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A short video essay attempting to articulate the essence of using a moonwalking simulation device, known as the Walker, created by Andrew Friend and Sitraka Rakotoniaina, in 2022.

"Learning To Moonwalk" is part of an ongoing research endeavour aiming to explore imaginaries as tangible spaces of investigation and infrastructure that shape societal constructs on and off planet Earth. It uses designed simulations as performances that embody the imaginary. Seeking to examine the active role of imaginaries in shaping our engagement with the unfamiliar, it also scrutinises the material instantiation of space exploration, their narrative embodiment and associated extraterrestrial "encounters".

In this video, the Walker embodies a transformative narrative, crafting abstract musings and "silly walks" into visceral moments where the imaginary infuses reality. Cosmic ideas are molded, felt, probed, and understood emotionally, intellectually, and perceptually.

Essentially, the Walker is portrayed as a narrative instantiation, an experiential manifestation of moonwalking, transforming the mundane into the extraordinary. Thus, it underscores the relevance and potential of conceptualising and approaching the unknown from the ground up, evolving narratives from a hyperlocal perspective, in contrast to solely adhering to traditional top-down approaches when imaginig cosmological visions and other worlds.

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In an era marked by global challenges, private spaceflight companies, such as SpaceX, dominate the narrative of the New Space Age, projecting optimism in the face of pandemics, climate change, and political instability. This research investigates how private spaceflight companies articulate and perform collectively held visions of a desirable multiplanetary species, focusing on narratives of future human settlements on Mars. Using the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, I dissect narratives from 2016 to 2023, utilizing social media as a primary platform for the reproduction of these imaginaries.

The rhetorical analysis of SpaceX’s narratives concludes that Mars is depicted as terra nullius, an empty canvas, free from Earth’s challenges. These narratives articulate a non-trivial vision of a better society, effectively shaped in Western terms, relying on scientific and technological knowledge and establishing hierarchical distinctions based on different knowledges and ways of being. While these better societies claim to be for the ‘good of all humanity,’ a deeper examination reveals that the central figure in this imagining of Martian futures is inherently exclusionary. The central figure is the Starman, the astronaut, described in masculine terms reminiscent of Hollywood superheroes and 19th-century cowboys. Therefore, even though these narratives may appear all-encompassing, they ultimately enable only Western men to envision themselves as the inhabitants of the Red Planet.

In this short talk, I present the paper's findings, emphasizing the contrast between the perceived neutrality of a desirable Martian society and the underlying colonial and exclusionary narratives.

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The technological infrastructure that enables spacefaring entities to deliver materials into orbit—whether they be state or commercial actors—is so deeply embedded with the military-industrial-complex that if you ask any emerging aerospace engineering PhD what their prospects are of getting a job not entangled with defense, they’ll tell you it’s close to none. If you ask them what inspired them to pursue a career in aerospace engineering, they might tell you watching Star Trek, reading Isaac Asimov, or riding Space Mountain at Disneyland sparked their imagination and desire to look towards the stars. What role do these imaginaries play in planting the seeds that are then harvested to provide labor to the defense industry? On a personal level, for those of us engaged in space-related work—whether we be in the sciences, engineers, social scientists, or humanities scholars—how might we learn to nurture different dreams?

In this presentation, we provide a broad overview of the material connections between the development of popular imaginaries of outer space and military development, starting with the relationship between Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun. We then share our personal experiences with popular culture that sparked our love of outer space, and the interventions that allowed us to reconsider normative narratives of colonial expansion beyond Earth. Finally, we will engage the audience in a conversation inviting similar introspection into how the imaginaries of space many of us grew up with are related to the very systems of violence anticolonial work related to outer space seeks to disrupt.

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Two lunar bases are supposed to be built by China (and Russia) and the USA with the eventual possibility of human habitation on the moon around 2040. The two projects are of comparable intent, have a similar time frame and are widely regarded as a new area of competition in the new “space race”. Interested states can become partners in the programs and often decide between the two possibilities. The hosting states provide norms and principles for the cooperation on Earth and the operation of the lunar bases to which partnering states have to adhere. This development can be regarded as a new era of fragmented norm-setting for space activities.

Hence, research on norm-setting as the basis of a future space regime is necessary. This paper contributes to this conversation by using the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to reflect on the visions of space, the promoted forms of social life, and ideas and values underpinning the semantics surrounding the establishment of the two stations. The comparison will be based on a content analysis of documents related to the two programs like the Artemis Accords and the ILRS Guide for Partnership, Memoranda of Understanding, press releases, and possibly news coverage. The proposed infrastructure including design and utility will also be taken into account as it shows which purposes are prioritized for what reason. The research aims to show conflicting and corresponding themes which could lead to divergence or consensus in the process of norm deliberation in the space sector.

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By following the spacesuit – a technological and cultural artefact – through real-world and fictional simulations, I want to show what kind of imaginaries about humans on Mars are (co-)produced. Firstly, documents and interviews from the Austrian Space Forum (OeWF), an organisation that builds spacesuit simulators and conducts simulated Mars missions, will give insights into what kind of imaginaries (i) are generally shared at the OeWF, and (ii) guide the organisational and material infrastructures of their simulated Mars missions. Secondly, analysing selected Science Fiction (SF) novels – literature being a long-standing venue for thought experiments and simulation – will reveal extrapolated imaginings of future human missions to Mars. In SF, we can experience sociotechnical imaginaries which develop when real-world technological and scientific limitations do not apply. Through this approach of symmetrically considering fact and fiction, I will show how technoscientific and sociotechnical imaginaries of humans on Mars echo through one “social ‘spacesuit’ arena” (cf. Clarke et al. 2018). I will build on former STS work regarding outer space imaginaries (e.g., Tutton 2018, 2021) as well as earthly outer space exploration sites and Science Fiction (Messeri 2016, Vertesi 2019). In today’s new space race, which is dominated by the perspectives of powerful actors like space agencies and billionaires, I seek to shift the angle to less obvious sites like a small NPO and popular fiction. Both are rehearsing the future of humans in outer space, thus generating data for, and contributing imaginings to our shared imaginaries of becoming a spacefaring civilisation.

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The proposed panel contribution explores the convergence of speculative fiction writing, urban creative practices, and speculative theatre's future, particularly as a socio-technological imaginary for the exploration of outer space. Leveraging the Creative Urban Methods group's qualitative methodologies and informed by posthumanist theories, I aim to define speculative theatre through attributes like political engagement, posthuman perspectives, intermediality, nomadism, and ontological inquiry that guide the proposed approach to staging speculative fiction narratives in urban context.

"Harvie: The Commander's Daughter," a Young Adult science fiction novel, serves as a case study for these theoretical frameworks. Set in a technologically advanced, yet catastrophe-scarred future world of near outer space colonies, it follows Harvie, a teenager confronting her father's complex legacy. The narrative weaves together themes of identity, resilience, and urban transformation, reflecting speculative theatre's ability to engage with futuristic space city imaginaries and extend speculative fiction's reach beyond literary boundaries to enrich urban creative practices.

The presentation will interrogate the intersections between speculative fiction writing, speculative theatre research, and STS studies of outer space, aiming to unpack how speculative narratives—such as "Harvie: The Commander's Daughter"—can illuminate and critique the imaginaries and infrastructures shaping human engagement with outer space. By drawing on my work, the proposed contribution seeks to showcase how speculative approaches offer methodological tools for STS scholars to conceptualize and critically engage with the futures of outer space exploration, settlement, and societal organization, both extraterrestrial and terrestrial, and to examine them as a contested domain that refracts fundamental questions about human existence.

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How do future visions of space shape forms of European integration in the present, and how, conversely, do geopolitical relations on Earth shape how and by whom these futures are imagined and inscribed in infrastructural processes? Using (controversies about) the joint European Ariane launcher as a case study, we explore how the politics of the present are shaped by how the future of space is envisioned and vice versa.

