Rick Tumlinson is the founder of SpaceFund, a venture capital firm investing in space startups. He also founded the Space Frontier Foundation, Earthlight Foundation, and New Worlds Institute and is a founding board member of the X Prize Foundation. He contributed the following piece — an edited essay from his upcoming book “Why Space: The Purpose of People,” to be published in the spring of 2025 — to Space.com’s Expert Voices section.

The societies and macro-social structures of space will be products of their founding purpose. From corporate company towns to crypto-democracies to religious or philosophically based communities, their smallest unit will still be the family. While for most of human history, the family was defined by literal bloodlines, this is no longer the case. Today, family can mean any number of permutations, combinations of genders, definitions of parents, siblings, and relationships. On the frontier, this will still be true and likely expand in its definition as new variations of relationships evolve. Whether by blood or simple relationship, the concept of the family is one of extreme closeness, tolerance of personal differences, and a willingness to put one’s own life on the line in defense of the unit or its other members — often in spite of any differences — because they are family.

In today’s world here on the surface, much has been made of the fragmentation of the nuclear family — even as other forms of family have come into vogue. Yet all of them have suffered the industrial disease of disassociation. While groups of people of different ages may all live in the same house or apartment, often there is little shared value and commonality between them. 

A portion of the far side of the Moon looms large just beyond the Orion spacecraft in this image taken on the sixth day of NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, in late 2022. (Image credit: NASA)

More recently, the COVID-19 experience, in some cases, brought people together as schools and jobs closed, and people found themselves stuck in the bubbles of their homes together, sometimes for the first time in their lives. For some, this was traumatic, but for many, it meant the birth of new and deeper relationships. After all, the last 300 years have, at least in industrial societies, created social walls within the walls of what used to be homes, oftentimes turning them into simple dwelling places in which a group of people live. The idea of willing sacrifice in the name of one’s blood kin has dissolved in many places, to be replaced by… well… nothing.