With the advent of the so-called New Space Age, promoted by private actors and driven by market logic innovation, the European space sector meets significant challenges over recent years. This article explores the implications of New Space’s emergence for contemporary societies that increasingly rely on space technologies as critical infrastructures. It does so by analyzing conflicting logics of innovation within the sector arising from a clash of Old Space and New Space cultures and associated role identities. To this end, it combines concepts of institutional culture and role identity from science and technology studies and organization studies. Tracing the identity work performed by members of the European space sector through qualitative interviews, it concludes that new demands of market logic innovation are negotiated within a mode of switching between different sector cultures. It concludes that this mode provides opportunities for the responsible future governance of critical space infrastructures.
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.
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