Troubled Orbits and Earthly Concerns: Space Debris as a Boundary Infrastructure

Abstract

Like other forms of debris in terrestrial and marine environments, space debris prompts questions about how we can live with the material remains of technological endeavors past and yet to come. Although techno-societies fundamentally rely on space infrastructures, they so far have failed to address the infrastructural challenge of debris. Only very recently has the awareness of space debris as a severe risk to both space and Earth infrastructures increased within the space community. One reason for this is the renewed momentum of interplanetary space exploration, including the colonization of the Moon and Mars, which is part of transhumanist and commercially driven dreams of the so-called New Space age. Understanding space infrastructures as inherently linked to earthly infrastructure, we attend to the ways in which space debris, a once accepted by-product of scientific-technological progress, economic interests, and geopolitics, increasingly becomes a matter of concern. Drawing on qualitative interviews with European space sector representatives and work in Science and Technology Studies on infrastructures, we argue that their discursive efforts and visual representation strategies coproduce space debris as a boundary infrastructure. We suggest considering this boundary infrastructure as relating orbital environments and the planet through enacting sustainability and responsibility for beyond-planetary environments.