Outerspatial: working through and with technologies that encircle us Charity Edwards

Outerspatial: working through and with technologies that encircle us

Words and illustration by Charity Edwards

instruments operate around the globe, and increasingly structure conditions down here. A decade-long drive to expand entrepreneurial opportunity off-world2 has catalysed the growing density of satellites entering low Earth orbit (LEO): a geocentric envelope 2000km above the planet’s surface, which satellites can circle through in just over two hours.3 This intensification reveals challenges including distorted astronomy, collision risks, and damaged environments, while research also shows proliferating orbiting artefacts cause actual harm to Sky Country, and Indigenous and First Nations communities’ ability to share knowledge of the stars with future generations.4 Failure to respond to such concerns is emblematic of planning for the future that proceeds with little consideration of plural worlds and lives entangled with technologies.

Planning for the future?

It is well understood by architects and planners that urban processes extend beyond the boundaries of the city. For instance, Melbourne is sustained by grains from the Wimmera-Mallee wheatbelt, fruit orchards throughout the Murray-Darling Basin, and milk sourced from the Gippsland dairy farming region. There is, however, little discussion of less obvious forms of urban processes – the geographer Matthew Gandy reminds us cities are simply one example of urbanisation1 – and especially those that direct our view away from the Earth’s surface. In fact, what we call urban extends into hinterlands and, significantly, the atmosphere above: up there an array of satellite equipment, monitoring systems, and sensing

Space, beyond a particular limit

In Australia, planning for LEO rests almost entirely with Federal infrastructure policy and property developers providing new home owner/occupants with access to broadband markets.5 At a global scale, the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs argues such technologies are key to creating resilient cities, although they reduce relations between space, outer space, and technologies “to pinpoint structures and reference points for cadastral and urban planning purposes.”6 In researching orbital space’s symbolic and material consequences for those on Earth, media sociologist Jennifer Gabrys argues our planet is not simply an object to be translated via devices, but an environment always becoming through and with technologies that encircle it.7

Given the intensifying use of spaces outside what is usually considered urban, we should be obliged to more carefully consider where these serve cities and urban development. Revealing contacts between objects and others in this zone allows re-making relations to technologies across the planet. How, then, to take outerspatial concerns into account?

Orbital urbanisation

First, when encountering convenient software and design products made possible by these technologies, we must remember they are also instruments of planetary commodification and control. Planners often focus on smart cities but it is the technological capture of Earth landscapes that prefigures all urban transformation.8 Indeed, sensing networks become critical where technologies are able – or enabled – to escape oversight. Global observation capacity has grown rapidly since the 1957 launch of Sputnik I but media scholar Lisa Parks argues this stems particularly from policy changes under US President Clinton, who made militarygrade satellite imagery available for commercial sale.9 A lucrative combination of broadcasting reach and networked computation has prompted radical new urban activities, ranging from remotely policing civil society to land consolidation for real estate speculation.10 Massive re-ordering of space is made possible by LEO observation. Increasing coverage in now-crowded orbital space, companies like SpaceX exploit diminishing returns from very low Earth orbit (located 100km to 450km above Earth) to station over 10,000 satellites. Their short-lifespan satellites supply global communications and cloud computing capacities required to integrate urban planning, remote working, and virtual governance deemed necessary for city recovery during the ongoing pandemic.11 SpaceX has launched more than 2700 satellites to date,12 and while concerns have been raised about impacts from orbiting artefacts and their signal pollution,13 such discussion is absent from urban planning. Disturbingly, there are no international agreements to police space debris collision risks or mitigate violence done to dark sky environments already under pressure from light pollution on Earth. Cumulative emissions from rocket boosters threaten our planet’s ozone layer by adding hydrogen chloride and alumina directly into the atmosphere. Troubling too, is research indicating end-of-life mega-constellation satellite removal scatters uncontrolled levels of atmospheric aluminium, akin to geoengineering experiments. Also worth noting is that Starlink deorbits are designed for five to seven years after launch, meaning nearly two tonnes of material will soon re-enter Earth’s atmosphere every day. 14

