Antarctica and Outer Space: relational trajectories

This issue of The Polar Journal is coming out at the waning of a tumultuous year in world politics, still early into an already turbulent Trump administration that has seen the US pull out of the Paris Agreement and UNESCO. It was a year that in any case is perhaps best captured by the World Meteorological Organisation’s report,¹ which states that we have surpassed our understanding of our changing climate and have stepped into new “uncharted territory”.

Uncharted territory is certainly a useful analogy for describing a new stage of corporate and state endeavours towards a new era in off-Earth exploration.² It was in 2017 that NASA discovered a record number of exoplanets located in circumstellar human habitability zones to a sun; Australia announced the creation of a new national space agency; Ghana launched its first satellite; SpaceX successfully launched its twelfth Commercial Resupply Services mission; and China turned an important page in establishing its intent to become the new main player in space exploration. In relation to this last point, in May 2017 during the concluding day of the fortieth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting in Beijing, China confirmed its plans to build its fifth scientific research station in Antarctica and that it is prepared to considerably step up its investments there. These investments are dwarfed by the Xi Jinping administration’s massive investment in China’s space programme and in advanced technology sectors such as robotics and artificial intelligence. Antarctica and Outer Space will no doubt test China’s capacity as a global leader in the next few decades.³

This Special Issue on Antarctica and Outer Space is materialising alongside a series of important anniversaries that speak of the intricate relational trajectories of the polar regions and Outer Space. Among the most significant of these events are the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) on July 1, 1957 and the tenth anniversary of the last International Polar Year in 2007; the sixtieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the first artificial Earth satellite launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit; and the fiftieth anniversary of the signing and entering into force of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, commonly referred to as the Outer Space Treaty, in 1967. Hence, the rationale behind the idea of this Special Issue was to mark these anniversaries with a selection of new work from the humanities, social sciences, planetary sciences and arts.

It is commonly agreed that the Space Age began sixty years ago with the Soviet Union launching Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957, an event that Hanna Arendt famously described in her chef d’oeuvre, The Human Condition, as “second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom”.⁴ The launch of Sputnik 1 took place as the 1957–58 IGY was just underway, during a period when many scientists were complaining that more was known about Outer Space than Antarctica.⁵ The IGY brought together Antarctica, the High Seas, the atmosphere, and Outer Space – the global commons subsequently defined in international law⁶ – as new frontiers for scientific exploration. More than sixty-seven nations participated across more than four thousand research stations worldwide (with a focus on the polar regions) in a global cooperative endeavour without precedent. Interestingly, as Roger D. Launius notes, the IGY “was timed to coincide with the high point of the eleven-year cycle of sunspot activity” and involved research across Earth sciences, including on aurora and airglow, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, gravity, ionospheric physics, precision mapping, meteorology, oceanography, seismology and solar activity.⁷

The intricate entanglements of Antarctica, the atmosphere, and Outer Space is one of the reasons why artist Adele Jackson was invited to contribute the cover image for this Special Issue with one of her Antarctic solargraphs. Jackson is a professional artist and currently a doctoral candidate with Gateway Antarctica at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She began creating Antarctic solargraphs in 2015 whilst working for the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. Her original idea was to create artwork that recorded her time living and working in Antarctica while marking the passing of the summer season. The solargraphs record a trace of the changing light and cloud conditions each day and provide a glimpse into the more cosmic dynamics of the Earth’s orbit in the Solar System. The arcs of sunlight in the image are created by the daily rotation of Earth and Earth’s orbit around the sun. Jackson’s Antarctic solargraphs represent the three-month austral summer period of December–March. The cover image is a solargraph that Jackson made in the 2016/2017 season depicting the anemometer tower at Base A, Port Lockroy, in the Antarctic Peninsula region. The image not only locates Antarctica in relation to the Solar System, it also references human heritage and scientific endeavours in Antarctica. A testament to some of the first polar infrastructures deployed, the anemometer tower was used for monitoring wind conditions in one of Antarctica’s historically important research stations, known for its ionospheric research in the 1950s. Base A was the first place in Antarctica where ionospheric measurements were recorded, pioneered by researchers from the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (the predecessor to the British Antarctic Survey). The base was also used for monitoring the electromagnetic waves of “whistlers”.⁸ The historic atmospheric data generated at Base A contributed to the discovery of the hole in Earth’s ozone layer that forms over Antarctica each September and which to date still grows to a staggering size of over eight million square miles.

