Article

Environment and Planning D: Society and

The matter of media in outer Space
2015, Vol. 33(5) 889–906
space: Technologies of ! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0263775815604920
epd.sagepub.com

Katarina Damjanov
University of Western Australia, Australia

Abstract
Media technologies are steadily populating outer space – satellites and their debris clutter earth’s
orbital regions, robotic rovers are surveying Mars, exploratory probes are appraising moons,
planets and asteroids in our solar system and further still. Drawing together a range of these
earth-born human-made devices, this paper reframes them as an object of critical inquiry into the
human ‘mediatic’ condition. These technologies occupy outer space as extraterrestrial footprints
of global capitalism, and they provide the vital infrastructure for its ‘high-tech’ pursuit of power,
knowledge and wealth. Yet, their presence in space exerts its own material and social effects,
unsettling strategic attempts to control the productive ambits of life, thus complicating what is at
stake in the purview of biopolitical governance. Extending Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics
into outer space, this paper explores the ways in which human relations with space-based media
apparatus reinforce new approaches to the governance of life and the living, shaping the horizon
of the ‘cosmobiopolitical’ on and beyond the globe.

Keywords
Media technologies, outer space, biopolitics, satellites, space debris, interplanetary Internet

Introduction
The momentum of technological progress has reached a stage in which advanced media
apparatus is not only increasingly surrounding us here on earth, but is also steadily
populating space beyond the globe. Beginning with Sputnik in 1957, thousands of
satellites have been launched into earth’s orbital space to facilitate imaging, mapping,
remote sensing, navigation, communication, surveillance and a range of other mediation
practices. They have been accompanied by nearly a hundred space telescopes deployed for
astronomical observations. Various spacecraft have been directed to flyby and orbit the
celestial bodies in our solar system and monitor planets, moons and asteroids. Four
robotic rovers have successfully surveyed Mars and several landers have made their
explorative descents onto the Moon and Venus. Deep space probes have been dispatched

Corresponding author:
Katarina Damjanov, Faculty of Arts, University of Western Australia, M257, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley 6009, Perth,
Australia.
Email: katarina.damjanov@uwa.edu.au
890 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(5)

out into the Milky Way to appraise its galactic expanses; two Pioneer spacecraft have passed
beyond the borders of our solar system and in 2016 Voyager 2 will follow Voyager 1 and
enter the unknowns of interstellar space. Over the years, many of these devices have ceased
to operate and their remnants now accumulate into deposits of technological waste that
remain in their extraterrestrial wake. However, a myriad other space technologies are
currently being developed such as an Interplanetary Internet, a World Space Observatory
and a Mars Gravity Biosatellite to uphold the media infrastructure and practices that
humans have begun to implement in outer space.
Although they are to be found thousands and millions of kilometres away from the globe,
these earth-born, human-made technologies are intimately tied to the gravities of their
terrestrial origin. They are an integral part of global media capital, inseparable from the
material and social contexts that frame them as technical objects, epistemic registers, indexes
of governance and modes of cultural expression. Thrust into space to follow directives,
conduct exploratory measurements and assessments, collect information and relay it to
their reception nodes, they constitute an extra-planetary limb of the technological
platform that sustains the human pursuit of power, knowledge and wealth. Their design
and construction is an outcome of the substantial investments of military-industrial
complexes in techno-scientific innovation. Their missions are propelled by the ever-
increasing demands for mediation systems and services with which to expedite the
production and circulation of information, images and data that are considered crucial
for securing the interests of the world’s governments, markets and communities. Despite
their remote position, these technologies are closely interlinked with terrestrial space through
the streams of signals that they exchange with their ground control and whose content is
then embedded into the foundations of politics, economy, science, arts and everyday life.
Even when they break up, or are abandoned, they remain cemented into the edifice of
regulative frameworks, administrative procedures and management agendas, forever
bound as property to the states, corporations and organisations on whose behalf they
operate. Their presence in space extends the scale, scope and impact of global media
apparatus out beyond the terrestrial confines of the earth, thus allowing a novel,
‘extraterrestrial’ perspective from which to rethink our mediatic condition.
Media technologies occupy the earth’s exterior as extraterrestrial footprints of global
capitalism and its contemporary ‘high-tech’ grasp over vital material and social processes.
Their presence in space is at once a result and a resource of the technological evolution of
politico-economic regimes grounded in exploitative control of the productive and
reproductive ambits of life – what Michel Foucault introduced in contemporary
intellectual thought as the order of biopolitics. Foucault’s (1990, 2004, 2007, 2008) work
on the genealogy of power over life traced the advancement of its conceptual and operative
framework from the principle of sovereign rule over a territory and subjects into a complex
governmental platform of biopower whose twofold agenda strives to harness the conduct of
human individuals and the life-processes of human populations. While the former, discipline,
prescribes and enforces behavioural standards for maximising individual productivities, the
latter, biopolitics, regulates the biological and social registers of life to strategically increase
the overall productive potential of human living space by seizing, as Foucault (2004: 245)
summarised it, ‘control over relations between the human race. . . and their environment, the
milieu in which they live’. The unfolding of the biopolitical episteme in the era of techno-
centred capitalism subsumed the bounty of ‘life itself’ under the calculative procedures of
informatics, logistics and strategic management – and media, communication and
information technologies have come to play a fundamental role in its current practices.
As works which extended Foucault’s thesis to contemporary techno-logic culture such as
Damjanov 891

