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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.