Let me return to the IGY for a moment. As readers of this journal know too well, the successes of the IGY were not only in the advancement of science. Among the pivotal political outcomes of the IGY were three groundbreaking legal frameworks, which six decades on still uphold the test of time.⁹ The 1958 United Nations Convention on the High Seas provided, for the first time, an international governance regime for a space beyond sovereign jurisdictions.¹⁰ In a period of heightened tensions in the early years of the cold war, the Antarctic Treaty followed in 1959, laying down the principles of a legal regime for the governance and scientific exploration of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.

Importantly, in the very short period between the start of the IGY in July 1957 and the signing of the Antarctic Treaty in December 1959 it became clear how Antarctica was to provide both a model and a threshold for the geographical spaces beyond terrestrial inhabitation (through the launching of polar orbiting satellites, upper atmosphere testing, and seismic work).¹¹ The Antarctic Treaty System has since provided lessons that are relevant to the governance of other extra-territorial spaces beyond sovereign jurisdictions, including Outer Space. Half a century later, both the Antarctic Treaty and the Outer Space Treaty remain exemplars of successful international relations, more so in the case of the latter, which unlocked Outer Space, as Luca Follis has recently argued, as a “province and heritage of humankind”.¹²

As extraterritorial spaces that are “imaginatively, historically, and juridically interconnected”,¹³ both Antarctica and Outer Space have been key to modern understandings of Earth and to the visualisation of global environmental change.¹⁴ They are also intimately connected to each other in the search for biosignatures and microbial life forms in our solar system and in exoplanets and other celestial bodies. Since the 1980s Antarctica has been conceived by atmospheric scientists and physicists as a “window on Outer Space” and a unique laboratory for atmospheric studies. Also since the 1980s Antarctica has become a primordial analogue and proxy for Outer Space environments, particularly for research in astrobiology and planetary sciences. Antarctica has always provided a “geopolitical test object for governance”, not only informing and shaping the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, but also “as a psychological test bed for habitation in Outer Space” in the 1980s, or as “a surrogate testing ground for technologies for potential use in Cold War Arctic contestations” in the 1940s and 1950s.¹⁵

If territory indeed constitutes the most fundamental political technology for the formation of modern states¹⁶, as extraterritorial spaces Antarctica and Outer Space tell a significantly different geopolitical story. These are stories that speak of geopolitics beyond the state and which seem to problematise the state-centric focus of a considerable proportion of the scholarship in geopolitics. In the case of Outer Space they open up new possibilities for a “critical astropolitics of outer space”.¹⁷ In regard to space exploration there is an increasing push towards non-state commercial endeavours, as seen, for instance, in the new legislative framework passed by the US Congress in 2015, or in such private enterprises as SpaceX, which come to coalesce as the business of Outer Space is opened to off-Earth capitalist expansion.¹⁸ It is worth mentioning that at the same time as the US Congress was passing this legislation, SpaceX, a company owned by Elon Musk, filed a request with the US Federal Communications Commission for permission to encircle the planet with telecommunications satellites (four thousand of them) capable of beaming the Internet to anywhere on Earth. Considering issues of reliability given the distance at which most satellites orbit, SpaceX is researching how to place satellites in low Earth orbit to allow for better connections, but at decreased ranges, so as to explore the possibilities of an Internet in space, a means for testing the Internet on Earth’s lower orbit as probe for deploying satellites on Mars’ lower orbit. This has many ramifications which lie way beyond the scope of this editorial. Yet it’s tempting to note, as Lisa Parks has observed, that as a growing amount of “signals, transactions, images and events either take shape within or pass through orbital space” it is ever more urgent to have a better understanding of how this space “is organised, who controls it and how it has been contested”.¹⁹