Gilles Deleuze’s (1992) ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ and Alexander Galloway’s
(2004) Protocol have demonstrated, these technologies now determine the conditions in
which any human action can occur. Media devices that reside in outer space are
necessarily bound up with the question of biopolitics in its ‘high-tech’ era – what
commenced with Sputnik as a military contest to secure states’ territorial and geopolitical
interests now extends to an extra-territorial edifice of technical media mobilised to fortify
global biopolitical regimes. From satellites sent to orbit the earth and collect and relay data
to global communication networks, spatial positioning and navigation systems, weather and
climate monitoring centres and surveillance grids, to spacecraft dispatched to measure,
evaluate and report on other celestial environments and events, these technologies have
become a decisive constituent of the security apparatus that underpins contemporary
biopolitics.
Today, when space-based media lie at the crux of global mechanisms of control, their
extraterrestrial position requires us to reconsider the scale at which the currents of biopolitics
assume their evolutionary course. The ever-increasing obsessions with advancing mediatic
devices with which to inspect and direct the routes of life, from its molecular minutiae to
the complex ecologies of the living, facilitate a continuous rescaling of the spectrum of the
biopolitical: to govern ‘life itself’ involves, as Eugene Thacker (2009) suggests, encountering
and overcoming a multiplicity of scalar restraints. With the possibility of media technologies
in outer space, aspirations to strategically interfere with, and capitalise upon, life and the
living are presented with a distinct window of opportunity: terrestrial constraints can be
circumvented. While providing the essential means for sustaining biopolitical regimes,
extraterrestrially situated media apparatus expedites both the micro and macro-scale of
their implementation, permitting both their intensive, ubiquitous, terrestrially oriented
assertion, and their potentially unlimited spatial expansion outwards. The extraterrestrial
presence of media technologies thus impose the need to uncover global topologies of power
and governance not only at their planetary level, but also to ‘un-earth’ them within the scale
of their cosmic prospects. I describe this extra-planetary capacity of biopolitical progress
conveyed by human media advances in space as a nascent order of what I call
‘cosmobiopolitcs’. I use the term in an attempt to both affirm its continuity with a
research trajectory established by Foucault, but also to emphasise the radical
transformations engendered by the extraterrestrial. I approach media technologies in
outer space as a symptomatic register of this cosmobiopolitical leap, suggesting that they
not only enable biopolitical gestures to be replicated off-world, but themselves have a
decisive impact upon ways in which ‘life itself’ is conceptualised and subjected to techno-
logic forms of control. Increasingly inflecting the human drive to be more and have more,
they have become critical to the unfolding of biopolitical regimes.
Media technologies that reside in outer space demand site-specific analysis – unlike
terrestrially bound devices, they inhabit what is external to earth. Both as a physical and
as a discursive site, the location of outer space conditions their mediatic capacity to sculpt
human societies. In 1967, the international law declared that outer space was a domain of
global commons, placing it outside territorial and property rights and under international
regimes of governance. Yet, while this legal provision framed outer space as a ‘common
heritage’ of humanity, it remained essentially an inhuman environment; all our encounters
with it are always mediated – from the astronaut suit that keeps the human body alive to the
Hubble Telescope images of faraway galaxies that once existed before the dawn of our time.
Positioned in outer space to overcome its fundamental incompatibility with humans, these
devices perform their primary function of technical media, acting as ‘mediators between man
and nature’ (Simondon, 1980: 1) and domesticating the unforgiving expanses of the
892 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(5)

extraterrestrial as a ‘living milieu’ onto which the human and its vital processes could be
imprinted and subsequently governed. However, except for a few astronauts currently on
roster in the International Space Station, outer space is generally empty of humans, and this
absence brings our biopolitical bonds with media technologies into sharp relief: claiming and
retaining outer space as a part of the human milieu entirely relies upon our ability to create,
manage and control these objects. The biological imperatives of securing the desired modes
of relationship between humans and their milieu necessarily involve governance of objects
(Thacker, 2009), in particular those of a technical kind, which are, as Gilbert Simondon
(1980) and Bernard Stiegler (1998) invite us to consider, historically inseparable from human
life. But in the inhuman milieu of outer space, technologies are no longer only a means, or a
side concern of governance, but its primary and central objects. Supported by an earth-
bound pyramid of elite scientific labour and sophisticated equipment, the human
relationship with these remotely positioned technologies is indicative of the readjustment
of the scope of the biopolitical. It necessitates shifting the governmental focus from living
humans towards inanimate objects and their own life in space, and acknowledging the
complexities produced in this interweaving of the human and the technological.
A distinct stage of our techno-scientific endeavour to exceed our ‘natural’, human and
terrestrial limitations, mediatic exploration of space fuels the vectors of technology and
currents of life beyond the globe, entangling them into relations which might appear
uncannily familiar yet utterly alien to us now. Ongoing media advances in outer space are
a major means for shaping what the 2014 symposium at Parsons New School of Design
invoked as the contours of ‘Post-Planetary Capital’, heralding a host of intersecting
trajectories surrounding ways of thinking at a scale beyond the planetary.1 A critical
focus upon the central role of media technologies appears as a crucial contribution to the
various arcs of speculative inquiry into ‘post-planetary capital’; this is not least because the
operations of these technologies are at the core of all political, scientific, economic and
environmental conceptions of human ways of life outside the planet. Media technologies
not only underwrite the spatial progress of capitalism, its re-scaling of the commons and the
transmutation of its biopolitical rationalities, these objects themselves exert their own
material and social effects, providing directional impetus to the idea of planetary and
extra-planetary ‘capital’. In this sense, they are not merely artefacts of techno-scientific
capability or markers of the assertion of property, nor are they just the scaffolding which
supports the evolution of media cultures. They act as a fulcrum upon which the productive
agencies of the human and the technological can reposition themselves within the arena of
life, demanding continuous reappraisal and redesign of the scope and techniques of its
control. This paper brings these diverse technologies together under the analytic rubric of
‘media’ to situate them within the conceptual framework of cosmobiopolitics. In the
following sections, I first historicise their role in the articulation of governmental
strategies that sustain capitalist expansion and biopolitical control of human ‘living
space’. I then consider our mediatic relations with the ‘extra-planetary’ through two case
studies; the first on satellites and their debris in earth’s orbital space and the second on steps
towards the establishment of interplanetary Internet networks, exploring their potential to
sculpt the material and social horizon of our futures on and beyond the globe.

