed that the universe was born from a "primeval atom".
• 1948: George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, Robert Herman. Odessa-born Gamow and his students calculated how the light elements formed in the first minutes, and predicted that a cooled radiation should remain. This radiation was found 17 years later.
• 1979–1981: Inflation theory. The Soviet physicist Alexei Starobinsky and the American Alan Guth independently proposed that the universe swelled at a dizzying rate in a time shorter than a trillionth of a trillionth of the first second. This explains why the universe looks so uniform in every direction. The Soviet physicist Andrei Linde developed the theory.

Here we must add a note of honesty: in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s, under the ideological pressure of the Zhdanov period, the expanding universe and Big Bang cosmology were for a while regarded with suspicion as "idealist". In the same years, in 1951, Pope Pius XII embraced the Big Bang as scientific proof of creation; even Lemaître was not pleased with this interpretation. Two opposing worldviews both wanted to use the theory for their own ideology. Science resisted both. Soviet cosmology later became one of the strongest schools in the world, with Yakov Zeldovich and his students. The lesson is this: dialectical materialism is not imposing a pre-written answer on nature, but listening to the answer nature gives. Dogma, whatever its colour, is the enemy of science.

Rival theories and open questions

The Big Bang is the main framework today, but saying "everything is solved" would be a betrayal of science. These are the subjects under debate:

Theory or question	What does it say?	Where does it stand today?
Steady state (Hoyle, Bondi, Gold, 1948)	The universe always existed and always looks the same; new matter forms as it expands	Largely abandoned after 1965 with the discovery of the microwave background radiation
Inflation (Starobinsky, Guth, Linde)	A dizzying expansion in the first instant	Part of the mainstream; its direct evidence (primordial gravitational waves) is still being sought
Cyclic universes (Penrose and others)	The universe passes through cycles of expansion and rebirth	Speculative; its testable predictions are disputed
Multiverse	Our universe is one of countless universes	Philosophically attractive, very hard to test by observation
Dark matter	A matter we do not see that holds galaxies together	~27 per cent of the universe; what it is is unknown
Dark energy	An effect that accelerates the expansion	~68 per cent of the universe; surveys such as DESI have found hints that it may be weakening over time
The Hubble tension	Different methods measure the rate of expansion differently (about 67 against 73 km/s/Mpc)	Measurement error or new physics? This is one of the most important jobs of Webb and Roman
"Too early, too mature" galaxies	Webb found galaxies in the first hundreds of millions of years that are brighter and more mature than expected	Models are being updated; they challenge not the Big Bang but theories of star and galaxy formation

Let us reduce this table to one sentence: only about 5 per cent of the universe is the matter we know. Planets, stars, gas, us. About the rest we know little more than names. Saying this is not a weakness of science but its strength. A knowledge system that knows what it does not know is more honest than one that claims to know everything.

---

Why do we observe the past in order to look at the future?

Perhaps the deepest lesson of astronomy is this: we cannot see the future directly; but by observing the past, we can calculate the future. The astronomer is not a fortune-teller but a historian. And the history of the universe, read properly, turns into knowledge of the future.

Reading the Sun's future in the past of other stars

No human lives from the birth to the death of a star; a star's lifetime is billions of years. So how do we know that in about 5 billion years the Sun will swell into a red giant, then cast off its outer layers and shrink into a white dwarf?

Think of a forest. You cannot follow the hundred-year life of a single tree; but in the forest you see the sapling, the young tree, the old tree and the fallen trunk at the same time. The sky is like that: stars being born in the Orion Nebula, middle-aged stars like the Sun, giants like Betelgeuse approaching their death and supernova remnants stand side by side. By looking at millions of stars at different stages, we build the whole life story of a single star. An explosion like AT 2026abck is one of the last pages of this story; and from an era when the universe was very young.

Reading the Earth's future on Venus and Mars

In size and mass, Venus is almost the Earth's twin. But its surface temperature is about 465 degrees; its atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide, and the pressure at the surface is 90 times the Earth's. The Soviet Venera craft sent the first data from the surface of this hell. Carl Sagan, as early as the beginning of the 1960s, was one of the first scientists to suggest that this temperature on Venus could be explained by a runaway greenhouse effect. Venus is an extreme laboratory of the climate crisis: an example of what a planet turns into when the greenhouse goes all the way.

Mars shows the other end: a planet that once had liquid water flowing on its surface, then lost its magnetic field and most of its atmosphere and turned into a cold desert. Every measurement the Mars rovers make in dried-up riverbeds and lake beds is a history of how a planet can lose its habitability.

Today the satellites that monitor the Earth's climate (satellites that measure the melting of glaciers, sea level, deforestation and carbon dioxide concentration) were built on this comparative accumulation of planetary science. Some of the strongest evidence against those who deny the climate crisis comes from space, from eyes turned towards the Earth.

Protecting our planet from the collisions of the past

66 million years ago, an asteroid about 10 kilometres across that fell on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico brought the end of most of the dinosaurs. We know this by reading the impact crater and the iridium trace left in rock layers all over the world. This knowledge of the past has today turned into a concrete measure for the future: in 2022 NASA's DART craft deliberately crashed into an asteroid and succeeded in changing its orbit. For the first time in human history, a species tested a way of defending itself against a catastrophe that could come from the sky. What made this possible was observing the collisions of the past.

Reading the future of the universe in the light of the past

In 1998 two teams found that distant Type Ia supernovae were fainter, and therefore farther away, than expected. This meant that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. By looking at the light of the past, the greatest finding about the future of the universe was obtained: if this acceleration continues, the universe will gradually cool, galaxies will move away from one another, and in the very distant future the sky will go dark. Today Euclid and Roman ask the same question more precisely: is dark energy constant, or is it changing? The future of the universe is being written by looking at the supernovae of the past.

The past as a class lesson

In the Grundrisse, Marx says that "human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape": understanding the more developed illuminates the past, and understanding the past shows where the more developed came from. In Dialectics of Nature, Engels hails the theory of Kant and Laplace, which proposed that the Solar System was born from a cloud of gas, as the first great breach in the conception of "unchanging nature": if the Solar System has a history, everything has a history.

For us this is a lesson in method. Just as the telescope reads the light of the past and calculates the future, the class movement cannot build its future without reading its own past (its gains, its defeats, its mistakes). The astronomer studies the past not for nostalgia but for foresight. We too should look at our history not as a museum to mourn in, but as an observatory where the future is calculated.

---

Why do we send telescopes into space?

A simple question: when there are such large telescopes on the ground (the giant mirrors in Chile are 8–10 metres, and the Extremely Large Telescope under construction is 39 metres), why do we spend billions of dollars to launch much smaller mirrors into space?

Because the atmosphere is both our shield and our curtain.

• Twinkling: The "winking" of stars is poetic but an astronomer's nightmare. Layers of air bend the light and blur the image. Telescopes on the ground partly correct this with a technique called "adaptive optics"; in space the problem does not exist at all.
• Absorption: The atmosphere swallows X-rays, most of the ultraviolet and a significant part of the infrared. This property, which protects our lives, prevents us from seeing the sky in those colours from the ground. The hot gas around black holes emits X-rays; the dawn of the universe shines in the infrared. To see them we have to get above the atmosphere.
• Heat: Infrared is in fact heat. The Earth itself, the atmosphere, even the telescope itself glow in the infrared. That is why Webb was sent 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth, to a point where it can escape the heat of the Sun and the Earth.
• Continuity: In space there are no clouds, no daylight, no seasons. You can look at the same point for months, for years.

That is why space telescopes are not rivals to telescopes on the ground but complements to them. Webb finds an object, and the giant telescope in Chile takes its spectrum; Roman flags something interesting across a wide field, and Webb takes a close look. Science, just like production, is a network of division of labour and cooperation.

---

Our eyes in space: Whose, for what, and in what state?

Hubble: Born flawed, turned into a legend

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on 24 April 1990 aboard the space shuttle Discovery. It has a 2.4-metre mirror and sees in ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light. It is a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency.

Its story is a lesson in humility. After launch it turned out that the mirror had been ground with an error about one fiftieth of the width of a human hair. The images were blurred. Hubble became a joke on late-night shows. In 1993 astronauts fitted the telescope with "glasses". From then on Hubble became one of the most productive scientific instruments in human history. Five servicing missions were carried out up to 2009.

What did it achieve?

• It measured the rate of expansion of the universe, and therefore its age, far more precisely than before.
• In 1995 it looked for days at a region of the sky that appeared empty, the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length, and found thousands of galaxies there. This "Deep Field" image changed our grasp of the scale of the universe.
• It contributed to the discovery of dark energy; helped show that there is a giant black hole at the centre of almost every galaxy; and studied the atmospheres of exoplanets for the first time.
• Its observations have been the source of tens of thousands of scientific papers.

What state is it in today? Hubble is 36 years old and ageing. Since June 2024 it has been working with only one of the gyroscopes that set its pointing; the other is held in reserve. This has reduced its productivity, but the science goes on. The real problem is the atmosphere: Hubble has no engine and is slowly descending through the friction of the air. The Space Telescope Science Institute's (STScI) central estimate is that, without intervention, it will re-enter the atmosphere around mid-2033. NASA rejected a private company's proposal to boost its orbit in 2024; in June 2026 it said it might be interested if costs fell. Meanwhile the budget is being cut: NASA told STScI to plan for 83–88 million dollars a year for Hubble in 2026–2028, a cut of more than 20 per cent. As Space.com's report shows, scientists speak of "death by a hundred cuts".

James Webb: The golden eye looking at the dawn of the universe

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on 25 December 2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou base in French Guiana. It is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. It cost about 10 billion dollars and was delayed for years.

Why was it sent? For four main aims:

• To see the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang,
• To follow how galaxies formed and evolved over time,
• To see how stars and planetary systems are born inside clouds of dust,
• To study the atmospheres of exoplanets and search for traces of life.

How does it work? It has a gold-coated 6.5-metre mirror made of 18 hexagonal segments (about 2.7 times the diameter of Hubble's). Because the mirror did not fit inside the rocket, it was launched folded and unfolded in space like origami; a single error at any of hundreds of points could have ended the mission. A five-layer sunshield the size of a tennis court keeps the telescope below minus 230 degrees. It orbits 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth, at a balance point of the Sun–Earth system called L2. Unlike Hubble, it is not somewhere astronauts can reach; so it cannot be serviced. The launch was so precise that the telescope's fuel is calculated to last more than 20 years.

What did it achieve? Webb has seen galaxies from about 300 million years after the Big Bang. That these galaxies turned out brighter and more mature than expected forced theorists to rethink. It found mysterious objects called "little red dots"; it detected water vapour, carbon dioxide and sulphur compounds in the atmospheres of distant planets. According to a preprint, it has so far detected more than 200 possible supernovae and opened a new era in supernova science. AT 2026abck is one of the latest and most interesting links in this list.

What state is it in today? Technically healthy. But not politically. In June 2025 STScI managers announced that a 25 per cent cut in Webb's 2026 operating budget had been proposed, that this could mean a 25–35 per cent reduction in scientific activity, and that it would "almost certainly" require staff cuts. Building a ten-billion-dollar telescope and then cutting the pay of the people who will use it is the essence of capitalist budget logic: there is money for the machine, but not for the labour that runs the machine.

Roman: The new wide-angle eye

Since we described it in detail in early September, we will keep it short here. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was launched on 30 August 2026 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket and is currently on its way to the L2 point. Its mirror is the same size as Hubble's (2.4 metres) but it can see at least 100 times what Hubble sees in a single frame. Its aims: to map a billion galaxies, to test with thousands of supernovae whether dark energy changes over time, and to find more than a thousand new exoplanets. NASA expects to release the first images at the start of 2027. That one of its mirrors is a mirror left over from a cancelled spy satellite programme, while its data are open to everyone, were the two ends of the class reading we set out in that piece: the best optics go first to surveillance, and what is left over is left to science; but what is left to science can become a commons when it is open to everyone.

Let us also note a connection: one of Roman's main tasks is to catch supernovae exactly like AT 2026abck, by the thousand. What Webb finds one by one, Roman will find in series.

The other eyes

The telescopes in space are not only these three. Each looks in a different colour, at a different question:

Telescope	Whose	Launched	What does it look at?	Status
Chandra	NASA	1999	X-rays: black holes, supernova remnants, hot gas in galaxy clusters	Working; under threat of budget cuts
Spitzer	NASA	2003	Infrared	Retired in 2020; showed Webb the way
Kepler	NASA	2009	Planets passing in front of stars	Ran out of fuel in 2018; found thousands of exoplanets
Planck	ESA	2009	The cosmic microwave background	Completed its mission in 2013; measured the age of the universe most precisely
Gaia	ESA	2013	A three-dimensional map of the Milky Way	Switched off in March 2025; positions and motions of about 2 billion stars
TESS	NASA	2018	Planets of nearby bright stars	Working
Spektr-RG / eROSITA	Russia–Germany	2019	All-sky X-ray survey	Germany's instrument, eROSITA, has been switched off since February 2022, after the war in Ukraine
Euclid	ESA	2023	A map of dark matter and dark energy	Working
Roman	NASA	2026	Wide field: dark energy, exoplanets	On its way to L2

Two lessons follow from this table. First, science works like a relay race: what Spitzer learned in the infrared feeds Webb, Kepler's planet hunt feeds TESS, Planck's measurements feed Euclid and Roman. No instrument is a genius on its own; each stands on the shoulders of those before it. Second, science can be held hostage by war. eROSITA was a unique instrument mapping the whole sky in X-rays; now it waits silently in space. It was not the scientists but the conflict between states, and their capital blocs, that closed one of the eyes.

What comes next?

New eyes will open in the next few years:

• PLATO (ESA): With its 26 cameras it will monitor about 200 thousand stars and search for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. Its launch is planned for March 2027.
• Xuntian (China): With its 2-metre mirror and a field of view hundreds of times wider than Hubble's, it will orbit in the same orbit as China's Tiangong space station and be able to dock with the station for servicing. Its launch is planned for 2027.
• Habitable Worlds Observatory (NASA): A giant telescope designed for the 2040s that will directly image Earth-like planets and search their atmospheres for traces of life.

---

The first steps into the sky: The Soviets and NASA

In our Sputnik piece in early October we described the space race in detail with a class reading. Here let us set out the basic milestones side by side for a class that knows nothing of the sky.

The Soviet firsts

A country where once most of the peasants could not read or write took almost all of humanity's first steps into the sky 40 years after the revolution. Behind this were the planned economy, mass education, and engineering being regarded as a social honour. There was also a price: secrecy, military priority, losses.

• 4 October 1957 — Sputnik 1: The first artificial satellite. The world woke up to a "beep" from the sky.
• 3 November 1957 — Sputnik 2 and Laika: The first living being in orbit. Laika did not return; this is the first wound the history of space left on our conscience.
• 1959 — Luna 2 and Luna 3: The first human-made object to reach the Moon; and the first photograph of the far side of the Moon, never seen from the Earth.
• 12 April 1961 — Yuri Gagarin: The first human in space. The son of a kolkhoz carpenter; he himself had been a foundry worker before becoming a pilot.
• 16 June 1963 — Valentina Tereshkova: The first woman in space. A textile factory worker and amateur parachutist.
• 18 March 1965 — Alexei Leonov: The first spacewalk.
• 1966 — Luna 9: The first soft landing on another celestial body.
• 1970 — Venera 7: The first craft to send data from the surface of another planet (Venus). With Luna 16, the first robotic return of a sample from the Moon; with Lunokhod 1, the first robot to rove on another celestial body.
• 1971 — Salyut 1: The first space station.
• 1986 — Mir: The first long-lived, continuously crewed station, which operated for 15 years.

The design roots of the Soyuz capsule that carries people to the International Space Station today still go back to the 1960s.

NASA's big steps

The US, shocked by Sputnik, founded NASA in 1958 and entered the race with an enormous public investment. At its peak the Apollo programme approached 4 per cent of the federal budget. This was large-scale planning not by the market but by the state; as an irony of the Cold War, capitalist America went to the Moon through planning.

• 1958 — Explorer 1: The first US satellite; it discovered the radiation belts surrounding the Earth.
• 20 July 1969 — Apollo 11: The first humans to set foot on the Moon. By 1972 a total of twelve people had walked on the Moon.
• 1976 — Viking: The first long-term observation from the surface of Mars.
• 1977 — Voyager 1 and 2: The first detailed close-up images of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. In 2012 Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to pass into interstellar space.
• 1981–2011 — The space shuttles: They launched and repaired Hubble; 14 astronauts lost their lives in the Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) disasters.
• 1990 — Hubble; 1998 to today — the International Space Station (jointly with Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada).
• 1997 to today — the Mars rovers: Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance; alongside them Ingenuity, the first helicopter to fly on Mars.
• 2015 — New Horizons: The first close-up images of Pluto.
• 2021 — James Webb.
• April 2026 — Artemis II: The first crewed journey around the Moon since 1972; with four astronauts.

Two systems, one lesson

Looking at the two lists together, something interesting appears: almost all the great achievements of the space age were obtained through public planning and public funding. In the Soviet Union this was openly the system itself; in the US, the state got ahead of the market out of the necessity of the Cold War. Today the narrative that "the private sector is conquering space" is widespread; but the knowledge, the engineering experience, the infrastructure and the first customers on which those companies rose are the legacy of this public investment.

---

Other countries: Who is looking at the sky, and why?

Space is no longer a race between two countries. But behind each country's view of the sky lies a different calculation.

Country or agency	Notable achievements	What is it after?
China	First landing on the far side of the Moon with Chang'e 4 (2019); first sample from the far side with Chang'e 6 (2024); a rover on Mars (Zhurong, 2021); its own space station, Tiangong (2022)	Technological independence, a strategic balance against the US, a crewed Moon landing by 2030; leadership in astronomy with Xuntian
Europe (ESA)	Landing on a comet with Rosetta (2014); Gaia, Planck, Euclid; JUICE, travelling to Jupiter's moons (2023); Webb's rocket and some of its instruments	Scientific leadership and independence from the US in access to space (Ariane 6)
India	Reaching Mars orbit on the first attempt (2014); first landing near the Moon's south pole with Chandrayaan-3 (2023); the solar observatory Aditya-L1	Low-cost technology, prestige, crewed flight (Gaganyaan)
Japan	Returning samples from asteroids with Hayabusa and Hayabusa2; a precision Moon landing with SLIM (2024)	Precision engineering, the origin of the Solar System
United Arab Emirates	The Hope craft in Mars orbit (2021)	Preparing for a post-oil economy, prestige
Russia	Transport to the station with Soyuz; the Soviet legacy	A programme in decline under war and sanctions
Turkey	The Turkish Space Agency (2018); Alper Gezeravcı's flight to the International Space Station (2024); the 4-metre telescope of the Eastern Anatolia Observatory in Erzurum; the TÜBİTAK National Observatory in Antalya	Prestige and satellite capacity linked to the defence industry; astronomy infrastructure mainly through the labour of universities

The common denominator of the table is this: astronomy and space research are everywhere both scientific curiosity and the power calculations of states. The two fly together inside the same rocket. Our job is to make the power calculation visible while defending the curiosity.

A note on Turkey: investments like the Eastern Anatolia Observatory are valuable; but a country's astronomy is measured not by the size of its mirrors but by the number of researchers working securely behind those mirrors, by the teacher who shows children the sky at school, by a night sky rescued from the city lights. The difference between a space show and space science becomes visible in where the budget flows.

---

How, and on what, does the world spend these budgets?

The sentence "billions are being spent on space" is true but incomplete. First let us look at how much those billions are, who spends them and where they go.

The space economy: Mostly commercial

According to the global space economy report published by the Space Foundation in July 2026, the world space economy reached 686 billion dollars in 2025, growing 12 per cent in a year. 79 per cent (544 billion dollars) of this total is commercial. In other words, most of the "money spent on space" goes not to telescopes but to satellite television, satellite internet, positioning services, communications, ground stations and their hardware. Most of this is the invisible infrastructure of everyday life, from the map on the phone in our pocket to the timing of banks' transactions.

States' space budgets: More than half military

The money states spend on space is about a fifth of this total. According to Novaspace's 2025 calculation, world governments' space spending is 137.4 billion dollars. Of this, 54 per cent (73.5 billion dollars) is for defence: spy satellites, military communications, missile early-warning systems, programmes such as the US "Golden Dome" missile defence project. Civil space spending is 63.7 billion dollars. Novaspace openly calls this period "a defence-led era".

Within the civil share, too, science is a small slice. Take NASA as an example. In January 2026 the US Congress approved NASA's budget for fiscal year 2026 at 24.44 billion dollars. The part of this allocated to science (telescopes, planetary craft, Earth observation satellites, solar physics) is 7.25 billion dollars. The White House had wanted to reduce the science budget to 3.9 billion dollars, that is, to cut it by 47 per cent; as The Planetary Society reports, following a campaign by scientists, students and citizens, Congress largely reversed this cut. So the science budget of the world's largest civil space agency could only be protected through an organised struggle.

The same world's weapons budget

Now let us change the scale. According to data released in April 2026 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military spending rose to 2 trillion 887 billion dollars in 2025. That is 2.5 per cent of the world economy; the highest share since 2009. The US alone spent 954 billion, China 336 billion and Russia 190 billion dollars. Turkey's military spending is 30 billion dollars and rose 7.2 per cent in a year.

Let us put these numbers side by side (the calculations are ours):

Item	Amount	Comparison
World military spending (2025)	$2,887 billion	About $7.9 billion a day
World governments' civil space spending (2025)	$63.7 billion	About a 45th of military spending; 8 days of the world's weapons spending
World governments' military space spending (2025)	$73.5 billion	More than civil space
NASA's total budget (2026)	$24.44 billion	About 2.6 per cent of US military spending
NASA's science budget (2026)	$7.25 billion	Less than 1 per cent of US military spending
James Webb's total cost (over about 20 years)	~$10 billion	About 1.3 days of the world's weapons spending
Roman's total cost	~$4 billion	Half a day of the world's weapons spending
Money raised in a single day in SpaceX's flotation (June 2026)	$85.7 billion	More than the annual civil space budget of all the world's governments

The table shows this: James Webb, the instrument that lets humanity see the dawn of the universe, could have been paid for with the money the world spends on weapons in less than a day and a half. And space itself is increasingly turning into a field of weapons: one of every two dollars states spend on space is now military.

---

"Isn't so much money for space wasteful while people are hungry?"

This question is perhaps the most important in this piece. Because it is not ill-intentioned; on the contrary, it comes from a good conscience. So let us take it seriously and answer it step by step.

First the fact: How big is hunger?

According to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in July 2026, in 2025 about 645 million people in the world faced hunger; 7.8 per cent of the world's population. This number has been falling since its peak in 2022, but in Africa one person in five is still undernourished, and the report predicts that if the trend continues, 520 million people will still be hungry in 2030.

This is an unacceptable picture. We have not the slightest hesitation in saying so.

The justified side of the objection

Where the objection is justified is this: trillions of dollars circulating on one side while hundreds of millions of people go to bed hungry on the other is a question of priorities. What public resources are spent on is a political decision, and that decision needs to be questioned. Space programmes cannot be exempted from this questioning. In particular, billionaires' personal space tours, show-off rockets and dreams of cities on the Moon, lived out in the same world as hunger, deserve anger.

The wrong target of the objection

But the objection's target is wrong. For four reasons:

First, the cause of hunger is not a lack of food. Today enough food is produced in the world to feed everyone. According to the UN Environment Programme's calculation, about a fifth of the food that reaches consumers ends up in the bin. Hunger is not a production problem; it is a problem of property and distribution. Food goes not to those who need it but to those who have money. Land, seeds, water and trade networks are in the hands of a handful of monopolies. Wars, embargoes and climate disasters are the biggest producers of hunger. The cause of none of these is the telescope.

Second, if the money for science were cut, it would not go to the hungry. In 2026 the US administration wanted to cut NASA's science budget by 47 per cent. The money cut would have gone not to food aid but to tax cuts and military spending. The same administration had, a year earlier in 2025, largely dismantled its foreign aid programmes too. In capitalist budget logic, science and social spending stand on the same side and are cut together; on the other side stand weapons and tax breaks for capital. Every argument that sets the telescope against hunger unwittingly protects the weapons budget.

Third, the scale of the figures is entirely different. Ceres2030, an international research programme, calculated in a study published in 2020 that to end hunger by 2030 the world would need to spend about 33 billion dollars a year in addition to current spending. This sum is equal to four days of the world's military spending. Or less than half of world governments' military space spending for a year. Or a little more than a third of the money raised in a single day in SpaceX's flotation. The money exists; the problem is in whose hands the money is and who decides what it is spent on.

Fourth, space science is also a tool in the fight against hunger. Satellites that foresee drought, forecast harvests, track locust swarms, warn of floods and hurricanes and measure soil moisture are indispensable tools of food security today. The early-warning systems of the FAO and the World Food Programme cannot work without satellite data. Many technologies, from imaging technologies in hospitals to the image sensors in phone cameras (the CMOS sensor was developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory), are by-products of space research. But let us be careful here: as we said in our Roman piece, usefulness is not the justification of science but its by-product. Defending science only because it is "useful" leaves it defenceless on the day it is said to be useless.

The right target

So let us frame the question correctly. The question is not "space or bread?" The question is: "Weapons, or bread and science?" And one step further: "Who decides where society's wealth is spent?"

Today this decision is largely made by the arms monopolies, their lobbies, the billionaires and the governments they shape. On one side, 645 million hungry people; on the other, a rocket company that raised 85 billion dollars in a day, and weapons on which 2.9 trillion dollars are spent a year. This is not a picture of scarcity of resources but a picture of class power.

A socialist view does not choose between space and bread; it takes both back from weapons and profit. The Soviet Union's attempt, with its own contradictions and mistakes, to build both mass literacy and a space programme in the same decades is a historical experiment showing that the two are not enemies. Our stance is also clear: first, an end to hunger, but not by cutting from science; by taking from weapons, profit and wealth.

---

Why have the billionaires set their sights on the sky?

2026's biggest flotation

In June 2026 SpaceX went public. At 135 dollars a share, with a valuation of about 1.77 trillion dollars and 85.7 billion dollars in net proceeds; according to KeepTrack's compilation, the largest flotation on record. By early October the company's market value had risen to about 2.2 trillion dollars. In February 2026 SpaceX had acquired Musk's AI company xAI in a share swap; so today the same company sells rockets, satellite internet, a social media platform (X), an AI model (Grok) and giant data centres.

That a rocket company is one of the most valuable companies in the world shows that the sky is now a field of investment. So what is being bought?

The first reason: An orbit is a plot of land

As of the end of August 2026, Starlink, with 11,102 satellites, makes up by far the largest share of active satellites in orbit; the company's target is 42 thousand satellites. Low Earth orbit is not unlimited; there are safe distances between satellites, radio frequencies and collision risks. The first to arrive grabs the best orbit and frequency. This is the old enclosure of land carried into the sky. It has a concrete cost for astronomers too: long-exposure telescope images are scored by satellite trails, and radio astronomy is polluted by satellites' leaking signals. In our Roman piece we called this "the enclosure of the night sky".

The second reason: The state is the best customer

Behind the narrative of "the private sector's space revolution" stands public money. SpaceX's growth was made possible by NASA contracts for carrying cargo and astronauts, by a contract worth billions of dollars for a Moon landing, and by military satellite services provided to the US military and intelligence agencies. This order, in which the risk is left to the public and the profit to the company, is something Marxist literature knows well: the socialisation of losses, the privatisation of profits. Apollo's engineering legacy, the generations NASA trained, the public research laboratories: all of these are the raw material of these companies.

The third reason: The ideology of escape

For years Musk said he would take humanity to Mars and make it "a multiplanetary species". On 8 February 2026 he changed direction: SpaceX's priority is now "a self-growing city" on the Moon. As Euronews reported, his reasoning is that the Moon can be reached every ten days, while Mars can only be reached through windows that open every 26 months. The same statements speak of factories on the Moon that will produce AI satellites and data centres in orbit. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, meanwhile, describes a future in which millions of people will live and work in space and heavy industry will be moved from the Earth into space.

These narratives share a structure. As we analysed in our piece on techno-fascism and futurism, the problems on Earth (the climate crisis, inequality, resource wars) are framed not as problems to be solved here but as problems to be escaped. The talk of "the future of civilisation" pushes the lives of the working people of today's civilisation into the background. And it is clear who can buy the escape ticket. The question we asked in our piece on Elon Musk's vision of the future holds here too: whose future is this future?

The fourth reason: Space is a regulatory vacuum

The idea of a data centre in orbit looks like a technical curiosity; but it also has a class reading. On Earth, data centres consume local people's electricity and water, get permits from municipalities, and are subject to environmental oversight, labour law and tax. In space most of these do not exist. A law passed in the US in 2015 opened the way for companies to take ownership of the resources they extract from asteroids. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says space is "the province of all mankind" and cannot be subject to the sovereignty of any state; but it leaves gaps regarding the property of companies. Capital flows wherever it sees a gap.

But science rides these rockets too

Let us be honest: it was a SpaceX rocket that carried the Roman telescope into space. Reusable rockets really have lowered launch costs, and that is a gain for science too. The problem is not in the technology but in ownership. The same rocket can be the vehicle of a public space programme or the enclosure tool of a monopoly. Which it will be is decided not by engineering but by class relations.

---

Why does the sky matter for a class vision?

So far we have talked about telescopes, rockets and budgets. Now let us ask the real question: why does the sky matter for the working classes, for organising workers, for young people who want to change the future? We have six answers.

The sky was the first calendar, and the calendar was power

For most of human history, knowledge of the sky was knowledge of production. When to sow, when to reap, when the Nile would flood, how to find one's way at sea: these were known by looking at the sky. In Egypt, the first appearance of the star Sirius at dawn heralded the Nile flood; the priestly class that held this knowledge also held the calendar of the harvest and of taxes. Since the earliest ages, knowledge of the sky has been knowledge of power: whoever could read the sky also organised the time of labour.

Today the same thing continues in another form. Positioning satellites, weather satellites and communications satellites determine the whole timing of production, from agriculture to logistics. Courier apps' algorithms work with location data from satellites; the warehouse worker's and the driver's every minute is measured by satellite. The sky still sets the rhythm of production; but this time it is not priests but monopolies who hold that knowledge.

The order of the heavens was used to legitimise the order on Earth

In medieval Europe the universe was described as an order with the Earth at the centre and the celestial spheres turning around it in a perfect hierarchy. This cosmic hierarchy was taken as proof that the hierarchy on Earth (king, noble, priest, peasant) was "natural" and "divine". When Copernicus took the Earth from the centre, and when Galileo turned his telescope on Jupiter and saw that it too had moons, what was shaken was not only an astronomical theory but the ideological foundation of a social order. Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome in 1600 for saying there could be infinitely many worlds.

There is an example from our own lands too: the observatory the Ottoman astronomer Taqi al-Din founded in Tophane, Istanbul, in 1577 was one of the most advanced observatories of its time. Only three years later, in 1580, it was demolished under pressure from religious circles. In every age, measuring the sky has suited someone badly; because the eye that measures shakes the authority of those who say "things have always been this way and always will be".

The sky is a school of materialism

A person who looks at the sky learns that the universe is a whole that works by its own laws, is made of matter, and changes and develops. Stars are born and die; galaxies collide; the universe has a history. Nothing stays the same for ever. This is one of the greatest proofs of dialectical materialism in nature. For someone who grasps this, it is easier to understand that capitalism too is not eternal, that it too was born and will die. In a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, claiming that a 200-year-old mode of production is "the end of history" looks ridiculous in the light of knowledge of the sky.

The sky is a monument to collective labour

No telescope is the work of a genius. There are tens of thousands of workers who ground Webb's mirror, sewed its shield, soldered its instruments, wrote its software, assembled its rocket and process its data: engineers, technicians, welders, programmers, cleaners, students. Science is one of the most concrete forms of socially produced knowledge, of what Marx called "the general intellect". When the product of this labour becomes the property of a company or an army, humanity's common accumulation is expropriated. That the data of Webb and Roman are open to everyone is living proof that this accumulation can remain a commons.

The sky is one of the last commons being enclosed

Marx describes the birth of capitalism through the enclosure of the peasants' common lands with fences and their seizure. Today the same process is taking place in the sky itself: orbits, frequencies, the Moon's resources, the minerals of asteroids, even the darkness of the night sky are becoming the property of whoever arrives first. A class vision must concern itself not only with today's factory and field but with tomorrow's fields of production too. How the sky is shared out today will determine who owns what tomorrow.

The sky is the worker's right too

Gagarin was the son of a kolkhoz carpenter and himself a foundry worker; Tereshkova was a textile worker. The first heroes of the space age were children of their class. This was no accident: it was the result of mass education, of a social order in which a worker's child could also become an engineer, a scientist, an astronaut. Today, by contrast, a significant share of the civilians who go into space are rich people who buy tickets for millions of dollars. Looking at the sky, knowing the sky and producing science should not be a privilege; they should be the right of the child of the worker, the peasant and the toiler too. Knowledge belongs to everyone; so does the sky.

