Commodity and the commons: accumulations of capital on the space frontier

ABSTRACT

Designated as one of the global commons, outer space steadily matures as a commodity frontier at which to propel the designs and imaginaries of capitalist economy. While plans to mine the Moon, massify space tourism and colonise Mars are still works in development, the routes of its conquest expand exponentially down here on Earth, as its spectacular proceedings are mediated into a range of images, events, artefacts, samples, and experiences that disperse across the productive and reproductive ambits of terrestrial cultures. These spin-off commodities herald the evolution of the high-tech structures of power that seek to seize control over shared natural and social resources and temper the ways in which the species assembles around the commons of space. I attend to the endeavour to incorporate space into the capitalist world-system by exploring the cultural logics that precede and underpin its expansions along its ‘final frontier’. Highlighting the role of commodity in more-than planetary accumulations of capital, I suggest that its proliferation is not merely an outcome of nascent forms of technological imperialisms as they set out to claim their cosmic share, but a vital resource from which to thrust their appetites for production, consumption, and destruction out there.

KEYWORDS:

• Outer space
• commodity frontier
• global commons
• spectacle
• technology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Stretching out at around 35,000 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, the geostationary orbit has come to constitute a prime position in space due to its suitability for hosting telecommunications, broadcast, and remote sensing satellites, but also its limited capacity for accommodating them (Collis 2009).

2 Both Total Recall (1990) and The Martian (2015) are screen adaptations of popular science fiction literature; the former is based upon Philip K. Dick’s short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale ([1966] 1997) and the latter on Andrew Weir’s novel The Martian (2014).

3 The official name of the Treaty is The United Nations’s Treaty of Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. Drawing upon the juridical principle of the ‘common heritage of humanity’, the Treaty situates outer space as what David Bollier (2003) describes as a ‘frontier commons’, demarcating it as one of the outstanding portions of the natural world which remain not quite captured by politico-economic regimes of power.

4 According to The Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space, maintained by United Nation’s Office for Outer Space Affairs (n.d.), over 12,300 satellites have found their way into orbit, as of 9 March 2022. Yet, this record is incomplete; it includes only the officially reported launches, excluding all those with details which fall under the category of ‘classified’ information.

5 They also concentrate national iconographies and geopolitical imaginaries; see Brumfitt, Thompson, and Raitt (2008) and Maclaren (2021).

6 Most of the samples brought from outer space thus far were collected from the Moon during the early stages of its exploration. Six Apollo missions took nearly 400kg between 1969-1972 and the three Soviet Lunar missions brought back about 320g during the 1970s (NASA 2010, 2016). Most recently, the China National Space Administration’s Chang’e-5 sample-return mission collected around 2kg of lunar material in 2020 (Amos 2020).

7 Space tourism is considered to begin in 2001, with millionaire Dennis Tito, who paid $USD 20 million to spend about a week aboard the International Space Station (Wall 2011). For more on the developments and futures of space tourism, see Cohen and Spector (2019).

8 Space camps have since been replicated across several sites in the US and also other countries such as Canada in 1994 (Cosmodome n.d.), Norway in 1996 (European Space Camp n.d.), and Turkey in 2000 (Space Camp Turkey n.d.).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katarina Damjanov

Katarina Damjanov is Senior Lecturer in media and communication at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests revolve around considerations of the changing relationships between humans, technologies and environments. Some of her recent work situates these inquiries in outer space and features in journals such as Science, Technology & Human Values, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Leonardo and Mobilities.