Birth of cosmobiopolitics
Long before the beginning of the Space Age, humans used the regions above the globe to
facilitate mediation practices; electromagnetic waves, for example, were emitted across
airspace and into the atmosphere to enable radio communication decades before the first
Damjanov 893

artificial satellite confirmed its arrival in the planet’s orbit on 4 October 1957. With its
possible roots in early societies’ use of the celestial bodies visible from the earth’s surface
for temporal and spatial orientation, the ‘media history’ of the human use of outer space
reaches a watershed moment with the launch of Sputnik. This basketball-sized metal sphere,
equipped with radio transmitter and four external antennas, was the first solid object, the
first functional media artefact that humans had placed outside their own world. This is not
to say that Sputnik marks the event in which human mediation practices begun to materially
impact outer space, erasing its original, ‘natural’ state – the radio signals that penetrated the
layers of the troposphere and ionosphere, although intangible, left their own material traces,
environmental alterations comparable with the material results of atmospheric pollution
triggered by industrial progress. These early uses of space have entangled it in a gamut of
processes of techno-mediation, initiating the extraterrestrial unfolding of a historical
trajectory which Jussi Parikka (2011: 3) terms ‘medianature’ – they have extended this
‘continuum between mediatic apparatuses and their material contexts in the exploitation
of nature’ into outer space. However, Sputnik’s orbital presence does represent a stepping-
stone in the extraterrestrial progression of human medianature: it indicates the species’
acquired ability to purposefully introduce an object of technical media into outer space.
As such, Sputnik epitomises a shift in the use of non-terrestrial spaces; no longer were they
incidental and remote to human media exploits, they were instead made central and
essential. What the first signal that Sputnik sent to its ground control announced was that
humanity’s techno-logic aspirations to transform the material world and advance its
productive capacity through the logic of acquisition, investment and destruction – an
intrinsic human impulse described by Karl Marx (1964) as our essence of species-being –
are no longer earth-bound.
Sputnik and all media devices that followed it have been gradually converting outer space
into a living milieu, reinforcing it as a material–social setting of human circumstances and
relations. The concept of ‘milieu’ is important for understanding the complexities involved in
the cosmobiopolitical transformation of outer space. In Foucault’s work and in other
influential texts such as those of his mentor Georges Canguilhem (2008) and Simondon
(1980) and Stiegler (1998), although employed in different contexts, the term ‘milieu’
essentially designates a site which simultaneously conditions and is itself conditioned by
the productive forces of human life – whether biological, social or technical. Courses of
medianature in outer space sharpen such perspectives on mutually transforming relations
between humans and their milieu, providing biopolitical focus to Simondon’s and Stiegler’s
perspectives on technology as fundamental in constituting human life. Stiegler’s view of
progress as human technological evolution frames technical objects as a prosthesis in
whose creation humans embed their ‘interiors’ and through which they further exteriorise
and mould their living milieu, a process which has been changing the idea of what it is to be
human (Stiegler, 1998: 17). In the Stieglerian sense, the human ‘exteriorisation’ in technical
media that are sent into space not only imbues the earth’s exterior with a reflection of the
human, but itself reconstitutes the human and reconfigures human ways of life. These
technologies thus radically enhance the capacity for species-being, becoming a vital part
of our biopolitical capital: while altering our apparently otherwise lifeless planetary
exterior into a malleable and thus governable locus of life, their mediatic operations assist
humans to overcome their biological and geographical limitations and proceed as a collective
towards becoming more-than-human.
Our medianature has been continuously adjusting to its extraterrestrial conditions and
the acceleration of our technological ‘exteriorisation’ in space has necessitated the
development of an attendant governmental framework. The landmark attempt to
894 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(5)

arrange the increasing multiplicity of human relationships with outer space was to define
them through the rule of law – a juridical prefiguration which, as Foucault and Giorgio
Agamben (1998) suggest, is a prerequisite for governing life. In 1967, the Treaty on
Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space,
including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (United Nations, 2002), or, The Outer Space
Treaty (OST) entered into force. In lieu of the pending human landing on the Moon, this
international legal agreement established outer space as the shared domain of a global
commons, which is to be explored and used by all nation-states, but which itself is to stay
outside the vagaries of territorial claims and property rights. A pre-emptive gesture aimed
at securing politico-economic codification of the extraterrestrial milieu before human
arrival, the OST did not specify where the administrative borders of outer space are –
the border between terrestrial and extraterrestrial space has been unofficially assigned to
the Kármán line, a region about 100 km above the planetary surface, where objects sent
into space do not fall back but remain in orbit. Nevertheless, the Treaty designates its
inhuman expanses as the precinct of human governance, and behind such legal coding
stood the same politico-economic rationalities which Foucault identified as pivotal for the
institution of the doctrine of the ‘Freedom of the Seas’ as a foundation of international
maritime law in the seventeenth century. This legal principle that identified the ocean’s
strategic importance as a jointly used resource and set it free from territorial claims,
symptomatically announced two interrelated entrances onto the world stage – the rise of
global capitalism and the birth of biopolitics, while its replication in the OST marked the
next phase in their development.
In one of his lectures at the Colle`ge de France, Foucault (2008: 51–73) provided a brief
account of how the history of international law echoed the emergence of modern approaches
to governance, where the primary emphasis upon territory becomes augmented with the
objective to secure the vitality of the shared market. He described how the Treaty of
Westphalia’s reinforcement of borders around sovereign states in 1598, which
strengthened their inner autonomy yet limited their external reach, instituted each of them
as a part of a collective of states gathered around the common interest of progress. This
territorial reform aimed to end devastating wars between the states and ensure their political
and economic stability, but it imposed the need for new domains of competition in which
each of them could independently acquire and prosper, and all them could together be in a
‘state of permanent collective enrichment’ (Foucault, 2008: 55). These spaces, Foucault
suggested, were inaugurated with the ‘Freedom of the Seas’ in 1609, which opened the
ocean as a space which all states could use to advance through economic competition
rather than rivalry over territory. While specifically related to the agenda of European
colonial expansions, the establishment of the seas as shared commons was indicative of
the awareness that the unlimited accumulation of wealth requires the infinitely free space
of the global market. Freedom of the seas was, as Foucault (2008: 56) described, born out of
this ‘new form of global rationality. . . a new calculation on the scale of the world’ and it
marked the start of economic globalisation. The interplay between the finite room of
territories and infinite possibilities for circulation and accumulation of capital was
sustained indefinitely by asserting the global freedom, the commonality of the seas.
Through the commons of the seas, capitalism assumed its global latitudes; while the
historical enclosure of wastelands that were shared as ‘commons’ enabled the initial,
‘primitive’ accumulation of capital, the creation of the ocean’s commons enabled
capitalism to articulate its processes at a global scale. This legal manoeuvre to defend
territory by rethinking the spaces of the market institutes the idea of shared commonality
as an Archimedean point for the governance of human societies, preparing the terrain for a
Damjanov 895

