Paper short abstract:

Narrative infrastructures underlying the scientific literature on Bioregenerative Life Support Systems are analysed. The paper investigates how technologies, human and non-human species are thought of as hybrid assemblages apt to permit space exploration.

Paper long abstract:

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.