Introduction
A burgeoning body of work within security studies has recently (re)turned to considerations of the ways in which technical and material infrastructures constitute a crucially important but complex element of world politics.Footnote 1 Even within that turn, though, consideration of space-based infrastructures and technologies has remained largely peripheral. This article seeks to redress that tendency. The justification for doing so lies not in the possible virtues of bringing a more ‘marginal’ area of study ‘in’ to the mainstream analysis of international security. Rather, space-based infrastructures have been integral components of world politics for decades and, as argued by the few scholars who have countered the view that space technologies exist at the outer limits of international studies, these infrastructures contribute significantly to how we come to know, understand and address the relationship(s) between ‘international’, ‘global’, and ‘planetary’ forms of security and insecurity.Footnote 2 Specifically, we interrogate the roles played by what we term ‘orbital infrastructures’ in conceptualisations and practices of security. In so doing, we extend the existing parameters of ‘astropolitics’ and ‘critical astropolitics’, discussed in more detail below as subfields of the wider study of space policy and technologies,Footnote 3 to take better account of re-emergent concerns with the study of ‘planetary security’. The latter theme, broached initially by scholars in the 1950s but only periodically and intermittently since, has become especially pertinent and worthy of reconsideration in relation to what has more recently been termed the ‘Anthropocene’. Indeed, a starting point of our argument and its contribution to existing debates is that although the study of ‘astropolitics’ and ‘critical astropolitics’ as disciplinary subfields most closely concerned with the study of outer space provides a valuable entry point into discussions of orbital infrastructures, the extent to which they currently address the critical role of such infrastructures as means to both understand and address forms of planetary insecurity has yet to be theorised and analysed fully.
To provide greater detail in this respect, we outline and analyse systems of Earth Observation (EO) and Near-Earth Object (NEO) detection as case studies of orbital infrastructures. Our examination of EO and NEO is not intended simply to contribute to greater awareness of two curios at the outer disciplinary limits of international security studies. Instead, key parts of our argument and analysis are, first, that both EO and NEO, albeit in different and complex ways, are already part of contemporary world politics rather than marginal to it; and second, that debates surrounding EO and NEO infrastructures simultaneously challenge existing conceptions of security but also reproduce familiar debates, disputes, and contestations. EO and NEO infrastructures and the debates surrounding their functions, technical affordances, and implications for contemporary security, our analysis suggests, are Large Technical Systems operative at a planetary scale. In and of itself, this challenges the ontological assumptions of the disciplinary boundaries of the study of international security. The cases of EO and NEO also exhibit accompanying forms of ‘technopolitics’ indicative of ongoing efforts to grapple with and reconcile understandings of international, global, and planetary (in)security. In that sense, we contend, orbital infrastructures should be taken into account within contemporary security studies, not just because they are progressively and materially important to world politics at a more general level but because they also inform and challenge conceptions of security in significant but complex ways.
To develop these arguments, the article first situates its discussions in relation to prior and recently re-emergent concerns within security studies with ‘the planetary’ as a context in which orbital infrastructures are particularly pertinent. It then moves to a more detailed discussion and outline of our understanding and conception of orbital infrastructures. We integrate and expand upon existing scholarship on space technologies, on the one hand, and infrastructures as Large Technical Systems, on the other, by introducing and applying an explicitly ‘technopolitical’ focus on the ways in which technologies ‘both create and constrain political possibilities’.Footnote 4 Indeed, we argue that a key feature of these orbital infrastructures is debate and contestation over precisely what kinds of political possibilities for planetary security are created and constrained by these Large Technical Systems. This is a key feature of governance discourses associated with these orbital infrastructures. To exemplify and add relevant empirical detail and texture to these discussions, the article then undertakes an analysis of EO and then NEO orbital infrastructures as, respectively, potential means of ‘looking in’ on and ‘looking out’ for planetary security. Each section provides both an overview of contemporary EO/NEO and an analysis of the technopolitical nature of the debates that surround them. In conclusion, the article reflects on what significance EO and NEO, and the wider conceptualisation and analysis of orbital infrastructures, might entail for the contemporary study of (planetary) security.
Planetary (in)security in the Anthropocene
Conceptions of ‘the planetary’ are revived and urgent topics of concern within security studies and in International Relations (IR) more generally. Where wider political philosophical reflections on and considerations of ‘the planetary’Footnote 5 and ‘planetarity’Footnote 6 seek to reflect on and highlight the implication of an ‘ecological crisis’ facing the Earth on a planetary scale, a growing number of voices have begun to argue that the nature of that crisis challenges and calls into question the disciplinary boundaries of IR, the limits of its utility as a field of study, and the conceptions of (in)security it has tended to assume. Thus do Anthony Burke et al., for example, declare that in the context of climate change, the ‘planet's watch is ticking ever louder, and too many diplomats and statesmen seem deaf to it; deaf to the running down of the world and the voices of those most affected by melting glaciers, rising waters, and drying continents’.Footnote 7 Complicit in this, ‘International Relations has failed because the planet does not match and cannot be clearly seen by its institutional and disciplinary frameworks.’Footnote 8 Their critique of the epistemological, ontological, and practical drawbacks of a branch of study originating from a focus on ‘the international’ in the context of planetary crisis is also echoed strongly elsewhere.Footnote 9
Though they might assume particular contemporary urgency, concerns with planetary security – both in the use of the specific term and as a denotation of a wider concern with existential threats operative at a planetary scale – are not entirely novel. As an operational term, ‘planetary security’ was cited within international attempts in the 1990s to rework notions of global governance in a post-Cold War world. The 1995 Commission on Global Governance report, Our Global Neighbourhood, for instance, introduced planetary security as a conceptual rubric within which to overhaul international efforts to address threats to ‘the planet's basic life-support systems’.Footnote 10 Closely coupled with emerging United Nations formulations of ‘human security’,Footnote 11 planetary security required a perspectival shift from traditional national security, the Commission argued, to other levels and fields of security, glossed in academic responses to these moves as a ‘deepening’ and ‘widening’ of security scale and emphasis.Footnote 12 A precise definition was elusive, but planetary security was conceived as a way of addressing anthropogenic threats to the global environment, their causal relationships with armed conflict, and the resultant effects on individual, national, and collective security.
