Cite as:
Tutton, Richard, Vidmar, Matjaz, Jones, Craig. 2019. "Regeneration or Regurgitation?" In "Social Studies of Outer Space." In Innovating STS Digital Exhibit, curated by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August.
This essay is part of the meta essay on the Social Studies of Outer Space group. It related to the shared question of "how does this innovation regenerate STS?"
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Furthering its theme, Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations , the 2019 annual 4S meeting in New Orleans will include a special exhibit, Innovating STS , that showcases innovations ...Read more
All Innovating STS exhibits are oriented by nine shared questions in order to generate comparative insight. These are:
ARTICULATION: What STS innovations (of theory, methodology, pedagogy...Read more
It’s not that outer space technoscience has been absent from STS. Far from it. But, if we use as our guide the four STS handbooks published since the 1970s, it’s clear that outer space has had a marginal presence in this interdiscipline. Only in the very first handbook is outer space given an extended discussion. For its editors, writing in 1977, the 1969 Apollo lunar landing, which many are now celebrating and reflecting on today in 2019, both represents the successful outcome of a national science policy but also what they call a ‘turning point’. After Apollo, they see the rapid ‘disenchantment affecting the space venture’ (page ref to add) as reflecting a wider critique of the place of science and technology in society, by which the role of the state and capital had come under intense scrutiny. By the middle of the 1970s, new futures were to be envisioned in molecular and digital spaces: biotechnology and personal computing became exciting areas of development and speculation.
Today, STS interest in outer space is undergoing a regeneration: multidisciplinary approaches are emerging to address outer space in terms of ‘New Space’ economics, technopolitics, extractivism, space archaeologies, human-machine relations, waste and sustainability, research infrastructures, globalization, sociotechnical imaginaries, surveillance, and warfare. Our network contributes to this regeneration of STS interests in outer space in all of its multiplicity.
In claiming that there is a regeneration of STS interest in outer space, and for this to be continued in part through our network’s activities, we should also note that, as STS scholar Barry Barnes remarked, “there is nothing new under the Sun!”, and the humanity’s ambitions to connect to the “Suns above” is as longstanding as there are records of our collective activities. We have a well researched periodic regeneration of interest in furthering “space exploration”, from 17th century in the form of Francis Godwin and Johannes Kepler’s fictional accounts of visiting the Moon (cf. Simon Malpas), late 18th century debates about the salvation of other worlds (Jenkins, 2015) or current technical proposals by space agencies and private companies to establish settlements on the Moon and/or Mars.
Not only are the visions regenerated, so is their proposed realisation. For instance, Francis Goodwin describes the journey to the Moon as riding 100 geese there and back and Elon Musk is proposing an interplanetary transport system rocket to get people to Mars. None of these “visionaries” think of more permanent or sustainable forms of infrastructure, such as “roads” or “bridges”, which are very seldom found in either fictional or technical accounts of reaching to outer space (the concept of a “space elevator” is the closest example we get, and even that is not taken seriously by most space engineers or fiction authors!).
STS can here provide a ready critique: this entrenchment of ideas about our connection (or perpetual lack thereof) to the “heavenes above” is, hence, also regenerating the same challenges and critical issues in our approaches to exploring and being in outer space - replicating expeditionary and “penetrative” excursions into the sky, rather than thinking about more inclusive and sustainable space ecologies which we access through interconected infrastructures.
A further site of regeneration that Outer Space provides for STS links back to our previous discussion of power and Outer Space. Discussions relating to Outer Space often use the all-encompassing term ‘humanity’. However, this terminology and the related imaginaries begs the question of which humanity? Or, whose humanity? Answers to these provocations may lie in who is (re)creating this future and its imaginaries, and to whom they are addressing. Through considering these points, STS is regenerated through an engagement with Outer Space as it necessarily requires that we turn to STS’s concerns with inclusionary/exclusionary practices, sites and sources of intersectional concern, and socio-technical inequalities.
Indeed, contemporary debates surrounding Outer Space have witnessed a regeneration of militaristic framings of the extraterrestrial, often drawing upon Cold War narratives. Recent decades have seen an increasing number of state actors becoming involved in Outer Space. This proliferation of spacefaring nations has led to the Cold War’s zeitgeist returning in various guises, such as Western coverage of Chinese ambitions regarding the Moon. This has been framed as a new ‘Space Race’ (see here). Such framings should not only be of interest to STS scholars, but also an area of concern as such discourses necessarily (re)produce inclusionary/exclusionary practices and policies.
Although perhaps understandable due to the proliferation of space capabilities during and for a period of military tension, this narrative lacks much of the nuance required for contemporary operations in Outer Space. The regeneration and abundance of militaristic discourses surrounding Outer Space fails to account for the shifting/shifted nature of Outer Spaces terrestrial uses and its embeddedness in daily life. It has become increasingly significant in economic planning (such as in China’s One Belt, One Road initiative (see here) and has numerous other applications, as demonstrated through ISRO’s operations for Earth Observation, Disaster Management, and Satellite Communications (see here). Other initiatives may be construed as an attempt to break out from under US hegemony in Outer Space, such as the Beidou (China), GLONASS (Russia), and Galileo (European) GPS satellite programmes. Although these and many other initiatives can easily lend themselves to a Cold War military narrative, a regeneration of Outer Space studies through engaging STS can and should create a more nuanced picture of these programmes and the debates and discussions that surround them.
Through these considerations - of what is meant by the term ‘humanity With the question of ‘humanity’ and how national space programmes are framed through outdated framings - we encounter a further regeneration proposed by the Social Studies of Outer Space. Presently, there has been little engagement with space agencies and programmes outside of a Western (primarily US) context (with some notable exceptions such as Redfield’s Space in the Tropics and Mitchell’s Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil). Future studies of Outer Space would be enlivened through engaging these (at present) under-studied space agencies, their programmes, and associated ambitions.
