The New Space Era and American Empire: SpaceX, Satellite Launching, and Local Community Responses

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

During the past decade, the US has witnessed a dramatic intensification of outer space activities. They range from the installation of massive Starlink satellite constellations to blueprints for moon mining, from new Star Wars defense initiatives to plans to colonize Mars. Described as the “New Space Era,” the current conjuncture is characterized by a deepened privatization of outer space ventures, a decrease in regulatory oversight, and an intensification of US imperial ambitions in the domains of orbit and beyond. Perhaps no company emblematizes these ambitions more than Elon Musk’s SpaceX. SpaceX’s bold approach to reusable rocket boosters, satellite constellation-building, and visions of travel to Mars has catalyzed a resurgence of public interest in space activities. The company’s intensified launch cadences, the public is told, are connected to the goal of universal internet service provision via Space X’s Starlink constellation. Yet the fiery liftoffs from Vandenberg Space Force Base and Starbase have had a cascading array of other effects as well. They have altered everyday environments, generated sonic booms and vibrations felt in nearby agricultural fields and prison complexes, and left contrails that slowly dissipate in the sky.

The papers on this panel investigate late-stage American empire in relation to SpaceX projects that have helped to shape and name the New Space Era. At the same time, the panelists convey an American Studies of outer space that is “otherwise, from its peripheries, from the standpoint of elsewhere.” More specifically, papers on the panel investigate how historically underrepresented communities – such as Indigenous Chumash and Carrizo/Comecrudo groups, farmworkers, and incarcerated persons – both think about and have been affected by Space X’s dramatic increases in its launch cadences. Combining analysis of US federal documents, aerospace industry reports, archival research, and community-based collaborations near launch infrastructure in Lompoc, California and Boca Chica, Texas, panelists discuss the local impacts of SpaceX’s quest to build a global satellite internet system. They explain how satellite launching has affected cultural resources and spiritual practices of communities indigenous to the area, environmental and public health-related concerns caused by noise and emissions, and socio-economic conditions in adjacent towns. The panelists also explore the technological understandings and cosmologies of diverse community members who work and live adjacent to launch infrastructure. In other words, the panel reorients the historical analysis of space technologies in relation to diverse communities who live and work adjacent to satellite launch sites but are not typically consulted about matters related to aerospace or science and technology. After a series of studies focused on local communities, the panel closes with a final paper that offers a more global, if not cosmic, approach--one that details historical phases of empire related to the moon, orbit, and outer space.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Launch Site Underworlds: Chumash History, Archaeology, and SpaceX Operations at the Vandenberg Space Force Base - Lisa Parks; Sophia Abbey, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Where Farms Meet the Sky: Examining Farmworkers and the Rocket Launches in Lompoc, California - Carlos Jimenez, University of Denver; Ricardo Mata Vazquez, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Histories and Speculative Futures of Vandenberg Space Force Base and Lompoc Federal Prison - Althea Wasow, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Boca Chica to Mars”: Rockets and community resistance in the Rio Grande Valley - Donny Persaud, Cornell University

• The American Empire and 21st Century Outer Space: Late, Early, or On-Time Arrival? - James Schwoch, Northwestern University

Chair

• Carlos Jimenez, University of Denver

Biographical Information

Lisa Parks is a Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab at UC Santa Barbara, and was previously a Professor at MIT. She is a media scholar with expertise in science and technology studies, and her research focuses on satellites and media globalization; critical studies of media infrastructures; media, militarization, and surveillance; and environmental media. Parks is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018) and Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke U Press, 2005). She is co-editor of Media Backends: Digital Infrastructure and Sociotechnical Relations (Illinois UP, 2023), Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke U Press, 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois Press, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers U Press, 2012), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press, 2002). Parks is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, and has conducted past community-based research projects to learn about technology, history, and power relations through Indigenous perspectives in the US and Africa. She is currently PI of a collaborative NSF research grant entitled, “The Satellite Coast: Launch Infrastructure and Sociotechnical Relations of Adjacency, Diversity, and Cosmology,” with co-PIs Carlos Jimenez Jr. and Althea Wasow.

Sophia Abbey is a Ph.D. student and Regents Fellow in the Film and Media Studies department at the University of California - Santa Barbara. Her research interests include cultural geographies, experience economies, and the intersections of media and design. Prior to her graduate work, she worked as a camera assistant and a stage manager in film production. She holds an M.A. in media studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in cinematography from Emerson College. Her master’s thesis, “Reimagining Los Angeles: Mapping the Urban Landscape in Contemporary Television,” explored how mediated visions of Los Angeles represent the everyday topographies of the city. Her work has been published in Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture. She is currently a Graduate Student Researcher on The Satellite Coast, an NSF-funded study hosted by the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab.