Indicating the extent to which the predominant institutional and disciplinary frameworks can be argued to have historically obscured and precluded ‘the planetary’ are the significant pockets of exception to that general rule. In the decades prior to the Commission's 1995 report, several international security scholars had already pre-empted the move to a concern with forms of planetary (in)security, with some, including John Herz, Richard Falk, and Daniel Deudney, articulating new international security arrangements to address environmental threats and those of military technologies, both nuclear and informational.Footnote 13 Each focused on threats to human survival that operated at the level of the planet as a whole. As early as the 1950s, Herz proposed a programme of applied ‘Survival Research’ to address the twin perils posed by environmental destruction and nuclear weaponry to the human species, perils that provoked him to pose the question: ‘How can a “planetary mind” be developed?’.Footnote 14 Herz channelled the spirit of Hans Morgenthau before him, who saw sense in developing ‘a supranational political solidarity, one unified not against other states or peoples but rather the threat of extinction’.Footnote 15 He wrestled with how this would work in practice, even as he remained pessimistic about the chances of developing a planetary sense of security: ‘At no time in modern history has security meant so much to him [humankind]; at no time has there seemed less hope of retrieving it.’Footnote 16 Falk argued that intersecting ‘vectors’ of nuclear weapons, war, population growth, pollution, and resource depletion already meant that ‘Only new organizational forms with a planetary scope that corresponds to the planetary dimension of the situation can offer any prospect of a timely, corrective and adequate response.’Footnote 17 Deudney, too, linked environmental and nuclear concerns in his investigations into alternative ways of ordering collective security, and addressed his explicit proposals for ‘planetary security’ to ‘only those problems that are irreducibly planetary in scale’.Footnote 18
Revitalised interest in planetary security is inherently bound up with the implications of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a defining addendum to the general themes previously broached by Herz, Falk, and Deudney.Footnote 19 The concept of the Anthropocene, as taken up and engaged with across the social sciences, denotes a period in which humankind is identified as the dominant influence on the planet's geochemical, ecological, and climatic systems, granting stratigraphic weight to the inscription of anthropogenic activities on the Earth.Footnote 20 Significant debate has centred on the question of when this epoch began but much less about how, when or whether it might end. After all, implicit within geological nomenclature is the notion of finitude: all stratigraphic units have a beginning and an end, a lower and upper temporal bound – their delimiting is, in Andrew Hom's terms, an act of purposive ‘timing’.Footnote 21 The very idea of an Anthropocene is predicated not on positive visions of human influence on the Earth but on its negative, potentially irreversible, effects.Footnote 22 Often, planetary survival is deemed threatened on account of a combination of political myopia, moral neglect, and corporate venality, as captured more specifically by, for instance, the alternative designation of the ‘Capitalocene’.Footnote 23 For some, this in turn is seen to emanate primarily from geographically concentrated practices of industry and consumption, as in Grove's suggestion of the ‘Eurocene’.Footnote 24 Climate change, environmental degradation, radically diminished biodiversity, pollution, and resource depletion all pose threats to humanity's capacity to secure its own long-term survival and that of the wider biome. In short, the question of planetary security has moved centre-stage.
Orbital infrastructures: Expanding the technosphere of planetary security
An appreciation of technology – or, more accurately, technologies – is, we argue, fundamental to understanding conceptualisations of planetary security and the Anthropocene. Debates over nomenclature notwithstanding, the vectors of our demise in this period are primarily technological,Footnote 25 and technologies provide us with much of the informational basis upon which to realise knowledge about our planetary predicament. Herz, Falk, and Deudney's prior considerations of forms of planetary (in)security occurred amidst an increased sociopolitical awareness of ‘globality’ in the postwar period, spurred not only by nuclear and environmental concerns but also by both technological change and cognitive shifts engendered by the exploration of outer space.Footnote 26 Similarly, as Alice Gorman observes, ‘Perspectives and data derived from satellites in Earth orbit [have] been integral to the very apprehension of what is now being called the Anthropocene.’Footnote 27 This is not to argue that technologies possess intrinsic properties or capacities that determine social outcomes, or which produce a monolithic understanding of the world. Rather, it is to understand technologies as sociotechnical assemblages of human and non-humans, as ‘partners’ in both the relational co-construction of knowledge and as producers of effectsFootnote 28 that may in turn lead to and inform multiple different practices of what Cara Daggett calls ‘world-viewing’ and ‘world-making’.Footnote 29 Here, we are specifically concerned with relatively distinct forms of sociotechnical assemblages that we have termed ‘orbital infrastructures’: assemblages comprised of terrestrial, atmospheric, and space-based systems, institutions, structures of governance, and technologies. Two analytical considerations inform our choice and use of that term.
The first responds to Maximilian Mayer and Michele Acuto's call to ‘dig deeper into the materiality of transnational infrastructures and technical complexity of multi-layered systems’ that help constitute world politics.Footnote 30 This reflects their ambition to move ‘technology’ to the centre of the study of the international via analysis of ‘Large Technical Systems’ (LTSs): ‘socio-technically complex systems, where human and non-human elements are intertwined’ within large-scale infrastructural networks of telecommunications, energy supply, and transport, to name but a few.Footnote 31 Borrowing from Bruno Latour, they note that social relations are mediated within LTSs by diverse technological infrastructures, such as, they suggest, oil pipelines, vaccination response mechanisms, and satellite positioning systems. These ‘missing masses’ are often excluded from sustained attention within international security studies, even though such networks routinely traverse, underpin, and are impacted by the boundaries of nation-states, security policies, and practices of global governance.Footnote 32 In common with critical geographersFootnote 33 and urbanists like Keller Easterling,Footnote 34 Mayer and Acuto contend that attention to infrastructures can illuminate the workings of power, resistance, and identity in the contemporary world, as well as contribute to our understanding of how physical space and sovereignty are transformed under conditions of globalisation. This is consistent with the key claim of scholarship on ‘critical astropolitics’ that considers the extent to which space technologies further destabilise established notions of territorial space and sovereignty, as opposed to treating these technologies and their related infrastructures either as apolitical or as simply transposing terrestrial inter-state geopolitics onto the realm of outer space.Footnote 35 It connects too with wider discussions of different forms of ‘technopolitics’, defined broadly as ‘hybrids of technical systems and political practices that produc[e] new forms of power and agency’, and the related contention that space technologies in particular can and should be considered as ‘technologies of world politics’ owing to the ways in which they, often in a very literal sense, incorporate and allow for the envisioning of different conceptions of global security.Footnote 36
A second and complementary consideration is that orbital infrastructures can help us address and reconsider what John Agnew calls ‘the territorial trap’ of IR,Footnote 37 and, by implication, its subfields across international politics and security. Agnew sought not to deny the importance of territoriality to international politics but to historicise the geographical assumptions of IR as a way of demonstrating the contingency of the integuments of state and society and of the dominant system of national sovereignty. As Jill Stuart has shown, human interactions with and through outer space provide multiple opportunities to reconsider the nature of territory and sovereignty, both of which are confounded by space technologies and practices.Footnote 38 Agnew conceded subsequently that IR scholars had made great strides in exploring physical space from perspectives that do not presume it is structurally or territorially deterministic,Footnote 39 but the majority remain resolutely stuck in the terrestrial plane.