Plural worlds, entangled plans

Entrepreneurial visions aside, there are real implications for lives experienced on Earth due to these ongoing technological changes and as orbital urbanisation reinscribes patterns of settler-colonial violence into the plural worlds of Indigenous and First Nations communities. As a non-Indigenous architect and beneficiary of uneven power structures embedded in/on stolen land, I am indebted to the work of Bawaka Country15 and others who describe obligations between Sky Country and beings who reside there, and Indigenous cosmologies that reject the separation of Earth from outer space as yet another fiction of terra nullius logics. Indeed, Yolŋu see sky modifications by orbiting sensing networks as supreme acts of erasure: damaging relations throughout the cosmos by disrupting dwelling places of their kin, curtailing existing knowledges, and ultimately, restricting possible futures to be imagined by all:

“Land, Sea and Sky Country are all connected, so there is no such thing as ‘outer space’ or ‘outer Country’ – no outside. What we do in one part of Country affects all others.”16

Conventional planning processes reliant on understanding an enclosed Earth through the creation of boundaries and maintaining hierarchies of control are already at a disadvantage when attempting to consider interconnected regions and material flows, let alone the re-making of worlds in relational terms.17 Architects could, however, reassert their historical capacity to work amongst farreaching entanglements (simultaneously in-between, across, and beyond multiple disciplines, systems, and technologies) to help dismantle distinctions between ourselves and objects both here and up there. Viewing the problem of orbital urbanisation simply as a need for new enforceable regulation

beyond local planning or the nation-state reinforces colonising practices of coding and classification which continue to externalise dispossession, climate change impacts, and biodiversity loss from urban development. Kānaka Maoli scholar, architect, and urbanist James Miller and architectural historian Eric Nay remind us Indigenous knowledges cannot “be ‘curated’ by Western ontological systems” when re-situating stewardship and care within design and planning.18 Building actual competencies for practice in the service of others requires bringing the study and profession of architecture – the co-making of worlds – and its supporting infrastructure back into clear relation with the cosmos.19 The concerns highlighted here offer no easy answers and the usual “technological solutionism”20 of urban debates are themselves a legacy of industrialised problem-solving that risk displacing Indigenous ways of knowing and world views.21 Instead, as orbital urbanisation increasingly conditions our lives on Earth, relational approaches beyond the limits of planning are demanded – and require embedding in education, practice responsibilities, and professional development. Current outerspatial policies only enable proliferating visible craft and signal pollution, which escalate space debris risks, disrupt scientific observations, cause harm to environments, and inscribe settlercolonial violence and extractive practices into the dark sky. Beyond careful oversight and ethical regulation, it is imperative that mounting low Earth orbit intrusions are understood, mitigated, and mediated with respect to plural worlds and entangled lives – for us to work explicitly with and through the technologies that encircle us – before their current trajectories are fixed and all our futures made final.

Charity Edwards is a practicing architect, researcher, and lecturer at Monash University Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. Her research highlights the impacts of urbanisation in remote and off-world environments. She is co-founder of The Afterlives of Cities research collective, which brings together expertise in architecture, digital fabrication, astrophysics, and speculative fiction to recover futures in space.

