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Paper short abstract

Drawing on participant observation, this talk discusses the multidisciplinary, embodied modelling practices of ESA’s Concurrent Design Facility (CDF). This research provides an insight into the material practices and epistemic cultures that lie at the basis of Europe’s future space missions.

Paper long abstract

The European Space Agency’s Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) is a key site where the future of Europe in space is conceptualised. In this design office, built on a digital infrastructure supporting collaborative design, interdisciplinary teams of space engineers and scientists conduct mission studies, working out first details for future mission concepts.

Based on short-term ethnography, this paper approaches the CDF as a laboratory of sorts, where domain-specific engineers experiment with designs responding to the mission objectives and the work of their colleagues. However, as the CDF brings together engineers from different disciplines, it is also a site of contesting epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina, 1999). This research investigates how these contestations are negotiated in the context of space mission studies, where knowledge claims are inherently difficult to validate due to the temporal and spatial scales of spaceflight.

We show how collective, embodied modelling practices contribute to a shared epistemic culture within the CDF (Vertesi, 2015). Particular attention is given to the materiality of these practices, situated in a hybrid virtual/physical workspace, and how this both shapes the CDF’s social organisation and the design of mission concepts (Henderson, 1994; Vinck, 2003). Building on work in STS and the social studies of outer space on the social organisation of space missions, we explore the earlier phase of mission design, connecting this to laboratory studies’ attention to material epistemic cultures. Overall, we show how the future of Europe in space emerges through a multitude of epistemic cultures which are held together by material modelling practices.

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Comparative analysis between Aby Warburg's curatorial approach for his 1930 'Cosmologicon' at the Hamburg Planetary and three 2025 art-science exhibitions on cosmology in The Netherlands. Contributes to building improved theorization of contemporary art-science curatorial practice.

Paper long abstract

In his decolonial cornerstone of a film Perfumed Nightmare (1977) Kidlat Tahimik showcases a particular affection for bridges: the single bridge in his Filipine hometown of Balian, the 26 bridges of Paris, and, most of all, the bridge Wernher von Braun built between the Cape Canaveral and the moon.

After an American brings Kidlat to Paris, the city’s destructive expansion drift as symbolized by the construction site of a supermarket in the old city centre, kills his affection for Western imaginations of progress (“liberté, egalité, fraternité, supermarché!”).

The credits reveal that the pictured construction site actually had been the bare skeleton of the Centre Pompidou all along, awaiting the instalment of her UFO-like chimneys.

Tahimik’s deceit feels appropriate: museums have been and continue to be powerful and intricately designed apparatuses bridging our imagination and the cosmos.

In my presentation, I will re-explore my doctoral research on Dutch science museums by probing their constructions of the cosmological. To do so, I will revisit Aby Warburg’s ‘iconomaniac[al]’ vision for a 1930s exhibition at the astronomy centre in Hamburg, a ‘cosmologicon’ where imageries of astral symbolism and astronomy meet in circular 'denkraum' [‘think-space’], designed to 'avert the tragedy of the tension between instinctive magic and analytical logic'.

Revisiting a number of research sites (Space Expo, Teylers Museum, Sonnenborgh Observatory and Old Observatory Leiden), I analyse: what constitutes their 'denkraum', when new curatorial practices (contemporary art, decolonial narratives) arise in these historical sites of public engagement with science?

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This talk examines analogue and literary simulations as sites of cislunar knowledge production. Using the materialities–infrastructure–imaginaries triad and drawing on STS and Literary Studies, I ask how imaginaries intertwine with materialities and reflect on the ‘otherwise’ in simulations.

Paper long abstract

Discussions concerning outer space generally emphasise impressive—and often iconic—technological artefacts such as rockets and highly contested infrastructures like spaceports. However, these represent only one aspect of the ongoing and profound techno-societal transformations, driven by public and private ambitions toward the Moon. My research investigates two specific sites of knowledge production for the emerging cislunar era: analogue and literary simulations. The former is exemplified by the LUNA Analog Facility in Cologne, Germany, which offers a 700m² replica of the Moon’s surface for equipment testing and mission rehearsals. The latter conceptualises science fiction as a long-standing venue for speculating about humanity’s extraterrestrial future(s). By using this panel’s kaleidoscopic lens of ‘materialities—infrastructure—imaginaries,’ I will scrutinise these sites towards uncovering, for example, whose and what kind of imaginaries shape the selection of materials and the infrastructure design for analogue simulations. Regarding science fiction, I argue that novels and short stories serve as “materialised imaginaries” – abstract imaginings rendered fixed within texts that persist over time, thereby enabling renewed engagement decades later. Literature provides a form of simulation that goes beyond current technoscientific boundaries and offers knowledge other than utopian visions of off-Earth societies. Authors and readers can think through what kind of extraterrestrial resp. cislunar societies we might become. Combining Science and Technology Studies with perspectives from Comparative Literary Studies, this talk explores analogue and literary simulations through the conceptual triad of materialities—infrastructure—imaginaries and reflects on their potential and limitations in ‘imagining space otherwise’.

key words: simulation, materialities, science fiction, imaginaries, knowledge production

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Paper short abstract

The monitoring of human rights violations in international conflict via satellite technology has evolved into a contested, multi-actor practice. While unequal data access and selective transparency persist, the increasing institutionalization of new actors could transform evidentiary standards.

Paper long abstract

Earth observation satellites have emerged as an integral tool for monitoring human rights violations in contemporary international conflicts. While in 1995, the US government presented satellite images of mass graves near Srebrenica in a closed session of the UN Security Council, by the 2020s, far more actors generate and globally disseminate imagery of war atrocities. I explore this proliferation by conducting cross-case comparisons of three cases: the Bosnian War (1992-1995), the Russian-Ukrainian conflict since 2022, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 2023. A systematic mapping of those engaged in documenting, analyzing, and verifying human rights violations using satellite data in all three cases reveals a shift from a narrow, state-centric actor constellation in the 1990s to a more pluralized, multi-actor landscape in which governments, commercial actors, civil society organizations, and intergovernmental organizations operate simultaneously, often in entangled and contested ways in the 2020s. Presumed democratizing effects of an increasingly pluralized actor landscape and multidirectional data flows, for example, are directly challenged by observed patterns including selective transparency and persistent asymmetries in data access and control. In a second step, I discuss to what extent a pluralized, multi-actor landscape coupled with the growing institutionalization of civil society organizations can reconfigure evidentiary practices and epistemic authority.

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By examining the sociotechnical imaginaries surrounding Esrange Space Centre in Sweden, the thesis offers insights into how ideas about “greener”, more secure space-enabled futures are increasingly reinforced through EU discourses, entwining space infrastructure with green capitalist dynamics.

Paper long abstract

Employing a political ecology framework, this thesis explores Esrange Space Centre in the Swedish High North as a case for broader sociopolitical dynamics in which space infrastructure is increasingly intertwined with green transition and securitisation discourses. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of three documents, informed by the concepts of capitalist catastrophism and sociotechnical imaginaries, this work sheds light on the sociotechnical imaginaries reflected in the discursive practices of Swedish institutions and the European Union. With that, it offers insights into the imagined, materialised, and contested visions of “greener”, more secure space-enabled futures. Further, it seeks to answer how these imaginaries may reinforce capitalist and colonial dynamics, foreclosing alternative future trajectories that are more socially and environmentally just. The imaginaries identified and analysed are “Space as an inevitable techno-fix for global challenges”, “Space as a commercial asset driving sustainability within a capitalist growth paradigm”, “Space as a realm and instrument for securing geopolitical power and military dominance” and “Peripheries as spaces inviting exploitation and marginalisation in the name of progress”. Arguing that space imaginaries work to legitimise dynamics of capital accumulation and colonial injustices, this research stresses the need to interrogate the naturalisation of techno-optimist discourses, calling for the inclusion of marginalised voices in development discourses.

Keywords: space infrastructure, green capitalism, sociotechnical imaginaries, Esrange Space Centre, Critical Discourse Analysis

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This proposal examines how the EU's IRIS2 programme sediments European space policy around military security and autonomy. Analysing strategy documents and press releases, it traces how these concepts are prioritised over others, framing space as a securitised frontier of state-private interests.

Paper long abstract

In rising tensions among space-faring geopolitical competitors, the EU has seen a significant increase in military spending and an active push towards militarisation. One of its flagship programmes is IRIS2, a secure government and military communications space infrastructure, composed of a constellation of non-geostationary satellites.

This intervention seeks to research the role of IRIS2 in the ongoing process of militarisation in European political discourse and policy. Thus, it examines how the IRIS2 programme contributes to envisioning space as a securitised frontier, where commons are accumulated for the political and economic advantage of state-private partnerships. Through IRIS2, the EU sediments visions of European sovereignty in space, centering notions of security and autonomy directly related to applications for military activity, favoured over social visions centered on benefitting end users and communities.

To ground its approach, the presentation exposes the result of a mixed methods document analysis of the EU Space Strategy for Security and Defence and several press releases of the Defence Industry Space Programme and of the SpaceRISE consortium. Here, it is possible to trace how those visions are turned into concrete policies and practices that shape the development of the programme. Through frequency analysis, the research traces which values are prioritised in documents and regulations, using a Keyword-in-Context approach to construct text fragments to be further interpreted qualitatively, especially regarding security and autonomy and immediately related concepts. The aim is to understand how the EU relates these concepts to public interest whilst remaining dependent on private technologies and resources.

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This project aims to present diverse perspectives, including local ones, to connect a global outer space infrastructure project to its impacts on local communities. It expands beyond the technoutopian and development emphasis of outer space projects through the case of the future spaceport in Peru.

Paper long abstract

The Peruvian government has made a series of announcements since the end of 2023 about plans to develop a spaceport at the aerial base “El Pato” in Talara, a region in the northern part of the country. These announcements emphasized the support from the US government, through the U.S. Space Command and NASA, as part of the expanding cooperation between the two countries. The spaceport is highlighted as fundamental to the country's and region's development.

Although spaceports are often emphasized as drivers of economic growth and technological advancement, and as symbols of national progress, less attention has been given to how these projects are imagined, justified, and contested by various actors, especially in historically marginalized regions of the Global South. The literature on the interdisciplinary field of social studies of outer space (SSOS) emphasizes the importance of studying local sites to challenge the techno-utopian fantasies of outer space that have detached outer space activities from geography, politics, and power relations on Earth. Thus, it is relevant to study the future spaceport in Peru as a political, ecological, and cultural project.

This research's main scientific issue is the disconnection between national narratives on the economic and technological benefits of a spaceport in Peru and local realities in Talara. This project aims to display diverse perspectives, including local ones, to connect a global outer space infrastructure project to the impacts on local communities. Therefore, the research question for this study is:

What are the potential impacts of the future spaceport in Peru?

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Paper short abstract

Military satellites, the ISS mission, startups, and an arms-manufacturing city expanding into space — Poland's sector is forming fast. A defence official asks: if every project carries a "security stamp," does it still mean anything? This paper seeks to map the ecology of competing space visions.

Paper long abstract

A defense ministry official observes that every Polish space project now carries a "security stamp"—then asks whether the category still retains meaning. A post-industrial city invests €6.2M to expand from arms manufacturing into space. Poland’s first crewed ISS mission returns with 13 completed experiments, sharing the public spotlight with popular highlights such as freeze-dried pierogi. These diverse points of focus illustrate that what counts as "space" depends on who is looking.

Since 2022, Poland’s space sector has accelerated under the pressure of the war in Ukraine. Military MikroSAR satellites, robotics startups, analogue astronaut habitats, and the country’s first university faculty dedicated to space technologies coexist in an institutionally young field (space agency est. 2014, first crewed mission 2025). This paper proposes that such fields are analytically productive: the mechanisms through which certain visions gain dominance—and others are foreclosed—may be easier to trace.

Drawing on Situational Analysis (Clarke et al., 2018) and the sociotechnical imaginaries framework (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015), I develop the concept of an "ecology of imaginaries" to map these dynamics. Initial analysis of strategic documents and sector conference proceedings reveals a security-oriented imaginary achieving primacy through institutional mechanisms: funding conditionalities, procurement architectures, and gatekeeping. Meanwhile, alternative visions concerning orbital debris or light pollution remain on the margins, largely overshadowed by geopolitical priorities. I ask what can be learned about space future-making by studying arenas where the question of what space is for is actively debated.

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Paper short abstract

The Copernicus programme -often framed as the EU space sectors flagship- combines the most extensive infrastructure for Earth Observation, with an open-data policy. This paper applies a STS lens to analyse how Copernicus policies, technologies and data, are relating to EU integration and governance.

Paper long abstract

Earth Observation (EO) data, primarily drawn from satellite infrastructures, is becoming increasingly important for EU governance and consequently, European integration. This is evident in two ways: a) the Copernicus programme and its technologies are specifically developed to meet the needs of EU policymakers, and b) policy decisions across different scales are frequently based on Copernicus data. This paper explores the entanglements of EU-governance paradigms and the Copernicus EO programme, drawing on concepts from STS including material semiotics, co-production, and material politics. These should be combined with the theoretical framework of multilevel-governance to generate valuable insights on the EU and EO. For instance, I argue that by maintaining Copernicus, the EU demonstrates its capacity for autonomous high-tech infrastructure, portraying itself as a unified, potent actor in the "New Space" era - both symbolically through imaginaries and materially through technical capability. Simultaneously, Copernicus swiftly replaces fragmented national measurement methodologies and technologies with a centralized framework. This facilitates cross-border policy enforcement, while at the same time, the supposedly ‘neutral’ data induces an effect of abstraction and depoliticization of apparent crises. Furthermore, by making Copernicus data public, the EU passes on the responsibility to develop digital-products or act upon immediate crises down to entities at lower levels within its institutional framework. This exemplifies the EU's multilevel-governance system, and expands the concept through the vertical dimensions of the EO setup. To support these arguments, I will collect empirical data using ethnographic research methods, including expert interviews and the analysis of legal and technical documents.

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Paper short abstract

Following the Ariane rocket through multi-sited ethnography, we trace how Europe's space infrastructures reshape geopolitical imaginaries and volumetric politics across policy negotiations, production sites, and foresight workshops to develop a topography of Earth-space relations.

Paper long abstract

Outer space is a contested socio-material terrain, entangled with terrestrial infrastructures, interests and imaginaries. In the unfolding new space race, Europe’s Ariane rocket is a particularly interesting case for studying the topographies of Earth-Space relations (Klimburg-Witjes & Popper, forthcoming). Ariane performs competing visions of integration, competition, and fragmentation, of strategic autonomy, securitization, and militarization that relate in various ways to European technopolitical histories and current geopolitical positioning work. But how does a rocket inter-act within these shifting constellations of power? And what does it reveal about the spatial and geopolitical imaginaries that underpin both European integration practices and space futures? Building on insights from Science, Technology, and Society (STS), the Social Studies of Outer Space (SSOS), and political geography, this talk “follows the rocket” through a multi-sited and interdisciplinary ethnography over three years—tracing its political-material assemblage from policy negotiations in Brussels, to its assembly in European factories and (neo-)colonial trajectories. We draw on the notion of volumetric politics to explore how controversies about Ariane 6 reconfigure European spatial orders beyond (epistemic) Earth-space binaries. By tracing the contour lines that connect scales, temporalities, and discursive practices, we develop a symmetrical understanding of the imaginative, material, and political dimensions of what we call a topography of Earth-space relations.

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Paper short abstract

LEO mega-constellations entangle geopolitical futures with the expansion of satellite broadband infrastructures. Spatial imaginaries materialise through processes of refiguration, mobilising investment and security claims while intensifying Earth–orbit spatial conflicts across scales.

Paper long abstract

The rapid build-up of LEO mega-constellations has turned outer space into a key arena of geopolitical competition and economic expansion. This paper examines how geopolitical futures are assembled through the co-production of material infrastructures and spatial imaginaries. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the project “Outer Space” within the CRC 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces”, satellites, ground stations, control rooms, launch infrastructures, and spectrum regimes are analysed as techno-political arrangements that refigure the future of digital communication by reorganising access, connectivity, and control across Earth–orbit relations.

Empirically, the paper traces two mutually reinforcing dynamics. First, it reconstructs how terrestrial operational sites (such as control rooms, ground-segment architectures, and coordination bodies) stabilise the promise of “planetary” reach, while embedding it in situated regimes of access, interoperability, accountability, and security. Second, it analyses how spatial imaginaries are articulated and stabilised through the NewSpace discourse: future-oriented narratives of innovation, commercial inevitability, and strategic autonomy align investors, regulators, and security actors by translating contested geopolitical ambitions into seemingly self-evident trajectories of expansion.

This coupling of imaginaries and sociotechnical systems refigures Earth–orbit relations by producing new spatial orders and frictions across multiple scales: from competitive political economies of financing, procurement, and vertically integrated platform strategies to transnational regimes of spectrum coordination and orbital governance. By tracing these conflicts, the paper contributes to STS and the sociology of space by specifying how infrastructural arrangements consolidate particular spatial imaginaries and redistribute digital capacities for observation, control, and access in and through outer space.

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Combining Critical Security Studies’ (CSS) sensitivity to power and discourse with STS’s attention to laboratory dynamics (broadly understood), this paper explores space security wargames as “security laboratories” where strategic futures are staged, tested, and made actionable through simulation.

Paper long abstract

Wargaming refers to structured simulation exercises used by military organisations, governments, and think tanks to model and rehearse potential future conflicts, crises, or strategic decisions. Combining Critical Security Studies’ (CSS) sensitivity to power and discourse with STS’s attention to laboratory dynamics (broadly understood), this paper explores space wargames as “security laboratories” where strategic futures are staged, tested, and made actionable through simulation. While CSS has robustly critiqued the discursive framing of threats, it has only begun to attend to the material epistemic infrastructures through which security claims gain traction. Drawing on classic STS concepts—such as epistemic cultures, experimental systems, and the performativity of simulations—we explore how wargaming, as a simulation exercise, generates not only strategic knowledge but also authority and plausibility, shaping what becomes thinkable and actionable in security policy long before crises erupt. Through ethnographic fieldwork at wargaming exercises on space security, we will trace how epistemic-material infrastructures and scenario design co-produce knowledge and legitimise particular threat narratives. Our aim is two-fold: To invite STS scholars to engage more deeply with pressing ethical and geopolitical questions related to military knowledge practices and to offer a novel conceptual lens for mapping the layered interplay of technology, knowledge and policy in international security through shared perspectives between STS and CSS.

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Paper short abstract

By exploring asteroid mining and planetary defense entanglements, this research explores how security threats are discursively and materially co-opted to legitimize and enable extractivism in space, and how this practice serves to extend colonial-extractivist logics into outer space futures.

Paper long abstract

While critical research has already cautioned against reproducing colonial language and practices in outer space amidst NewSpace developments, including commercial space mining, one crucial colonial continuity remains unexplored: Extractivism has repeatedly been enabled by constructing peoples, territories, and materials as dangerous threats. Historically, Indigenous populations were portrayed as uncivilized savages and resource-rich regions were cast through counter-terror narratives. Today, I argue, a similar logic emerges in the depiction of asteroids as “hostile invaders” or “marauding space rocks” that threaten our planetary security. In this framing, asteroid mining incentives are cloaked under the umbrella of planetary defense (PD) missions. This research-in-progress aims to explore how security threats are constructed/framed to discursively legitimize and materially enable space extractivism, and how this practice connects space mining to colonial extraction histories. Focusing on entanglements between the European Space Agency’s PD mission Hera and the Luxembourgish space mining sector, this project analyzes how PD’s security narratives and infrastructures function as a security alibi for extraction in space. Examining selected public communications, it preliminarily explores how asteroids-as-threats representations construct celestial bodies as exploitable ‘Others’ and facilitate PD developments (e.g., asteroid deflection technologies and composition data) that hold extractive potential and can become co-opted for mining. Hence, outlining this discursive-material security-extraction entanglement in space, the project supports anti-colonial space scholarship by reflecting on how extractivist logics are rearticulated and repackaged to perpetuate coloniality on an extraplanetary scale.

Keywords: Extractivism; security framing/securitization; security alibi for extraction; coloniality; space/asteroid mining; planetary defense

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Paper short abstract

Institutions in technoscience act as massive bodies that bend social time. In Europe’s launcher ecosystem, large programs stabilize slower but durable futures, while startups move faster yet remain fragile—showing how institutional scale curvatures temporal horizons and governs technological futures

Paper long abstract

Gravity is not a force but an effect of mass curving spacetime. Drawing on this analogy for outer space governance, this paper argues that time in technoscientific systems does not simply pass, but bends, and institutions act as active time generators (Felt, 2025), employing spatiotemporal practices as governance infrastructures that distort the sociotechnical space–time continuum in which technological futures are organized.

Large organizations operate as “massive bodies” that bend the tempospatial fabric around them and as actors move closer to these institutions, temporal horizons stretch, decision cycles slow, and certain futures become gravitationally stabilized. Scale and power thus reorganize speed, urgency, and the location of the future within technoscientific systems.

The argument is illustrated through Europe’s launcher ecosystem. Start-ups involved in the European Launcher Challenge promise rapid, cost-efficient development, yet their futures are often framed as precarious or “doomed to die.” Institutional programs such as ArianeNext and Themis occupy a different temporal orbit: development cycles lengthen, decision-making slows, and futures stabilize within the gravity wells of infrastructure, funding, and industrial architectures. Size thus becomes a temporal variable—microlaunchers move quickly but remain temporally fragile, while heavy launchers produce slower but more durable futures.

The paper conceptualizes this dynamic as the relativity of social time. Temporal governance emerges not merely as the management of time but as the curvature of collective space–time coproduced by institutional scale, distributing actors across different temporal horizons within the same technoscientific field, introducing a tempospatial dimension to analyses of futuring practices and infrastructure.

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Hauntological politics grasp how the future inescapably occupies the present through residues. Space debris mitigation, as an example, imagines otherwise the haunting future of a congested Earth orbit. The alternative yet only normalizes the generation of atmospheric instead of orbital space debris.

Paper long abstract

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is getting congested – with spacecrafts and their ghosts: orbital space debris. A key contemporary initiative for imagining otherwise that future which is haunting the sustainable use of LEO are space engineering -based protocols of space debris mitigation, likely best known for rules of timely atmospheric disposal of mission-terminated spacecrafts. Through space debris mitigation in LEO, I discuss hauntological politics: the making of choices over what residues to pass down as the legacy of the present to the future. What I claim is that space debris mitigation does not restrict the generation of space debris but normalizes it. However, the space debris whose generation is normalized are not orbital but atmospheric. Theoretically, I argue that the hauntology of waste is not only in how after being managed waste comes back, like a specter of the past, to haunt the present. Instead, it is also haunting that stuff that one intends to produce, like spacecrafts, can turn into waste in unintended ways, like spacecrafts fragmenting in on-orbit collisions, which demonstrates the affective trash-power of not just waste materials but any object of use to be ever produced. Moreover, if ontological politics address the enactment of certain futures and foreclosing of others, hauntological politics address situated socio-material practices intended to prevent the passing down of certain residues that can usher in a feared future. Regarding space debris mitigation, the dispose-abling of spacecrafts is such a practice which yet paradoxically results in atmospheric pollution through sustainable single-use of space.

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At SpaceX, the vertical layering of social media, Gen AI, launch capabilities, Starlink, and space-based data centres, is critical to how Elon Musk is exercising political and economic power. I consider the futures both on Earth and above-Earth this ‘stacking’ enables, constrains or produces.

Paper long abstract

For years, Elon Musk presented his entrepreneurial projects in space technologies through his vision of establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars, offering this prospect both as an exciting adventure for humanity and a hedge against future global threats. However, in that time, his company, SpaceX, has developed the world’s largest network of megaconstellation satellites called Starlink. Initially framed as simply a means to fund the ultimate Mars vision, this has enabled Musk to gain political status and standing and to advance his economic interests. Given these developments, my paper builds on scholarship that is engaging critically with Low Earth Orbit as a key site for examining the technopolitics of New Space and on the power of ‘tech oligarchs’ (Cohen 2025). In doing so, I extend arguments to consider the importance of vertical integration or ‘stacking’ (after Bratton 2016). At SpaceX, the vertical layering of digital platforms and other material assets such as generative AI, orbital launch, Starlink, and potentially space-based data centres, warrants close analysis as it is critical to how tech oligarchs such as Elon Musk are exercising political and economic power with global implications. I explore this development and consider what kinds of futures both on Earth and above-Earth this ‘stacking’ enables, constrains or otherwise produces with unintended consequences. I conclude by reflecting on the value of this type of analysis and how it relates to other ongoing work in the social studies of outer space that is also concerned with mapping relations between orbital and Earthly spaces.

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Through a multimodal ethnography across the European space sector and its emerging infrastructures, we trace how policy and industry actors imagine strategic autonomy and economic competitiveness, with special attention to how these priorities conflict and cohere in the (dis)integration of Europe.

Paper long abstract

Since 2022, Europe has faced a myriad of threats to its strategic autonomy—production delays to the Ariane 6 propelled Europe into a “launcher crisis”, while restricted access to Starlink in Ukraine highlighted Europe’s reliance on foreign infrastructure (Abels 2024; Bennett & Cudney 2026). In response to fears about a lack of access to critical capabilities, the European Union and the European Space Agency (ESA) initiated several infrastructure programmes, including the European Launcher Challenge (ELC) and a secure communications satellite constellation called IRIS2. Both projects explicitly integrate private industry to prevent future compromise to European strategic autonomy in space, while trying to close the technological gap between European industry and international competitors. By stimulating industrial competition between member states, ESA embraces a privatised innovation sector while disrupting legacy mechanisms of European integration. These emerging programmes and their discursive enactments represent a material manifestation of geopolitical anxieties and commercial ambitions—of particular interest is how those conflict and cohere in broader debates about ‘Europeanness’.

In this paper, we discuss the waves of European (dis)integration as expressed through collaborative, public-private ‘European’ infrastructure programmes such as the ELC and IRIS2. Using a multi-sited, multimodal ethnography, we follow how Europe is united and dismantled through the rockets and satellites it seeks to create. Starting from STS work in infrastructures and imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim 2015; Tutton 2020), we draw together SSOS, international relations, and innovation studies to understand what makes an infrastructure ‘European’ and how that is narrated and constructed within shifting industry and policy discourses.

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This paper investigates the industrial entanglements of military and civil interests within the European Ariane 6 space program. It examines the effects of military-strategic considerations on the development and manufacture of the Ariane 6 and proposes an STS-reconceptualization of 'dual use'.

Paper long abstract

This research investigates the industrial entanglements of military and civil interests within the European space program, specifically the Ariane 6. Based on expert interviews, conference ethnographies and document analysis of key white papers this research examines the influence of military-strategic considerations in the development and manufacture of the Ariane 6. The focus on the technological relation between the Ariane 6 solid fuel boosters and the M51, the French submarine-launched nuclear ballistic missile, reveals how the solid fuel boosters of the Ariane 6 enable the maintenance and reproduction of France’s solid propulsion industrial base and therefore demonstrates the Ariane 6’s significance for French nuclear deterrence. It furthermore traces the effects of these military-strategic entanglements on particular engineering decisions concerning the propulsive configuration of the Ariane 6. Drawing on the amalgam of empirical material collected in one and a half years of research and building on a tradition of STS scholarship concerned with the relation between technology and the military, this research productively intertwines the theoretical frameworks of Actor-Network-Theory, technopolitics and multiple ontology to conceptualize the industrial entanglement between the civil Ariane 6 and the military M51. The analysis of this industrial dual-use kinship allows for a critical assessment of the current, primarily legalist notion of ‘dual use’ and develops and elaborates an appropriate STS-inspired ‘dual use’ concept.

