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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