biopolitical system of governance based upon its abstraction into a method of subsuming
‘life itself’ to the massifying logic of averages and estimates.
The institution of the OST and its associated Agreements and Conventions2 from the
mid-twentieth century was an outcome of yet another spatial crisis; it was an attempt to
negotiate the many tensions that the arrival of the Space Age stirred within global affairs. It
was at the time of Cold War and states’ political polarisation, in a world where rapid
industrialisation and massive population increases were coupled with anxieties about
limits to economic growth, that outer space was identified as a potential site of military
conflicts, competing claims of sovereignty and a rapacious race for resources. The looming
possibility of still deeper crisis necessitated another repositioning of states and markets
around their vital assets, and a restoring of the global equilibrium of powers. Here the
OTS drew upon the juridical principle of a ‘common heritage’ of humankind – a concept
previously employed in the Antarctic Treaty in 1959 for comparable arrangements of
international regimes of governance – and took the idea of the commons outside the
globe. The treaty expanded the conceptual borders of ‘the scale of the world’ into
extraterrestrial space, prescribing that its exploration ‘shall be carried out for the benefit
and in the interests of all countries’ and that it ‘shall be the province of all mankind’ (OST,
article 1). Once again, international law established a space of commons whose exploration
and exploitation would proceed as a joint enterprise through which all states could freely
advance and prosper both individually and as a part of collective. Just as the ‘Freedom of the
Seas’ opened routes for ships sailing in the name of nations, the OST unlocked flightpaths
for spaceships and other technologies, stimulating states’ techno-scientific interests and
competition and ensuring that the emerging mode of ‘high-tech’ capitalism had from its
beginnings an extra-planetary, infinite prospect. This trans-national legal netting codified an
idea of global commonality and framed the inhuman regions of outer space as the ‘province
of all mankind’, drawing them into its global system of governance. The OST thus provided
the juridical platform from which to articulate a cosmobiopolitical order; it offered a
governmental framework for enacting a vision of the human race as a species-power,
which will, through the techno-mediated exploration of space, direct its own cosmic
progress.
Almost a half century after the OST, media technologies remain crucial to the
transformation of outer space into a human province. The voracious neoliberal drive of
the state-industry nexus that conditions global biopolitics is so dependent upon them, that
they become a target of the same systems of governance they catalyse. Their construction,
launches and distribution are the subject of careful calculation, meticulous planning and
complex logistics, their condition and movements are continuously being monitored,
assessed and managed, and this transfer of governmental rationalities from living humans
to inanimate objects changes the biopolitical approach to human species-being. If biopower
emerged as concerned with bodies of human individuals and populations, and pressing
environmental concerns about the ‘global body of the Earth’ augmented its application
‘from human to planetary bodies’ (Bryld and Lykee, 2000: 92–94), then space-based
media technologies mark a subsequent phase in the development of its architecture. They
trigger the transposition of life management onto the bodies and populations of media
technologies and it is this shift which inaugurates the object-centred coordinates of the
cosmobiopolitical: the governance of the human without actual humans.
The legal basis of cosmobiopolitics, the OST respectively preserves the status of outer
space as a globally shared domain and permits its occupation by technical media that are the
legal province of particular terrestrial entities, thus accommodating the contradictory tenets
of their governance. However, these governmental rationalities are defined by codes of law
896 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(5)

and ‘the law’ as Foucault (2007: 47) notes ‘works at the level of the imaginary’, and it can
only imagine things which can and cannot be done; like the 0s and 1s of digital code, it only
prescribes a state of presence or absence of things. It is the very presence of media
technologies in outer space (and the absence of humans) which contradictorily makes
possible and disturbs the cosmobiopolitical imaginary. Their remote position situates
them beyond the reach of juridical rule and the policing-power of states, literally placing
them outside of the ‘global grid’ of governance. While they are used as apparatus through
which to enable human terrestrial enterprises, these objects themselves carry the essence of
terra and of the absent presence of the human beyond the globe. The media technologies in
outer space do not only reduce the incompatibility between the human and the
extraterrestrial, but also introduce frictions within their exchanges. This disturbance
suggests that their material realities disrupt the imaginaries implied by law and instead
assert their own force, reinforcing these objects somewhat absurdly as the non-governable
markers of extraterritoriality in the commons, as the non-human emissaries of humanity,
and as a non-living population of objects which are managed as if they were alive. In outer
space, the matter of media itself becomes code through which to define what can be
propertied and what remains commons, what can be governed and what poses itself as
ungovernable, where the human ends and the non-human begins, where the boundaries
that distinguish governance of the living from the non-living lie and when biopolitics
transmutes into a cosmobiopolitics.
The media apparatus that support the metamorphosis of biopolitics in outer space are
varied, and the milieus in which they function require a range of different performances. The
following sections of this paper consider a number of the varying ways specific media
technologies perform this extra-planetary extension of the impulse to govern life by
focusing on satellites and their debris, and on the prospects of an interplanetary Internet.
None of these specimens provides a complete picture of the ways in which media
technologies inspire the advent of a cosmobiopolitics. Rather, each offers a different angle
from which to consider the shifts in material and social arrangements that are demanded by
forays beyond the earth, signs that herald a radical shift in the way humanity conceives of
life and articulates its governance. What follows is a series of initial steps, the first paces in a
far larger survey that aims to chart the natality of the emergent cosmic traits of biopolitics.
I offer here a series of sketches, an outline of tentative trajectories suggested by contemporary
mediatic excursions into outer space. By exploring how we manage an over-population of
functional and defunct media objects in orbital space and imagine the utilities of interplanetary
Internet networks, I suggest that human extraterrestrial medianatures necessitates a profound
alteration in our relationship with the technologies, and the reframing of governmental
obsessions with discourses of territory, security, and population.

