Intimate Outer Space: Towards a Politics of Gravity, Waste, and the Spatial Orientation of Bodies

Abstract

Examining the feat of maintaining life in orbit draws a sharp focus to the relationship between the human body and its environment, the porous and circulatory matter that blurs any boundaries between habitat and habitant. These intimate, engineered spaces evoke a microcosm of urgent planetary concerns surrounding air and water resources, and waste capture, storage, and elimination. This paper explores NASA’s management of biological operations and discharge wastes in low gravity environments. Without strong gravitational fields, liquids coalesce at the location they are created, instead of flowing down and away. Such excesses disrupt the orderly engineered environments and minutely monitored bodies of these techno-scientific endeavors. Analyzing astronaut tears, space gynecology, zero-g surgery, and NASA’s “Space Poop Challenge” through feminist queer and disability theory, new materialist, and discard studies lenses, this paper seeks to refigure the deeply entangled relationships between fleshy bodies and planetary bodies, biomass and geomass, and prompt new discussions of gravity politics.

Key Words:

• bodies
• discard studies
• habitat
• materiality
• waste.

INTRODUCTION

While a new corporate space race is shifting space-waste politics by designing reusable rockets and proposing orbital debris recycling, tech billionaires behind the rise of private space travel ventures have focused on the need for a kind of backup for humanity (Sammler and Lynch 2021a). This class of astrocolonial frontierists (Taylor 2022) are “suggesting that we must move beyond our home planet, find new spaces, membranes and volumes in which to start again…removed from Earth’s climatic extremes and decay” (Squire, Adey, and Jensen 2019, np). Amidst various private and public space programs’ stated goals, both national agencies and entrepreneurs have been planning for more intensive offplanet operations beyond Earth’s orbit, leading to the need for longer space walks and extravehicular activities. The spectacle of space tourism claims it will increase access to space (Sammler and Lynch 2021b), while the stated long-term design is the development of offworld colonies. Elon Musk has invoked Stephan Hawking in declaring the need for preserving the species if an asteroid strikes Earth, while other tech entrepreneurs have proudly compared themselves to Columbus colonizing the “new” world. Part of an apocalyptic narrative, as a perceived “planetary obsolescence,” Taylor (2022, 56) explains that these “erotic frontierist fantasies of a promised libertarian paradise, are based in a “Christian-inflected tradition of romantic frontierism, unapologetically championing ‘manifest destiny’” (ibid., 62). Such formulations of the planet and space in relation to waste, wasting (Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022), and humankind contain within them colonial spatiotemporalities of abandonment (John 2020), discard (Liboiron 2021), and escape.

With the anticipation that humans will expand their spatial horizons offplanet, NASA has been tasked with the mission of colonizing the Moon on the way to Mars. These plans require prolonged spacewalks and extra-vehicular activities. Engineers are then tasked with devising plans to address bodily functions within space suits and habitats, perfecting the “subject-body of the colonizer” (Sammler and Lynch 2021a, 947). This is where the proposed solution of escaping planetary waste becomes sutured with the more intimate problem of escaping bodily waste. To address these issues, NASA has devised two challenges, the Space Poop Challenge in 2016 and the Lunar Loo Challenge in 2020 (NASA 2016a; NASA 2020; see Figures 1 and 2). In the case of suit design, the goal is to manage human waste at and near the body. Although given the eventual goal of colonization, such waste would become a resource. Currently on the International Space Station (ISS), using a water purification system that NASA attests, “mimics mother earth,” urine and humidity are reclaimed as potable water; this includes even lab animals’ liquid waste. Like in the movie “The Martian” (Scott 2015), where astronaut poop is used to supplement and fertilize the nutrient- and bacteria-vacant soil, research is underway to recycle astronaut feces as part of a closed loop extraterrestrial nutrient cycle.

FIGURE 1 NASA’s logo to promote the 2016 Space Poop Challenge competition (Image credit: NASA, 2016, available at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/space-poop-challenge).

FIGURE 2 NASA’s logo to promote the 2020 Lunar Loo Challenge competition (Image credit: NASA 2020, available at https://www.nasa.gov/solve/nasas-lunar-loo-challenge/).

Meanwhile, there is an emergence of scholars exploring the upper atmosphere and low earth orbit as a part of the global environment. Essentially there is no hard and fast boundary where Earth ends, and space begins. One justification for human expansion offplanet is, as Julie Klinger explains, “to restore Earth’s biosphere by moving mining, polluting industries, and energy production to space” (Klinger 2019, 187). Within this model, there seem to be two plans for escaping planetary waste: shifting polluting and extractive industries offplanet¹ to sustain Earth’s habitability, and alternately to abandon Earth and move (select) humans offplanet. These are both of the same rationale, an expanded spatial fix that does nothing to address the root causes of such issues, particularly capitalism’s requisite expansion (Dickens 2009). Experimentation with precisely engineered habitats that reproduce the human necessities of Earth, like Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert or space-stations, -ships and -suits, are imperative for these plans. As Lockhart and Marvin explain, “visions of advanced environmental control often represent some of the most techno-utopian imaginaries for overcoming capitalism’s ecological contradictions” (2019, 639).

