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- Convenors:
-
Lisa Ruth Rand
(California Institute of Technology)
Réka Patrícia Gál (University of Toronto)
Donny Persaud (Cornell University)
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- Chair:
-
Lisa Ruth Rand
(California Institute of Technology)
- Discussants:
-
Réka Patrícia Gál
(University of Toronto)
Donny Persaud (Cornell University)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
In response to current space industry efforts to promote reusable rocket technology while continuing to operate under longstanding extractivist logics, this panel will consider outer space pasts, presents, and futures grounded instead in ethics of care and repair.
Long Abstract:
The development of reusable rockets to support expansion of a colonial space industry is often framed by proponents as a sustainable solution to socio-economic, climate, and orbital crowding crises and a pathway to democratizing access to orbit. Yet, following a 2022 static engine test of “Starship,” the largest space rocket to date, Elon Musk tweeted that it is “much better to break things on the ground than en route to orbit.” The following year Starship broke en route to orbit on its first test flight. Upholding the illusion of a material and discursive division between Earth and an externalized Elsewhere (Olson and Messeri 2015), this extractivist way of thinking underpins outer space’s ongoing transformation into a monitored, governed, and appropriated entity for the growing neoliberal space sector. The commercial space industry’s ‘move fast and break things’ ethos indicates limits and risks of the paradigm of reuse as currently configured, and points towards the need to consider alternative approaches to space presents and futures that are explicitly grounded in care.
This panel invites engagements with outer space that focus on the concepts of repair and reparation. In doing so, this panel seeks to explore and critically reflect on the transformative power of the “reparative turn” prevalent within STS and infrastructure studies (Forlano 2017; Jackson 2014; Mattern 2018; Mauldin 2020; Murphy 2015; Sharma 2018; Singh 2020) for the social studies of outer space. How might such conceptual reframings and reparative readings be deployed to transform practical and analytical encounters with outer space? How can focusing on repair work reconfigure practices and epistemologies relating to space? How can reparative historical readings bring attention to previously overlooked or excluded actors in space culture and governance? We especially encourage contributions that take anti-colonial, anti-racist, crip, feminist, Indigenous, and/or queer approaches to this topic.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Kai Strycker (University of Vienna) Nina Klimburg-Witjes (University of Vienna)
Short abstract:
Through a collaborative dialogue between STS and aerospace engineering, the study explores the complexities of managing and mitigating the risks associated with space debris, shedding light on the daily struggles and affective engagements of engineers maintaining space infrastructures.
Long abstract:
Space technologies like satellites play an integral role in national and international security – and defense strategies and infrastructures. But when satellites break down or run out of fuel, they become space debris, continuing their trajectories unresponsive to ground control and self-multiplying through collisions. Decades of spaceflight activities have left an ever-growing pile of space debris in Earth’s orbits, and a gridlocked outer space has now taken the shape of a haunting specter (Clormann & Klimburg-Witjes, 2022). Hurtling through space at incredibly high velocities, these former objects of security become objects of risk for active satellites and space infrastructures alike. Linking work from STS on the temporalities of infrastructures to CSS approaches on materiality and the technologization of security, we explore how space governance and engineering actors relate to the material leftovers of past security regimes in their attempts to protect functioning space assets from their risky predecessors. Methodologically, this paper is an experiment in collaboration (Passoth et al., 2021) written as a conversation between social science and aerospace engineering in an attempt to capture the “lively, energetic and sometimes unruly behaviour of materials and objects” (Walters, 2014) from a transdisciplinary perspective. Together, we will trace space and security experts' daily struggles of and affective relations with space debris and their efforts to tame the risks stemming from security leftovers.
Peter Timko (Jagiellonian University)
Short abstract:
In this presentation, I draw on interviews with Ukrainian Starlink users to reflect on the social and technical labor required to repair and maintain the terrestrial component of this space-based infrastructure.
Long abstract:
Starlink is a satellite constellation owned and operated by the private aerospace company SpaceX. Consisting of more than 5000 units in low-Earth orbit, the network is built to provide broadband internet service to terrestrial users. To date, the company has received much critical attention for the logistical issues presented by its substantial in-orbit presence and the ways its satellites can disrupt Earth-based observation and appreciation of the night sky. However, in-orbit technologies represent only one side of Starlink’s necessary infrastructure—to access Starlink services, terrestrial users require a proprietary antenna as well as a registered subscription.
The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has disrupted communication systems throughout the country, accelerating the adoption of Starlink services to fill the gap. As a result, Starlink terminals are in high demand. To meet this need, a grassroots network has arisen to facilitate the acquisition, distribution, repair, and operation of Starlink terminals. In this presentation, I draw on interviews with participants in these networks to reflect on the social and technical labor required to repair and maintain this crucial infrastructure. In doing so, I foreground the overlooked terrestrial components of space technologies and highlight how active engagement with space infrastructure can rearrange terrestrial relations.
Graham Minenor-Matheson (Linköping University)
Short abstract:
Reimagining repair as necessary for survival in outer space I extend repair as a conceptual tool to argue that repair as survival becomes vital because without tending to, or caring of infrastructure(s) through repair, astronauts/passengers would be left to the harsh conditions of space to perish.
Long abstract:
Failure, repair and maintenance. Long considered by NASA as vital concepts to the dream of regular spaceflight, they are also levers through which critics contribute to disrupting our collective imaginaries to reevaluate the role of the public sector in delivering space programs in favour of a growing private sector. As commercial companies become more involved in the “mundane” tasks of ferrying astronauts to and from the ISS aiming to make spaceflight sustainable through reusability, sustainability has become a recent buzzword omitting the importance of failure, repair and maintenance to the daily life of space exploration. The mundanity of repair which scholars inform us disappears into the background in earthly infrastructures, is so far invisible to commercial space.
As Valerie Neal argues, NASA promoted mundanity for the space shuttle as a “space truck” shuttling astronauts-mechanics in promoted missions of repair as part of a “working” age of space travel mundanity. Overshadowed by failures of the space shuttle this notion of focusing on repair and maintenance as an important part of space daily life is one that I argue should be returned to. Reimagining repair as necessary for survival in outer space using examples from science fiction and spaceflight history of failure, repair and maintenance, I will show how extending the concept of repair as a conceptual tool to argue that repair as survival in space becomes vital because without the tending to, or caring of essential infrastructure(s) through repair, astronauts/passengers would be left to the harsh conditions of space to perish.
Lisa Ruth Rand (California Institute of Technology) Eleanor Armstrong (Stockholm University)
Short abstract:
This paper assesses the methods, priorities, and practices of the history of spaceflight through a queer lens, with the aim of offering new directions and potentials to expand the field beyond cis-heteronormative limits.
Long abstract:
We wish to assess the methods, priorities, and practices of the history of spaceflight through a queer lens. Despite strides towards LGBTQ+ inclusion and representation in broader cultural contexts, to date there haven’t been any openly queer active-duty astronauts. Taking as a point of departure the posthumous outing of Sally Ride and Anne McClain's outing after returning from the International Space Station, this paper will reflect on sexuality in space culture. We aim to bring into focus a larger treatment of queer themes within the histories of spaceflight, by emphasizing LGBTQ+ histories and current lives in space domains, and as or more importantly by embracing queer theory perspectives to pluralize, expand, and enhance the practice and scholarship of space politics, technology, and culture into the twenty-first century. We will offer pathways towards a reparative historiography that reconsiders the queer potentialities of existing space histories and asks what may come next for queer space futures.