Article ID: CBB576295610

Of Defunct Satellites and Other Space Debris: Media Waste in the Orbital Commons (January 2017)

unapi

Defunct satellites and other technological waste are increasingly occupying Earth’s orbital space, a region designated as one of the global commons. These dilapidated technologies that were commissioned to sustain the production and exchange of data, information, and images are an extraterrestrial equivalent of the media devices which are discarded on Earth. While indicating the extension of technological momentum in the shared commons of space, orbital debris conveys the dark side of media materialities beyond the globe. Its presence and movements interfere with a gamut of governmental, commercial, and scientific operations, contesting the strategies of its management and control and introducing orbital uncertainty and disorder in the global affairs of law, politics, economics, and techno-science. I suggest that this debris formation itself functions as media apparatus —it not only embodies but also exerts its own effects upon the material and social relations that structure our ways of life, perplexing dichotomies between the common and owned, governed and ungovernable, wealth and waste. I explore these effects of debris, framing its situation in the orbital commons as a vital matter of concern for studies of the human relationship with media technologies and their waste.

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Authors & Contributors
Yoshizawa, Go
Mikami, Koichi
Ernst van der Wal
Nina Klimburg-Witjes
Barnett, Allain J.
Craig, Robin Kundis
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Public policy
Environment
Law and legislation
Media (communications)
Waste
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
Places
Canada
United States
Germany
Great Britain
United Kingdom
London (England)
Institutions
Centro Nacional de las Artes
Centre national de la recherche scientifique France (CNRS)
Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
United States. Environmental Protection Agency
Centre National d'Études Spatiales (France)
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