Rocket Politics: European space infrastructures in the New Space Age

• In Event: Infrastructuring Research: (Re)assembling Collaboration and Place-Making Practices I

Abstract

Large-scale and highly visible infrastructures play a strong symbolic role in connecting different regions, supporting the narratives of a united Europe made through shared infrastructural projects. In this paper, I explore how rocket infrastructures contribute to the making of Europe and how practices of infrastructural collectivity are linked to rationales of political connectivity. Focusing on the European rocket Ariane, often presented as a symbol of European integration, I ask how it shapes and is being shaped by processes of European infrastructural integration: 20 years after World War 2, European countries began to explore the opportunities for a collaboratively built launch vehicle, called “Europa”. However, it lacked a shared set of ideas of what a European space program should be about and never fully launched. With the foundation of the European Space Agency in 1975, a new rocket, Ariane 1, was built and became for decades the most successful on the market. However, as the commercial New Space Age flourishes, the European collaboration model is not competitive with private companies such as SpaceX. Ariane 6, the newest version, continually spurs controversies in the European space sector about the need to maintain such an expensive large-scale infrastructure and its contribution to so-called European autonomy. Mobilizing work in STS and infrastructure studies, I attend to practices of infrastructuring as relational to space-making practices, forms of European (dis)integration, and sovereignty and trace how collective space infrastructures help stabilize notions of Europe and, conversely, how imaginaries of Europe materialize in these large-scale space infrastructures.

Author

• Nina Klimburg Witjes, Vienna University