It's not rocket science: Humanities, arts and social sciences in the space sector

Abstract

The space industry is traditionally associated with STEM disciplines, but humanities, arts and social sciences have plenty to offer to the modern space sector. Space accounting scholars Dr Basil Tucker and Dr Hank Alewine investigate the potential of HASS to address the unique and unprecedented challenges of the New Space Age.

The art of living together: space mining ecosystem, sustainability and accountability

“…As Tucker and Alewine (2022b) explain, a firm's stakeholders in space ecosystems have their own agendas and views and therefore managing their expectations is critical for accountability in outer space. Our ecosystem framework can help not only identify key stakeholders and the linkages with the stakeholders but also understand the stakeholders' views and agendas.…”

“…Therefore, being accountable for a firm's actions and dealing with sustainability issues require collaborations between the firm and its stakeholders and the co-development of evaluation measures and standards, target goals and key performance indicators (KPI). As Tucker and Alewine (2022b, p. 48) precisely describe, a space firm needs to manage its stakeholders' expectations and perspectives in setting goals and KPIs as well as solving problems: “you could say the problems facing us in travelling to Mars fit the definition of wicked problems.… stakeholders in the area of space are not passive observers – they have agendas and need to be convinced that things are running to their view of what the plan should look like. These expectations need to be managed.”…”

“…Alewine (2020) points out that as far as space accounting is concerned, accounting research is in its infancy, with numerous unanswered questions. For space accounting research to grow, Tucker and Alewine (2022b) explained that research needs to take an interdisciplinary approach from fields like STEM, law, psychology, political science, strategy and innovation, among others, to advance accounting research in the space economy. For example, Tucker et al (2021), one of the few accounting studies that examined space as a context, used the Apollo 13 mission as a case to study management control and innovation.…”

“…Building upon Alewine (2020) and Tucker and Alewine (2022a, b), this paper proposes an “ecosystem” framework to advance our knowledge on space sustainability and accountability. The purpose of the paper is to develop a theoretical framework that helps define a context in the space ecosystem and the boundaries of that context to analyze a space firm's actions.…”

To boldly go where no one has gone before: a critical realist approach to space accounting

“…According to Tucker and Alewine (2022a), addressing many of the complex issues related to accounting for space requires accounting scholars to collaborate with experts from a broad range of scientific disciplines and build robust platforms for knowledge exchange across disciplines. However, in a related study of the possibilities of inter-disciplinarity in space research (Tucker and Alewine, 2022b), they cautioned that such knowledge exchange may be hampered by a lack of effective communication between especially natural and social scientists and the perceived inferiority of the latter in a field that has historically been dominated by the natural sciences. Such barriers may be exacerbated by differences in philosophical outlook across the natural and social sciences that have perhaps been cemented by their long-standing separation.…”