These matters of the extraterrestrial, once mostly the realm of literary studies, have increasingly become part of the remit of anthropologists, philosophers, historians, geographers, scholars in science and technology studies, and artistic researchers and practitioners.²⁰ As several social studies of how astronomers and other natural scientists study the cosmos indicate, scientists never simply depict or describe the cosmos “just as it is”. Their research is always characterised by a specific aesthetic style and by a “cosmic imagination”. As we have discussed elsewhere in more detail, scientific knowledge of the universe is also based on skilled judgements rather than on direct, unmediated perception. It is science, but it is also an art.²¹ Furthermore, and despite the fact that Antarctica and Outer Space have never been spaces “for humanity to attach to pre-existing flows of culture”,²² contemporary social and cultural research is providing a rich body of work with accounts of how Antarctic places and cultures are emerging, with distinct modes of subjectivity and forms of sociality in extreme environments.²³ These novel approaches in the human disciplines are also providing new understandings of how planetary scientists and astrobiologists studying outer space environments rely on analogue environments on Earth (such as Antarctica) for their endeavours and are engaged in practices of place-making to make sense of other planets, such as Mars.²⁴

Antarctica, as a place “outside the circuits of the known world that both precedes the moon as a destination of otherworldly knowledge and is coterminous with ‘outer space’”,²⁵ has now been a sphere of human endeavour for well over a century; and Outer Space for just over fifty years. Humans are now physically present in Antarctica year-round in the form of over a thousand transient and semi-permanent scientific and logistics personnel, a figure that expands – like Antarctic ice expands in winter – to five thousand people in summer, in addition to the more than thirty thousand tourists who visit the fringes of the Antarctic continent every year. Small numbers of individuals have “inhabited space” with relatively short hiatuses for the last two decades, and without interruption since 2000 by successive crews in the International Space Station, launched in 1998 and arguably the most expensive technological structure ever built.

To coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Outer Space Treaty, this Special Issue of The Polar Journal brings together international scholars from across several disciplines to reflect on, examine critically, and speculate on the relational trajectories, histories, and futures of Antarctica and Outer Space. This exercise in relationality is a call to offer conceptual and empirical itineraries of associations, relations, and connections that point towards an understanding of both Antarctica and Outer Space as crucial sites for examining human life in extreme environments on Earth and beyond. It’s an invitation to think of cosmo-ecological futures, for figuring these worlds and associated future-making practices in social, economic, ecological and political terms – what Kearnes and van Dooren have recently termed “cosmo-logics and an ethic of interstellar flourishing”.²⁶

This exercise in relationality is also judicious and pertinent for considering changing modes of nationalism and internationalism in both Outer Space and Antarctica, and the emergence of new Asian powers in both Antarctic and space affairs which lead to fostering more open debate about future governance systems in Antarctica and beyond Earth, including low Earth–orbit politics.^27,28 Implementing a relational approach, and not necessarily a comparative one, is also fundamental for addressing questions of valuation and the anticipated modes of regulation and ethics that would be needed to govern both commercial space activities and Antarctic endeavours in a not-so-improbable future that may see a transformed version of the current Antarctic Treaty System in place. This question of ethics also applies explicitly to the principles of bioprospecting in Antarctica and Outer Space and potential looming future dilemmas – discussed in the astrobiology and planetary sciences community since the early 1980s – of terraforming and ecosynthesis of other planetary ecosystems.²⁹ On a different trajectory, this relational effort also implies paying more critical attention and being more attuned and attentive to the gendered and racial politics at play in the scientific exploration of both Antarctica and Outer Space.

Exactly one year ago, Sanjay Chaturvedi noted in his editorial introduction to another Special Issue of The Polar Journal, “The Circumpolar “Social Natural Sciences” Laboratories”, how since its launch in 2011, this journal has continued to grow in academic standing and global visibility with a focus on presenting the best research in polar studies in the social sciences and humanities. In this special issue, I have attempted to go a bit further – or sideways – and integrate work from the physical sciences and the visual and sound arts. Fostering a new collaboration among the geophysical, biological, and social sciences, as well as the humanities and the arts, is indispensable to reveal novel forms of knowledge production that may respond positively to the dilemmas and “wicked problems” of the current times. Likewise, we must not forget that the impressions of Outer Space and the polar regions that most people have are likely shaped by images in popular culture, the media, and art, rather than science.³⁰ As Jane Marsching and Andrea Polli eloquently noted the poles are places that are part fantasy and part reality.³¹ In a similar vein, Glasberg evokes the “symbolic lure of the unknown south” and how this shapes the “ways that Antarctica as geographic terminus has been made to stand for hope or for doom – and usually both at the same time”.³² In literary fiction on Antarctica, as the extensive work of Elizabeth Leane shows,³³ the Antarctic continent has always been “inhabited” in previous or alternative historical times (lost or alien civilisations, indigenous peoples, supernatural beings).³⁴

In the opening article to this Special Issue, “Unearthly Pole: Planetary Imagination and the ‘Last Place on Earth’”, Elizabeth Leane and Graeme Miles argue for the expediency of considering Earth’s geographic poles as “planetary places”, that is, as storied locations on Earth’s surface which are meaningful primarily in an (inter)planetary context. As the authors observe, the poles are thus not only specific places that evoke what Ursula Heise terms a “sense of planet”³⁵: they also strikingly enact a sense of Earth’s interconnectedness with extraterrestrial, unearthly (and interior) spaces. As Leane and Miles argue, by reversing its usual hierarchy, the South Pole becomes a solid location that can be built and lived upon, with a strong local place-identity, since its position “underneath” the Earth enables a defamiliarising view of the planet with unique possibilities for both a global as well as a cosmological imagination.

Antarctica and Outer Space have always been political spaces. This is further explored by Christy Collis in the second article “Spaces Beyond Possession? Antarctica, Outer Space, and the Deep Seabed”. Collis starts by observing that seventy-five per cent of the Earth, and the infinite environment of Space in which Earth is situated, is not owned: it is no one’s property. This idea that unowned spaces make up more of the Earth’s surface than do owned ones is striking in and of itself. But as Collis notes, it would be naïve to assume that Antarctica and Outer Space are therefore exceptional, similar, uncontested spaces of “peace and science,” free from the territorial drives of states and non-state actors such as mining corporations. The big elephant in the room here is the existence of valuable minerals in both spaces, both of which hold significant strategic value for both states and non-state actors. Following on from some of her previous work, Collis describes the legal geographies of these related spaces, highlighting the congruencies and differences between them not only to explain the nature of terra nullius and terra communis today but also to analyse the ways in which these “non-territories” comprise a notable component of contemporary geopolitics.

The third article provides an extraordinary opportunity to hear from some of the most important astrobiologists and planetary scientists working today across Antarctica and Outer Space, including path-breaking work in Mars and the anticipated missions to the Jovian System in the next few decades. The leading author, Chris McKay, is most known for his pioneering research on planetary atmospheres, particularly the atmospheres of Titan and Mars, and on the origin and evolution of life. He played a pivotal role in the Huygens probe, the Mars Phoenix lander, and the Mars Science Laboratory and has done extensive research on extremophiles in below-ice lakes in Antarctica leading to the planned Icebreaker Life astrobiology mission to Mars. In their article, “Antarctic Ecosystems as Planetary Models”, McKay and colleagues from NASA and SETI, Alfonso Dávila and Dale Andersen, describe how Mars and the oceans beneath the icy surfaces of the moons of the outer Solar System, in particular Enceladus, are worlds of primary interest for the search for a second genesis of life. Of particular interest to researchers in the humanities and social sciences is how planetary scientists and astrobiologists are using Earth analogues for studying habitability in these “other worlds”, and as research sites on Earth to develop and optimise strategies to search for evidence of life off Earth.³⁶ For these scientists, the Antarctic analogues for Mars appear to discourage hope for life present on the surface of Mars today; however, they hypothesise that ice-covered lakes could have been a habitat for life over a more extensive period of Martian history than previously thought.

A significant commonality between space exploration and Antarctic exploration has been the gendered politics of scientific exploration. This is the basis of the next article by Morgan Seag, “Women Need Not Apply: A Feminist Perspective on the Antarctica–Outer Space Analog”. Seag takes us back to 1983, a year of firsts for women in two of the world’s leading institutions of scientific exploration, when NASA sent a woman into space for the first time and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) sent women to Antarctica, also for the first time. Seag’s article is grounded in perspectives of Antarctica and Outer Space within histories of gendered labour, and traces the relational trajectories of Antarctica and Outer Space using the overlapping histories of BAS and NASA and by undertaking archival work through hundreds of previously unexamined records in the BAS Archives as well as recent literature dealing with gender at NASA.³⁷

The next three articles are by artists, art curators and art researchers and provide a very welcome view into the intricate ways in which Antarctica and Outer Space are connected. As has been the case with climate change and the emergence of ecocriticism and a range of cli-fi literature and environmental art, arts–sciences dialogues are critical to exploring how interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity may provide novel platforms for reconceptualising and putting into practice the role of cultural and creative responses to future engagements with the Antarctic and Outer Space³⁸. These three final articles are examples of some of the new perspectives whereby the arts–science intersection might offer new ways of looking at the relational trajectories of Antarctica and Outer Space.

First up is “At the End of Night: Explorations of Antarctica and Space in the Sound Art of Philip Samartzis” by Carolyn Philpott and Philip Samartzis. Just as Christy Collis prompted us to note that the vast majority of space on Earth is not owned, Philpott and Samartzis begin their article by reminding us that in a sound-rich world, a common misconception abounds that both Outer Space and Antarctica are “silent” spaces. Through an exploration of the work of Australian sound artist Philip Samartzis, who documented the ecoacoustic characteristics and atmospheric effects of Antarctica and its environs during two field trips in 2010 and 2016, the authors provide a reflexive piece on experimental art at the interstices of art–science collaborations. Similar to Adele Jackson’s solargraphs, Samartzis pieces are produced from sound recordings of radar installations measuring upper atmospheric turbulence and auroral activity and, in the case of the work At the End of Night, on sound recordings of a Medium Frequency Spaced Array radar used to measure upper atmospheric conditions through the transmission and reception of coded sine tone pulsations. As the authors argue, this article reveals the approaches and methods behind Samartzis’s sound art to show how these compositions not only enhance general understandings of Antarctica and the Earth’s atmosphere but also produce novel sensory and affective engagements with these spaces.

The next article is Craig McCormack and Miranda Nieboer’s “Under Geodesic Skies: A Cultural Perspective on the Former South Pole Dome and Extra-terrestrial Geodesic Domes”. This piece is an implicit tribute to the avant-garde thinking of Buckminster Fuller, who wrote his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)³⁹ midway between the signing of the Antarctic Treaty and the Outer Space Treaty. As the authors explain, the geodesic dome has featured in the Antarctic and Outer Space imagination as an architectural typology, a reference to “closed-world” environments. For McCormack and Nieboer, focussing on the reciprocal trajectories of the built environment of Antarctica and Outer Space through a cultural and architectural investigation of the typology of the geodesic dome is a way of understanding how Fuller’s work was a manifestation of tentacular modes of ecological thinking on Earth that might be extended beyond terrestrial boundaries.

The final article in this Special Issue is Nicola Triscott’s “Art and the Planetary Commons”. Triscott takes the reader through an expanded field of contemporary art that is looking with an increasing sense of urgency to the need to engage with matters of political ecology. As Triscott points out, the notion of the Anthropocene has been embraced by scientists, social researchers, and artists alike, even as it has begun to attract criticism for its limited political agency. Triscott’s article is a gentle call for alternative interpretative frameworks, both ecopolitical and geopolitical. Her paper proposes the notion of the planetary commons as a tactical and interpretative framework for curating art-led projects in the realm of eco- and geopolitical concerns, specifically a range of interdisciplinary art projects that have engaged with the polar regions and outer space. In this way Triscott’s article provides an interesting take on the notion of the commons akin to Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s, who notes how “control of the global commons has shifted in terms of scale” from past centuries where whoever “controlled the seas controlled the continents” to “the Cold War era and beyond [when] the control of outer space is understood to be vital to the control of the planet”.⁴⁰

Concluding remarks

In August 2017, glaciologists drilled an ice core in Alan Hills, East Antarctica which yielded a 2.7-million-year-old ice sample, the most ancient evidence of Earth’s atmosphere to date.⁴¹ Only a few weeks earlier, a trillion-tonne, 5800 km² iceberg had calved off from the Larsen C ice shelf.⁴² While this calving event was not the largest on record, it confirmed that Larsen C is now at its smallest extent since the end of the last ice age some 11,700 years ago. More than ten other shelves further to the north along the Peninsula have either collapsed or greatly retreated in recent decades. The drama of this cannot be understated if we deliberate for a moment that Earth’s icy polar regions are quite unique in the Solar System. Furthermore, the accelerated melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic in recent decades has been linked to changes in the rotational axis of the planet, which scientists are calling “climate-driven polar motion”. Whether this has happened before in Earth’s deep history or is happening for the first time is not actually the point. What is at stake here is that human activities have acquired a force capable of sparking these massive changes to Earth systems, profoundly impacting geological and atmospheric cycles.

What must be acknowledged from all this and what is politically at stake here and now, is the predicament that humanity is no longer able to control most of the feedback effects derived from its own actions, mostly its consumption of energy and production of waste. Over a period of only two centuries, human activities have transferred from the ground to the atmosphere, in the form of gases or heat, a substantial part of the Earth’s hydrocarbons, which took millions of years to accumulate. More substantially and worryingly, this epoch comes to signal an epoch in which the furthest reaches of Earth, from the stratosphere to the deep sea, are now affected by the actions and detritus of humankind. Of course, the use here of the term “humanity” as species-being obscures the profound socioeconomic and political differences that a notion of a homogenous “humanity” in fact implies.

In this regard, Antarctica and Outer Space come to represent an inherently future-oriented quandary as the most serious test to our collective and coordinated capacity to exercise foresight on a planet that for many is already damaged beyond repair. In the case of Antarctica, this foresight is necessary not only to protect the unique and fragile Antarctic ecosystems but also to understand ongoing transformations in the framing of Antarctica.⁴³ And on a more philosophical level to recast our species as part-of and in relation-with nature in ways that might provide novel experiments with living differently in the Anthropocene.

As sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos has argued,⁴⁴ our time is one of paradigmatic transition, of strong questions and weak answers. For de Sousa Santos, strong questions are those that address our options for individual and collective life and the factors that have shaped our current horizon of possibilities. They are, therefore, questions that arouse a particular kind of perplexity. In his view, weak responses fail to abate this perplexity and may, in fact, increase it. For decades, we have known that Antarctic scientists are painting a dire picture of an unfolding and relentlessly unravelling future where changes will only intensify considerably during this century. These changes are also linked to shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Southern Polar region, enhanced technological and logistical capabilities, intensifying human activities in the continent and surrounding ocean, and increased interest in its bioresources. As Tom Griffiths once noted, Antarctica is

not only a region of elemental majesty; it is also a global archive, a window on outer space and a scientific laboratory. It is not only a wondrous world of ice; it is also a political frontier, a social microcosm and a humbling human experiment. It offers us an oblique and revealing perspective on modern history, an icy mirror for the world.⁴⁵

In other words, the Antarctic provides a unique opportunity to develop an affirmative relationship across disciplinary divides, to create a space for dialogue about what sort ethics are needed to engage with this territory not only as a laboratory for science but also as a kind of cultural probe for thinking and practising an alternative ethics of care for living in the Anthropocene.

Juan Francisco Salazar
[email protected]

Acknowledgements

As guest editor of this special issue I am grateful to the Executive editor of The Polar Journal Anne-Marie Brady for the invitation to put together this volume. I also wish to thank Alan D. Hemmings for comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. My thanks also extends to Adele Jackson for kindly providing the image of the cover and a huge thank you to all the contributors and reviewers that made this issue possible.

Notes

¹ WMO, “Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2016.” https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/1189_Statement2016_EN.pdf.

² Kearnes and van Dooren, “Rethinking the Final Frontier.”

³ For a detailed analysis see Anne-Marie Brady, China as a Polar Great Power.

⁴ Arendt, The Human Condition, 1.

⁵ See for instance Gould, Antarctica in the International Geophysical Year, v, or Jessup and Taubenfeld, Controls for Outer Space and the Antarctic Analogy.

⁶ See the United Nations Environmental Program’s definition at http://staging.unep.org/delc/GlobalCommons/tabid/54404/Default.aspx. While UNEP’s definition is widely used, it is not legally binding for states, particularly for the 7 claimant states that do not recognise Antarctica as a global commons and/or common heritage by virtue of their claims upon parts of the continent. Therefore, in view of the seven declared claims, and two reservations of a basis to claim to Antarctic territory (Unites States and Russia), other states with interests in the antarctic region may have reservations about the applicability of this term.

⁷ Launius, “Establishing Open Rights,” 218.

⁸ Whistler, also referred to as whistling atmospheric, is an electromagnetic wave that propagates through the atmosphere and which may occasionally be detected by a sensitive audio amplifier as a gliding high-to-low-frequency sound.

⁹ Questions have started to be raised by several actors and scholars concerned with whether these legal frameworks are indeed apt for the twenty-first century. For an interesting critique of how international relations, “as both a system of knowledge and institutional practice, is undone by the reality of the planet”, see Burke et al., “Planet Politics”, quote at 501. For discussions on international relations theory of outer space see Natalie Bormann and Michael Sheehan, “Securing Outer Space.”

¹⁰ It is important to note that negotiations by the UN started in 1956, before the IGY, and that the four treaties of 1958 were superseded by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which by 2017 had been ratified by 167 states.

¹¹ Yusoff, “Test Landscapes.”

¹² Follis, “Province and Heritage.”

¹³ DeLoughrey, “Satellite Planetarity,” 260.

¹⁴ To add to Hannah Arendt’s awe at the launch of Sputnik a decade later in 1969, and reflecting on the initial Apollo images and the first humans to walk on the Moon, Allen Ginsberg wrote: “No Science Fiction expected this Globe-Eye Consciousness” (“In a Moonlit Hermit’s Cabin”, 128). This of course links to Denis Cosgrove’s argument that these images opened up for the first time a path for a new kind of planetary imagination in the West, a new form of planetary consciousness which took on a new dimension once the planet was able to be “seen” from afar, from outer space: a planetary disposition that computer imaging – also since the 1970s – has been able to powerfully convey through the modelling and visualisation of a planetary ecology. Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye.

¹⁵ Yusoff, “Test Landscapes,” 2.

¹⁶ For a detailed discussion of this argument see Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory and his thesis of “territory as political technology”; or James Crawford The Creation of States in International Law.

¹⁷ See for instance recent work by Dunnett, “Geopolitical Cultures.”

¹⁸ In regards to this idea that “space is open for business” another example – among many others worth mentioning here – is Rocket Lab – a United States/New Zealand private operation established in 2006 whose mission is to which “remove the barriers to commercial space by providing frequent launch opportunities to low Earth orbit”. This operation has been instrumental in leading the New Zealand Government to establish a space agency and ensure it was fully compliant with a string of international space law agreements – see http://www.treaties.mfat.govt.nz/search/details/t/3858/c_1. See Rocket Lab at https://www.rocketlabusa.com/.

