FutureSpace Talk 11 | Enrike van Wingerden and Darshan Vigneswaran |

How are People Governed in Outer Space? Using Astronaut Memoirs to Describe Political Order

Abstract

When people go to outer space they encounter a unique political order that is separate to, and different from, political order(s) on earth. As plans to deorbit the ISS gather pace, many actors are planning new forms of crewed exploration, including orbital labs, lunar habitation modules, and missions to Mars. These new crewed missions raise questions about governance, power and authority in outer space—in particular, how will these crews and ‘settlements’ be governed? While space law and analog environments have been previously used to help envisage how astronauts might be governed in the future, they have not fully addressed how crews have been governed in the past. Our research corrects this problem by studying astronauts memoirs for their accounts of the political dimensions of space travel. Astronaut memoirs are a rich source of historical data which extensively document relationships of power and authority established by crewed missions. Their analysis generates new findings about outer space politics, with important implications for actors interested in pursuing new exploration goals. This talk thereby offers a first rich description of the nature and construction of a unique and independent – albeit still embryonic – political order in outer space.

Bio

Enrike van Wingerden is a lecturer and researcher at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and the University of Amsterdam. Her work connects environmental politics, colonial histories, and the politics of science and technology. Darshan Vigneswaran is an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Most of his previous work is on the politics of migration, but he has been recently been shifting focus to study the movement of humans to outer space environments. 
 
Darshan and Enrike are partners on the Outer Space Politics project. This team has recently published an article on the ‘Terrestrial Trap’ which seeks to explain what could be gained if Political Science and International Relations scholars began to pay more attention to outer space. They have also built the Crewed Exploration and Settlements Database, which lists all of the actors and projects currently working on crewed missions to outer space environments, and the Astronaut Memoirs and Autobiographies database.