Utilizing queer and disability feminist theories, new materialist, and discard studies approaches, this paper has three main goals. Firstly, it seeks to defamiliarize waste, through examining bodily relations with the force of gravity. Secondly, within the broader power arrangements of wasting as a technique of power (Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022, 5), to connect waste and wasting across the deeply entangled relations of fleshy bodies and planetary bodies, biomass and geomass to repudiate imperial capitalist narratives of planetary wasting. Lastly, to prompt a critical dialogue about the lived physics and politics of gravitational forces. The acceleration of gravity on this planet (9.81 m/s) is something so familiar that it is near-universally taken for granted, and therefore its intersections with power and politics have been mostly ignored. However, queer and disabled feminist theories that examine notions around the integrity of the body and the transgressive potential of hybridity, porosity, and cyborgism, also direct this work to carefully consider relationships between bodies and their environment, as “a set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled…a way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self” (Garland-Thomson 2002, 5). The following analysis looks beyond national and corporate actors in space to consider intimate, bodily waste in zero-g or microgravity towards an exploration of the politics of planetary and human bodies, and how orientations “shape the contours of space by affecting relations of proximity and distance between bodies” (Ahmed 2006, 3). As David Valentine argues, “thinking humanness from elsewhere in the cosmos offers new anthropological insights about questions of difference and relation, specificity and universality, Indigeneity and settlement, ontology and epistemology, and habits of embodiment on Earth” (2017, 185). This paper thinks humanness from orbit, a perpetual falling towards Earth, centering bodies to offer geographical insights towards a better understanding of relationships between space, orientation, bodies, mass, power, and politics. In the following sections, I will first discuss the idea of separate and closed systems as fundamental to the physical and ideological construction of analog habitats, but also how this construct of purported hermetically sealed entities permeates notions of planetary and fleshy bodies. The next section connects the power of waste and wasting with the role of gravitational and relational fields as a physical and ethical (dis)orientation between objects. Subsequently, I discuss the experience of different bodies in orbit, demonstrating the messy materiality of bodies in relation, as well as the potential to reorient relations between waste, bodily (dis)abilities and difference, and the planet.

MYTH OF a CLOSED SYSTEM

Earthly Analogs and Biospherics

An Earth analog might refer to an Earth-like planet or twin, whereas an analog habitat can include an enclosed space where the outside might represent Mars, yet the inside replicates the environment necessary to support life. Squire, Adey, and Jensen define analog broadly to mean, “a space, practice, logic or sensibility that is comparable to, or seeking to reproduce another” (2022, 518). For this analysis, an analog may be of various scales, from an individual space suit to more expansive building-sized, multi-inhabitant dome complexes. These enclosures are designed to emulate and encapsulate the earthly variables necessary for human survival. During the Cold War, U.S. projects like Sealab and Skylab had more terrestrial goals to control and dominate the ocean and orbit, inner space and outer space, and to display technological and geopolitical supremacy over Russia (Squire 2021). However, echoing an increasingly common public discourse, the motivation behind contemporary analog experiments is to escape the deterioration and decay of Earth’s habitat and to establish a “backup” of humanity elsewhere (Sammler and Lynch 2021b).

Such habitats have been imagined filtering out, or preventing from entry, any unsavory toxins, natures, peoples, or even ideas. A minimalist, intimate, and exclusive Eden. Explaining the relationship between the concept of an analog and projections of the future, Squire, Adey, and Jensen continue, “envisioning Earth’s destruction seems to go hand in hand with protective enclosures, environments, bubbles and even domes” (2019, np). Such analogs are a subset of controlled environments like artificial ski slopes or indoor industrial agriculture, as part of “a growing systemic and infrastructural logic and imperative…as a strategic form of urban adaptation and immunisation in the face of increasingly unpredictable ecologies” (Lockhart and Marvin 2019, 638). However, unlike the more common controlled environments, an enclosed tropical garden in London or cooled office building in Phoenix for example, many Earth analog projects contribute to the goal of escape of the predictably “unpredictable” climate change currently unfolding across the planet by relocating select populations offplanet.

These earthly analogs, whether part of the escape fantasies of tech billionaires (Rushkoff 2022, np) or state-run space projects, focus on the bounding of environments, bodies, and the vital elements of life from some external conditions, as well as from each other. Such projects seek to break free of the biological limitations of the human body by encompassing and shielding it, as well as enclosing parcels of air, tanks of water, mechanized pumps and filters meant to replicate planetary flows and cycles, conceivably a cyborg ecosystem (Bentley 2016). Each part is imagined as an independent system to be integrated, a useful abstraction for isolating elements and controlling variables within a “complex” system of numerous “internal” and “external” relations, taming the multiplicity. More so, postulating planetary and analog habitats as closed ecological systems, considers a bounding that attenuates or eliminates exchanges with an outside, as “self-building and self-maintaining systems, closed except for nourishing flows of matter and energy” (Haraway 2008, 32). Of course, a system, and its inherent openness or closedness, is determined depending on where one draws the boundaries, or what Barad (2007) would call agential cuts. Such cuts “produce determinate boundaries and properties of ‘entities’ within phenomena” (148). The domes, suits, or other physical barriers of an analog are just one part of these “material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted” (Barad 2007, 141), an always contested process of determining interior/exterior bounding between the controlled habitat and the externalized environment, as well as the individuation of bodies.

For example, Biosphere 2 research facility (Figure 3), in the Arizona desert of the United States, demonstrates how agential cuts were made to claim the facility as a closed ecological system, and the stakes of such a bounding. Meant to explore the interactions of multiple biomes and humans in a way that could maintain life, the structure was built as a materially closed system, while still exchanging energy with its conceptual outside. The experiment notoriously ran into problems, including running low on food and oxygen, leading to nutrient deficiencies and hunger among the occupants (Nelson 2018). There were accusations that the closed ecological system was breached when supplies were sneaked in after one of the Biospherians was injured and taken to the ER. Moreover, during one of the “closed” 2-year long experiments in the 1990s, oxygen had to be pumped in on two separate occasions, since it turned out the domes leaked 10% of its air. The installation of carbon dioxide scrubbers to get rid of “waste” produced by the human and non-human animal exhalations, was also apparently not originally disclosed (Cooper 1991). One ecologist explains that the introduction of these materials “disqualifies the installation as a closed experiment, but we already knew that. So it’s an exercise of a very strange kind of living in very close proximity in almost a prison-like situation” (Larry Slobodkian quoted in Rotstein 1992, np). While Gaard argues that “Biosphere II was a deeply antiecological project,” employing masculinist, techno-capitalist frameworks of “colonizing and capitalizing on outer space, not solving environmental problems here on earth” (Gaard 2017, 101, 103).

FIGURE 3 Main section of the crew habitat building, one of several dome and pyramid shaped structures arranged on the Biosphere 2 facility in Oracle, Arizona (Image by author, March 20, 2011).

As instances of intentional or transgressive material flows, such examples, “unsettle the supposedly strict boundaries often constructed between the inside and outside” (Lockhart and Marvin 2019, 641).

While perhaps serving some role as an experiment in the psychology of isolation, Biosphere 2’s stated purpose of self-regulation, where “green plants would take human wastes (urine, feces and carbon dioxide) and turn them into oxygen, water and food for human consumption” (Broad 1991, np), was not successful in sparking an autopoietic or homeostatic ecosystem. The University of Arizona took over the facility in 2011, using the interior for controlled ecological experiments within the various biomes and tout it as “The World’s Largest Earth Science Experiment…a meso-scale Earth” (https://biosphere2.org/). This research does not largely utilize it as a closed-system and, in fact, the premises are open to public tours. Yet, in Spring 2023, thirty years after the original experiment, the first mission of the Space Analog for the Moon and Mars (SAM) was launched in a new habitat housed inside a portion of the original buildings.

Building from the lessons of Biosphere 2, some of the research goals for SAM include “demonstrating the transition from machine-based to plant-based life support, maintaining food crops in a sealed greenhouse, [and] studying the microbiome of a sealed environment” (University of Arizona 2023, n.p.) With updated ideals and design, SAM’s Inclusion I and II are more modest missions, consigning one to four people, from six days to a few weeks, to the fully hermetically sealed and pressurized module. Inclusion missions seek “to demonstrate the unique skills and adaptations that a diverse, mixed ability crew can contribute to human spaceflight” (SAM at B2 n.d.). The first mission included linguist, disability scholar, and space researcher, Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, who is blind, as mission communications officer and accessibility officer. Incorporating air locks and pressure suits to explore the “Mars yard” terrain park, the missions are proposed as “an opportunity to perform scientific research in a diverse, inclusive simulation mission, without the frequent barriers of discrimination, cost, or accessibility” (SAM at B2 n.d.). This inclusivity includes adding value through the addition of disabled crew, as well those trained outside the sciences, like musicians, writers, photographers, and filmmakers.

While the mission parameters are broadening, the overall objectives remain unchanged. Future additions to the SAM habitat’s components include a mission control center, a synthetic lava tube for exploration, and a NASA gravity offset rig for a reduced gravity simulation experience. There are dozens of analog sites around the world now, with similar goals, emphasizing the separation and enclosure of bodies (flesh, water, air, soil, waste) and precisely regulating matter and energy flows. The goal of these are to both optimize the closed biospheric or ecotechnological systems as independent from some external environment, as well as “to produce an idealized subject for offworld colonies” (Sammler and Lynch 2021a, 959). These analog missions can benefit greatly from the inclusion of “mixed ability” and disabled crew, as well as feminist disability studies analysis critical of the dominant ideals of “techno-optimism and the redemptive power of technology” (Nelson, Shew, and Stevens 2019, 10).

The genre of self-regulating dome habitats, deeply connected to cyberneticians, systems theorists, and futurists like Buckminster Fuller, conceptualizes machines, animals, ecosystems, and eventually the whole planet, as a series of inputs and outputs to be calculated and managed. Of course, Gaia hypothesizers like James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, theorize the Earth as a self-regulating planetary system, a closed ecology or ecosphere, that is also “an emergent property of interaction among organisms” (Margulis 2020, 119). However, in discussing the romanticized ideal of nature as always working in tandem for balance, Heise highlights the need to “search for modes of representation that might accommodate ecological dynamisms, disequilibria, and disjunctions…[to] resist any direct summing up of parts into wholes or any simple foregrounding of connectedness at the expense of disjunction and heterogeneity” (Heise 2008, 64). The command and control approach to such analog habitats are built on the calculation of discrete system inputs and outputs. Yet, beyond the notion of emergence, feminist and new materialist scholars have demonstrated how entities do not pre-exist their relationships, they “lack an independent, self-contained existence (Barad 2007, ix), or as Haraway argues, we must grapple with “relentless otherness knotted into never fully bounded or fully self-referential entities” (2008, 32). However, the mechanistic system-thinking that permeates science and engineering are fundamental to the very idea of habitat containment.

Bounding Bodies

Even though Earth can be approximated as a closed system, the planet interacts materially well beyond its imagined bubble. Atmospheric molecules continually escape, just as meteorites are drawn into, Earth’s gravity well (the gravitational pull the planet exerts in space). About 90 tonnes of upper atmosphere materials break free from Earth everyday (European Space Agency 2016), an example of continual leakage from the ostensibly bounded sphere (although still many orders of magnitude less than the Biosphere 2 leak). In fact, some research shows evidence that there used to be 25% more water on Earth, lost long ago when hydrogen atoms, dissociated from the oxygen atom, escaped to space (Pope, Bird, and Rosing 2012). Some of these departures have been negated over time by water contributions from meteorite landings. Of course, people also have contributed to the porosity of our planetary body. There are over 6,500 satellite installations orbiting the planet, a little over half of which are still active (Rawat 2021, see Figure 4) and the dereliction and fragmentation of which have created over 27,000 pieces of orbital debris (Garcia 2022). Counterintuitively, the launch of crewed space missions has both perforated the conceptual bubble, as much as contributed to the envisioning of it.

FIGURE 4 Some of the many orbital trajectories of GIS, communications, earth observation, and military satellites extending Earthly interactions beyond its imagined atmospheric boundary (Image by Nicola 2022).

The idea of our planet as a bounded sphere, containing the only livable habitat within an otherwise hostile universe, was made broadly intelligible via extraplanetary photography (Heise 2008; Holly and Taylor 2009). As Helmreich puts it “Earth as Gaia is one result of extraterrestrial travel. It is the planet rediscovered from outer space” (2009, 258). Taken during the Apollo missions, the images titled Earthrise in 1968, and Blue Marble in 1972, were snapped by astronauts in tiny capsules meant to approximate the life-sustaining conditions present back on Earth. And it is within these capsules, minimalist lifeworlds, that engineers, scientists, and space science administrators had to think through bodily relationships with the planetary through a precisely engineered habitat replicating a life-supporting ecosphere – but without the assistance of gravity. These ventures were premised by Sealab experiments in the 1960s. Aquanaut and astronaut experiences parallel each other in many ways, and a body’s buoyancy in water is substituted as training for microgravity missions. Similarly confronting issues of oxygen and waste regulation, monitoring and experimenting with the physiological and psychological effects of bodies and orientations within an extreme environment, the comparisons demonstrate “the inner workings of the body as a key geopolitical site” (Squire 2021, xxi). Waste within an ostensibly closed ecological system, such as a life supporting habitat, whether a submerged ship, a spaceship, or spaceship Earth, draws close attention to the relationality of the habitat to the habitant – the biological dependence on air, water, nutrient, and “waste” cycles. This dependance highlights “the Möbius nature of geochemistry and biochemistry” (Povinelli 2016, 43). While the harmonious Gaia system framing recognizes that planetary life labors to create its own habitat, where life itself is entirely entangled with the “non-living” elements of the environment, the very mass of the bodies involved is not acknowledged.

Just as the permeability of the conceptual planetary system is realized, ongoing debates in critical theory and philosophy about the “human” have taken a relational turn, moving away from the human as a closed system (subject, body, species), to a new paradigmatic recognition as neither discrete, somatic, nor autonomous. Instead, there is increased engagement towards a porous and entangled post-human, where the species, body and subject materialize from entanglements with the non-human, whether that be microbes, minerals, technologies, distributed agencies, or differentiated subjectivities. Many theorists of new materialism emphasize the deconstructing and decentering of the human through the blurring of the corporeal and earthly, the vital and the alleged inert, of life with non-life. Pushing ontologically beyond the myth of a materially closed system, Povinelli (2016) argues “nothing can remain alive if it is hermetically sealed off from its environment” (26), reconceptualizing life “as something that is not in-itself but always beyond-itself…the openness of all beings to their surroundings” (51).

This co-constitution of fleshy bodies and the earthly body proliferates across scales. It exposes the unsettled boundaries between the human and the non-human, revealing the radical dependency and vulnerability connecting all material bodies, where each is external to the other only if the scale of our perception is confined to the skin, to a set of epidermal enclosures. But human lungs are constant reminders that this separation is imaginary. Yet, beyond bodily intakes and circulations of air/oxygen, and exhalations of “waste” carbon dioxide, there are many bodily materialities that connect, disrupt, and pose risks. Recognizing the connections, as well as the disjunctions within atmosphere, air, oxygen, breath, emissions, toxins, or virus exposes the fragility of the human body, the body politic, and planetary life. In Barad’s posthumanist approach, “the nature of the production of bodily boundaries is not merely experiential, or merely epistemological, but ontological” (Barad 2007, 160), and central to this are questions of the ethics of bounding, selection of agential cuts, and contests over who has the power to make the cuts.

RELATIONALITIES

Fields & Forces

Realigning orientations away from individuated bodies and towards circulations, emergences and relations exposes the myth of a closed system – be it the closed system of a body, a planet or other life-supporting habitat – and simultaneously radically alters the future of our relationships emerging from these bodies. For engineers modelling and constructing near-closed habitats, beyond just the regulation and filtration of gases, solid and liquid discharges are also of utmost importance to their operations. For NASA, the problem of human excrement in microgravity, or “space poop,” is a problem of separation, of finding ways, as the Space Poop Challenge explains, “to keep all of these materials away from the body, its orifices, and the spacesuit air inlet/outlet orifices” (NASA 2016b). This problem is familiar in many ways to waste disposal in municipalities. The need to move bodily wastes from bodily “intakes,” or porous dermis, is perpetual. However, as with the modern revelation that there is no real “away” for persistent pollutants, the intimacy of the problem for organic discharges within analog habitats also shifts the spatiotemporal relations of waste.

The emerging interdisciplinary field of discard studies attends to the materiality and power relations of waste with the ever-increasing recognition that there is no “away” place for disposal, amidst discussions of bounding, interior/exterior, life/not life, and agential cuts (Barad 2007; Liboiron 2021; Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022; Povinelli 2016). Discard studies works to look beyond waste, towards understanding systems of hierarchical structuring of power relations, developing and employing a “critical framework[s] that questions premises of what seems normal or given, what is valued and not valued, and the processes of devaluation and normalization” (Liboiron 2020, np). Discard studies scholars have discussed the difficulty of defining waste. Waste can be an object or a process, something might be considered waste in one space, time or context, but not in another (Arefin 2019). Additionally, human activities, such as generating waste, span multiple scales, from molecular to planetary. For example, public and private orbital endeavors that extend beyond Earth into orbit.

One approach to defamiliarizing waste, disrupting ingrained tropes and stereotypes, it to explore it in extreme locations, situations, and events. Towards resituating waste relations, including moving beyond its construction as waste, and reconsidering its differentiation as separate from bodies and habitats, this work looks to the farthest spaces of discard. Offplanet activities draw attention to the mass of bodies in communication with each other through a gravitational field. Specifically, bodies of mass exerting a mutual attraction. One of the principal ways we orient ourselves is our geophysical relationship to the earth beneath our feet—although taken for granted, especially by able-bodied persons. Gravity is a field that represents a fundamental relationship between physical bodies, the force experienced between two masses, as an acceleration that, for us on earth, holds in place. Conceivably, nothing is more familiar, in a bodily sense, than gravity. For the most part, we are too oriented in relation to gravity and terrestrial geomass to consider it a field for analysis.

Over the last several years, geographers and other social scientists have embraced vertical and volumetric approaches towards moving beyond the flatness of politics and its representations (Billé 2020; Elden 2013; Hawkins 2019; Lehman 2013; Weizman 2002). Others have since worked to engage the materials that produce, and are produces by, these volumes, focusing on caves and holes (Bosworth 2017; de Lourdes Melo Zurita 2019; Pérez and de Lourdes Melo Zurita 2020), topography (Gordillo 2018, 2020), or drones and bombs (Adey, Whitehead, and Williams 2011; Williams 2010). Yet, verticality is a spatial relationship that only exists in a specific frame of reference (Sammler 2020).

“Perceiving the direction of gravity is essential for balance and orientation in space. The vestibular system signals the brain the orientation of one’s own head relative to gravity…integrated with signals from vision, proprioception, and somatosensory system to build a coherent representation of the right way up, the so-called gravitational vertical” (Tucciarelli et al. 2023, 3434). Necessary to defining a vertical orientation is the force exerted by bodies in communication with each other, more specifically, mass bodies exerting a gravitational pull, thus exposing an under theorization of the politics of gravity. While we have a “habitual relation with Earth’s gravity” (Valentine 2017, 186), investigating our own changing relationship as mass within a gravitational field can be revealing. And as Barad explains, “matter is promiscuous and inventive in its agential wanderings: one might even dare say, imaginative” (Barad 2015, 387).

Gravity is particularly interesting in that, on the one hand it is the single most important force at the scale we navigate in our daily lives, yet it is the least understood of the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetic force, the weak force, and the strong nuclear force). Dark matter and dark energy suggest we don’t understand it at the galactic and intergalactic scales, yet it also isn’t compatible at scales of quantum theory. Dark matter is a kind of placeholder representing the unknown gravitational effects, or unseen extra matter, necessary to fit the observed galactic structures in the universe to the equations of general relativity. It is used to explain why galaxy rotation doesn’t fling them apart given their deficient observable mass. Dark energy designates the unresolved explanation for observations of the accelerating expansion of the universe, causing distant galaxies to move further away instead of their masses drawing them together. Gravity prevents physicists from ordering the universe into a tidy unified theory, designated the Theory Of Everything (TOE) or sometimes the final theory or master theory, that would describe all physical phenomenon in the universe across domains currently explained by general relativity and quantum mechanics separately.

Between these scalar theoretical differences lie questions about the fundamental materiality and behavior of the universe. As Barad explains general relativity is a “dynamical space-time relations… a field theory (rather than an action-at-a-distance theory like Newton’s)” (2007, 437), explaining the force of gravity as enacted through the curvature of space-time. However, they continue “the general theory of relativity does not challenge the Newtonian understanding of matter as substances made up of discrete entities with inherent properties” (Barad 2007, 438). Because of the challenges posed by gravity, debates are still ongoing about the nature space-time or whether gravity has a quantum nature at all, and needs a postquantum theory of classical gravity (Oppenheim 2023). It is yet another way that bodies, specifically their corresponding masses exerting mutual attractive forces in a gravitational field, introduce messiness.

Massumi explains, “gravity is a habit of mass…so familiar, so automatic, as to be ignored. Every sensation is a gravitational pull, grounding and orienting (1998, 160). We take gravity for granted, but it also shapes topographies of power, and even though we all fall at the same rate on earth (9.81 m/s²), we experience gravitational relationships differently, from aerial flight (whether that’s having access to commercial flights or being targeted by drones), death by gravity (via lynchings or suspension torture), the environmental violence of “downstreamness” for waste flows, and multiplicitious differing physical mobilities and bodily orientations (postural differences, such those with disabilities and chronic illnesses that benefit from reclining or lying down). Valentine argues that we must consider how space can offer nuanced theorizations of the human by drawing attention to how “specific kinds of bodies in specific nonterrestrial places reveal different problems for how general relations of difference and equivalence—‘human’ and otherwise are understood” (2017, 189). Specific nonterrestrial differences alter human bodies and technocultures. Without strong gravitational pull and grounding, astronauts’ muscles and bones experience wastage, losing mass and density. Speculation from evolutionary biology suggest that over time biocultural adaptations to the context of an offworld habitat or environment may result in vast changes to the construct of humanness (Smith 2013).

Objects & Orientations

Ahmed argues that a queer phenomenology purposefully turns us towards a concern for the phenomenon that surround us, the familiar objects, spaces, and bodies whose presence mediate experiences of orientation, and whose absence produce disorientation. This approach makes orientation central, as “consciousness is always directed ‘toward’ an object, and given its emphasis on the lived experience of inhabiting a body…[which shape the contours of space by affecting relations of proximity and distance between bodies” (2006, 2, 3), challenging us to recognize the most familiar and intimate objects and relations. Ahmed explains “we are not only directed toward objects, but those objects also take us in a certain direction. The world that is around has already taken certain shapes, as the very form of what is more and less familiar” (2006, 545). Yet, objects are only one aspect of a phenomenological experience, where the fields that objects encounter and negotiate also produce their relations—whether physical fields like gravity and electromagnetic forces, or sociopolitical flows of power. A switch from differentiated, bounded objects, to fields and relations, requires new considerations regarding (dis)orientation, (dis)placement, and the spatiotemporal relationship of objects and bodies.

Even before human bodies were launched into orbit, escaping Earth’s gravity well, people have reported on their sensations and relations with Earth when experiencing a break from its influence. The “Breakaway Phenomenon” was first described by pilots at high altitude as investigated by Clark and Graybiel in their 1957 article in The Journal of Aviation Medicine. They learned from pilot interviews that many had experienced, “A condition of spatial orientation in which the pilot conceives [themselves] to be isolated, detached, and physically separated from the earth… somehow losing connection with the world” (121, 126). One pilot described his experience stating, “I feel like I have broken the bonds from the terrestrial sphere” (122), while another describes having, “left the world, [t]here is only the ship to identify myself with, her vibrations are my own, I feel them as intensely as those of my body” (125). Such experiences also occurred for the aquanauts of Sealab, the experience of vertical disorientation, losing touch with the Earth’s surface from below instead of above (Squire 2021). Described as a cognitive shift, this experience has been observed to alter once’s appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole. As Sammler and Lynch explain, “drawing attention to the conditions of daily human existence in outer space – drudgery, play, nourishment, sex – are topics that refocus these endeavors beyond state-centric geopolitics to scales of the corporeal and collective, radically altering the scope and targets of analyses” (2021b, 714). The bodily experiences at depth in the sea, at high altitude in the atmosphere, and in orbital space reveal new orientations and perceptions of the planetary relation.

Ahmed’s theory of orientations describes a “starting point for orientation is the point from which the world unfolds: the ‘here’ of the body and the ‘where’ of its dwelling…about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places” (2006, 8). She also argues that in order to become reoriented, we must first experience disorientation in our encounters with the world. As experimental psychologists Gallagher and Ferrè explain, “in the absence of gravity, there is no vertical” (2018, 2661). Astronauts experience Space Adaptation Syndrome in microgravity, but also “when people lie horizontally, their perception of the vertical shifts away from the gravitational vector towards the orientation of the body axis” (ibid). Gravity shapes, in part, spatial memory (Tucciarelli et al. 2023) as well as aesthetic perceptions of environmental objects (Gallagher and Ferrè 2018). Such reorientations are necessary for the making of new worlds, opening productive capacities and spaces to interrogate the experiential dimensions of orientations and relations. Orientation is how bodies find their way in space time, but also a turning towards or away from actants as matters of care. As in Povinelli’s illustration of Indigenous Karrabing analytics, “things exist through an effort of mutual attention…though they can turn away from each other and change states. In turning away from each other, entities withdraw care for each other” (2016, 28). In examining the orientations of bodies (human and non-human) in gravity fields, which “often disappears from view” (Ahmed 2006, 4) – in particular low or microgravity – there are certain dis- and re-orientations for earth-habituated bodies. Such analysis may also reveal new encounters with the world and possibilities for relations of care between fleshy bodies and planetary bodies.

MESSY MATERIALITIES

Blood, Puke, and Tears

The Canadian Space Agency (2013) hosts a video on its YouTube channel of Astronaut Chris Hadfield simulating the act of “crying” in space (see Figure 5). This video illustrates how fluids, without a gravitational pull, blob up on the eyes, but also shows the only opening for a cry within the hypermasculinity of astronaut training is by means of a science-based demonstration. The fluid’s inability to flow can be a dangerous proposition for an astronaut on a spacewalk as it blurs and obstructs their vision. Wells-Jensen, the blind crew member from Inclusion 1 analog training, explains how this is not entirely an issue of vision but is produced by an orientation privileging sight. She explains, how on a spacewalk in 2001, Hadfield “was temporarily blinded by a combination of soap and tears inside his helmet. The real problem was not that he was unable to see; it was that the current spacesuit design forces astronauts to over-rely on hand-eye coordination to the exclusion of other useful sensory information” (2018, np). While NASA is designing for messy materialities that broach bodily boundaries, they rely on hand-eye coordination that moves beyond “essentialized notions of the senses where vision is only vision and touch only touch” (Ballestero 2019, 764). Calibrating to this cross-modal forms of sensemaking could allow for more haptic design considerations improving adaptation and usability. Wells-Jensen continues her argument, that for blind astronauts, whether temporarily or persistently, “the priority would be to design suits with better flexibility and increased tactile feedback, so the hands could be used more easily to explore and manipulate tools” (ibid).

FIGURE 5 Still shot from ‘Tears in Space (Don’t Fall)’ of Canadian Space Agency Astronaut, Chris Hadfield (Video credit: Canadian Space Agency, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P36xhtpw0Lg).

