Short abstract:

Outer Space is at the heart of a particularly productive tension since it is so inherently “open” to access, but the required technology to actively pursue its exploration and utilization is prohibitively inaccessible. This paper examines these challenges through the framing of Open Engineering.

Long abstract:

Paradigms such as Open Science, Open Access, Open Innovation and Open Source, have permeated from the information technology fields to the frontiers of scientific and technological development. Combining these networked, distributed systems of scientific and technological production with principles of responsible research and innovation (RRI) – a critical gap has emerged in understanding the processes and management structures of new project and mission development.

Open Engineering is emerging as a new framework to understand and support the co-production of new knowledge in high-tech domains, acknowledging the wider range of contributing stakeholders and critically engaging with key technical, ethical and political challenges. Following this framework, this paper examines a series of ongoing anticipatory experiments, contextualizing engineering processes and management with different dimensions of societal systems:

1) Technological Paradigm: A speculative design for a new space station in geostationary orbit – Gateway Earth - as a way to contextualize the transition of open engineering processes and challenge the traditional military-industrial complex.

2) Legal Framework: A curated engagement with pivotal Outer Space Treaty in contrast to alternative, performative and embodied legal frameworks, challenging the inclusion and exclusion of stakeholders in (post-)colonial extractivist practices.

3) Socio-political Context: The emergence of social imaginaries around trans-planetary ecologies and their problematic, contradictory and transformative promises in contrast with the impact of space and satellite technology on daily life on Earth.

4) Cultural Visioning: Using collaborative practices to establish fictions and narratives challenging current mindset and cultural conditioning vis-à-vis utopian and dystopian future(s), spanning collective and individual practices.