Satellite population and orbital security

Over 6000 military, scientific and commercial satellites have arrived in Earth’s orbital space
to take on a key role in advancing global production, distribution and consumption of media
content.3 Designed to perform specific tasks, they have been disseminated across different
orbital altitudes; Low Earth Orbit has been mostly occupied by the earth observation,
remote sensing, communication and reconnaissance satellites, Medium Earth Orbit by
those used for global positioning, Geosynchronous Orbit by broadcasting satellites and
High Earth Orbit has been increasingly utilised for their disposal. More than 1200 of
them are currently operational;4 arrayed around the planet as if to imprison it under
omniscient technical armour, they provide a major logistic backbone for governmental
Damjanov 897

practices that expedite what Deleuze (1992) identified as the ‘society of control’, extending
Foucault’s ideas about ‘disciplinary societies’ onto the contemporary context of automated,
multifaceted systems of ubiquitous global surveillance. Yet at the same time, satellites are
themselves besieged by the same systems of control that they make possible. Their conduct in
space is subjected to exhaustive diagnostic management via specialised schemes such as The
United States Space Surveillance Network and the European Space Agency’s (n.d.) Space
Surveillance and Tracking program, similar projects led by other states and space agencies,
and independent expert groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists. The orbital
constellation of satellites necessitates another security layer around the global apparatus
of biopolitics – the control of its control infrastructure, forging a double-bind diagram of
networked governance.
Satellite control is guided by the perspective of Space Situational Awareness (SSA),
which, although central to orbital logistics, is thus far without an official definition
(Kaiser, 2014). In essence, SSA is concerned not only with observation and surveillance of
satellites as a way of knowing details of their orbital position, but also with collecting,
aggregating and analysing a wide range of types of data about all objects and events in
orbital space as a reference point from which to estimate the best courses in their
management. One of the many descriptions of the SSA postulates it as the pursuit of ‘a
comprehensive knowledge of the population of space objects, of the space environment, and
of the existing risks and threats’ (European Security and Defence Assembly, 2009). While
suggestive of the biopolitical agenda of securing human activities in the orbital milieu, this
formulation symptomatically reveals a turn towards object-oriented governance: SSA
focuses upon the ‘population of space objects’. On one hand, the term ‘space object’ is a
legal classification of all human-made items placed in outer space, a nomenclature
introduced by the OST and elaborated in the Liability Convention from 1972, which gives
their legal owners exclusive rights to control and interfere with them. On the other, the
phrase ‘population of space objects’ – an expression which is customarily used in expert
vocabulary surrounding SSA5 – signposts a repositioning of the human-centred en masse
purview of biopolitics to incorporate a population of technologies. The biopolitical use of
the term ‘population’ originally specifies a mass of living humans; however, with its
application to the assemblage of human-made satellites, biopolitics in outer space
becomes central to attempts to manage a population whose bodies are neither human, not
animate, but that of technology. This twofold satellite logistics which focuses upon both
singular ‘space objects’ and a collective ‘space population’ to assess multiple variables that
determine their productive capacity and manage risks associated with their occupation of
orbital space, reinforces regimes of satellite management which operate parallel to that of
humans.
At both its administrative and executive levels, the governance of satellites regulates their
material presence in space, managing their distribution, traffic, operations and
decommission. Satellite launches require technical and procedural compliance with
national and international protocols. Information about each satellite is stored in the
United Nations Register of Space Objects Launched into Outer Space that functions as
an inventory of their births and deaths, and while apparently excluding undisclosed
missions,6 acts as an (always incomplete) global census on satellite population. Activities
of satellites are continuously examined, evaluated and upheld via a multifaceted
management system termed Tracking, Telemetry and Control (TT&C). TT&C enables
ground control centres to monitor satellites via sensors and on-board computers with
which they are equipped, telemetrically measure their ‘health’ by determining the
‘condition and performance of various subsystems such as fuel status, attitude and output
898 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(5)

