Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth is a short book by R. Buckminster Fuller, first published in 1969, following an address with a similar title given to the 50th annual convention of the American Planners Association in the Shoreham Hotel, Washington D.C., on 16 October 1967.

Noting the lack of any user manual to help Earthians steward this ship, Fuller offers some reflections, prognostications, and guidance, based on contemporary concepts of linked relationships, that may help in the understanding, management, sustainment, and creation of a plan to preserve spaceship earth for the future of humanity .

The Great Pirates had a special ability to comprehend and activate a wide range of skills and knowledges required to generalize, translate, navigate, and integrate existing systems.

Fuller posits that these Great Pirates established governments in various areas and supported leaders who will defend their trade routes.

Power struggles for waterways ensue, requiring people such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to design better defenses for the Great Pirates.

As the size of the people in the Great Pirates' employment grow, training becomes a necessity, and the beginnings of schools and colleges ensue.

Monarchs are encouraged to develop civil service systems to provide secure but specialized employment for their brightest subjects, which prevents them from competing with the Great Pirates in their lucrative global trading.

This previous epoch set in place the current system of political organization rooted in the concept of sovereign nations which control the planet's natural resources and distribution networks.

The public is unaware that Great Pirates had been ruling the earth, and the role falls back to kings and politicians, though the frameworks of trade, rating and accounting remain.

Fuller declares that the Great Pirates society became extinct as a result of advances in industrial production and technology.

This form of control is used to limit one's experience, knowledge, focus, viewpoint, and network within only one segment, subservient to their specific organized societies.

The concepts of "spending" energy and of entropy are used to support outdated systems of thought which believe that in order for one group of lifeforms to survive, others must be made extinct.

The idea of the Earth as a spaceship alludes to it as a mechanical vehicle that requires maintenance, and that if we do not keep it in good order it will cease to function.

Additionally, Fuller refers to fossil fuels as our savings account; if we burn through the finite amount available rather than reserving it, our energy potential will only become bankrupt.

He encourages instead the harvesting of regenerative sources, specifically the Sun's radiation and Moon's gravity via wind, solar, and water tools.