The concept of orbital infrastructures provides further analytical purchase with which to address this concern. Political geographers have provided us with sophisticated analyses of the vertical dimensions of power, from the aerial visions of drone technologies and other airborne military and policing assets to the subterranean urbanism of the modern city.Footnote 40 Similarly, geologists advancing the Anthropocene concept have recognised that anthropogenic artefacts are not limited to the apprehensible, terrestrial realm alone. Since 1957, satellites and orbital debris have extended an ‘aerial technosphere’ into and beyond the Earth's atmosphere.Footnote 41 As Jan Zalasiewicz et al. argue in terms of the scope of the technosphere, ‘human influence on materials extends globally, including deep underground and into outer space’.Footnote 42 This includes spacecraft voyaging far beyond our gravitational well and, in the case of electromagnetic signals, various Pioneer and Voyager missions and the New Horizons craft, past the boundaries of the heliosphere and beyond the solar system itself.Footnote 43 At the same time, the Earth is the net recipient of extraterrestrial entities, in the form of solar and extra-solar radiation, meteorites and cosmic dust, which forces us to rethink any idea of the Earth as divorced from the wider cosmic environment.Footnote 44
More generally, space systems and technologies, critical astropolitics scholars contend, are integral to what makes terrestrial politics ‘work’. As Fraser MacDonald points out, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) enable not only military invasions and drone strikes but are also crucial elements of all manner of terrestrial transport and geospatial positioning systems. Satellite infrastructures enable multiple and constant forms of location, surveillance, and communications systems and practices that cross conventional distinctions between public and private, military and civilian.Footnote 45 In contrast to, and in critique of, classical geopolitical readings of outer space as a ‘strategic high ground’ to be dominated militarily – as originally advocated most notably in Everett C. Dolman's conception of ‘Astropolitik’Footnote 46 – MacDonald's articulation of critical astropolitics is equally attuned to evaluating the extent to which ‘space is becoming ordinary’.Footnote 47 This does not assert the decline or disappearance of the ‘exceptionalist’ politics of space militarisation and its efforts to dominate near-Earth orbit, but rather locates it on a continuum with a more ‘everyday’ politics of outer space.Footnote 48 Hence, space ‘is not some far-fetched or indulgent distraction from the “real world”; rather … we need to think about the contest for outer space as being constitutive of numerous familiar operations, not only in respect of international relations and the conduct of war, but also to the basic infrastructural maintenance of the state and to the lives of its citizenry.’Footnote 49
Building on such arguments, we propose that figuratively ‘in between’ the Earth and the cosmos and acting as a kind of mediator or permeable membrane between the two, there lies a diffuse ‘layer’ of ‘orbital infrastructures’ that is critical both in defining planetary insecurities and in proposed mitigation of those insecurities. The figurative language of membranes and layers belies the extent to which such orbital infrastructures are not simply comprised of objects placed and located in low- or near-Earth orbit; they are most often crucially dependent on Earth-based components such as ground stations, sensor networks and associated personnel and technicians. Rather than treating such orbital infrastructures as either literally or metaphorically ‘out there’, we suggest that the development and management of such infrastructures, and particularly of their space-based components, are indicative of the outgrowth of Earth's ‘technosphere’ and comprise systems and processes ‘through which technological transformations of Earth's surface reach a geological scale’ into outer space.Footnote 50 Functioning (and defunct) satellites are ‘increasingly occupying Earth's orbital space’,Footnote 51 and yet even if we take these as key nodal or emblematic technologies, as we do here, it is precisely as sociotechnical assemblages that we can only fully appreciate orbital infrastructures as made up of terrestrial, atmospheric, and space-based systems, institutions and technologies. Our identification of these infrastructures as ‘orbital’ thus intends to draw attention, following Michael Sheehan, to the functional differentiation of their distinct contributions to ‘space security’ in general. Sheehan distinguishes between the use of outer space for Earth security and defence and its use in protecting Earth from outer space threats.Footnote 52 Earth Observation falls in the former category, the monitoring of NEOs in the latter. A third category concerning the security of space assets themselves is not covered by this article.
‘Looking in’: The planetary technopolitics of Earth observation and security
In keeping with the understanding of critical astropolitics outlined above, Johan Gärdebo et al. argue that ‘the contemporary problem [of a] thickening orbital technosphere’ can be traced not only to the military imperatives of the Cold War but also to the ‘emergence of functionalities where satellite data became a tool for environmental monitoring’.Footnote 53 The latter environmental impetus may be at least as significant as military drivers in expanding the Earth's technosphere, particularly in relation to infrastructures of Earth Observation. Earth Observation (EO) generally denotes practices for ‘gathering of information by remote sensing or in-situ measurements about physical, chemical and biological conditions of the Earth system’.Footnote 54 EO has received relatively little consideration within mainstream security studies, but over two decades ago Karen T. Litfin argued of emergent EO systems and science that a ‘major shift in the way knowledge about our planet is produced is now under way, a shift that is likely to have profound consequences for environmental politics in the coming decades … Among participants and observers alike, the expectations are lofty, verging on the grandiose … Yet th[is] celebratory discourse … serves to mask deeper questions regarding the uses of science and technology in an unequal world.’Footnote 55
As EO competences and functions continue to expand, Litfin's words resonate even more intensely today. Beyond the disciplinary bounds of international security studies, a copious literature advocates and espouses not just the virtues but the necessity of EO in terms of perceived benefits for addressing issues of national, global, and even planetary security. A common pattern in such advocacy is an opening passage that refers either directly or indirectly to issues of ‘planetary (in)security’ and anthropogenic processes of change affecting the Earth's surface, natural resources, and climate, as key imperatives for developing and making use of EO infrastructures to assist in comprehending and addressing these ‘global challenges’. As stated by Giuliani et al., for example, the study of EO is required precisely because ‘Comprehensive, coordinated and sustained observations of the Earth, acquired by satellites, ground, marine-based systems and airborne platforms, are essential for monitoring the state of the planet, increasing understanding of Earth processes, and enhancing predictability of Earth system behaviour’.Footnote 56 Elsewhere, and in terms of the wider promotion of EO services and capacities, the ‘NewSpace’ company Satellite Vu markets itself as aspiring to provide an invaluable ‘service to those who tackle critical global issues’, and notes that:
Our planet is facing enormous global stresses that affect us all. In the last decade, we have produced more plastic than in the entire 20th century and plastic constitutes approximately 90% of all waste floating on the ocean surface … excessive nutrients from sewage outfalls and agricultural runoff have contributed to the number of low oxygen (hypoxic) areas known as dead zones, where most marine life cannot survive, resulting in the collapse of some ecosystems. Piracy, arms smuggling, people trafficking and illegal fishing are conducted by clandestine ships that are currently hard to detect and identify … Other issues related to population, natural resources and conflict are all matters of global concern, yet these occur prevalently in areas that are currently barely monitored by space-based systems.Footnote 57
Founded in 2016 and led by its CEO Anthony Baker, Satellite Vu seeks investment to address what it argues to be key gaps in current EO infrastructures. Baker claims that ‘Using cutting-edge technology, Satellite Vu is looking forward to delivering transformative information that will enable users to see our world in a unique way and in more detail than ever before … By using the incredible technology we have created for the good of the planet, we are providing the facts for our leaders to make the world a better place for future generations.’Footnote 58 Investors in the company will, therefore, help in promoting the global public good: ‘This is more than a simple donation. It is an investment in our Planet.’Footnote 59
‘Lofty and grandiose’ as they are (to borrow Litfin's phrase), the marketing rhetoric and aspirations of Satellite Vu, at least as things stand, far exceed its current capabilities. Satellite Vu has yet to launch a satellite, hence its appeal for public investment via crowdfunding and for ‘seed money [that] won't buy a whole satellite but … will get the ball rolling’.Footnote 60 Yet the promotion of the initiative in many ways condenses, as well as indirectly references, themes and issues in wider discussions of materially more developed Earth Observation (EO) technologies and infrastructures. As alluded to in Satellite Vu's critique of the current insufficiencies and patchy nature of EO infrastructures, there exists already an extensive and complex set of technologies and initiatives devoted to EO. While these have received some attention within security studies as well as in political geography, this pales in comparison to the volume of discussion – and often advocacy – of EO within the natural sciences.Footnote 61 There, related themes to those distilled by the promotion of Satellite Vu tend to recur.Footnote 62 First, that EO technologies and infrastructures are particularly suited to ‘visualising’ and addressing specific kinds of ‘global challenges’, often those associated with anthropogenic processes of change and, in many cases, explicitly identified with the Anthropocene. Second, that existing EO technologies and infrastructures create an improved capacity to address these challenges but are under-used and under-developed. And third, that access to EO technologies and infrastructures and the forms of data they produce remains uneven, accompanied by a general debate that recurs around the extent to which EO data should be made publicly and freely available to all.
The global challenges of Earth observation
As suggested by the prevalence of the themes identified above, elements of a planetary EO infrastructure already exist or are in development. More generally, existing EO technologies and the practical forms of data, knowledge, and awareness they enable are increasingly considered essential to understanding and addressing a plethora of ‘global challenges’. Discussions of EO often focus on very specific aspects of particular EO technologies, processes, or technical issues, beginning from the level of ‘global challenge(s)’ before delving into the minutiae of specialised fields of knowledge and expertise. These include: the monitoring and management of the Earth's climate, biodiversity, and ecosystems;Footnote 63 humanitarian and disaster response via enhanced capabilities for ‘rapid mapping’;Footnote 64 and mapping of deforestationFootnote 65and the scope and scale of ‘bare ground gain’, defined as ‘complete land conversion from vegetative cover to non-vegetative cover’.Footnote 66
Similarly and more comprehensively, Noel Gorelick et al., employees of Google and hence invested proponents, celebrate the powers afforded by ‘Google Earth Engine’ as a form of ‘Planetary-scale geospatial analysis for everyone’ that potentially allows us to visualise a multitude of challenges to an unprecedented degree.Footnote 67 They proselytise that the Engine – a cloud-based platform for visualisation of geospatial datasets, including a public data archive of satellite imagery and historical earth images going back more than forty yearsFootnote 68 – ‘brings Google's massive computational capabilities to bear on a variety of high-impact societal issues including deforestation, drought, disaster, disease, food security, water management, climate monitoring, and environmental protection’.Footnote 69 In short, EO technologies and their corresponding infrastructural capacities are promoted as affording new and improved ways by which to visualise, in the form of satellite imagery in particular, the kinds of global challenges noted above. They also offer enhanced information in the form of ‘geospatial big data’, through which the precise nature of these challenges can be better understood and addressed.Footnote 70 As a consequence of the capacities of EO orbital infrastructures to provide both imagery and data, it is sometimes even claimed that EO is radically altering our sense of the planet itself and the place of humans on it. Akimisa Sumi, for example, claims that ‘Earth observation satellites have opened all of our eyes and, in the process, made us acutely aware of the importance of our planet's environment … Earth observations also provide intangible and philosophical benefits. Their views remind us that we are all global citizens of planet Earth, living together in a fragile ecosystem that requires our utmost care and respect, urging international peace and cooperation.’Footnote 71
And yet, as intimated by Litfin's (1997) concerns noted above, and in more recent scholarship on ‘the politics of globality’,Footnote 72 there is not necessarily a straight line running from technologies of Earth Observation to ‘mutual understanding’, conceptions of ‘global citizenship’ or, indeed, agreed understandings of planetary insecurities. As Paul Edwards succinctly puts it, ‘globalities’ – that is, plural understandings of the global – ‘turn out to be a tangled set of messy, contradictory, often failed or incomplete projects that look very different depending on who you are and where you stand … most “global” things – the economy, international law, common futures, the Framework Convention on Climate Change – are in fact lumpy, disjointed, full of holes and dropouts, much more network-y than spherical’.Footnote 73 Rather than constituting a seamless means of ‘looking in’ on, observing, and acting upon ‘global challenges’ facing the planet, EO infrastructures and practices provide a further and particularly apposite illustration of Edwards’ point. Even the more celebratory accounts of EO often allude to the technological gaps, systemic incompleteness, and uneven institutionalisation of EO infrastructure such that it may not even be meaningful to speak of ‘EO infrastructure’ in the singular. The existence of initiatives such as the ‘Group on Earth Observations’ (GEO) and its ‘Global Earth Observation System of Systems’ (GEOSS) in and of itself evidences a perceived need to develop ‘a set of coordinated, independent Earth observation, information and processing systems that interact and provide access to diverse information for a broad range of users in both public and private sectors’.Footnote 74 Current forms of space-based EO technologies and systems are, as GEO's drive towards improved coordination and integration indicates, multiple and variegated in nature and type. This includes, but is not limited to organisations and initiatives such as: NASA, including Landsat, plus multiple ‘Earth Observation Data’ initiatives including Earth Science Data, LANCE (Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS), NASA Worldview, NASA Earth Observatory, and specific systems such as ICESat-2;Footnote 75 the EU Copernicus/European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel programme; Japan's GOSAT project for monitoring greenhouse gases from space;Footnote 76 and private-corporate initiatives, such as the aforementioned Google Earth Engine, GEOSS, and others like DigitalGlobe.Footnote 77
