The Spacefaring Community and the State of Denial of Crimes in Outer Space

• In Event: Space, the Final Criminological Frontier: Imagining Crime, Policing and Security in Outer Space

Abstract

Space, in the popular imagination, predominantly comprises sci-fi movies, rockets to the Moon, and more recently, NASA’s Mars Rover expedition, the James Webb Telescope pictures, and human-missions to Mars like the one that forms the centre of Elon Musk’s SpaceX programme. We look up to the stars and marvel about space exploration, hoping for a better future. Space would unite us outside of Earth where we ‘no longer dream of over-coming difficulties but merely of surviving them’ (Lasch, 1979: 49). However, the idea that, for example, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA)’s plans to return Martian rock samples to Earth in the 2030s with Martian microbes that may contaminate our planet into another pandemic (Stuart, 2022), is a possibility but not desirable to imagine. Indeed, space crime and its harms remain unacknowledged in the popular imagination and criminological imagination. This presentation will explore why the spacefaring community and criminology reside in the state of denial (Cohen, 2001).

Author

• Yarin Eski, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam