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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.