Tears are only one of many bodily fluids that, without the presence of a strong gravitational field, cling to the body when expelled. In this way, the intermolecular force of surface tension keeps the body of water connected to the human body, falling together towards Earth. In Mary Roach’s book Packing for Mars, she interviews astronauts and cosmonauts about their experiences, as well as the engineers that tackle these challenges. They explain how, “If you vomit in your space helmet during a spacewalk…you can’t get that sticky stuff away from your mouth…It just floats right there and you have no way of getting it away from your nose and mouth so that you can breathe” (Roach 2011, 117). Rose Eveleth (2019) writes about the Gallaudet Eleven, volunteers that underwent many space analog motion tests in the early 1960s – such as days in a rotation room, reduced gravity flight, and extended periods on heaving seas – all to study the effects of prolonged weightlessness on the human body. These men were unperturbed by these nauseating trials, as they “were recruited for these tests for the exact reason they would never pass the NASA astronaut qualification exams’’ (Eveleth 2019, n.p.), their deafness. Specifically, a meningitis-damaged vestibular system, “the system that is mainly responsible for motion sickness. This made the men perfect test subjects for a space program that was trying to understand what might happen to people in places where the inner ear can’t sense up and down” (ibid).

Waste in microgravity in other forms also becomes a challenge, ranging from merely inconvenient to potentially deadly. For example, without gravity, our bodies do not feel the sensation of needing to urinate and the overextension of the bladder can be life threatening. Astronauts must instead use a timer to avoid needing emergency urinary catheterization. Dr. Varsha Jain, a space gynecologist who works with NASA, discusses in an interview with Marie Claire magazine, how “scientists once surmised that period blood would flow backwards, into the body, in space” (Wolfe 2015), referred to as retrograde menstruation. However, astronauts that have experienced a zero-G period report a normal experience, likely due to capillary action, “the ability of a liquid to flow in narrow spaces without the assistance of, or even in opposition to, external forces like gravity,” related to intermolecular forces. However, only about 10% of all the humans that have travelled to space are people who menstruate, and almost all of them take types of birth control that prevent them from having a period in space, called medically induced amenorrhea. This is stated to be for convenience among other reasons. However, feminist political geographers have also made clear that, “the abject flow of menstrual blood with little warning reveals the body as a territory with porous and leaky borders, instead of a solid, bounded corporeal container of fleshy territory” (Joanes 2023, 3), posing a threat to the techno-modernist ideals of the highly engineered habitat. In fact, “the waste disposal systems onboard the US side of the International Space Station that reclaim water from urine were not designed to handle menstrual blood” (Jain and Wotring 2016, 3).

Additionally, bleeding from injury needs to be planned for. The potential traumatic injury of an astronaut in space poses a dilemma as, “blood can splatter even more than it usually does on Earth, unconstrained by gravity. Or it can pool into a kind of dome around a wound or incision, making it hard to see the actual trauma” (Rogers 2017). For a wound to heal, it must be able to drain and discharge, the ability to flow away, which would need to be simulated. Common bodily fluid excretions, or even a minor cut or injury, that we experience on Earth effectively challenges what seems as normal or given for many people’s daily life. Where an open tap, or flush, and sewage system keeps fluids flowing from private spaces into public works, these intimate bodily materials are easily removed and forgotten. For many more, the obstacles to managing these wastes falls to individuals, small communities, or specific castes. A task that may take an inordinate amount of time and energy and can pose various health risks. In some spaces, such as an analog habitat, a circular system for waste reuse attempts to repurpose the abject into coveted resources. But only certain wastes can be redeemed in NASA’s analogs: yes to urine, no to blood and feces.

Excreta

Beyond fluid excretions, solid waste disposal must also be carefully engineered. In Roach’s visits to the Johnson Space Center’s toilet test and training facilities, she outlines the trajectory of solutions to the problem of poop in space. Early on, during the Gemini and Apollo missions, the solution was an adhesive bag placed around the anus. However, as with the collection of bodily fluids at the source, the act of “separation” of solids in weightlessness is also an issue, as “fecal matter never become heavy enough to break away and drop down” (Roach 2011, 271). For this reason, the fecal bag has a small inset for one’s fingers to act in a scissoring motion (see Figure 6). Subsequently, elaborate toilets have been designed to ease the challenges posed by bodily waste produced in low-gravity environments. These require training to operate which includes a video camera to master one’s aim and avoid making a mess. Having gone through several designs, there were many issues properly containing solid waste during “disconnect,” leading to potential “free floating fecal material” or “escapees,” or even the return of materials back from the frozen tank in a process called “fecal popcorning” (ibid.). Such examples affirm disability design specialist and scholar, Mallory K. Nelson’s point that such complications would not arise for astronauts who use ostomy bags, as she does. “I could plug into the wall and just empty the container that’s been collecting…I’ve moved the output location of poop, which creates a lot more flexibility in the kind of systems I can have. I could attach it to a space suit” (quoted in Eveleth 2019).

FIGURE 6 Apollo-era fecal containment device, defecation bag with finger cots for separation (Image credit: NASA, available at http://collections.spacecentre.co.uk/object-2017-33, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License).

In most of the cases outlined above, in the absence of gravity, suction is the replacement used to remove or separate these intimate wastes from porous bodies. However, issues vary between space habitats and space suits. NASA’s plans for more intensive offplanet operations beyond Earth orbit, has led them to plan for longer space walks, or extravehicular activities. Absorbency garments, or adult diapers, have been the previous solution, since astronauts were only outside for hours at a time. Now NASA wants astronauts to be able to survive in their suits for up to six days, which would require a long-term waste-disposal system. This was what led to the launch of NASA’s “Space Poop Challenge” in 2016, an open call for the engineering of an improved spacesuit waste disposal system. One of the winners of this challenge was Thatcher Cardon, a family doctor, flight surgeon, and US air force colonel. His design employs a small air lock located on the crotch called the perineal access port. He used his experience as a surgeon, drawing on the model of laparoscopy, where complex surgery is performed through a small hole instead of a large incision. Through the hole, the astronaut can insert the appropriate attachment into the spacesuit without depressurizing it. As NASA engineer Kirstyn Johnson, explains “for females, it gets a little harder, obviously, because of the geometry of a person’s body, and then you have to deal with issues of pubic hair,” which increases the surface area for liquids to glom onto, as well as poses issues for adhesives. Dr. Cardon’s design uses a variety of instruments of different shapes that are inserted into the miniature airlock at the front of the crotch of a suit (see Figure 7).

