Reindeer, rockets and space infrastructures: Enacting oligoptic-satellitarian environments in Northern Sweden

Abstract

This article focuses on a series of connections between space infrastructures and environments in northern Sweden. Swedish space professionals often highlight the centrality of outer space for contemporary imaginaries about the planet as an interconnected whole. At the same time, the country's sounding rocket range outside the city of Kiruna relies on deep-seated constructions of the subarctic environment as empty wilderness. With the ongoing development of small satellite launch capability, the surrounding landscape needs to be sustained as an impact area, with the consequence that Sámi land practices are increasingly pushed to the sidelines. By turning to reindeer herders’ own uses of satellite technology, I delineate an oligoptic-satellitarian environment that runs athwart panopticonic understandings of satellite vision. Rather than trying to see everything from nowhere, the herders bring into view a limited set of more-than-human relations in order to challenge conceptions of the landscape as empty and exploitable. While showing that space activities in Sweden fold into and reproduce colonial histories, the article also argues that space infrastructures contain the potential for their own reconfiguration by eliciting the other worlds that are already being performed from within dominant socio-technical regimes.