The Russian Ecology of Leaving Earth: Magic Rites and Frontier Experiences at the Baikonur Cosmodrome

• In Event: Science, Technology and Society in Outer Space - II

Abstract

Despite a series of drawbacks that have recently slowed down spaceflight, humanity’s drive to move beyond its historical habitat and beyond temporary orbital outposts seems to be unstoppable. Replacing the Cold War state fever, entrepreneurial enthusiasm has depicted human extraterrestrial expansion as the inevitable future. In this paper, I situate this projected space colonization, a blend of political utopia and technological vision, within historical realities of the Cold War by focusing on the birthplace of the space age, the present-day Baikonur Cosmodrome. A seemingly perfect example of “what people are ‘left with’” (Stoler 2008), Baikonur denotes imperial debris as much as it is a testimony of transcending empires and techno-political regimes. The Soviet space program was ambitiously dubbed as osvoenie, which is a Russian term denoting a socioeconomic process of incorporation of new territories that was to convey its purported goal of human evolutionary expansion in outer space. But, in the end, the only frontier settlement it has produced is one just south of the cosmodrome in the Kyzyl-Kum desert. This paper offers a critique of technocratic understandings of space exploration and colonization and human futures; this critique is grounded in an ethnographic fieldwork at the Cosmodrome and the very first human space colony that its activities produced on earth, pointing to historical contingency and temporality of space projects, if not the space age itself.

Author

• Saulesh Yessenova, University of Calgary