Space infrastructure reproduces colonial violence

Reaching outer space requires Earthly infrastructure, which means that space launches have concrete footprints that change according to developments in launch technologies. The placement of outer space related infrastructure on Earth is a question of environmental (in)justice. Which sites are chosen, who is expropriated, and which environments are impacted is subject to strategic geopolitical calculations, which, more often than not, employ classical geopolitical reasoning (Hickman and Dolman 2002; Ingold 2006; Meira Filho, Guimarães Fortes, and Barcelos 2014; NDRI 2006). Launch sites are tightly controlled to reduce the risk of interference or failure, therefore situating launch sites in remote areas is often explained in terms of safety and security (Zapata and Murray 2008). No doubt this is important: rockets are composed of many tonnes of material and combustive fuel, so they must be launched in places where damage from routine as well as potentially catastrophic explosions can be contained. For humans to reach “the final frontier,” they must first find a frontier space on Earth that can be made into an empty space in which controlled explosions can be routine. Frontiers are seldom as empty as those aiming to conquer them would claim. Where they are not populated by people, they are filled with other sorts of meanings and life forms (Klinger 2017; Tsing 2005). Potential launch sites and testing ranges deemed by government authorities to be simultaneously remote, safe, and suitable to contain the risks of rocket launch must first be made empty of people, with prior land use regimes or territorial claims pushed beyond designated buffer zones (Gorman 2007; Mitchell 2017). Hence the placement of space infrastructure follows colonial geographies of extraction, sacrifice, and risk (Mitchell 2017; Redfield 2001). As Gorman (2007) put it: “because of their distance from the metropole, these places lend themselves to hosting prisons, detention camps, military installations, nuclear weapons, and nuclear waste. All of these establishments, including rocket ranges, have inspired reactions of protest.” These so-called ‘peripheral’ spaces are nevertheless central to their inhabitants and their neighbors, who question the logic of extraglobal conquest in the face of unresolved Earthly injustices. Consider, for example, the case of the launch site in Alcântara, Brazil, which has been well documented by Araújo and Filho (2006) and Mitchell (2017). Through a close examination of local, national, and international politics, these authors document how the government’s racialized approach to the subsistence communities displaced by space infrastructure deepened structural inequalities. Grassroots opposition to the launch site grew not out of an a priori ideological opposition of poor people to national progress in outer space, as some officials alleged, but rather resulted from the failure to account for the food insecurity generated by state resettlement projects. The resettlement schemes were themselves misinformed by impoverished notions of local livelihoods. Local claims against the deprivations caused by statesponsored space practices have deepened schisms between the military and civilian space programs at the federal government level. Through the lens of classical geopolitics, these structural inequalities scarcely register, with the result that the ‘crawling’ progress of Brazil’s space program is pathologized as poor management practices symptomatic of an inadequately implemented national development vision (Amaral 2010). Critical geopolitics helps deconstruct the nationalist performativity of such endeavors by considering the political and economic value placed on the spectacle of spaceflight (Boczkowska 2017; Macdonald 2008, 2010; Sage 2016). Feminist geopolitics draws our attention to the racialized and gendered dispossession advanced by the state, through the construction of space infrastructure and exercised through access to land. The fact that environmental and public health impacts were only considered by the authorities after years of mobilization by Black social movements, religious communities, and scholars highlights the ways in which inattention to the local in the pursuit of space power perpetuates environmental injustice, which in turn interrupts national plans for space progress. Rocket launches affect local and global environments through the construction of infrastructure, the exposure of local environments to toxic residues, and the dispersal of pollutants in land, air, and sea. Rockets are the only source of direct anthropogenic emissions sources in the stratosphere. Ozone-depleting substances (ODS) such as nitrous oxide, hydrogen chlorine, and aluminum oxide are emitted by rockets, and can destroy 105 ozone molecules before degrading (Voigt et al. 2013). The ozone layer prevents cancer and cataract-causing ultraviolet-b waves from reaching the Earth. As of 2013, rocket launches accounted for less than 1% of ODS emissions. As other ODS are phased out under the Montreal Protocol and the frequency of lower