Space Weather Security in the Data Centre Industry

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

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the data centre industry, this paper will explore how solar-terrestrial relations are being reconfigured through prisms of preparedness and profitability in response to the space weather threat. Since 2012, space weather has swiftly moved on to national security agendas around the world as a growing risk to critical infrastructure in need of urgent address. Space weather arises when electrically-charged particles ejected from the Sun interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. If these electromagnetic disturbances are powerful enough, they can induce damaging high-voltage surges in the electronics of spaceborne and ground-based technology systems. The data centre industry, in particular, has emerged at the forefront of space weather preparedness, with growing numbers of facility operators taking precautions to increase the resilience of their data centres to this disruptive and destructive electromagnetic activity. The capacity to offer protection for such low probability but potentially high-impact threats like severe space weather events has become a key sign of a data centre’s robust and all-encompassing commitment to security. With discourses and practices of data centre space weather security connecting solar material to terrestrial technological worlds, foundational narratives of technological progress and mastery are being reconfigured, generating new imaginaries of dystopian futures where humanity is deprived of its digital technology. Analysing how the space weather threat arises in the data centre industry as a security concern and a commercial opportunity, this paper propels STS and social studies of outer space through new ethnographic and conceptual trajectories.

Author

• A.R.E. Taylor, University of Cambridge