Critical Geopolitics of Outer Space

The 2019 US Congressional decision to create a “Space Force” as the sixth branch of the US military (Zengerle 2019) should prompt some inquiry into what sort of geopolitics are at work in and through outer space. This was followed, in the depths of the COVID-19 Pandemic and National State of Emergency, by the April 6, 2020 Executive Order to promote private sector mining of the Moon and other planets. Popular fictions aside, these decisions were not inevitable, nor did they result from a legal vacuum. Outer space is governed by the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial bodies (also known as the OST), which was signed by 132 countries including the United States, Russia, and China. With this treaty, the international community did something remarkable. In the depths of the Cold War, the OST constituted an agreement to treat outer space in a fundamentally different manner than nearly all other global commons in the last 500 years. Having long foreseen the dangers of remaking outer space into the next frontier for colonization, resource extraction, and militarization, the OST designated outer space as our “common heritage” and permits only “peaceful use” in the “province of all [hu]mankind” (UN 1967).

The OST prohibits claims of sovereignty “by means of use or appropriation or by any other means.” This treaty makes space open to all for peaceful exploration and discovery – always. This means that you cannot plant a flag on a celestial body to call it your own, regardless of what contemporary would-be colonizers might think. Contrary to the language of the 2015 SPACE (Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship) Act signed into law by former US President Obama, you cannot claim “finders keepers” and then set up a mine that pulverizes other worlds into commodities to be sold to the highest bidder, even if you are a US citizen. It most certainly means that you cannot turn your space station or lunar base into a military garrison and then threaten to rain down death and destruction on your fellow humans. In fact, weapons and the use of force are forbidden in outer space, so it is unclear what 2019 US Congressional decision to allocate funding to create the Space Force intends to accomplish. One thing is clear: the decision opens a Pandora’s Box that the OST was designed to keep firmly closed.

Unlike all other lands on Earth to which humans are native, in outer space mutually-exclusive sovereignty gave way to res communis – the international legal definition for the commons. The contrasting governing norms between continuously occupied terra firma and entirely un-occupied (as far as we know) outer space might not be surprising, so what about other immense areas, like Antarctica, the Oceans, or the atmosphere? The OST again emerges unique in comparison. Unlike Antarctica, no territorial claims to any part of outer space that had been advanced prior to the treaty were granted recognition. While the very idea of honouring a deed to the Moon awarded by the King of Prussia may be laughable (SI 1949), the territorial claims of eight countries to Antarctica remain in place under the 1961 Antarctic Treaty System.

In comparison to the governance regimes for the oceans, that of outer space is elegantly simple. Unlike the oceans, in outer space, there is no difference between territorial and International waters, neither are there “Exclusive Economic Zones” or “Protected Areas.” Space can only be used in a way that is open to all, the benefits from which much be shared by all humankind. And unlike the atmosphere, in outer space there are no exclusive national “airspaces” and therefore no “No-Fly Zones.” Of course, there are carefully parcelled orbital slots into which one can place a satellite, but these are overseen not by a sovereign state but by the International Telecommunications Authority.

Originally conceived in the run-up to the OST’s 60^th Anniversary in 2017, this special issue represents several threads in the growing field of space geography more generally, and in critical geopolitics in particular. Since 2015, dedicated sessions on outer space at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers have explored diverse forms of human engagement with the spaces beyond our atmosphere, from the historical and aesthetic to the ludic, philosophical and political economic. Participants in these sessions, and contributors to this special issue, have been building on a dispersed canon of social science literature that included the works of Redfield (2001), Gorman (2007), Elden (2013), Messeri (2016), Macdonald (2007), Parks and Schwoch (2012), Olson (2012), Sloterdijk (2011), Paglen (2008), Vertesi (2012), Siddiqi (2015), Beery (2012), Weitekamp (2004), Dickens and Ormrod (2007).

Many of us found that although our field uses space-based technology daily, we were breaking new ground. Through the mid-2010s, even with a growing body of social science research, with particularly strong showing among anthropologists (e.g. Valentine, Olson, and Battaglia 2009), this plain fact of our entanglement with the spaces of outer space had not yet provoked any serious rethinking of even the most robust analytical frameworks used in human geography. This was puzzling, given that so many of the contemporary phenomena under investigation – globalization, land use and environmental change, human and natural disasters – have in fact co-evolved with human engagement with outer space. More basically, many of the tools used in our discipline are space-based or space-linked technologies. How then, could these tools and their associated infrastructures be taken for granted, even as critical scholars were fundamentally questioning social phenomena that had been reified or treated as stable background structures: the body, the household, care work, technology, logistics, the state? It’s not so much that we were missing the elephant in the room as we were ignoring the very existence of the room in the first place.

Perhaps this is because, for the most part, the OST has worked so well that it has drawn relatively little attention. Peace rarely makes the news. Global adherence to the terms of the OST enabled the development of global communications, transportation, and scientific systems that depend significantly or entirely on the placement of extremely expensive and exceedingly delicate technologies in Earth’s orbits, where they circle the Earth at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour along predictable trajectories. These technologies on which contemporary society depends are extremely vulnerable; peace is what makes their proliferation possible. Although there have been some serious infractions over the years – the testing of Anti-Satellite Missiles by the US, China, and India, for example – the OST has for decades, provided the legal infrastructure necessary for the technological infrastructures of globalization to develop.

By undertaking a critical geopolitics of outer space, the objective of the collection and the works engaged herein is not to reduce outer space to a mere geopolitical theatre. What an unforgivably reductionist thing to do to the infinite expanse of the cosmos! Instead, the articles in this collection attend to the geographies of outer space, which means that they look at the way outer space shapes the production of space on Earth and which actors, institutions, discourses, and materialities are involved. A critical attention to diverse forms of power, their manifestations and contingencies, runs through the articles.

This special issue in an invitation to a broader conversation. If Space belongs to all, then governance is the responsibility of all. While there has been a brilliant profusion of critical literature and emancipatory praxis around efforts to reclaim the commons on Earth, we have largely disengaged from the struggle to defend the commons of outer space. But that is changing. This issue joins a robust tradition in this journal, bringing critical geopolitical inquiry of outer space to complement the issues of the subterranean (Squire and Dodds 2019), peripheries (Hörschelmann et al. 2019), borders (dell’Agnese and Szary 2015; Raza and Shapiro 2019) and the intimate (Barabantseva, Mhurchú, and Spike Peterson 2019). The authors in this collection hope that readers will be inspired to revisit their more familiar domains of inquiry, to search for the inextricable interconnections with the outer space, and to engage in the important work of keeping the cosmos free and peaceful for all.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the reviewers and editors who contributed to this special issue, as well as the participants in the outer space geography sessions at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers since 2015, and particularly her co-organizer of many years, Danny Bednar, PhD.