cost space launches increases, the proportion and quantity is likely to increase (Durrieu and Nelson 2013; Ross et al. 2009). GEOPOLITICS 13 Although affluent economies in the northern hemisphere are responsible for most ODS emissions (Polvani 2011; Rousseaux et al. 1999), the geography of exposure disproportionately affects an overall higher population in remote regions and in the southern hemisphere (Norval et al. 2011; Robinson and Erickson 2015; Thompson et al. 2011) because ozone depletion is most serious in regions where high altitude stratospheric clouds are most likely to form: above the polar regions and major mountain ranges (Carslaw et al. 1998; Perlwitz et al. 2008). This is an example of environmental injustice on a global scale, where the global south bears the environmental burden of actions predominately taken in the global north, rocket launches included. In the process, global power relations are reinscribed through the uneven distribution of harm to peripheral and southern bodies, mediated in this case through the redistribution of gases in the stratosphere that increase exposure to solar radiation. Coming closer to Earth, environmental geopolitics of outer space are manifest in the dispersal of particulate matter into ecosystems surrounding active launch sites. This is more than a strictly local environmental concern, because which spaces are subject to the hazards of launch sites involves careful calculations weighing financial cost, state power, and multifarious territorial interests. With each launch, surrounding areas are showered with toxins, heavy metals, and acids over a distance that varies widely with wind, weather, and precipitation patterns at the moment of lift-off.3 The most researched of these pollutants are hydrogen chloride, aluminum oxide, and various aerosolized heavy metals. Release of these pollutants from rocket launches results in localized regional acid rain (Madsen 1981), plant death, fish kills, and failed seed germination of native plants in launch sites (Marion, Black, and Zedler 1989; Schmalzer et al. 1992). These effects, and research on them, are mostly concentrated within one kilometer of the launch site. But they have been recorded several kilometers away under certain weather conditions (Schmalzer et al. 1998). Recent studies on the concentration of trace elements in wildlife in areas near NASA launch activities in Florida, USA, found that more than half of the adults and juvenile alligators had “greater than toxic levels” of trace elements in their liver (Horai et al. 2014). Both the subject, and the vague statement of findings, highlights the lack of research into the impacts on downstream human and non-human communities. In contrast to the precautions taken to protect workers in buildings adjacent to facilities where these technologies are developed (Bolch et al. 1990; Chrostowski, Gan, and Campbell 2010), much less consideration is given to communities within the dynamic pollutant shadow of rocket launches. In Kazakhstan, Russia, and China, researchers have begun examining the effects of the highly toxic liquid propellant, unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine which has been in use since the dawn of the space age. It has noted carcinogenic, mutagenic, convulsant, teratogenic, and embryotoxic effects (Carlsen, Kenesova, and Batyrbekova 2007), and it has been found to cause DNA damage and chromosomal aberrations in rodents living near the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (Kolumbayeva et al. 2014). Despite these known hazards, methods to detect UDMH at the trace concentrations at which toxic effects begin to manifest in humans do not yet exist (Kenessov, Bakaikina, and Ormanbekovna 2015), meaning that there is no knowledge of how this circulates in the environment, bioaccumulates up the food chain, or could potentially be sequestered through soil or plant filtration. The lack of technology or methodology to adequately track the dispersal of hazardous pollutants that have been used for decades in the surrounding environment illustrates another aspect of environmental injustice: the preference on the part of political and economic elites to create spaces of waste rather than allocate adequate resources to maintain safe and non-toxic environments.4 The hyper-local politics of basic livelihood security shape long-term access to outer space and space geopolitics at multiple scales. Attending to the local matters is important, not just because it sheds light on broader geopolitical processes, but because failing to do so leaves the substantive matters of human engagement with outer space entirely overlooked, at best. At worst, ignoring local environmental conditions recasts them as places to be “left behind,” casualties in a Darwinian race to the cosmos in which the poor have no place. Attending to the environmental geopolitics of outer space on Earth shows the co-production of Earth and space. Earthly environments and social relations are remade in our evolving relationship with outer space and reconceived alongside evolving deliberations on the prospects for human survival.