FIGURE 7 Winning design of NASA’s 2016 “Space Poop Challenge” by Dr. Thatcher Cardon (Image credit: NASA, available at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/space-poop-challenge, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License).

These examples demonstrate the messy bodily materialities that emerge in the microgravity at distance from Earth’s massive pull. These excesses often fail to be cleanly incorporated into the established, highly engineered, orderly environment of an analog habitat. And while there is a playfulness in this floating matter-in-excess, there are potentially dangerous episodes that can emerge from the novel spatiality of these materials in relation to the astronauts and their environmental systems. Specifically, when materialities leak, or escape, their containers –whether a toilet or tear duct – it creates disorientation and breaks down hierarchies within intimate subject-object-environment relationships. These moments have potential for reshaping these bodies into more suitable technological-cyborg or habitat-hybrid subjects for these missions. As NASA, as well as private space moguls, have set out to create “the individual bodies and psyches of would-be astronaut-colonizers, it surveilles and shapes their embodied relationships to the spaces they inhabit” (Sammler and Lynch 2021a, 256). But they may also pose other possibilities.

CONCLUSION

While it is productive to “thinking humanness from elsewhere” in reorienting our “habits of embodiment on Earth” (Valentine 2017, 185), this paper has tried to reorient to our embodied and relational inhabitation, situated within the violent struggle to maintain the livability of our habitat here on Earth. The goal of this work is not just to say that our bodies have evolved to live, bleed, and excrete on planet Earth, within the familiar and requisite gravity well, nor that we can engineer our way out of this relationship. This exploration aims to move beyond the modernist myth of a closed system, such as the body or a planet, as self-enclosed autonomous entities. It is upon this myth, among others, that modernist relations of exploitation, colonialism and environmental degradation are built upon. Moving towards a deeply embodied experience of our materiality, as orientation to the planetary mass of Earth, may engender a transversal orientation that connects us bodily in space to our earthy milieu as beings in relation. The force and politics of this gravitational relation is one that is not experienced evenly but is enmeshed with power hierarchies as a field that produces both possibilities and constraints.

This paper has also, drawing on queer and disabled feminist and new materialist theorizations, shown how intimate wastes have an agency to unsettle the porous boundaries of human and habitat, to the point of transgressing its own formulation as waste by cycling between. Indeed, these messy materialities and the leaky porose bodies reveal, within the context of experiential gravitational fields as the primary physical force that orients, radical relationality and dependency of all material bodies. Historically space engineering is deeply entangled with military, corporate, and consumer technology. These waste solutions get incorporated into systems for use across a broad spectrum of applications, used by fighter pilots or people with disabilities. These issues of waste, gravity, and bodies are not just outer space problems and can inform how we relate and experience embodiment beyond our own epidermal bubbles, considerations of gravitational fields and sociopolitical power, definitions of waste within – not a closed but finite at human scale – habitat and theorizations of our animal bodies within the habitation of the unique planetary body of Earth.

Abilities to adapt in microgravity can inform our creativity in changing relations with earthly habitats, that can be practiced as, not an extension of our human bodies, but as emergent with conditions necessary for care. While fleeing offplanet is fantasized by the mega rich as the ultimate “away” space – a turning away from, withdrawing care – they still cannot escape the intimate materiality of their own bodies, even while they breakaway from the gravitational orientation of this massive world. Instead of projecting futures of capitalist extraction and colonial escapism onto imagined offplanet spaces, we might leverage a dis-habituation to gravity into changing our embodied relationship with our planetary home to inhabit this planet, instead of those that always have one foot out the door.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the editor and the two reviewers for reflecting on this work and offering constructive comments. This project was sparked by discussions with geographers at the 2018 International Geographical Union/Canadian Association of Geographers meeting. This research also received kind insights from audiences at the 2019 Association of Pacific Coast Geographers meeting and the 2021 conference, Everybody’s Business: Toilets as a Contested Space, at Humboldt University in Berlin. Special thanks to Sunčana Laketa and Lily House-Peters for extensive feedback on earlier drafts and Daniela Craciun for creative insights. I am grateful for continuous solidarity and support from the Marine Political Ecology Collective in Oldenburg, Germany. Lastly, this work also took inspiration from Rose Eveleth’s project, the Flash Forward podcast, expanding discussions of creative and equitable futures, as well as the worldbuilding of James S. A. Corey, and their detailed accounting for physics and gravity in an expanded geopolitics.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine G. Sammler

KATHERINE G. SAMMLER is an Assistant Professor  of Environmental Knowledge, Technology, & Sustainability Studies in the Section of Knowledge, Transformation, and Society (KiTeS) at University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]. Their research interests include anticolonial nature-culture relations and the role of knowledge, law, and power in defining global commons, resource access, and environmental justice.

Notes

1 Asteroid mining is one example of a proposed dirty industry that might relieve the burden of its externalities by pushing it up the gravity well (a gravity well describes the spatial expanse where the gravitational attraction, of a large mass like a planet, is of influence). However, given the expansionism necessary for capitalism, offplanet mining will likely just supplement onplanet extraction activities, not replace them (Sammler and Lynch 2021b).