Space in Common? Property,Waste and Their Colonial Lives in the Cosmos

Abstract

This article focuses on the politics of use and pollution (due to both light and debris) of the night sky as an environmental commons and discusses the fraught postcolonial dynamics of accessing and occupying orbits. It establishes a dialogue between the political ecology of space assets and the interdisciplinary critical tradition, unearthing the colonial legacies that structure environmental, sociolegal and political relations. This dialogue unveils that the idea of property is at the centre of the colonial matrix underpinning the cosmic expansion of capitalism. This territorial appropriation takes place through the interconnected actions of owning and discarding space objects. Space debris emerge as postcolonial remains, because the unequally distributed property of space objects and their pollution make up the present lives of colonialism in space.

Either commons are a means to the creation of an egalitarian and cooperative society or they risk deepening social divisions, making havens for those who can afford them and who can therefore more easily ignore the misery by which they are surrounded. (Caffentzis and Federici 2014: i100-101)

Introduction

Shortly after leaving Georgetown for the Amazon rainforest in the interior of Guyana, the town of Linden started to appear on the horizon. Wide, spread out – a skyline of flat and gently sloping roofs. Approaching the Demerara River, the mirror image of a bauxite factory appeared in the calm waters. White smoke powerfully pumped out from the exhaust contrasted with the stillness of the river. I looked down and then up. The environmental degradation from the stripping of layers of soil seemed to meet the air and water pollution resulting from industrial processes. I was travelling to the Amazon rainforest for a project on the use of satellite technologies for environmental monitoring and, ironically, I had previously only seen this area through maps enabled by satellites. Those aluminium boxes, made of bauxite (maybe the same bauxite?), embody environmental relations that stretch from soil to the atmosphere, and all the way to orbits. There are almost 10,000 satellites encircling our planet, and over half of these are owned by a US-based commercial company: Space X. Their occupation of orbit represents yet another dimension, unseen hence underappreciated, of the environmental crisis. Satellites and space junk, as I discuss in this article, are harmful to communities and environments because of the earthly extractive economies that produce it, the changes to the dark sky (light pollution) they engender and because of the possibility of collisions and debris re-entering earth.

In Linden, the relation between exploited land and more-than-terrestrial pollution appeared as neat as the mirror image of the steaming bauxite factory in the river water. Starting from here, this article weaves together critiques of uses of orbital space and changes to the night sky by focusing on the role of private property in shaping current inequalities in space access. The aim is dual: firstly, to analyse how property, often dismissed as irrelevant to the de-territorialised domain of outer space, is central to understand the coloniality of neoliberal space activities. Critical theory, which has so far marginalised outer space, has a role to play in unmasking the legal, social and cultural devices that support the expansion of capitalist accumulation beyond earth. Secondly, to foreground activist calls for protecting orbits and extraterrestrial environments as commons in the context of building just ecological futures.

A growing academic debate has focused on adjudicating whether or not the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (often referred to as Outer Space Treaty, or OST) – the main instrument of space governance – protects outer space as a global commons. There is broad agreement that the Outer Space Treaty rejects state sovereignty claims in space and upholds the principles of collaboration and reciprocity. However, competing traditions interpret differently the privileges and obligations regarding space as res communis and, crucially, the boundaries set to its use and possible resource appropriation. ¹ In ‘Why Isn’t Outer Space A Global Commons?’, US-based legal scholar John S. Goehring maintains that while claims to territorial sovereignty are in breach of the Outer Space Treaty, the possibilities of using, appropriating and profiting from resources in outer space environments are not refuted by all states adhering to it. ² This view is in keeping with current US policy. A 2020 Executive Order of President Donald Trump stated that ‘the United States does not view [space] as a global commons’, and the Artemis programme opened up the possibility to extract and commercialise lunar regolith – the layer of dust and broken rocks that covers the Moon’s surface. ³ The rejection of the commons status is partly related to the threat this label poses to the possible expansion of commercial and profit-driven activities into space. For the same reason, reclaiming outer space as commons in activist practices and scholarly works remains a powerful expression of resistance against the state-centric model of international law, which can be blind to the histories that brought about and perpetrate global inequalities.

In this article, I hold on to thinking of space as commons by advancing a political ecology analysis of the environmental degradation of earth’s orbit. However, I also propose that the idea of space commons can effectively challenge new enclosures of ‘cosmic capitalism’ (Dickens, 2023) only if room is made to reckon with the complex interaction between the exploitative environmental processes that underpin production of debris and the use of property as a tool for establishing the right to use and waste space. The sections that follow engage with Ann Laura Stoler’s (2013) Imperial Debris, Brenna Bhandar’s (2018) Colonial Lives of Property and Max Liboiron’s (2021) Pollution is Colonialism and discuss how these works enlighten space debates. They demonstrate that the right to own and waste technologies is integral to the practices of environmental ruination of colonial modernity, which extend temporally until today and spatially beyond the atmosphere. Placing megaconstellations, networks of hundreds to tens of thousands of satellites, into orbit is a ‘space grab’ – a form of extra-terrestrial occupation that rewards countries that already possess space objects. The idea of ‘better’ use of resources coupled with the discourse of technological superiority have enabled a (slowly widening) pool of predominantly Global North actors a disproportionate hold on space assets, with little provision in relation to their care or the sharing of space benefits. After taking stock of some existing debates over the distribution of space benefits and activism over protecting the night sky, the last section points out that claims to space commons have also been criticised for their disregard towards Indigenous sovereignty. I suggest that ‘commoning’ outer space, as an anticapitalist project committed to challenging the production of new enclosures and wastelands, can only be realised if it is anticolonial and discards exploitative material processes and legal tools enabling unequal access to outer space.