Carlos Jimenez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Film, and Journalism at the University of Denver. His research broadly examines the role of media in the everyday lives of work-class and immigrant communities: farmworkers, youth of color, and day laborers. His essays have appeared in the New Media and Society, Journal of Learning, Media and Technology, Journal of Radio and Audio Media, and other scholarly journals. He is finalizing a book, Media in the Fields, about how immigrant farmworkers in Oxnard, California use media to bring visibility to their lives and to reshape rural communities according to their needs. Dr. Jimenez brings experience in audio production. In Oxnard, California he helped farmworkers build a community radio station, Radio Indígena, from the ground up. More recently he has directed an award-winning podcast (1st place at the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence Award regional competition 2023) on immigration issues in Colorado called Hear Alla Presente, and is currently helping to build DU’s student-run KDXU radio station. He also received a 2024 NSF grant (with PI Dr. Lisa Parks and co-PI Dr. Althea Wasow at UC-Santa Barbara) to study the perception and experiences of farmworkers with the satellite Space X launches from the Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Ricardo Mata Vazquez (He/Him) is a first-generation Chicano raised in the San Fernando Valley, California. In 2018, as a non-traditional student, he completed his bachelors with a double major in Chicana and Chicano Studies and Anthropology (Cultural Emphasis). For several years, Ricardo worked as a bilingual educator, youth outreach worker, and family engagement liaison for the Santa Barbara Unified School District. Ricardo has a long history of grassroots community organizing and activism, is a traditional Mexicayotl (Aztec) dancer, and is currently a graduate student enrolled in the MA/PhD program in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is researching the relationship between artificial intelligence and chicanx-indigenous communities. He is currently a Graduate Student Researcher on The Satellite Coast, an NSF-funded study hosted by the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab.

Althea Wasow is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Currently, she is revising her monograph, Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives, which analyzes the complicity and resistance between police power and motion pictures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is also developing a Bert Williams essay film, Nobody (fiscal sponsor: Aubin Pictures), and conducting research on the relationship between Vandenberg Space Force Base and the Federal Correctional Complex in Lompoc, California, as co-PI of The Satellite Coast project (with PI Lisa Parks, UCSB, and co-PI Carlos Jimenez Jr., University of Denver). Prior to joining the faculty at UCSB, Wasow was UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) at UC Santa Cruz, where she collaborated on IAS’s public scholarship initiative, Visualizing Abolition.
As a filmmaker, Wasow wrote and directed the wannabe, which won Best Short at HBO’s New York International Latino Film Festival. In addition to national and international film festivals, her films have screened at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Queens Museum of Art. Her collaborations in film and visual culture also include, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (media researcher and consultant), An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (senior editor & co-writer), Rikers High (co-producer) and The Innocents (producer & project editor). Wasow has taught courses on film & media and policing, silent film history, experimental cinema, and photography at UCSB, UC Berkeley, The New School, and NYU. She has also taught in jails and prisons in New York and California, including San Quentin State Prison, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, and Rikers Island.

Donny Persaud is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. Broadly, his research analyzes the socio-economic and environmental implications of technologies aimed at resolving persisting inequities characterizing underserved, rural, and remote communities. His current research explores emerging issues associated with Starlink, SpaceX’s low-earth-orbit satellite internet constellation, and how satellite constellations at large are reshaping understandings of place, nature, and the future of internet connectivity. His work details how stakeholders including telecom operators, astronomers, legal bodies, and activists mobilize overlapping and conflicting visions of nature to argue for varying levels of environmental protection for outer space. He holds an M.A. in Geography from Memorial University and a Hon.B.Sc. in Physical and Environmental Geography from the University of Toronto. He was awarded a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in 2022 and a NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant in 2024.

James Schwoch is a Professor at Northwestern University, with appointments in the Department of Communication Studies, the Program in Science and Human Culture, the Ph. D. Programs in Media, Technology, and Society and in Technology and Social Behavior, and the Ph. D. cluster in Environment, Culture, and Society. He is also a related faculty in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, and a faculty affiliate at the Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy and at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern. Schwoch conducts research and teaching in areas related to global media, media history, outer space, planetary boundaries, and media-communication-environment. He is a SKYWARN Trained Weather/Storm Spotter with the National Weather Service and is FEMA-trained in climate and environment-related emergency and disaster response. He has published seven books and many articles, and his most recent book is Wired Into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier with University of Illinois Press in 2018. Schwoch has held visiting professorships in Finland on three occasions. He was a resident fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies from 1997-1998. He was a founding faculty and Senior Associate Dean at Northwestern University in Qatar from 2007-2012, and a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in 2017. Additional agencies and institutions supporting his research include the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Qatar Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Fulbright Commission (Germany 1997, Finland 2005.) Schwoch is presently working on topics related to The New Outer Space. He currently serves as a contributing member and researcher with the International Astronomical Union Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference.