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Space development and exploration especially militarization leads to US imperialism. Duvall and Havercroft 2008 [Raymond of the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan,
Assistant Professor at Department of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma, Taking Sovereignty Out of This World, in Review of International Studies 34.4]

Each of the three forms of space weapons has important constitutive effects on modern sovereignty, which, in turn, are productive of political subjectivities. Exclusive missile defence constitutes a hard shell of sovereignty for one state, while compromising the sovereign political subject status of other states. Space control reinforces that exclusive constitution of sovereignty and its potentiality for fostering unilateral decision. It also constitutes the space-controlling state, the US, as sovereign for a particular global social order, a global capitalism. Space weapons capable of direct force application obliterate the meaning of territorial boundaries for defence and for distinguishing an inside from an outside with respect to the scope of policing and law enforcement that is an authorized locus for deciding the exception. States, other than the exceptional American state, are reduced to empty shells of de jure sovereignty, sustained, if at all, by convenient fiction for example, as useful administrative apparatuses for the governing of locals. And their citizens are produced as bare life subject to the willingness of the global sovereign to let them live. Together and in conjunction, these three sets of effects constitute what we believe can appropriately be identified as an empire of the future, the political subjects of which are a global sovereign, an exceptional nation linked to that sovereign, a global social order normalised in terms of capitalist social relations, and bare life for individuals and groups globally to participate in that social order. If our argument is even half correct, the claim with which this article began that modes of political killing have important effects would be an understatement!

Space exploration and development represents an extension of earthly imperialistic concerns. (generic) MacDonald 2007 [Fraser, Professor at the University of Melbourne, Anti-Astropolitik outer space and the orbit of geography,
in Progress in Human Geography 31.5]

My basic claim, then, is that a geographical concern with outer space is an old project, not a new one. A closely related argument is that a geography of outer space is a logical extension of earlier geographies of imperial exploration (for instance, Smith and Godlewska, 1994; Driver, 2001). Space exploration has used exactly the same discourses, the same rationales, and even the same institutional frameworks (such as the International Geophysical Year, 195758) as terrestrial exploration. Like its terrestrial counterpart, the move into space has its origins in older imperial enterprises. Marina Benjamin, for instance, argues that for the United States outer space was always a metaphorical extension of the American West (Benjamin, 2003: 46). Looking at the imbricated narratives of colonialism and the Arianne space programme in French Guiana, the anthropologist Peter Redfi eld makes the case that outer space reflects a practical shadow of empire (Redfi eld, 2002: 795; see also Redfi eld, 2000). The historian of science Richard Sorrenson, writing about the ship as geographys scientific instrument in the age of high empire, draws on the work of David DeVorkin to argue that the V-2 missile was its natural successor (Sorrenson, 1996: 228; see also DeVorkin, 1992). A version of the V-2 the two-stage Bumper WAC Corporal became the first earthly object to penetrate outer space, reaching an altitude of 244 miles on 24 February 1949 (Army Ballistic Missile Agency, 1961). Moreover, out of this postwar allied V-2 programme came the means by which Britain attempted to reassert its geopolitical might in the context of its own ailing empire. In 1954, when America sold Britain its first nuclear missile a refined version of the WAC Corporal its possession was seen as a shortcut back to the international stage at a time when Britains colonial power was waning fast (Clark, 1994; MacDonald, 2006a). Even if the political geography literature has scarcely engaged with outer space, the advent of rocketry was basically Cold War (imperial) geopolitics under another name. Space exploration then, from its earliest origins to the present day, has been about familiar terrestrial and ideological struggles here on Earth.