Back down to Earth: EO governance gaps and glitches
Groups like the ‘International Advisory Board Workshop on Assessing the Impact of Satellite Earth Observation on Society and Policy’ have pointedly noted that ‘Earth observations should be regarded as critical societal infrastructure’,Footnote 78 hence endorsing the general valorisation of EO in this respect and advocating for its greater coordination and integration within unified structures of governance and regulation. EO, they argue, is too important to the functioning of modern life to allow the situation to be otherwise. But as the history of EO has repeatedly shown,Footnote 79 design and implementation decisions have always been subject to competing interests and corporate desires that have led to a range of fractured, complex, and divergent initiatives and systems. Implicit within advocacy of EO is the strong sense that the very capacity to ‘observe’ the Earth as a whole should, in turn, correspond with and generate a single system of EO governance. However, although they may at times couch the virtues of specific applications of EO within broader narratives of ‘global challenges’, Anthropocene imperatives and the virtues of planetary scale perspective, scientists and academics working with forms of EO systems and data are often less wide-eyed about the extent to which EO technologies in practice lend themselves to integration of systems and perspectives. Matthew Hansen et al., for example, in their widely-cited work on deforestation, note that ‘International policy initiatives, such as the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) program … often lack the institutional investment and scientific capacity to begin implementation of a program that can make use of the global observational record; in other words, the policy is far ahead of operational capabilities.’Footnote 80
The political, contested, and ‘messy’ (to quote Edwards) nature of EO orbital infrastructures is in many ways best exemplified by reference to ongoing and contentious debates surrounding the issue of access to EO technologies and the data they produce. Characterisations such as that noted from the International Advisory Board Workshop above often refer in somewhat anodyne terms to the potential benefits of EO to ‘all stakeholders and end users’, and hence the rationale not just for EO itself but for coordination of institutions and systems at a global level. Access to (data produced by) EO technologies and infrastructures remains uneven, however, and there is a general debate surrounding EO as to the extent to which EO data should be made publicly and freely available.Footnote 81 The general consensus among authors and analysts is that EO data should be, but this almost always comes with caveats about the complexities of what ‘public’ and ‘free’ might entail in this context and the potential limits to both.Footnote 82 In addition, corresponding practical issues about accessibility arise, with the obvious precondition for the use of, for example, cloud-based EO datasets being Internet access as well as requisite forms of computer hardware and software. ‘In passing’, Ray Harris and Ingo Baumann note, in their otherwise detailed discussion of EO and open data policies, ‘some countries in the less economically developed world do not yet have ubiquitous internet at low cost, so … the concept of open Earth observation data over the internet is not always valid.’Footnote 83
That characterisation simultaneously highlights and belies (in its brevity) the complex and unequal political economy of EO. It is not simply that there are complex constellations of ‘public’ and ‘private’ actors and interests within the ‘global’ assemblage of contemporary EO. As has been addressed in forensic detail by Mariel Borowitz, the accompanying rhetoric of ‘global challenges’ and ‘planetary perspective’ that surrounds EO systems and initiatives is rendered even more complicated once it is recognised that access to the data they produce is often subject to multiple ‘exceptions’.Footnote 84 As the term suggests, the nature of these exceptions varies, with some forms of EO data restrictions arising from international law, others from data protection laws, commercial laws and imperatives, or privacy regulations.Footnote 85 Commonly, foreign policy and national security imperatives also lead to authorised exceptions on and restrictions to EO data. Thus, for example, does the European Commission reserve the right to ‘restrict the dissemination’ of data and information from the Copernicus Earth Observation programme (the European Union's flagship EO initiative for environmental monitoring) where such dissemination is deemed to present ‘an unacceptable degree of risk to the security interests of the Union or its Member States’.Footnote 86 In cases such as this, environmental and national security imperatives for EO become less clearly distinct.
Different kinds of ‘security’ rationales are thus operative in and striate the global politics of contemporary EO as a form of orbital infrastructure, as do contending political and profit-seeking agendas.Footnote 87 While the surrounding discourse most often tends to ‘celebrate’ EO technologies and data as conducive to clarifying, understanding, and addressing planetary problems and ‘global challenges’ as a matter of urgency, a more fine-grained and critical eye on the politics of EO suggests a more complicated ‘picture’ in which contending and less benign logics of security and (geo)surveillance are at play. On this reading, while EO might well be argued to be central to contemporary discourses of ‘planetary (in)security’, not least those associated with the onset of the Anthropocene, neither the technological forms that EO takes nor the types of ‘spatial knowledge production’Footnote 88 they sustain can be taken as ‘post-political’.Footnote 89 In fact, the opposite may be the case. EO might instead more accurately be characterised as constituting an inherently (techno)political example of contending visions of security: a form of orbital infrastructure that is variously conceived of by key ‘stakeholders’ as potentially promoting and protecting corporate interests as much as global public goods; as allowing for enhanced border monitoring as much as envisioning a shared planetary space; and as preserving the status of the most technologically capable to survey the planet, rather than necessarily distributing the responsibility for and ability to respond to ‘global challenges’.
‘Looking out’: The planetary technopolitics of near-Earth objects and security
EO technologies’ promise of planetary oneness is fractured once the political economy of orbital infrastructures is explored and the competing claims to planetary security are shown to (re)produce forms of inequality and insecurity. Moreover, the perspectival flattening of the Earth's surface via the verticality of observation may mask the heterogeneity of the Earth object itself, obscuring the operations of power as much as it purports to identify and address issues of planetary concern. When we look outwards from Earth, structures and objects also appear across a single plane of vision. The early modern application of reason and optical technologies showed this to be illusory and we now perceive the vast depth and texture of the universe beyond the Earth. ‘Looking out’ from the Earth requires shifting from an areal apprehension of our planet from orbit to a volumetric appreciation of cosmic spatiality.Footnote 90 Here too the theme of governing planetary security comes into view. Concerns with anthropogenic threats to humankind and ‘extinction events’ have been accompanied in recent decades by growing comprehension of extraterrestrial hazards emanating from these outer space volumes. This includes Near Earth Objects (NEOs), solar system bodies whose orbits bring them into possible collision with Earth and with orbital assets.
