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Paper short abstract

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.