Research

This book project examines the promise of satellite infrastructure for the democratization of scientific knowledge and the pursuit of global justice. Over the last seventy years, space agencies, intelligence services, and private corporations have populated the night sky with a host of artificial satellites, enveloping the surface of the Earth in new infrastructure for communication, entertainment, commerce, national security, surveillance, and environmental monitoring. This revolution in orbital technologies was initially envisioned as a project of international cooperation, knowledge sharing, and a move toward material abundance, but it has instead been guided by national interest, secrecy, and privatization.

 

The book will reconstruct mid-twentieth-century visions of satellite technology (with emphasis on planning for the International Geophysical Year), in which physicists and geoscientists imagined both new possibilities for scientific discovery and new opportunities for social and political progress. Drawing on extensive archival research, I read this earlier vision of satellite technology in conversation with contemporary democratic theory and eco-philosophy to reveal the unfulfilled potential of orbital infrastructure—and space exploration more broadly—for egalitarian society. Hannah Arendt’s reflections on Sputnik serve as a starting point from which to connect philosophical inquiry into technology and society to utopian visions of the scientists working on satellite infrastructure. Through engagements with the political thought of Sheldon Wolin, Donna Haraway, Ralph Abernathy, Bruno Latour, and Wendy Brown, among others, the project considers the perils of privatized space technology for democracy.

 

Despite the profound transformation of both geospace and life on Earth through satellite infrastructure, studies of space exploration in the social sciences and humanities tend to focus on the development of novel technology or the relationship between space agencies and the national security state. To the extent that such studies think about just futures, they focus on the desire to simply transcend worldly conditions by traveling beyond Earth. In contrast to these approaches, I seek to mine the scientific and public debates around satellite infrastructure for their insights into making the Earth more habitable, just, and sustainable. By recovering the ethical, political, and philosophical orientations of early space scientists, the project breaks new ground in the humanistic study of space technology, offering relevant insights for democratic theory, infrastructure studies, and global justice.