Most NEOs burn up in the atmosphere without causing damage to life or property, or are too small to constitute a threat. Larger objects may ablate insufficiently in the upper atmosphere and either hit Earth at high velocity or explode as low-altitude airbursts, as famously occurred over eastern Siberia in 1908 and over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013.Footnote 91 The former event levelled over 2,000 square kilometres of forest; the latter, a mere 20 metres in diameter, caused 1,500 injuries and property damage across hundreds of square kilometres. At the other end of the scale, and attested by the geological record, the Chicxulub impact, 66 million years ago in what is now Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, was caused by a large asteroid, 10–15 kilometres in diameter. It is implicated in the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction event that eliminated three-quarters of all species, including most dinosaurs.Footnote 92 Were a similar event to happen today, humanity might be at risk, if not from the immediate impact then from subsequent climate change and environmental degradation.Footnote 93 Extinction-scale events are exceptionally rare, but ‘civilisation-destroying’ impacts – one to two kilometres in diameter, one million megaton-equivalent – may occur every 100,000 years.Footnote 94 More common (10–100,000 years) are impacts by smaller NEOs up to 500 metres in diameter, which would have substantial regional implications, especially from earthquakes, firestorms and tsunamis.Footnote 95A large NEO collision with Earth would be hugely energetic and cause great harm to natural and human systems. The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs consequently identifies such NEOs as ‘potentially catastrophic threats to our planet’.Footnote 96
IR scholars have rarely explored the articulation of NEOs with planetary security, or examined the technopolitics of the orbital infrastructures developed to identify, monitor, and mitigate NEOs. Sheehan has identified the general threat to human security from outer space phenomena, while noting the potentially problematic securitisation of natural phenomena.Footnote 97 He argues, however, that securitisation of dangers originating from the ‘space environment’ itself is warranted, due to the existential risk they pose.Footnote 98 Deudney observes that NEO collision events might help foster a sense of ‘Earth security’ or ‘planetary security’, particularly in the face of a ‘globally catastrophic’ collision.Footnote 99 Deudney's argument contrasts with those promoting outer space regimes that prioritise national military and commercial interests, such as Dolman's Astropolitik.Footnote 100 Instead, he adopts a more obviously liberal astropolitical stance by proposing that the temporal and existential urgency stimulated by the prospect of a disastrous collision will require a global sense of communality hitherto lacking in global politics.Footnote 101 Writing in 2003, Deudney also pointed to emergent institutional arrangements and technoscientific infrastructures that recognised the NEO threat and aimed to understand and mitigate it.Footnote 102 The following discussion extends aspects of this foundational IR work on NEOs by addressing NEO detection, monitoring and mitigation infrastructures and how they articulate with and (re)produce notions of planetary security and insecurity.
NEOs and Space Situational Awareness
Modern science has revealed past NEO collisions such as Chicxulub and enabled the recording and analysis of contemporary events like Chelyabinsk and many less visible incidents. It has further catalysed an understanding that NEOs should be regarded as a valid object of anticipatory security on the planetary level. Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, for instance, submit that NEOs might qualify as a ‘universal physical threat’ against ‘[a]ll states, and all nations, and all faiths, and all people’.Footnote 103 James Clay Moltz states more emphatically still that managing the NEO risk ‘qualifies as one of the most common interests among all countries on Earth’.Footnote 104 NEO science and policy has therefore shifted from mere observation and retrospective analysis into more proactive modes of detection, monitoring, prediction, and mitigation. These recognise both the potential global impact of NEOs and the need to develop effective NEO infrastructures on a planetary scale.
Through practices of Space Situational Awareness (SSA), orbital infrastructures play key roles in ‘looking out’ into outer space volumes for threats to human life and property, including from NEOs. At its most abstract, SSA is ‘the ability to know what is happening in space’.Footnote 105 More concretely, it is a mode of hazard detection concerned with threats from orbital debris, space weather and NEOs. Orbital debris (‘space junk’) consists of manmade objects derived from failed or defunct satellites, spacecraft and associated equipment, which have yet to fall back to Earth. The potential for fast-moving debris to damage spacecraft is well established, as is the possibility that impact events could cascade out of control (‘Kessler Syndrome’), thereby rendering volumes of near-Earth space unusable. Significant attention is paid to the identification, cataloguing, monitoring, avoidance and, potentially, removal of orbital debris.Footnote 106 Space weather is less amenable to prediction and mitigation, as it consists in the effects on terrestrial and space-based systems of solar – and, potentially, cosmic – radiation, the causes of which are wholly outside human control.Footnote 107
All three SSA fields are associated with extensive terrestrial and orbital arrays of detection, monitoring, and early-warning technologies, in both civilian and military-intelligence domains, which in practice often overlap and reinforce one another.Footnote 108 Some, like the US military's Space Surveillance Network (SSN), are rooted in post-Second World War superpower competition.Footnote 109 Others are more recent but also identify with terrestrial political entities, like the European Space Agency's (ESA) Space Situational Awareness Programme.Footnote 110 These assemblages of Earth- and space-based infrastructures are deemed essential to a host of other dependent activities. The European Union, for instance, has designated these services and their orbital assets critical infrastructures and objects of anticipatory security in and of themselves. SSA can therefore be considered within wider frameworks of critical infrastructure protection and resilience.Footnote 111 Nor is SSA restricted to state actors and agencies, as commercial and academic entities compete to provide novel applications in orbital space, particularly in the field of orbital debris mitigation.Footnote 112
NEOs and orbital infrastructures
In the long term, SSA technologies may become ‘a precondition of our capability to access space on acceptable security/safety terms and to conduct operational activities’.Footnote 113 This illustrates the priorities of NEO infrastructure activities: to determine the orbital and material characteristics of such objects and to assure their continued monitoring. They also aim to develop mitigation strategies should they be required. A thick matrix of national and international initiatives has arisen, involving state, private, hybrid actors and, through organisations like the B612 Foundation and the Spaceguard Foundation, the third sector. The most developed national programme is in the United States, where NEO risk is articulated in the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan. Footnote 114 NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) in Washington, DC is the day-to-day point of contact for many aspects of US NEO risk management.Footnote 115 It collates data from the Space Situational Awareness components of the US Air Force and from NASA's own NEO Observations Program, which includes groups like the Minor Planet Center, responsible for the formal designation of minor solar system bodies, and the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.Footnote 116 Should a Potentially Hazardous Object be discovered, the PDCO would coordinate communications to government, media and the public and help formulate response plans within the broader framework of national and international disaster preparation and recovery.
The European Space Agency performs similar functions for its 22 member states and partner organisations through its ‘Risky Asteroids’ workstream.Footnote 117 It discovers and tracks NEOs, predicts and warns of Potentially Hazardous Objects and, like the PDCO, is involved with the development of NEO mitigation technologies. Much of the NEO data flowing into this SSA-NEO system comes via the Minor Planet Center in the US, which collates data from international astronomical partners, including amateur volunteers. These are further processed by the NEO Coordination Centre in Italy, which calculates NEO orbits and risk profiles. If Potentially Hazardous Objects are identified, SSA-NEO advises on risk mitigation and communication, as the PDCO does in the United States. SSA-NEO is in the process of being upgraded to a fully-fledged ESA NEO capability, including the construction of its own ground-based survey and early-warning Near Earth Object Survey Telescope (NEOSTEL) system, also known as Flyeye. As the name suggests, these telescopes mimic insects’ compound eyes, using multiple lenses that expand the field of view available for scanning the night sky for NEOs. ESA hopes that they will be able to detect any NEO above forty metres in diameter at least three weeks prior to an Earth impact.Footnote 118 The first NEOSTEL installation is due to become operational in Sicily in 2020, with a further three sites planned, at least one of which will be in the southern hemisphere.
NASA and ESA are, along with national space agencies and individual observatories, members of the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), which further coordinates NEO observation and reporting. Members are encouraged to share ‘survey telescope operations; critical follow-up observations; orbit computation and hazard analysis; observations to characterise specific NEOs; data distribution, processing, and/or archiving; or other analysis and infrastructure contributions’.Footnote 119 This clarifies once more that orbital infrastructures are complex assemblages of ground- and space-based assets. Additionally, such arrangements should be understood not merely through the lens of physical artefacts but also with attention to the knowledge and informational systems in which they are embedded. Central to IAWN's work is the development of communications policy and protocols, should an NEO be identified as sufficiently hazardous to require international public and political engagement.Footnote 120 At present, a NEO event is very unlikely – asteroid 2009 FD has a 1 in 710 chance of hitting Earth in March 2185, which translates as a 99.86 per cent chance of missing EarthFootnote 121 – but the preparatory logic is clear. NEO scenarios are also ‘war-gamed’ at the biennial International Academy of Astronautics Planetary Defense Conference and other events, to help test and refine these processes.Footnote 122
IAWN was established in 2014 as a result of recommendations endorsed by the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, part of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs. The UN Office works closely with IAWN and another organisation established by the same process, the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SPMAG). SPMAG's remit is to plan and promote international collaboration on ‘space mission response activities’, including NEO deflection.Footnote 123 It would be SPMAG's task to coordinate any international mission to prevent an imminent NEO strike, but it represents the tip of a global iceberg of counter-NEO research and development. Many suggested technologies are speculative, like ion beam shepherds, solar ablation, and gravity tractors.Footnote 124 Others like kinetic impactors merely require suitable spacecraft to intercept an NEO with sufficient energy to nudge it from its path. In the case of nuclear deflection methods, the debate is less about the feasibility of delivering an explosive device than its effectiveness once there, as well as the ethics and law of nuclearising spaceflight.Footnote 125 National space programmes have demonstrated since 1996 (NEAR-Shoemaker) that close rendezvous with distant NEOs is possible; NASA's OSIRIS-Rex and Japan's Hayabusa-2 missions are recent examples.Footnote 126 In October 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will test the kinetic impaction technique on the smaller ‘moonlet’ of the binary NEO Didymos.Footnote 127 This will be the first test of any technique to change the motion of an NEO in space.
NEO infrastructures and planetary in/security
The initiatives noted above do not exhaust the organisational, institutional, and technical frameworks for monitoring and mitigating NEOs, but they do provide an indicative sense of the complex technopolitics of NEO orbital infrastructures. As a putative form of global governance, the question remains as to who is being served by these arrangements, above and beyond the scientific communities that comprise the bulk of their membership. Recalling Deudney's suggestion that NEOs might help engender a sense of ‘planetary security’, how plausible is this, particularly should an NEO impact be imminent? In the 2017 IAA Planetary Defense Conference simulation exercise, the predicted ‘corridor of impact locations’ passed through ‘Japan, China, Kazakhstan, Russia, northern Europe, and the British Isles’, and into the North Atlantic.Footnote 128 What geopolitical considerations might creep in – or opportunities arise – if national interests are prioritised above those of the collective? Each of the countries and regions in this scenario poses different political questions for major actors. Would the US consider Kazakhstan, a leading provider of orbital launch capability, ‘more important’ than Russia and thereby more worthy of collaboration? Might China calculate risk differently if Xinjiang were a more likely impact zone than Beijing or Shanghai? What levels of likely human casualties and climatic disruption are deemed ‘acceptable’ or otherwise across a range of imaginable scenarios? We can perhaps surmise that were an NEO impact thought to be species-threatening, a truly planetary response would be forthcoming, but what of events below that threshold? Who will – or, indeed, who can – pay for hugely expensive NEO-mitigation missions, particularly if time is short? As a participant in the 2019 IAA exercise observed, any such decision ‘obviously carries a lot of geopolitical concerns, a lot of concerns of power’.Footnote 129
To illustrate this further, NEO infrastructures are dominated by space-faring nations, including at the United Nations level. As established elsewhere, the US exerts a dominant, perhaps even hegemonic, influence upon space security and space affairs.Footnote 130 Moreover, groups like IAWN are comprised of self-selected nations with the scientific and space-technical capacity to contribute; no African or Middle Eastern countries, or Asian ones outside China and South Korea, are signatories to the IAWN Statement of Intent. This does not prevent non-IAWN countries from becoming involved in NEO activities or other space-related initiatives, nor does it diminish their contributions to UN space cooperation activities and the development of space law, but it does reflect long-standing disparities in national capacities, borne principally of colonial legacies across the Global South.Footnote 131 It also reminds us that many of the US activities, in particular, are closely bound up with military and intelligence spheres, an historical artefact of the Cold War and US space administration, perhaps, but one that still registers in fields like SSA, in which orbital infrastructures are effectively dual-use military and civilian. In the specific field of NEO mitigation, US researchers and military scientists have long collaborated, despite concerns about the potential weaponisation of space.Footnote 132
The vision of planetary security proposed by Deudney and others, and channelled through multilateral counter-NEO efforts at the UN and in scientific research, is therefore disturbed by terrestrial geopolitics and pursuit of national interests. In the absence of an imminent NEO threat, the issue remains primarily political, rather than a security issue per se. As Buzan and Wæver observe, attempts ‘to construct physical threat universalisms [like climate change and NEOs] in a macrosecuritisation of the planetary environment’ have tended to fail as securitising moves.Footnote 133 This is because each polity or identity-group is its own referent object, rather than humanity as a whole. To shift NEOs from politics to security may require, as Deudney suggests, that ‘a collision is anticipated authoritatively, or a highly visible (and perhaps destructive collision occurs’.Footnote 134 In contrast to the ‘slow violence’ of environmental change,Footnote 135 an imminent NEO strike might encourage cooperation in ways that climate change has not. This is not necessarily an argument for securitising NEOs; nor does it ignore the risks inherent in the securitisation of space, in general, which tends to exacerbate insecurities.Footnote 136 But it does suggest that global initiatives may still be subordinate to national interests and geopolitics, and fall short of being truly planetary in the sense intended here.