¹⁹ Parks, “Mapping Orbit,” 62.

²⁰ For an example of interdisciplinary perspectives see Luca Codignola-Bo and Kai-Uwe Schrogl, Humans in Outer Space: Interdisciplinary Odysseys.

²¹ Praet and Salazar, “Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial.”

²² Glasberg, Antarctica as Cultural Critique, 34.

²³ See for instance O’Reilly and Salazar’s account of life in Antarctic settlements, “Inhabiting the Antarctic”. For similar work on outer space see Gorman, “Culture on the Moon”; and Valentine, “Exit Strategy”.

²⁴ See for instance Praet and Salazar’s Special Issue of Environmental Humanities entitled “Anthropology Off-Earth”.

²⁵ Glasberg, Antarctica as Cultural Critique, 4.

²⁶ Kearnes and van Dooren, “Rethinking the Final Frontier,” 178.

²⁷ For an original discussion of how the International Space Station poses an interesting case of effective internationalisation and “a counterpoint to the quite limited development of joint facilities in Antarctica”, see Alan D. Hemmings, “Why Did We Get An International Space Station Before An International Antarctic Station?” 11. For a discussion of ongoing and emergent forms of nationalism in Antarctica see Hemmings et al., “Nationalism in Today’s Antarctic.”

²⁸ For an original discussion of everyday, mundane, banal and hot polar nationalisms see Dodds, “Awkward Antarctic Nationalism.”

²⁹ For a detailed discussion see McKay, “Planetary Ecosynthesis on Mars.” For an anthropological discussion of how astrobiology as a scientific enterprise preoccupied with the quest for life beyond our home planet is also a “conceptual laboratory and a hotbed of philosophical experimentation” see Praet, “Astrobiology and the Ultraviolet World.”

³⁰ See for instance Glasberg’s argument of Antarctica as “the most mediated place on Earth”. Glasberg, Antarctica as Cultural Critique, xix.

³¹ Marsching and Polli, “Far Field.”

³² Glasberg, “‘Living ice’: Rediscovery of the Poles in an Era of Climate Crisis.”

³³ Leane, Antarctica in Fiction.

³⁴ In parallel, the imagination of outer space in art and popular culture has a plethora of work, incommensurable for the scope of this piece. For an excellent overview see Geppert, Imagining Outer Space.

³⁵ Heise, Sense of Place.

³⁶ Three exemplary recent ethnographic works from US-based researchers come to mind: Janet Vertesi’s study of robotic spacecraft teams at NASA and how organisational factors affect and reflect planetary scientists’ activities and scientific results; Lisa Messeri’s study of how planets are made into places, which traces ethnographically how the place-making practices of planetary scientists transform the void of space into a cosmos filled with worlds that can be known and explored; and the ongoing and path-breaking ethnographic work of Valerie Olson and her accounts of the astronautical visions and ecologies of US scientists. Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover; Messeri, Placing Outer Space; and Olson, American Extreme.

³⁷ For a related discussion in art see Bloom, “Antarctica: Feminist art Practices and Disappearing Polar Landscapes in the Age of the Anthropocene.”

³⁸ For a related discussion see Gabrys and Yusoff, “Arts, Sciences and Climate Change.”

³⁹ Fuller, Operating Manual.

⁴⁰ DeLoughrey, “Satellite Planetarity,” 259.

⁴¹ Voosen, “2.7-million-year-old Ice Opens Window on Past.”

⁴² Hogg and Hilmar Gudmundsson, “Impacts of the Larsen-C Ice Shelf calving event.”

⁴³ For a detailed discussion of “transformations in the framing of Antarctica” see Hemmings, “Antarctic Politics in a Transforming Global Geopolitics,” 513.

⁴⁴ De Sousa Santos, Descolonizar el saber.

⁴⁵ Griffiths, “Cultural Challenge of Antarctica,” 4.