of solar panels’, and adjust their trajectories, configurations and functions (U.S. Army Space
Division, n.d.). Within satellite logistics, authority over each satellite is restricted to its
owners and allows for its individual proprietary control, but the overall population of
satellites is seen as a shared matter of global security, which necessitates cooperative
collection and exchange of data between space agencies, commercial and space experts
and enthusiasts. There is a range of satellite tracking software and databases, some with
restricted access such as the US Space Surveillance Network that only provides data to
subscribed governmental and commercial parties, and others which are freely available
online such as the UCS Satellite Database or the website Heaven Above that enable the
public to monitor the movement of satellites. Taken together, these examples of logistical
inscription and calculated management suggest attempts to institute a global system of
networked satellite control which corresponds with the twin-poled organisation of power
over life. It simultaneously centres on an individual satellite (aiming to diagnose and restore
its health and discipline its conduct in order to maximise its productivity) and their entire
population (overseeing its demographic distribution and circulation and seeking to uphold
its ‘public health’).7
However, like the volatile lives of humans, the orbital life of satellites to some extent
eludes its logistical control; as Foucault (1990: 143) reminds us, ‘it is not that life has been
totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them’.
Aside from the stealth or spy satellites constructed to avoid detection by any party external
to their missions and the general techno-scientific limitations of satellite control, a satellite’s
life in orbit could take many unexpected turns which rupture the effective performance of its
control grids. For example, the Eutelsat W2M unexpectedly fell from its orbital pathway
(Selding, 2009), the unforeseen collision between US Iridium 33 and the inactive Russian
Kosmos 2251 satellite demolished them both (Iannotta and Malik, 2009), and an Indonesian
satellite was damaged ‘by urine and faecal matter’ left in orbit by manned space missions
(China Daily, 2006). Due to human error or factors beyond human control, a satellite
occasionally crashes with another object in orbit, sometimes it falls back to Earth, its
body suffers material damage and its vital functions fail, the service that it provides is
terminated and its ‘death’ takes the hands-on approach of satellite logistics out of hand.
Orbital debris or space waste (Figure 1) presents a particular encumbrance for the efficiency
of satellite logistics: millions of pieces of obsolete satellites silently swirl around the planet at
ultra-high velocities and are to stay in orbit for years, centuries and even millennia, posing a
constant collision hazard for active spacecraft and constraining their future launches. Space
waste is subject to the same logistic networks of surveillance and database governance as the
active satellites, but while its ‘Tracking’ is possible to a very limited extent,8 its management
does not involve ‘Telemetry’ and certainly not ‘Control’. The unruly blanket of satellite
debris participates in satellite circulation as a bad element, ‘a living dead’ formation that
is impossible to command – material evidence of the effective loss of authority and control in
orbital space. The fragmented bodies of defunct satellites introduce a disorder into satellite
logistics, and they are literary ‘non-governable’ objects which, as Ned Rossiter describes in
his discussion of the management of electronic waste, ‘hold a range of implications for
biopolitical technologies of control’ (Rossiter, 2009: 37). They suggest, in this instance,
that cosmobiopolitical modes of governance also need to incorporate the risk produced
by the afterlife of space objects as a way of compensating for deterioration of its aptitude
to enforce sovereignty rights and property management over their ‘unruly’ conduct.
The proliferation of spent satellite hardware destabilises the security of the global
circulation of information and knowledge. The movement of each satellite entails a
constant risk from damage that would transform it into uncontrollable ‘living dead’
Damjanov 899

Figure 1. Graphic representation of debris objects in orbital space, a view of geosynchronous orbit (GEO).
Image courtesy of NASA.

matter with the potential to subsequently contaminate others and corrupt their signal
transmissions. Foucault’s research into ways in which historical approaches to epidemics
reflect the methodological shifts in exercising power over life, evolving from the sovereignty
model of the exclusion of the contagious, via disciplinary prescription of normative
procedures surrounding the diseased, to biopolitical strategies of prevention and
prediction of outbreaks. In contemporary culture, metaphors of epidemics and contagion
have been extended from their originally biological context to the circulation of ‘immaterial’
digital content such as computer worms, viruses and spam (Parikka, 2005, 2007a, 2007b;
Sampson, 2011; Thacker, 2005a). With space debris, such metaphors extend to the
technological hardware which sustains information networks and ultimately global
systems of biopolitical control. The application of information technologies to evaluate
the ‘public health’ of satellites mirrors the practice of biosurveillance that monitors the
risks of epidemics among living biota and in this sense, their logistics can be seen as a
strategy of preventive biodefense. The official guidelines that cover the construction,
management and disposal of satellites provide instructions about developing them from
900 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(5)

materials that would enable greater control over their bodies, even when they cease to
operate (United Nations, 2010; US Government, 1997). Here endeavours to command the
matter and ways of life through the application of advanced technologies are imposed upon
the bodies and population of satellites. The efforts to improve the vitality of satellites’
physiques and breed them into a healthy, resistant population, transfer the risk-combating
strategies of satellite logistics from discipline and surveillance to deep ecologies of
bioengineering. The materiality of satellites triggers a biopolitical response, a human
attempt to mitigate the contagion risk by attempting to govern these inanimate objects as
if they were living.
The mass of functional and defunct satellites that swarm around the globe has become an
inseparable part of its environs, which reconfigures the circumstances of human
medianatures. Each of their atoms is now a constituent element of orbital space and as
such they themselves become a common that is shared by all. This is a common created
by humans at the level of species – material evidence that the impact of human techno-
industrial activities which have pushed the planet into a new geological period, the
Anthropocene, is already overspilling the globe. Satellite populations facilitate new paths
for the biopolitical production of the commons, revealing the material aspect of information
and communication technologies as vital to the creation of human collectivities. Thacker
(2005b) suggests that, in the age in which informatics becomes central for securing life and its
processes, ‘perhaps we can rephrase Foucault’s formulation of biopolitics, and suggest that
biopolitics is the condition in which population, information, and security become
intertwined in a set of practices, responses, and preparations’. In the context of the
satellites that inhabit the orbital commons, this rephrasing should also include the impact
that the matter of technology has upon the global focus and practices of biopolitics. In this
sense, the human relationship with satellites signposts a possible transformation of biopower
as power concerned only with the mere survival of the human element of ‘bare life’
(Agamben, 1998) towards a more technical and perhaps networked definition of life,
which encompasses both humans and objects involved in mediation practices and whose
governance incorporates their living and living-like populations.

