Research Training Group World Politics RTG 2225

My dissertation is concerned with the impact of human spaceflight ambitions beyond the Earth's orbital space on world (space) politics. The relevance of space for social organization is increasing. A wide range of economic, ecological, social, and political expectations are linked to current space activities, which are based on long-term imaginaries of the relationship between humans and space. While the general public is mostly informed about highly publicized and spectacular scientific missions and achievements, international tensions, antagonisms, and highly visible NewSpace enterprises, the politics and social realities of space are much more complex and diverse. The human reach into space has been sparsely integrated into accounts of world politics, or treated in a fragmented way and as an external, material variable. 

I seek to challenge this literature in my thesis by integrating the unique 'externality' and resulting uncertainty of space, and its emerging potential for radical imagination, into conceptions of world politics, while paying attention to the entanglement of world politics with science and technology. More fundamentally, the research is concerned with the politics of expanding human settlement into non-Earth space, with a particular focus on the implications for relations between political communities on Earth. Therefore, I will focus on human spaceflight beyond Earth's orbit, such as the new lunar exploration programs. I am interested in who participates in this discourse (and who does not), and what norms and values are practiced. My research aims to uncover the meanings attributed to these spaces in world space politics, and how these meanings affect relations between political communities on Earth. I will approach those intersubjectivities through the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries and how they are inscribed and performed in relevant current space programs.

My research will be primarily based on documentary analysis and particpant observation of relevant events in world space politics like the sessions of the UN Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and the International Astronautical Congress. A special focus will be on the analysis of the technical designs of specific crewed deep space missions.