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Analyzing defunct space technologies and their materialities in the long run, this paper questions them being qualified as ‘space pollution’. It shows that such a ‘pollution’ is more terrestrial and multifaceted than orbital congestion and explores the relationship between outer space and ‘nature’.

Paper long abstract

Technical objets are usually understood in terms of their uses. They can also be thought according to their ‘modes of existence’ [Simondon 1958], which implies looking at them in their materialities, ahead of and after their functioning. I suggest analyzing space technologies when they don’t work anymore, and the relationships they institute – as debris, waves, particles – with the environment, the human world, and other artifacts.

Such a perspective may provide insights about the relations between ‘nature’ and ‘technology’, as well as about the relations between Earth and outer space. Indeed, even when a technical object (e.g. a satellite) is defunct, it doesn’t cease interacting with the (near) space environment. Nor has it ceased its relationships to Earth, as shown by atmospheric reentries, landings and splashdowns.

In this paper, I’d like to ask two questions.

1) Space debris can be seen as a risk for the continuity of space activities, due to orbital congestion. Drawing on recent research in geophysics, I’ll show that the problem is in fact more complicated, more terrestrial than one may think at first glance: it is multifaceted, implying multiple timescales and involving values that can conflict with each others.

2) The phrase ‘space pollution’ is used to qualify space debris, whereas the term ‘nature’ is usually not applied to outer space. This paradox brings me to analyze the concept of ‘pollution’ [Liboiron 2024] in the case of space debris, and how it can have a heuristic value regarding the concepts of nature and ecology.

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This paper explores the emerging intersections between space technology and environmental sustainability through the lens of ruination and repair. It approaches outer space as a site of ruination where the material afterlives of technological objects surface as a form of infrastructural decay.

Paper long abstract

As the accumulation of defunct satellites, spent rocket stages and fragmentation debris in the orbit expands, recent research has begun to question common remediation strategies. In particular, ablation upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere has been shown to produce hazardous compounds with as of yet unknown climatic consequences. Situating these findings within broader socio-environmental debates about climate futures, this paper examines shifting paradigms from disposal to repair. Drawing on ethnographic research with engineers, it considers material practices in orbit through the lens of terrestrial imaginaries of sustainability. By attending not just to the issue of debris removal, but to the cultural and ecological logics that produce orbital ruins, it argues that sustainable futures depend on infrastructures of maintenance and accountability, transforming orbital ruins into sites of ecological responsibility and collective stewardship.

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The paper explores attempts at a recent “Space Summit” in Singapore to trajectorialise the location and biography of Singapore’s space ambitions by staging a technological history of Singaporean space technologies, and positions the Summit in a wider regional astropolitics.

Paper long abstract

In contemporary ethnographic scholarship, space conferences have formed an important site for scholars to critically examine how security discourses, geopolitical alignments, and visions of extraterrestrial order are produced and historically staged. This paper forms a situated account of an annual space conference, an airshow and an inaugural “Space Summit” in Singapore in which the long-anticipated ‘National Space Agency of Singapore’ (NSAS) was announced. Attentive to conceptualisations of the ‘trajectory’ across political geography, cultural studies, and postcolonial Science and Technology Studies, the paper focuses on attempts at a recent “Space Summit” within the Singapore Airshow to trajectorialise the location and biography of Singapore’s space ambitions by diagramming and staging a technological history and lineage of Singaporean satellites successfully launched into space.

Utilising ethnography and archival research, the paper situates space summits as key elite sites for framing space in Singapore and staging (inter)national histories of technology, cooperation, and ’space heritage’ linking wider spaces, sites, and industries, in ways that might be considered an ‘emergent’ astropolitics beyond the leading (post-)cold war space powers, and forms of sovereign emboldenment and resistance within the expanded (extra)terrestrial canvas.