Methodologically, this speaks to longstanding questions in infrastructure studies, namely how to connect the different dimensions of a large-scale infrastructural project and describe their complex relations. However, what changes when such questions are extended to infrastructures that extend beyond Earth? ‘Following the rocket around’ to construction sites, policy conferences, foresight departments, and trade fairs, we aim to specify how the complex socio-political and spatial relations of European integration shape and are shaped by collective imaginations. To do so, we develop a novel interdisciplinary and multi-sited ethnographic approach that links work in STS, social studies of outer space, design, and aerospace engineering. In our talk, we will present initial findings from ongoing research, paying symmetrical attention to material and imaginative aspects of how the future is not only envisioned but concretized in building Ariane, how this generates new layers of spatial conceptualizations and might support the extension of potential Earth-Space assemblages.

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In many countries, space agencies have played a crucial role in shaping and realizing the future visions of societies, much like NASA symbolized the American spirit of explorations on the frontier. On January 9, 2024, the National Assembly of Korea passed a set of bills outlining the planned launch of the Korea AeroSpace Administration(KASA), with the establishment scheduled for May 2024. The creation of KASA was the realization of a long-standing dream in the space sector in South Korea.

The establishment of KASA was one of the key national tasks of the Yoon Suk Yeol administration, realizing this enduring aspiration of Korean society within two years after Yun’s inauguration. However, the planned launch of KASA assumed different roles and formats compared to the ongoing discussions within the space sector. Conflicts emerged between various regions and sectors through the implementation process, and numerous challenges persisted despite the imminent opening in May.

This study analyzed the national imaginaries of Korean society around the Korean Space Agency. By comparing past discussions with those related to the planned launch of KASA, the analysis examines the sociotechnical imaginaries associated with the space agency in Korean society. The study aims to explore the implicit ideals and aspirations embedded in KASA and assess how they align or differ from the previously envisioned image of Korea in the discourse in the Korean space sector. This exploration could offer insights into the trajectory of KASA and provide a glimpse into the future Korean society through the lens of space.

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The space sector is seen as a significant area for future economic growth and national competitiveness, with recent investment made in creating new commercial spaceports to serve the small satellite and space tourism markets. In this presentation, we analyze the role of the UK state as a promissory and entrepreneurial actor (Mazzucato 2018), investing in, regulating and organizing the ‘promissory space’ of the space launch economy (Pollock and Williams 2010). In these roles, the UK state, with its industry partners, is actively constructing a new industrial sector in the UK, which promises both tangible and intangible assets. This presentation contributes new insights to previous work in the social studies of outer space on spaceports by addressing the sociotechnical expectations of creating space launch economies and how these expectations are implicated in assetizing access to outer space. We identify similar dynamics at work to other domains of technoscientific capitalism, namely the importance of asset creation, the role of regulation in asset-making and valuation, and the relationship between cultural and economic asset-forms. In doing so, our findings are relevant to STS scholars engaged in the analysis of sociotechnical expectations and assetization in other technoeconomic domains as well as the space sector.

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Space food is often linked with the life support systems for crews during missions beyond Earth. In light of plans for interplanetary travel by numerous space agencies and commercial entities, there's a growing focus on developing innovative space food technologies and products to meet the demands of long-duration missions to destinations like the Moon, Mars, and beyond (e.g. NASA and the Canadian Space Agency's Deep Space Food Challenge).

Food and agriculture take center stage, serving as both a technical challenge—addressing the need to provide and produce food in microgravity environments—and a means to contribute to addressing Earthly issues such as climate change and food security. Initiatives like the IAEA/FAO’s Cosmic Crops underscore this focus on leveraging advancements in food production and technology transfer to benefit both space exploration and terrestrial sustainability efforts. Drawing from Inayatullah's five future images (2008) and adapting them to the context of space food, I delve into key official documents from international fora such as UNOOSA, materials from space agencies, New Space companies websites, and official communications from International Space Station (ISS)’s crews regarding food. The overarching objective is to uncover the primary 'narratives of change' (Wittmayer et al., 2019)—that is, the sets of ideas, concepts, metaphors, discourses, or storylines on food transformation in multi-planetary spaces. This analysis aims to reveal how these narratives inform and guide actions, strategies, and interventions for transforming food systems, both on Earth and beyond.

