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Paper short abstract

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.