Towards networked cosmic futures

Besides occupying orbital space with satellites, we have also begun to populate more distant
extraterrestrial regions with a range of orbiters, landers, robotic rovers and flybys, spacecraft
that compound a host of technological innovations in order to gather data, record
environments and mark our presence, or potential presence, beyond our own planet. They
are also sent out into a domain that is deemed common to all, but they too are the legal
province of particular states and companies. They too break down and increasingly litter the
surfaces and orbits of celestial bodies such as the Moon and Mars. Current streams of
information between these technologies and their ground control are facilitated via Deep
Space Networks, the telecommunication infrastructure that is comprised of large terrestrial-
based antennas with highly sensitive signal receivers and transmitters. Each space mission
has its unique communication platform – no hardware specifications or software standards
are apt to all of them. Communication with remotely situated spacecraft on their lunar,
interplanetary or interstellar missions is also very slow and unstable – for example, it takes
around 20 min for a signal from earth to reach a rover on Mars, and on its way, it suffers
substantial distortion and interference. As a response to the significant expense, time-delays
and packet corruption of deep-space communication, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is
currently developing Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN). Essentially, the aim here is to
Damjanov 901

Figure 2. Earth–Mars interplanetary Internet infrastructure, an artist’s view. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL.

create an ‘Interplanetary Internet’, or InterPlaNet (IPI) – a complex network infrastructure

that can overcome the signal transmission noise and enable stable and efficient Internet
connection at great cosmic distances (Figure 2). In his work on forms of digital pollution
such as computer viruses and spam, Parikka (2005, 2007a) suggests that by introducing noise
and glitches into circuits of communication, these ‘anomalies’ fuel the creation of marketable
defence mechanisms such as anti-virus software, becoming a part of ‘viral capitalism’
through which it extends its productive machinery into newly created uncapitalised
domains. Development of an IPI signals the acquisitive potential of global capitalism to
cultivate reliable technology as a remedy for anomalies of extraterrestrial communication
and itself virally spread its infrastructure beyond the globe, drawing the extraterrestrial
environment into its ‘networked’ anatomy.
The architecture of an IPI would comprise a ‘network of Internets’; Vinton Cerf, who also
helped develop the terrestrial Internet protocols, suggests with his team in one of their
working drafts on the IPI for the Internet Society’s Internet Engineering Task Force that:

The best way to envision the fundamental architecture of the Interplanetary Internet is to picture
a network of internets. Ordinary internets . . . are placed on the surface of moons and planets as
well as in free-flying spacecraft. These remotely deployed internets run ordinary Internet
protocols. A system of Interplanetary Gateways connected by deep-space transmission links
form a backbone communication infrastructure that provides connectivity for each of the
deployed internets. New long-haul protocols, some confined to the backbone network and
some operating end-to-end, allow the deployed internets to communicate with each other.
(Cerf et al., 2001: 4).

The IPI will connect multiple Internets by using ‘interplanetary gateways’ to convert their
TCP/IP protocols into a special ‘bundle’ protocol which will carry information from one
Internet to another, linking them together into a kind of cosmic supernetwork, whose
‘central accounting authority’ will be ‘nominally based on Earth’ (Cerf et al., 2001: 23).
902 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(5)

The establishment of an IPI requires the re-coding of the model of the Internet network –
fundamental protocols need to be adjusted, the way computers communicate has to change,
and the hierarchies of technological control have to evolve. As an exploitative tactic for
harnessing the glitches of communication in outer space, the infrastructure of an IPI serves
as a basis for further organisational patterns of cosmobiopolitics.
The architecture of an IPI will accelerate the global production and circulation of
information and knowledge, but its technical protocols will define the circumstances in
which humans and technologies will be able to participate in networked forms of sociality
beyond the Earth. The IPI extends TCP/IP protocol – a crucial mechanism for the capillary
distribution of control across an apparently decentralised Internet network (Galloway, 2004)
– into outer space, but also introduces another control layer via interplanetary gateways and
their bundle protocols as gatekeepers of interplanetary communication traffic. This twofold
protocol system both distributes control over the technological infrastructure of an IPI (local
controls of multiple Internet networks) and centralises it (terrestrial control of the entire
interplanetary communication). The question of the right to access the IPI’s protocols would
be of central importance in defining the nature of participation in extraterrestrial
communication networks. Although the IPI’s infrastructure will be situated in the
commons of outer space, its exchange networks are not anticipated as commonly shared
by all, but restricted and terrestrially controlled (Cerf et al., 2003). Such design of an IPI
protocol emphasises the way in which the infrastructure of communication serves as a
platform through which to establish hierarchies of control. The exclusivity of access to an
IPI in this sense implies what Thacker (2005a) defines as a ‘construction of exceptional
topologies, in the sense of an ongoing ‘‘state of exception’’’, a condition which facilitates
new modes for exercising sovereignty. In the commons of outer space, sovereignty is
apparently not related to territory, but to the objects of technology. In this sense, IPI
development indicates the emergence of technological sovereignty, a type of domination
which depends upon the techno-scientific capacity of military–industrial complexes to
enforce the protocological management of network infrastructure.
Developing technical standards and logistic procedures to increase compatibility and
interconnectedness between Internets located in terrestrial and extraterrestrial space
maintains this network system as infinitively open for expansion. It allows for unlimited
multiplication of the semi-autonomous network subsystems, reproduction of their
productive capacities and replication of their security diagrams. The blueprint of the IPI
thus announces the potential rise of a cosmic capitalist order grounded in control of the
material infrastructure of interplanetary communication, its gates of information exchange
and ultimately the means of producing the social. Galloway and Thacker (2007: 71) suggest
that ‘if networks permeate the social fabric, and if networks bring with them novel forms of
control’, then they should be seen as ‘living networks’. Its affinity for virality highlights the
IPI as a constantly expanding ‘living network’ in which the imperative of technical
connectivity comes to determine the vectors of human collectivities, becoming central to
the control of life itself. Bound into the living network of an IPI, the productive forces of
humans and technologies unlock the cosmic dimensions of what Soenke Zehle (2009: 4)
terms ‘network ecologies’ within which ‘socio-technological infrastructures of
interdependence, their protocols and modes of production’ and ‘biological processes, their
complexity and organicity’ merge to reinforce their ‘mutual constitution and configuration’.
Within the ecology of an IPI network, what emerges from exchanges of new languages, rules
and protocols between the human and the technological itself will have the potential to
innovate and incubate courses of life on and outside the earth. Although current
projections of IPI governance suggest a strictly controlled network environment, the
Damjanov 903