Previous page: The illustration 'No Outside Worlds' merges archival images from early Earth sensing technologies, recent photographs of Starlink constellation tracking from very Low Earth Orbit polluting the night sky, geostationary orbit diagrams, global positioning system objects, satellites under construction, communication towers, and the Melbourne CBD skyline to underscore the extraplanetary nature of contemporary urbanisation. Notes 1 Gandy, Matthew., 2014. "Where Does the City End?" in Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, ed. Neil Brenner, Berlin: Jovis, pp 86-89. 2 Cringily termed ‘Space 2.0’. 3 Since 2010, the scale of global broadband demand and reduced space launch costs have allowed a new generation of networked satellite systems to enter the market and exploit the hitherto marginal LEO zone. Those new players include the Starlink telecommunications mega constellation < www.starlink.com >, although SpaceX is just one of several commercial start-ups planning to launch more than 65,000 satellites in the near future. 4 Finnegan, Ciara., 2022. "Indigenous Interests in Outer Space: Addressing the Conflict of Increasing Satellite Numbers with Indigenous Astronomy Practices", Laws 11, no. 2: 1-19. 5 Australian Parliament., 2020. Telecommunications Amendment (Infrastructure in New Developments) Bill 2020, C2020B00172 Canberra, ACT, pp 1-15, https://www. legislation.gov.au/Details/C2020B00172 6 United Nations’ Office of Outer Space Affairs., 2022. “Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities”, https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ ourwork/space4sdgs/sdg11.html 7 Gabrys, Jennifer., 2016. Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 8 Edwards, Charity., and Brendan Gleeson, 2020. "New Orbital Urbanization" in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Futures, ed. Robert Brears, Cham: Springer International Publishing. 9 Parks, Lisa., 2005. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual Durham, USA: Duke University Press. 10 For remote policing, see: Delf Rothe and David Shim, "Sensing the Ground: On the Global Politics of Satellite-Based Activism" Review of International Studies 44, no. 3 (2018): 414-37. For real estate speculation, see: Rajji Sanjay Desai, "Afterlives of Orbital Infrastructures: From Earth’s High Orbits to Its High Seas" New Geographies: Extraterrestrial 11 (2019): 39-45; Carsten Juergens and M. Fabian Meyer-Heß, 2021. "Identification of Construction Areas from VHR-Satellite Images for Macroeconomic Forecasts" Remote Sensing 13, no. 13: 2618. 11 World Economic Forum, 2020. “Shaping the Future of the Internet of Things and Urban Transformation”, https://www.weforum.org/platforms/shaping-the-future-ofthe-internet-of-things-and-urban-transformation. 12 “Live coverage: SpaceX launches 53 more Starlink internet satellites”, Space Flight Now, 2022, https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/06/17/falcon-9-starlink-4-19-livecoverage/ 13 McDowell, Jonathan C., 2020. “The Low Earth Orbit Satellite Population and Impacts of the SpaceX Starlink Constellation” The Astrophysical Journal 892, no. 2: 1-10.

14 Boley, Aaron C., and Michael Byers, 2021. “Satellite Mega-constellations Create Risks in Low Earth Orbit, the Atmosphere and on Earth” Scientific Reports 11, no. 1 (): 1-8; Sylvie Durrieu and Ross F. Nelson, "Earth Observation from Space – the Issue of Environmental Sustainability" Space Policy 29, no. 4: 238-50. 15 Bawaka Country, including A Mitchell, S Wright, S Suchet-Pearson, K Lloyd, L Burarrwanga, R Ganambarr, M Ganambarr-Stubbs, B Ganambarr, D Maymuru, & R Maymuru, 2020. "Dukarr Lakarama: Listening to Guwak, Talking Back to Space Colonization" Political Geography 81: 1-19. 16 Bawaka Country: 2. 17 Escobar, Arturo., 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds Durham, USA: Duke University Press. 18 Miller, James., and Eric Nay, 2022. “Ontological Upgrade: Indigenous Futures and Radical Transformation”. SPOOL 9, no. 2: 65-76, https://www.spool.ac/index.php/ spool/article/view/206. 19 For the collective learning and unlearning required, see: Casper Bruun Jensen, 2022. “How to Deal with Cosmoecological Perplexities: Artscience, Critical Zones, Pluriversal Politics.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 8, no.1: 189-198. 20 Morozov, Evgeny., 2013. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Follow of Technological Solutionism New York: PublicAffairs Books. 21 Akama, Yoko., Penny Hagen and Desna Whaanga-Schollum, 2019. “Problematizing Replicable Design to Practice Respectful, Reciprocal, and Relational Co-designing with Indigenous People” Design and Culture 11, no.1: 59-84.