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This paper proposes an approach towards the material space of the cosmos through subjective perspectives as an alternative to the scientific objectivity that frames both the development of technologies and its visual output. Thinking with Paul B. Preciado's planetary thinking and its relation to alternate subjectivities in his compilation of writings titled, An Apartment on Uranus, I refer to contemporary artworks that approach the site of the cosmos as utopian alternatives to socio-political marginalization on earth. This includes looking at contemporary artworks that engage with for example, agencies of temporality by the collaborative duo, Black Quantum Futurism and their work titled "Black Space Agency" (2018), imagining environmental colonialism by Daisy Alexandra Ginsberg's in her artwork titled, "The Wilding of Mars" and relations between collective politics and the individual in Ilya Kabakov's, "The Man Who Flew into Space From His Apartment" (1982). This cultural analysis looks at how the site of the cosmos is generative of reimagined and redefined forms of subjectivity that generate from and against socio-political and capitalist marginalization and against the backdrop of techno-scientific visual output that have been historically framed by logics of objectivity. This inquiry is framed by the questions, how have the cosmos been a site in which subjectivity expresses itself (as well as already existing as a material space from which we were all formed)? How can the technological output of visualising outer space be used by artists to create visions that figure subjectivity in ways that are pluralist and non–universalizing?

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In recent years, the aerospace corporation SpaceX has been a vocal proponent of Martian colonisation. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, has argued for the necessity “to make life multiplanetary” in the face of various existential threats of the anthroposcene, ranging from climate collapse to nuclear war. These bold claims have cultivated considerable public attention, attracting extensive headlines and an enormous social media following reinforcing SpaceX’s role in imagining humanity’s future.

This paper maps out the hopes, fears, and limits of this imaginary through a combination of theories of anticipatory regimes drawn from STS and the Sociology of Outer Space with a Foucauldian analytics of power/knowledge. We empirically examine an array of statements that SpaceX have used to elaborate their vision, including legal documents, corporate merchandise, Elon Musk’s social media accounts, and concept renderings of Martian infrastructures.

We will show how these different statements coalesce to mobilise long-standing narratives of colonialism and technological progress in which great (White, Western) men of history are centred as protagonists in the advancement of civilization. We describe how this nostalgic future-building has the effect of foreclosing trajectories for collective action and resistance in the present. Chiefly, we argue that to pursue the mission to make life multiplanetary is to leave vital discussions surrounding colonial reckoning, environmental reconciliation, and the ethics of obscene wealth to the wayside. As such, our paper will show how anticipatory regimes of Martian colonisation operate as much through foreclosures, silences and exclusions as they do through their imagined hopes and promises.

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As we look forward to our future in space, there are many activities and timeframes we should consider. Some of these timeframes are far out, such as the settlement of another planetary body. Some are a little closer, such as the industrialization and militarization of space. Others, such as human space exploration, span the past, present and future and hold many insights into the values we hold about space as a shared resource and source of scientific and infrastructural discovery. Human space exploration has informed many of the imaginaries of future space infrastructure, and will continue to do so. Understanding the values underlaying these missions, then, is important in considering how we plan for future activities in space. How we conceptualize the history of human space exploration, plan for near missions and imagine future missions will help us more deeply understand the dominant ideological values that have been historically ingrained into space exploration. This will then allow us to evaluate how those ideologies make their way into mission planning during the present, help us integrate a more diverse set of values into future missions, and by extension, inform the development of a more equitable future in space. Using an interdisciplinary lens that pulls from human space travel research, space ethics, and feminist STS, this short talk will explore how a critical examination of the past, present and future of human space exploration can inform the development of future space infrastructure to reflect a more socially equitable future in space.

