Abstract
<jats:p>Currently, NASA and several outer space industry multi-billionaire entrepreneurs (e.g. Elon Musk (Space X), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic)), are actively engaged in outer-space research that reports innovative advances such as, outer space: mining, tourism, medicine labs, terraforming Mars and the Moon, and altering celestial bodies and terrestrial humans to enhance extra-terrestrial survivability. All these advances unearth serious ethical concerns of human identity and cosmic sustainability that we address here. Further, the current understanding of sustainability development (SD) is highly anthropocentric (i.e., the earth is meant solely for man’s use), and limited in scope as a terrestrial, temporal, economic and pro-human project. We expand SD to include trans-terrestrial, trans-temporal, trans-economic, and trans-human developments. We view this complex problem by distinguishing anthropocentric (nature is for man) versus non-anthropocentric (man is for nature) modern views of natural sustainability; Each view can be made to include either natural outcomes / processes of nature, or industrial uses and outcomes of nature to provide a four-fold framework of Natural Sustainability within which we explore ethical implications of outer space advances (OSA). We discuss managerial implications and limitations and suggest directions for future research.</jats:p>