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- Convenors:
-
Graham Minenor-Matheson
(Linköping University)
Michael Godhe (Linköpings universitet, Campus Norrköping)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Since the founding of SpaceX, there has been a shift in space exploration operations and focus on who gets to produce the future. This panel will interrogate key questions of democratisation, future(s) building and alternatives to a hegemonic commercial space imaginary.
Description
Since the middle of the twentieth century, space exploration has largely been conducted by government agencies like NASA, the ESA and Roscosmos. However, since the founding of SpaceX in 2002, there has been a growing private sector influence in space exploration activities that are considered as disrupting the space industry. This shift is seen as natural, an evolution. Commercial companies, then, are inheriting the mantel of space exploration and proselytising about and crafting a future that claims to be “for all of humanity” but also responding to the climate and environmental crises with bold claims of a future off-Earth. Key questions need to be asked: What kind of future(s) are being opened up or closed off in this shift to the private sector? Who is setting the tone and agenda for the future and what, and who, does that look like? What does the democratisation of space mean? Who gets to decide what democracy means in space? This panel aims to explore all of these questions with the aim of offering alternatives to the capitalist commercialisation process ongoing as of now. Power is being shifted to a private sector ready to seize the future for its own ends and leave the rest of humanity in its wake as it explores the solar system and the universe. What alternative imaginaries exist to confront this hegemonic commercial space imaginary? But, more importantly, how do we disseminate these alternatives to a wider public exposed to the dominant visions of a capitalist future in space?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Commercial settlement is framed as a future for all humanity, yet it often assumes that procreation in space will secure survival. I argue that procreation is a governance issue, so commercial space ethics should require explicit procreative governance rather than leaving reproduction implicit.
Paper long abstract
Commercial actors increasingly describe off-Earth settlement as a universal insurance policy and a future for all humanity. This paper argues that such promises rely on a largely unexamined moral assumption: that creating new people in space will be the default means of securing long-term survival. Yet commercial settlement plans make reproduction both politically marginal and practically central. They treat procreation as a background necessity while leaving unanswered who may reproduce, under what constraints, and with what responsibilities toward future children. In my paper, I develop a normative framework for assessing procreation in commercial space habitats, where life is defined by high risk, strict rationing, limited exit options, and deep dependence on corporate infrastructure. I argue that in such environments procreation cannot be treated as a private choice alone. It becomes a matter of governance, because it creates new vulnerable people whose welfare depends on decisions about resources, medical standards, liability, and mission priorities. Ignoring this turns humanity’s future rhetoric into a form of moral outsourcing to future dependents.
Paper short abstract
This paper extends J. Schwartz’s proposal on common governance of near-Earth material resources, which involve regulating access and benefits. I contrast deep-sea mining regulation, which I tend to favor, with Schwartz’s state-based mining rights modeled on the International Telecommunication Union.
Paper long abstract
In this contribution—whose title deliberately echoes Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom—I seek to extend the proposals advanced by James Schwartz regarding what a common governance framework for space resources might look like. The paper is situated within normative political philosophy and builds on recent work in space ethics.
The focus is on near-Earth resources, understood as material resources in celestial bodies near Earth whose extraction could become plausible within the next fifty years. These include: (1) rare and valuable minerals—platinum, gold, iron, lithium, cobalt, nickel, or titanium—found in asteroids; (2) lunar regolith, i.e., the Moon’s dust and soil; and (3) water in the form of ice at the lunar poles.
Governance involves two dimensions: regulating access and regulating the benefits of exploitation. Concerning the latter, Schwartz proposes taxation to redistribute benefits in countries that allow private appropriation, such as the United States. However, few proposals exist for countries, like France, that have not legislated on space resources ownership.
I argue that the signature of the Artemis Accords should not lead to legal implementation. Instead, governance could draw on the regulatory framework for deep-sea mining under the authority of the International Seabed Authority (UN).
The paper also considers an alternative approach, advocated by Schwartz, inspired by geostationary orbit regulation under the International Telecommunication Union, which would involve transferable state-based mining rights. While this model offers a clear institutional mechanism, it risks reinforcing national appropriation of space resources, contrary to the principle that such resources belong to all humanity.
Paper short abstract
Based on an analysis of the exhibition “Planet Eden” and other archival materials, the presentation will address various forms of techno-imagination, alternative visions of possible futures, and the clash among technocracy, socialist cosmism, and socialist utopianism in Czechoslovakia.
Paper long abstract
This paper investigates alternative techno-imaginaries in socialist Czechoslovakia, asking what visions of the future were possible – and what democratic potentials they carried or foreclosed. Drawing on an analysis of the exhibition “Planet Eden / The World of Tomorrow in Socialist Czechoslovakia 1948–1978” and other archival materials, the paper traces a shift from enthusiastic utopian thinking and visions of the "ideal man" (Sputnik/Gagarin) toward the rationalized ambitions of an "ideal technocratic system" (first cosmonaut Remek). Rather than treating these as failed or obsolete futures, I argue they remain analytically and politically generative: alternative imaginaries oriented not only toward an unrealized future, but also toward past visions of utopian time-spaces. To recover these layered temporalities, the paper draws on several analytical frameworks: futurology as a distinct practice embedded in the scientific and technological revolution; the exhibition as heterotopia and heterochronia (Groys, 2009, 2018; Bryant & Knight, 2019); Ssorin-Chaikov's (2006) concept of multi-temporality – understanding how different temporal orientations coexist and intersect; and contemporary approaches to time, temporality, and the future (Godhe & Goode, 2018). Speculative fiction and worlding (Davison-Vecchione & Seeger, 2021; Wolf-Meyer, 2019) serve as key analytical lenses, particularly through science fiction films, novels, and visual art from the 1960s to the 1980s. These materials reveal how socialist cosmism and fantasies of space colonization produced imagined worlds where technologies of power consistently crowded out visions of radical democracy – a tension that speaks directly to the question of what space futures could have been otherwise, and for whom.
Paper short abstract
This paper showcases "All Worlds, All Times", a performance workshop that explores the unknowns at play across discovery processes of finding life beyond earth. Participatory play invites alternative imaginaries of space futures into dialogue
Paper long abstract
All Worlds, All Times is a performance workshop exploring plural futures for the discovery of life beyond earth and the unknowns at play across discovery processes. We propose participatory play as an STS method for engaging space histories and space futures otherwise.
The workshop builds on a research-creation workshop presented at 4S 2025 that examined the politics of earthly and unearthly media. Asking how speculative imaginaries reproduce marginalisation across human and more-than-human worlds, and how fascination with the extraterrestrial can come at the expense of the terrestrial. By foregrounding media as a site of contested truth, authority, and collective sense-making under conditions of uncertainty and misinformation, players investigate the nuances of speculative imagining.
Extending this approach, All Worlds, All Times invites participants into specific future scenarios in which communication, interpretation, and protocol are worked through collectively rather than imposed technocratically. Through improvisation, embodied decision-making, and collaborative world-building, the workshop opens questions of who gets to interpret the unknown, whose values shape space futures, and how alternative imaginaries might be rehearsed and disseminated publicly. In doing so, it positions creative practice not as supplement to theory, but as a speculative and political method for making more plural, relational, and more-than-human futures of outer space thinkable.