potential of life to escape its restraints is foreshadowed in the innate viral capacity of the IPI;
it opens up ways for both organised and accidental resistance to its systems of control. While
extending cosmobiopolitical regimes of governance, the evolving IPI’s ‘living network’ has
the potential to facilitate different scenarios for the constitution of connectivity and different
forms of human and technological collectiveness within the prospective interplanetary
cartographies of power over life.
The establishment of an IPI suggests new ways of marking the conquest of space and
conceiving the control of territory, new modalities of security based upon the increasing
technological capacity to overcome distance and duration. As Paul Virilio (1997: 58) pointed
out, the speed of exchange facilitated by technological progress accelerated the ‘pollution of
distances and lengths of time’, undermining the human-scale of our experiences of space and
time by substituting them with the ‘real-time’ of virtual proximity and instantaneity. If, as
Virilio (1997) argued, the creation of technologies for telecommunication and telepresence
resulted in the disintegration of the terrestrial horizon, the development of an IPI represents
an additional step towards pushing the limits of the human horizon still further away into
extraterrestrial space. The IPI’s agenda of increasing the speed of interplanetary
communication through specialised protocols directly works to overcome the ‘tyranny’ of
extraterrestrial space by erasing it as the last remaining geographical distance and
annihilating it as the last void of temporal delay. Achieving this erasure, the IPI would
connect a multiplicity of spatially and temporally separated Internet networks into a
single, universally shared ‘real-time’. The Internet enables its own expansion outwards by
keeping its system of controlled inclusivity perennially open, as Terranova (2004: 3) puts it,
the ‘design of the Internet (and its technical protocols) prefigured the constitution of a neo-
imperial electronic space, whose main feature is an openness which is also a constitutive
tendency to expansion’. The protocols of a prospective IPI could likewise produce an
imperial space, a space of open networks with the potential to indefinitely expand
themselves through assimilation and absorption. However, because the IPI is system
located in an apparently infinite space, it will continuously entertain the prospect of a new
horizon and the obstacles of cosmic distance and delay will always remain. While the idea of
an IPI itself suggests a return of the distance which media technologies have erased on earth,
it does not herald a freedom from the expansion of the cosmic empire of viral capitalism.
Rather, it enables its technological governance of speed to perpetuate itself in an exploratory
cycle that overcomes space and time, only to rediscover them and reproduce its ‘real time’
network once again.
While the extraterrestrial progress of global capitalism continues through enclosure of the
commons by media technologies, its biopolitical rationales breed novel modes of
collectiveness, shaping planetary and extra-planetary mores of human species-being. The
mediatic origins and destiny of the human conquest of outer space stresses the necessity of
rethinking the ontological divide at the nexus of the human–technological and the potentials
and consequences of our conviviality; as Stiegler reminds us, ‘it is important to understand
that technology is a process, an evolutionary process. What is technics, or technology, or
technicity? It is a new form of life’ (in Lemmens, 2011). The advance of media apparatus in
outer space not only conveys the idea of life, but also constitutes life itself, deepening the
relationship between humans and technologies involved in cosmobiopolitical projections and
accumulation of capital. However open this possibility, it is bounded by the need to control
and govern outer space as a living space. To do this, traditional expressions of governance
have to change, concepts such as ‘territory’ have to be embodied in objects and the design of
security diagrams have to be honed through managing the lives of inanimate populations.
Media technologies in outer space suggest the need for fundamental developments in ideas
904 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(5)

about the scale and scope of biopolitical practices, the life and death of technologies, the
viral dimensions of high-tech capitalism, the vital significance of what is deemed common
and above all, what will constitute the nature, or medianature, of human life on and beyond
the globe.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. For details and video documentation of the symposium, see Post-Planetary Capital (2014).
2. The edifice of the OST has been expanded with the Agreement on the Rescue of Astronauts, the
Return of Astronauts and the Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space (1968), Convention on
International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects (1972), Convention on Registration of
Objects Launched into Outer Space (1975) and the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on
the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (1979); see United Nations (2002).
3. This overall number of satellites launched into earth’s orbital space is an approximation by the
European Space Agency (n.d.); the exact data are unknown since not all of them have been
registered, such as military spy satellites.
4. These numbers are fast changing; the ‘Satellite Database’ of the Union of Concerned Scientists
(2015) indicates that as of 31 January 2015 there were 1,265 operative satellites in earth’s orbit.
5. The phrase proliferates in material relating to SSA and space policy in general; see for example its
application in Benkö et al. (2005) and Gasparini and Miranda (2010).
6. There are also an unknown number of unregistered and secret-classified satellites; the artist Trevor
Paglen revealed a portion of this in his exhibition The Other Night Sky, at Berkeley Art Museum in
2008, where he used the data provided by amateur satellite observation communities to track and
take photographs of nearly 200 spy satellites.
7. Logistic management of satellites is an apt example of the dual mode of biopower as described by
Foucault (1990: 139): ‘‘One of these poles is. . . centred on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the
optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and
its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls. . . The second. . . is
focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis
of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy
and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary’.
8. Space agencies are only able to track around twenty thousand objects of space debris – those which
are larger than ten centimetres. Telescope observations and radar measuring of orbital detritus
approximate that there are also half-a-million objects of a size that varies between one and ten
centimetres, and billions that are smaller than one centimetre (Liou, 2013).

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Katarina Damjanov is lecturer in digital media and communication design at the University
of Western Australia. Her current research considers the sociomaterial dimensions of media
technologies in outer space.