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Spaceports are increasingly dotting the so-called 'edges of the world'. Reflecting on fieldwork conducted in Scottish Outer Hebrides, this paper will trace the reformulation of 'peripheral' spaces as sites of cosmic future-making — bringing into focus an array of pertinent earthly questions.

Long abstract:

In 1830, on a small islet in Loch Scolpaig in the Outer Hebrides, a Gothic-style tower was built, replacing an iron age dun. It was a structure without practical purpose, known as a folly, erected for the sole reason of providing employment as part of local famine relief — to keep the poor placated and their idle hands busy. Fast-forward to 2019, a contemporary iteration of the folly was proposed by Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (the local council) with an investment of £1m to purchase land at Scolpaig for the construction of a launch facility, in a consortium with the Scottish government, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, UK technology company QinetiQ and the consultancy Commercial Space Technologies (CST). Rockets were to be launched vertically to carry payloads into Sun synchronous and polar obits. The project promised 50-70 jobs and the revitalisation of an ailing Hebridean economy. It was to bring a peripheral 'backwater' into cosmic relevance. This paper examines the conflicting futures assigned to regional spaces like North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, which are increasingly thought of as emergent frontier zones for space exploration and military securitisation, potential eco-havens, and as bastions of tradition and heritage. In this way, cosmic visions invoke pertinent earthly questions — regarding appropriate land-use, proprietary relations, and environmental care. The paper will trace local forms of resistance to the proposed spaceport, particularly through the capitalist/anti-military rhetoric of the grassroots organisation 'Friends of Scolpaig' and their citizen science strategies.

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Critical storytelling can be a potent medium for reflecting on alternatives to the fraught narratives of extraction that loom over possible futures in outer space - departing from this premise, this lecture performance sets out to examine the ways in which we can 'prototype' narrative imaginaries and strategically activate these as potent collective envisioning tools, which can produce deep reflections around the cultures and politics that will guide our outer-planet expansion. Visions of outer-space narratives require critical reflection on, to paraphrase Haraway, 'what worlds world worlds' (2018), and this research will seek to demonstrate an experimental practice-based methodology through which outer-space imaginaries can be worlded and materialised through an STS approach to the deployment of game engines.

To explore this question, this paper aims to reflect on the ways in which game engine technologies can become tools of possibility for envisioning alternative futures outside of the cultural logic of our techno-capitalist imaginary; it argues that immersive design tools, whilst traditionally perceived as capitalistic frameworks used primarily for the production of recyclable templates for standardised content, can be 'hacked', 'misused' and 'subverted' for the purpose of critical storytelling - becoming, in essence, a form of "cyborg writing" (Haraway, 2018).

Part film screening, part video essay, and part spoken word, this performance lecture will present an immersive audiovisual journey across possible future settlements and their cultural imaginaries, aiming to reflect on the future by using game engine technologies as potent tools for speculation and 'STS doing' informed by indigenous and alternative knowledges.

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In the most philosophical chapter of his 1961 sci-fi novel "Solaris", Stanislaw Lem lets one of the main characters articulate vision of the unremarkability of human existence in the cosmic context, summed up by the statement: "We are the grass of the universe." The aim of this short talk is to elaborate on this claim as both a description and as a proposition of human situatedness in the more-than-planetary realm, while analysing environmental implications of SETI research. The narrative arc of the talk is organised around solution to Fermi paradox proposed by Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum in 2009, which suggests that ecological sustainability of the coupling between communities of intelligent species and their planetary environments is the major factor in the possibility of their successful detection by remote observation. In particular, the so-called "Sustainability Solution" posits that "exponential or other faster-growth is not a sustainable development pattern for intelligent civilizations," which significantly constrains viable historical trajectories of any community of intelligent species. The scenario of space-faring civilizations colonizing solar systems or whole galaxies is thus rendered rather unlikely. Instead, this solution implies that maintaining and increasing the habitability of a planet is the most suitable strategy for historical development of intelligent species, and that, metaphorically speaking, a sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from nature. Through the author's own pseudo-ethnographic engagement with astronomic community, this talk utilizes SETI research as an expanded framework for environmental thinking, thus exemplifying new "gestures of cosmic relation", as first theorized by Lisa Messeri.

