The satellite in your weather app was mined by a community that wasn't asked

Every satellite begins as a mine.

The reaction wheels that point a spacecraft, the magnets in its momentum control, the phosphors in its optics: neodymium, dysprosium, terbium. These are not exotic additions to an otherwise clean technology. They are the technology. Remove them and there is no attitude control, no downlink, no weather forecast on a phone.

The extraction happens somewhere specific. It happens on land someone lives on, upstream of water someone drinks. The people affected are rarely consulted before a licence is granted, frequently displaced once operations begin, and almost never compensated in a way that survives contact with the local cost of resettlement.

We are not arguing that satellites should not exist. We use them. Climate monitoring, disaster response, and agricultural forecasting are among the most defensible uses of the orbital economy. We are arguing that the supply chain behind them is treated as somebody else's subject, and that aerospace engineers are trained in every part of the system except its ground floor.

Free, Prior and Informed Consent is not an aspirational principle. It is an operational standard with a documented procedure, and it is skipped routinely because skipping it is cheaper and nobody downstream asks. Procurement teams could ask. Mission planners could ask. The question is not technically difficult; it is socially awkward, which is a different problem with a different solution.

The next time a sector conference opens with a slide about how satellites serve humanity, the honest version of that slide includes the humans at the extraction end.