Abstract
Research into outer space has burgeoned in recent years, through the work of scholars in the social sciences, arts and humanities. Geographers have made a series of useful contributions to this emergent work, but scholarship remains fairly limited in comparison to other disciplinary fields. This forum explains the scholarly roots of these new geographies of outer space, considering why and how geographies of outer space could make further important contributions. The forum invites reflections from political, environmental, historical and cultural geographers to show how human geography can present future avenues to continued scholarship into outer space.
I Introduction
Human geographers have begun to re-engage with outer space as an object of their research. Much of this work has drawn inspiration from a landmark paper by Denis Cosgrove (1994), which examined the Apollo astronaut photographs of the earth from space, and their significance in the genealogy of the global imagination in western culture. Cosgrove thereby opened up extra-terrestrial perspectives in contemporary studies of geographical representations. A further significant intervention was Fraser MacDonald’s (2007) paper in this journal, which argued that outer space should no longer be seen as remote and detached from the everyday geographies of people’s lives, as it has become instrumental to many modern technologies and forms of mobility. Such lines of argument have echoed more recently, with Jason Beery (2016: 68) suggesting that geographers should ‘reject…anxieties about engaging with outer space’, and grasp the opportunities therein.
Indeed, outer space matters, and its engagement through critical voices in the humanities and social sciences has become more important with the increasing presence of outer space technologies in people’s everyday lives (Johnson, 2016), the growing diversity of human activity in outer space, with private companies described to be launching ‘a new space race’ (Grady, 2017), and the imaginative configurations of outer space that continue to shape human understandings of the universe, influenced by unprecedented developments in astrophysical science (NASA, 2017). With geography specifically meaning ‘earth writing’, some may wonder why there is a need for geographies of outer space. Yet outer space and geography have historic connections, from the ages of Classical and Medieval cosmography up until Alexander Von Humboldt’s Cosmos (1849). We argue that outer space should be of pressing concern within contemporary human geography given the increasing prominence of outer space within culture and politics, and the need to fully contextualize this. Human geographers are well-placed to draw on a breadth of conceptual developments from its range of sub-disciplinary perspectives, including an established engagement with concepts of scale (Sheppard and McMaster, 2004), and a post-modern cultural turn that has created the possibility for ‘an extra-terrestrial human geography’ (Cosgrove, 2008: 47). With the rise of planetary geomorphology in physical geography (Craddock, 2012) and interdisciplinary science (Mackwell et al., 2013), as well as significant new studies on outer space in history, sociology and anthropology (Geppert, 2012; Dickens and Ormrod, 2016; Messeri, 2016), there is a compelling need for human geographers to catch up with this ‘turn to space’ and the diverse influences outer space has had, and is having, on earth and its inhabitants.
What form, then, might such new geographies of outer space take, and how might we theorize engagements that have already started to emerge? One starting point would be to think through specific geographical terminologies and how they might apply to studies of outer space. The most obvious connection, noted by MacDonald (2007), is the term ‘space’ itself, a homonym that denotes both the most widely-adopted ‘unit of geography’ and also the cosmic void between planetary and other cosmic bodies, drawing on notions of absence, vacuity or nothingness. Space, however, is too vague a term for the immensity and diversity of the cosmic realm, and adopting more specific geographical terms such as place, surface, environment, volume, trajectory or landscape could open up the multiplicity of meanings behind these varied and distinct extra-terrestrial spaces. This approach also generates a whole range of outer-space-specific terminologies and nomenclatures as possible objects of study. Thinking through the nuances of the ‘spaces of outer space’ through terms such as extra-terrestrial or extra-global space, earth-orbital space (involving polar, parabolic or geostationary trajectories), interplanetary space, exo-planetary space, interstellar or celestial space, the cosmos, or even the heavens, invokes a variety of scales and understandings to help unpick and focus in on particular objects of study. What these suggestions offer is a specific lexicon for geographers to take forward in future research to critically interpret these different spaces, thinking beyond the simplistic binary separation of ‘outer’ space from ‘terrestrial’ space.
Geographers’ limited involvement with outer space has occurred mostly through critical geopolitics, or ‘critical astropolitics’, interrogating terrestrial power relations embedded in spaceflight industries (Warf, 2007; Collis, 2009; Beery, 2012), space-promoting organizations (MacDonald, 2007; Dunnett, 2017), and outer space in popular culture (MacDonald, 2008). The significance of national space programmes (Sage, 2014) or outer space cultures (Dunnett, 2012) has also shown the entwined nature of outer space with national identities and military-industrial complexes. Recent developments afford geographers further possibilities for study, with newly-industrialized nations becoming increasingly involved with spaceflight (Pace, 2015) and new private sector engagements with research, development and manufacturing disrupting Cold War-era concepts of nationalism in outer space. With existing studies often focusing on the national and global politics of outer space, there has been a comparative lack of research on the localized political and economic geographies of production embedded in the newly-emergent space industries. In this forum, Daniel Sage looks to address this shortfall by articulating geometries of power and dispossession inherent in the labour geographies of upcoming space projects that operate in contrast to the utopian visions of ‘NewSpace’ magnates such as Elon Musk.
Cosgrove’s landmark paper (1994) helped establish the significance of space imagery in engendering a sense of environmental unity in the earth. Subsequent studies have expanded the concept of ‘environment’ beyond earthly limits, considering, for example, representations of the planet Mars in the early and late 20th century (Lane, 2011; Dittmer, 2007). Researchers have also examined how earth-orbital imagery, rocketry and planetary visualization have helped to configure a sense of frontier expansionism through narratives of discovery and exploration (Sage, 2014; MacDonald, 2015). Such studies have investigated the connections between humans and the extra-terrestrial environment, but have only made limited progress in comparison to the multitude of ways in which people have understood off-world spaces in various national, regional and local contexts. Thinking through the meaning of earth’s place in the cosmos raises broader questions regarding the limits of human influence in the solar system, and the role of humanity in safeguarding environmental futures in the long term. In the forum contributions that follow, Julie Klinger and Maria Lane seek to address these issues by configuring potential new geographies of nature-culture relations in outer space, through both contemporary and historical research, looking at examples such as off-earth mining and the mapping of other planets.
Part of MacDonald’s (2007) argument in promoting the study of outer space was to draw attention to the terrestrial geographies that are connected to the technologies and discourses of outer space. Others have shown how certain places on earth, such as the Antarctic continent, mountains and deserts, have been seen as proxies of extra-terrestrial spaces (Collis, 2016; Lane, 2008; Dittmer, 2007). This work makes significant progress in understanding geographies of outer space through earthly analogy. There is, however, further scope for studies that investigate the more accessible and everyday spaces through which people derive meaning from outer space. In the penultimate section of this forum, Oliver Dunnett examines how landscapes of outer space have been articulated through popular representations and experience, seeking also to configure the moral geographies of outer space in popular understandings. Finally, Andrew Maclaren examines the concept of affective nationalism in the contemporary context of NASA space shuttle exhibits in various museum spaces across the United States, thinking through how ‘space heritage’ has become a major focus in everyday narratives of human engagement with outer space.
This brief overview has pointed out a significant but underdeveloped corpus of work in the new geographies of outer space that has emerged in the past decade or so. This work has intervened successfully in areas such as critical astropolitics, planetary environmentalism and earth-space analogies, in explaining various human understandings of the cosmos. These interventions, and those that follow in the main sections of this forum, seek to take advantage of geography’s unique traditions and perspectives in understanding the spaces of outer space, and what they mean to people on earth in various social, cultural and economic contexts. In an era in which human interactions with outer space are only likely to develop, such perspectives are all the more important.