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Paper short abstract

Drawing on participant observation, this talk discusses the multidisciplinary, embodied modelling practices of ESA’s Concurrent Design Facility (CDF). This research provides an insight into the material practices and epistemic cultures that lie at the basis of Europe’s future space missions.

Paper long abstract

The European Space Agency’s Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) is a key site where the future of Europe in space is conceptualised. In this design office, built on a digital infrastructure supporting collaborative design, interdisciplinary teams of space engineers and scientists conduct mission studies, working out first details for future mission concepts.

Based on short-term ethnography, this paper approaches the CDF as a laboratory of sorts, where domain-specific engineers experiment with designs responding to the mission objectives and the work of their colleagues. However, as the CDF brings together engineers from different disciplines, it is also a site of contesting epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina, 1999). This research investigates how these contestations are negotiated in the context of space mission studies, where knowledge claims are inherently difficult to validate due to the temporal and spatial scales of spaceflight.

We show how collective, embodied modelling practices contribute to a shared epistemic culture within the CDF (Vertesi, 2015). Particular attention is given to the materiality of these practices, situated in a hybrid virtual/physical workspace, and how this both shapes the CDF’s social organisation and the design of mission concepts (Henderson, 1994; Vinck, 2003). Building on work in STS and the social studies of outer space on the social organisation of space missions, we explore the earlier phase of mission design, connecting this to laboratory studies’ attention to material epistemic cultures. Overall, we show how the future of Europe in space emerges through a multitude of epistemic cultures which are held together by material modelling practices.