Lecture in English
The human presence in outer space is undergoing a radical transformation, with the rapid growth of an off-Earth commercial sector marking a shift from an era of space exploration to one of space exploitation.
This talk seeks to grasp the powerful economic and geographic imaginaries driving the growth of these so-called ‘NewSpace’ industries, the role of states in facilitating and promoting the commercialization of space, and the political, environmental and cultural stakes of the ‘final frontier’ becoming the last frontier of capitalism.
The US "SPACE Act" of 2015 – or the "Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship Act" to give it its full name – recognized the private property rights of US citizens and companies engaging in the appropriation of resources in outer space. The SPACE Act was the first instance of a nation state passing legislation to facilitate the expansion of extractive industries and private property regimes into extra-planetary space, and it stands not only to reshape US dominance in outer space but also profoundly reorder its governance around commercial interests.
Yet the clamor for ‘space resources’ is not simply an American tale. Other states, eager to claim a stake in this speculative cosmic bonanza, are rushing to produce their own legislation. Luxembourg, which recently launched a new model of national space agency based wholly around supporting commercial enterprise, passed its own legislation recognizing corporate property claims to ‘space resources’ in 2017, and the United Arab Emirates is allegedly soon to follow.
This talk will explore the growth of the commercial space sector, and particularly off-Earth extractive industries, through four lenses: the ‘neoliberalization’ of outer space governance; the powerful neocolonial imaginaries of off-Earth frontierism; corporate and state-led attempts to contest the status of outer space as the ‘common heritage’ of all in international law; and the implication of thinking about the cosmos as an ‘environment’ that has ‘resources’ that can not only be exploited but can also be regulated and protected.
The talk suggests that despite recent media fanfare around speculative projects for the corporate colonization of Mars the already existing, and rapidly transforming, entanglement of off-Earth activities with earthbound social processes deserves more critical attention given the importance of questioning who can and should do what, both on and off Earth.