---

Two views of the sky

The sky through the eyes of capital	The sky through the eyes of the commons
An orbit is a plot of land; first come, first served	An orbit is a limited common resource; it must be shared in a planned and fair way
A telescope is an expensive luxury; the first target of budget cuts	A telescope is humanity's common eye; its budget should be weighed against need, not against weapons
Space is a way of escaping the Earth	Space is a way of understanding and protecting the Earth better
Data is a saleable asset	Data, as in the case of Roman and Webb, is a commons open to everyone
The night sky is a billboard for satellite constellations	The night sky is the thousands-of-years-old common heritage of all humanity
The scientist is a project-based, insecure cost	The scientist and technician are workers who must work securely
The heroes are billionaires	The heroes are the thousands of nameless workers who grind the mirror, fold the shield and process the data
Curiosity is a marketable feeling	Curiosity is the oldest weapon against dogma

---

The Pale Blue Dot: Why should we look at the sky?

The story of a photograph

14 February 1990. Voyager 1, thirteen years after its launch, turned around one last time from about 6 billion kilometres away, as it headed out of the Solar System, and photographed the planets it had left behind. The idea was Carl Sagan's; at NASA everyone thought it had no scientific value and that pointing the camera towards the Sun could damage it. Sagan insisted.

In one of those photographs, in the middle of a streak of light formed by sunlight scattering inside the camera, there is a pale blue dot smaller than a pixel. That dot is the Earth.

Shortly afterwards, to save energy and memory, Voyager 1's cameras were switched off. This photograph remained among its last images.

In 1994 Sagan devoted a book to this photograph, Pale Blue Dot. The book's main idea, summed up in our own words, was this: the whole history of humanity, all its wars, hopes and sorrows, was lived out on a mote of dust suspended in that sunbeam. The blood spilled to rule a little corner of that dot for a while takes on a different meaning seen from this distance; borders become invisible. And there is no sign that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us to protect the only home we know and to be kinder to one another.

Exactly a month later: One light-day

Voyager 1 is still on its way today and still sending signals to the Earth; most of its instruments have been switched off one by one to save energy, but the old machine has not fallen silent. According to NASA's calculation, on 18 November 2026, exactly a month after this piece, Voyager 1 will be one light-day from the Earth: about 25.9 billion kilometres. A signal saying "hello" to it will take a day to arrive, and the reply another day to return. A craft launched in 1977 with computers that had less memory than a calculator is travelling through the interstellar dark as humanity's most distant envoy.

Why does this photograph matter to us?

The Pale Blue Dot is open to two easy readings. The first is cosmic pessimism: "We are so small, nothing matters." The second is abstract humanism: "We are all in the same boat; classes and borders are meaningless."

Both are incomplete. We propose a third reading:

• Our smallness is not our worthlessness. On this small dot developed a consciousness capable of photographing the dot itself. We are a part of the universe that can come to know itself. What made this possible is the thousands-of-years-old accumulation of labour and knowledge: from the shepherd who first looked up at the sky to the worker who soldered Voyager's circuits.
• From afar borders are invisible; but up close classes are visible. "We are all in the same boat" is true, but it is also true who is on the bridge and who is in the engine room. Saying that the planet is our only home is incomplete without naming the property relation that is burning that home. If, while the climate crisis heats the planet, the same capital is drawing escape routes in orbit, then the lesson of the Pale Blue Dot is a class lesson.
• No saviour will come from outside. Not an alien, not a billionaire, not a Moon city. Sagan's warning is close to Marx's thesis: humanity makes its own history. If this dot is to be saved, it will be saved by the organised labour of those who live on it.

Why does looking at the sky matter?

Because looking at the sky is how people learn to look at themselves and their world from the outside.

• Astronomy is the enemy of dogma. Copernicus took the Earth from the centre, Galileo saw Jupiter's moons, Bruno was burned for speaking of infinite worlds. Every great astronomical revolution shook the hierarchy the rulers presented as "the natural order". The sky is the oldest proof against those who say "things have always been this way and always will be": nothing stays as it is; even the stars are born and die.
• Astronomy teaches scale. A 300-thousand-year-old species in 13.8 billion years; that species' 5-thousand-year written history; capitalism in the last 200 years of that history. This scale also shows how young, how temporary today's social order is.
• Astronomy teaches cooperation. No telescope is the work of a single country or a single genius. Webb's mirror was made in the US, its rocket in Europe, one of its instruments in Canada; scientists all over the world process its data. AT 2026abck was found by a team in Illinois; but tomorrow its data may also be on the computer of a student in Istanbul or Erzurum.
• Astronomy teaches patience. AT 2026abck is the product of a programme that looks at the same sky every two months. Social change is like this too: it comes not through a single spectacular moment but through patiently repeated, organised labour.
• Astronomy protects curiosity. Curiosity is the exact opposite of the "mind your own business" attitude the system tries to teach us. A curious person asks questions; a person who asks questions is not satisfied with memorised answers.

---

Concrete tasks

If the sky is a commons, defending it is also a matter of practice. A few concrete proposals:

Really look at the sky. Get a little away from the city lights. Follow the phases of the Moon for a month. Find the Pleiades, the constellation of Orion, the faint band of the Milky Way. This costs no money; the free and open-source Stellarium software offers a sky map even on the phone in your pocket.

Turn sky-watching into a collective activity. Night observation events for associations, unions, student groups and city councils are the cheapest and most effective science education. Follow the public nights of Turkey's amateur astronomy associations and university observatories; if there are none, demand them.

Put light pollution on the agenda as a right to the city. Street lamps that light downwards rather than upwards, limits on unnecessary giant advertising lights and the protection of dark-sky areas are concrete demands that can be made of local governments. The night sky once belonged to everyone; today most children growing up in cities have never seen the Milky Way.

Defend and use open science. A significant part of the data from Hubble, Webb and Roman is open to everyone. This is a gain to be defended. Demand open access against the walls of paid journals and the privatisation of data. That a curious student can access the data of the world's most expensive telescope free of charge is no small thing.

Put the rights of science workers on the agenda. The cuts to the budgets of Webb and Hubble first hit the jobs of the people who run those instruments. In Turkey too, research assistants and young scientists working on project-based contracts are insecure. Defending science means defending the labour that produces it.

Speak out against the militarisation and enclosure of space. The principle of "the province of all mankind" in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty must be strengthened against the de facto enclosure by companies and armies. Transparency in space programmes, and the separate disclosure of military and civil budgets, are questions that can be asked in Turkey too.

Ask for astronomy in schools. There was a time when the curriculum included astronomy lessons. Today astronomy has been squeezed into a few pages on the margins of science lessons. A child who knows the sky also thinks about the world in a wider frame.

---

Whoever looks up looks forward

12.6 billion years ago, in an age when the Earth, the Sun and the Milky Way as it is today did not yet exist, a giant star died in a distant galaxy. Its light passed among countless galaxies, through expanding space. In the last few hundred thousand years of its journey, on a small blue planet, a species appeared that walked on two feet, found fire, worked the land and invented writing. In the last second of the light's journey, that species carried a gold-coated mirror 1.5 million kilometres away and caught that light.

This story is our story. The story of a species made of star stuff becoming curious about its own origin. And what made this curiosity possible was never a single genius or a single billionaire, but the accumulated labour of millions of people who ground the mirror, folded the shield, welded the rocket and processed the data.

That is why the sky is a commons. There is an order that tries to make us forget it again and again: an order that fixes our eyes on screens, on our debts, on the next bill; that fills the night sky with advertising lights and the orbits with satellite constellations; that turns even curiosity into a marketable product. Looking at the sky is a small but deep objection to this order: We are not tenants of this universe; we are part of it.

Dear young comrades, this evening, if the sky is clear, raise your heads for a few minutes. Think of every point of light you see as a letter from the past. And remember that pale blue dot: the one home on which we live, love and struggle, the one that has no spare.

Do not stop looking up. Because whoever knows how to look up also knows how to look forward.

In comradeship, Knowledge Commons

---

Sources

The AT 2026abck story

• Phys.org, "Webb spots possible early-universe supernova just days after it happened", October 2026
• Universe Magazine, "JWST detected a supernova explosion just a few days after the disaster", 13 October 2026 — redshift, the NEXUS programme, filters, physical properties, more than 200 possible supernovae
• Daily Galaxy, "Webb Telescope Detects a Mysterious Explosion From the Early Universe That Defies Expectations", 14 October 2026 — comparison with 34 Type II supernovae, two possible explanations, the way to test them
• Zhuang, M.-Y. et al., AT 2026abck preprint, arXiv:2609.38373, 29 September 2026
• SN Eos, Wikipedia — the most distant spectroscopically confirmed supernova, ~30× lensing
• "A New Era for Supernova Science with the James Webb Space Telescope", arXiv:2610.12100

The state of the telescopes

• KeepTrack, "Hubble Orbit Decay and Reboost Status in 2026" — single gyroscope, the 2033 estimate, the reboost debate, the 2026–2028 budget plan
• Space.com, "The Hubble Space Telescope turns 35 as NASA budget cuts loom"
• Astronomy, "James Webb, Hubble space telescopes face reduction in operations over funding shortfalls", June 2025 — proposed 25 per cent cut for Webb
• Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, Wikipedia — launch and commissioning
• NASA Science, Roman Space Telescope
• PLATO, Wikipedia — March 2027 launch plan
• DLR, the PLATO mission and its aims
• Xuntian, Wikipedia

Space and capital

• KeepTrack, "SpaceX Valuation History" — flotation, the xAI merger, market value
• Space.com, "Starlink satellites: Facts, tracking and impact on astronomy" — 11,102 satellites (27 August 2026), the 42,000 target
• Euronews, "SpaceX puts Mars mission plans on ice and U-turns for Moon city instead", 11 February 2026
• Space Launch Now, Artemis II

Budgets and hunger

• Space Foundation, "The Space Report: Global Space Economy", July 2026 — $686 billion, 79 per cent commercial
• Novaspace, "Global space spending reaches $137B, marking a defense-led era" — 54 per cent of government space spending is defence
• SIPRI, world military expenditure 2025, April 2026 — $2,887 billion, Turkey $30 billion
• The Planetary Society, "You just saved NASA's budget" — NASA's 2026 budget $24.44 billion, science $7.25 billion, the proposed 47 per cent cut
• Vatican News, "FAO report: 645 million people faced hunger in 2025", July 2026 — SOFI 2026 data
• IFPRI, "Big costs, bigger rewards: How $33 billion in spending each year can help end hunger sustainably by 2030" — Ceres2030

Voyager and the Pale Blue Dot

• EarthSky, "Voyager 1 will be 1 light-day from Earth on November 18, 2026"
• NASA Science, "Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot"
• Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
• Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)

The foundations of cosmology

• Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857–58), Introduction — "human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape"
• Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (1883) — the Kant–Laplace theory and the collapse of the conception of unchanging nature
• Planck Collaboration, "Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters" — age of the universe 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years

Related pieces from Knowledge Commons

• "To Look Far Is to Look Into the Past: NASA's Roman Telescope, the Science Budget and the Ownership of Knowledge", 1 September 2026
• "The Space Race from Sputnik to Starlink: The Sky Is a Commons", 5 October 2026
• "From Futurism to Techno-Fascism", 7 September 2026
• "A Marxist-Dialectical Critique of Elon Musk's Vision of the Future", 30 July 2026

---

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 — you may reproduce, distribute and adapt this work provided you credit the source and share it under the same licence.

This is a living document; it will be updated when the spectroscopic observation of AT 2026abck is published and its classification is confirmed. bilgimusterekleri.org