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Paper short abstract

Military satellites, the ISS mission, startups, and an arms-manufacturing city expanding into space — Poland's sector is forming fast. A defence official asks: if every project carries a "security stamp," does it still mean anything? This paper seeks to map the ecology of competing space visions.

Paper long abstract

A defense ministry official observes that every Polish space project now carries a "security stamp"—then asks whether the category still retains meaning. A post-industrial city invests €6.2M to expand from arms manufacturing into space. Poland’s first crewed ISS mission returns with 13 completed experiments, sharing the public spotlight with popular highlights such as freeze-dried pierogi. These diverse points of focus illustrate that what counts as "space" depends on who is looking.

Since 2022, Poland’s space sector has accelerated under the pressure of the war in Ukraine. Military MikroSAR satellites, robotics startups, analogue astronaut habitats, and the country’s first university faculty dedicated to space technologies coexist in an institutionally young field (space agency est. 2014, first crewed mission 2025). This paper proposes that such fields are analytically productive: the mechanisms through which certain visions gain dominance—and others are foreclosed—may be easier to trace.

Drawing on Situational Analysis (Clarke et al., 2018) and the sociotechnical imaginaries framework (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015), I develop the concept of an "ecology of imaginaries" to map these dynamics. Initial analysis of strategic documents and sector conference proceedings reveals a security-oriented imaginary achieving primacy through institutional mechanisms: funding conditionalities, procurement architectures, and gatekeeping. Meanwhile, alternative visions concerning orbital debris or light pollution remain on the margins, largely overshadowed by geopolitical priorities. I ask what can be learned about space future-making by studying arenas where the question of what space is for is actively debated.