Conclusion
More than three decades ago in his Space: The High Frontier in Perspective, Daniel Deudney exhorted that ‘It is time to abandon the view that space is some remote frontier where survival of the fittest is the law.’Footnote 137 Instead of focusing on space either as an extraordinary realm or solely as a form of strategic ‘high ground’ to be dominated militarily, our considerations, Deudney argued, needed to better incorporate and appreciate the ways in which ‘near space’ had by that point already become ‘an extension of the human world’. As well as affecting everyday life, satellite infrastructures had come to underpin what he called ‘earthkeeping tasks’: practices aimed at understanding and preserving the planet's habitability. Our specific focus on EO and NEOs further highlights orbital infrastructures and their roles within the complex politics of informing and performing such ‘earthkeeping tasks’ in a context of growing concerns with planetary insecurities, particularly the climatic and ecological crises of the Anthropocene. We have sought to draw attention to the ways in which these orbital infrastructures help to take ‘territory beyond terra’Footnote 138 by extending world politics into extra-planetary space via technological means.
Considered in this way, Deudney suggested, ‘Near space … just like the earth, is the site of ideological competitions, warped spending priorities, resource disputes and relative indifference to the interests of future generations.’Footnote 139 Yet the current context also suggests both added degrees of complexity and a compelling case to study the specificities of the technopolitics of orbital infrastructures, as we have tried to show in relation to EO and NEO. Approaching these orbital infrastructures as Large Technical Systems, but with specific attention to their technopolitics, counters the persistent sense that outer space is still or should remain a ‘remote frontier’ within international security studies. These infrastructures are subject to vagaries of commercial, geopolitical, and institutional contentions among a plurality of actors and interests. Drawing attention to those aspects reduces to some degree the sense of ‘remoteness’ of orbital infrastructures from more familiar debates on global governance and within the broader study of the international. More distinctively, those contentions have been and are increasingly bound up with differing visions and initiatives for the provision of security on a planetary scale and with a view to the future habitability of the Earth, visions and initiatives in which conceptions of national, international, global, and planetary (in)security are imbricated in complex and often contending ways. While terms such as ‘global’ and ‘planetary’ are commonly invoked with reference to both EO and NEO as seemingly self-evident scalar concepts – often as if universal understanding of, and consensus on, such concepts arise simply as an outcome of technological capacities to ‘look in’ on and ‘look out’ from the Earth – a more fine-grained analysis, as undertaken above, forces greater consideration of their more ‘messy’, ‘disjointed’, and political aspects. What planetary security entails, the ways in which it is being threatened, whether and to what extent it is compatible with national, international, and global scales of understanding, and how various forms of technological and institutional infrastructures might be developed and employed to address these threats is thus itself, we would argue, a key aspect of the technopolitics of orbital infrastructures.
Taking a technopolitical perspective thus allows us not only to draw attention to the ‘large’ nature of these ‘technical systems’Footnote 140 but to analyse and politicise the ways in which these orbital infrastructures play a crucial role in defining and seeking to address forms of insecurity at the ‘largest’ possible planetary scale: whether that be in uses of Earth Observation systems to monitor our planet's condition, or in proposals to provide and govern infrastructures of planetary defence against Near-Earth Objects. Understood in these terms, these infrastructures for ‘earthkeeping’ provide not only instruments for ‘world-viewing’ – whether looking ‘in’ on the Earth or ‘out’ into the cosmos – but are always already entangled with particular forms of ‘world-making’.Footnote 141 They help to constitute and inform multiple conceptions of the conditions within which politics takes place, and the terms in which planetary security is being understood.
Identifying and analysing the technopolitics of orbital infrastructures is consequently relevant to contemporary considerations of the international and is of wider practical and normative significance; and, we hope, opens up scope for further avenues of research and critical engagement. Orbital infrastructures have existed at the ‘outer limits’ of international relations and security for several decades. However, as concerns with forms of planetary insecurity become central public and academic concerns, their salience is growing. Indeed, their importance is only likely to increase if current dynamics and trends continue, as extant infrastructures grow in scale and scope, and as new functionality is shifted into orbit. What novel forms of planetary insecurity will therefore be engendered and how will this affect the boundaries of the Earth as a planetary system? Both of the cases considered in this article point towards a tendency for orbital infrastructures to reproduce existing fault lines and power imbalances of international security – leaving unclear the extent to which such infrastructures provide a sustainable basis for understanding and addressing human, environmental, and other security threats in the context of the Anthropocene. Questions remain over how the authority to define and act upon such threats should be configured when security politics is ‘scaled up’ to the planetary. In this sense, we would suggest, critical considerations of orbital infrastructures should be brought in from the margins of international security and developed as an area of research. They have much to tell us about how we conceive and address the limits of planetary (in)security.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the organisers of and participants in the ‘Astropolitics Collective’ workshop, held at King's College London on 4 May 2017, from which conversations this article was subsequently developed. Thanks also to Rens van Munster for providing feedback on an earlier version, and to the anonymous EJIS reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. Any errors or omissions that remain are, of course, entirely our own.
Dr Columba Peoples is Senior Lecturer in International Relations, in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol. Author's email: c.peoples@bristol.ac.uk
Dr Tim Stevens is Senior Lecturer in Global Security and Head of the Cyber Security Research Group, Department of War Studies, King's College London. Author's email: tim.stevens@kcl.ac.uk