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The ongoing New Space Age leads scientists to investigate practicable ways of making spacefaring self-sufficient and thus permit long-term manned missions and even the permanence of humans in space colonies. To this aim, researchers are designing Bioregenerative Life Support Systems (BLSSs), that is, ecosystems conceived as “closed worlds” (Anker, 2005; Kallipoliti, 2018) where technological devices, humans, plants and microorganisms are enabled to produce and recycle oxygen, water, and other nutrients and substances needed for life. In this way, different species could survive (autonomously) in extreme conditions as those of outer space. This contribution analyses the scientific literature on BLSSs to highlight imaginaries of life in outer space - and future life on Earth - proposed by outer space technoscience. Our research investigates the narrative infrastructures (Felt, 2009) underlying the writing of scientists, showing how narratives about outer space research predicate a renewed form of existence, and how new forms of “transferability” - or "translation” - of earthly life in the extraterrestrial environment require (re)assemblages (Latour, 2005) of human and non-human actors. In these narratives, relations of interdependence among “companion species” (Haraway, 2008; Tsing, 2015) are essential and deserve attention. The contribution will thus discuss how the narratives on the entanglements of multiple species build a narrative infrastructure that sustains ambitious space exploration projects, making this human-non-human bond at the core of renewed (not new, in fact) projects of long-distance space travel.

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The European space sector is undergoing a renaissance due to novel geopolitical power constellations and commercial competition. Within this shifting landscape, strategic visioning plays a crucial role in shaping long-term goals and fostering collaboration, for both public space programs and private entities. Focusing on the Ariane rocket programme, a symbol of European techno-political integration, this research project explores the intricate processes of strategic visioning within the European space sector, and analyses how processes of conferring, compromising and consolidating strategic visions work towards “making” Europe.

Examining the sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015) surrounding the Ariane rocket, my talk then explores the co-production (Jasanoff, 2010) of social and techno-political futures in processes of strategic visioning within the European space transportation sector. Here, I will particularly investigate multiple actors and diverging interests from space agencies and companies, who, through structured foresight and futuring processes, actively work in collectively envisioning European space futures. Thus, my talk further explores how this vision alignment informs the broader processes of European integration in space.

My research links work in STS and the emerging field of Social Studies of Outer Space (Salazar & Gorman, 2023) to Critical Futures Studies (Inayatullah, 1998). Grounded in poststructuralism and deconstruction and using an interdisciplinary ethnographic approach, my work attends to the complex relationship between structured foresight processes and collective imagination in European space futures.

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Space colonization projects are commonly envisaged as a means to prepare for and potentially escape the implications of apocalyptic conditions on Earth. More specifically, the colonization of outer space is seen as a means to discover and develop settlements that are suitable for sustainable human presence in locations beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. This is often presented as a means of preparing for an event such as a nuclear war, meteor impact, or catastrophic environmental disaster that may render the Earth uninhabitable. In this respect, space colonization represents an example of "prepping" on the greatest scale: the ultimate "bugging out." It is infused by similar combinations of apocalyptic anticipation, risk-based justification and fears of societal and state collapse as small scale, individualistic prepping plans but then carries these logics to an unprecedented level of ambition.

In this paper we unpack the underlying logics and frameworks of outer space colonization through the prism of “prepping” as an anticipatory practice. We delve into the mechanisms by which governmental bodies, industry players, and research institutions secure investment and political backing for these monumental outer space colonization endeavors. We demonstrate how prepping on such an extraordinary scale only becomes possible through the intricate relationship between speculative visions and material infrastructures, which merges technological ambition, societal anxieties, and aspirations for survival and transcendence. Through our analysis, we outline how the hubristic imaginaries and advanced material technologies of space colonization are fashioned as part of an extreme cosmic “survival kit.”