The Debris of Postcolonial Entanglements

A political ecology of the commons focuses on the politics intrinsic in the erosion of environmental resources and the fraught dynamics of accessing those resources (Agrawal, 2007). It is also an opening to rethink intertwined ecological relations, and to imagine ways of doing environmental justice differently (Harcourt, 2019). Tracing a political ecology of space technologies is fundamental to defining a ‘politics of the commons’ (Wells and Lynch, 2000: 93) for more environmentally just futures in space, and it is urgent now that a de facto occupation of orbital space has already altered the night sky. Satellites, with their light and material pollution, represent a neglected side of our environmental catastrophe and, as I discuss in this article, a colonial entanglement between old processes of enclosing and exploiting environments and the creation of new wastelands. The words waste, junk and pollution are commonly used to refer to both the debris cluttering orbits and the interference of their light with the night sky. I here suggest that debris are the remains and reminders of highly polluting activities, including the extraction of raw materials, the industrial processes for manufacturing space objects and the atmospheric pollution derived from space launches. By focusing on various types of pollution as the result of entangled activities on earth and outer space, I widen the scope of current investigations that too often separate neatly the two domains. Through a political ecology of the commons, planetary-orbital environments (Clormann and Klimburg-Witjes, 2021) appear to be a continuum.

While capitalism creates ever new enclosures, not only focusing on the materiality of mineral resources but also on cognitive labour (Hardt and Negri, 2011; Mies, 1986; Shiva, 2020), outer space constitutes the ultimate ‘spatial fix’ (Dickens and Ormrod, 2007: 49). It is a promise of new extraction of materials, bacteria and extreme life forms (Helmreich, 2011; Klinger, 2017; Salazar, 2017) and the place of proliferation of technological assets, such as megaconstellations. In line with economists Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie (2014), the New Space Age and its expansion of capitalist exploitation can be seen as benefiting from a ‘commons fix’: space entrepreneurs, and space enthusiasts, often cast outer space commons as the solution to the earth’s environmental crisis and the supposed scarcity of earthly resources. But also, simultaneously, terrestrial resources are extracted and used for the material occupation of the sky. This double move is the focus of this article, which zooms into the coloniality of imaginative, legal and material practices of space appropriation and use. The colonial matrix of capitalism, based on systematic appropriation and pauperisation (Venn, 2018), underpins its expansion beyond the atmosphere.

As space and earth are entangled domains, global postcolonial power dynamics extend to the politics of space access, use of terrestrial resources and infrastructure. Anthropologist Peter Redfield, investigating the infrastructure of the spaceport in French Guiana owned by the European Space Agency, has demonstrated that space infrastructure relies on use of land and resources from former colonies, while most of the benefits – economic, social and otherwise – are redistributed within the Global North (Redfield, 2000). In Karou (French Guiana), Alcantara (Brazil) (Mitchell, 2017) and Mauna a Wākea (Hawaii), where the Thirty Meter Telescope (or TMT) was proposed for construction on the mountain considered sacred to Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (native Hawaiians) (Casumbal-Salazar, 2017), dispossession and land expropriation have been crucial tools for building space facilities. Deondre Smiles defines this as one of the ‘settler logics’ of outer space (Smiles, 2020), and I suggest that geographer Max Liboiron’s definition of colonialism as ‘the maximum use of resources, dispossession and property as a way to secure settler and colonial futures’ (Liboiron, 2021: 36) is particularly fitting for the New Space Age.

The renewed rush to space through technological innovation and use of orbits has been compared to the settler occupation of American territories (Trevino, 2020; Venkatesan et al., 2020). Colonising space, however, cannot be simply defined as a one-way route towards an empty outside; it is a process bound up with various forms of earthly dispossession, degradation and extractivism – from space infrastructure to bauxite mining. It is almost a commonplace to note that satellites mediate ecological relations on earth by, for example, enabling the monitoring of planetary climate conditions. ⁴ An ecological lens reveals the material connections of these technologies to the bauxite that makes up their aluminium shells or their coating. Jamaican filmmaker Esther Figueroa’s (2019) documentary Fly Me to the Moon provides a groundbreaking analysis of the reliance of the space economy on aluminum, which is materially a byproduct of mining earthly soil. Postcolonial relations are at play here, as most of the world’s bauxite is in tropical regions, and Brazil, India and Caribbean countries (including Jamaica and Guyana) are amongst the main producers. Figueroa’s critique is grounded in Cockpit Country in Jamaica – where the history of the Maroons’ resistance to British colonialism overlaps with the contemporary resistance against land dispossession for mining enacted by the state with the help of colonial laws. ⁵ As media scholar Jussi Parikka shows in A Geology of Media (Parikka, 2015), energy, labour and waste are essential parts of media assemblages. Tracing the political ecology of satellites means similarly analysing the processes of their making and wasting, but also uncovering stories of discarded materials that may never be buried deep down in the soil. Figueroa’s Fly Me to the Moon narrates the more-than-earthly interconnections that materially constitute space objects. These connections root both the space economy and resistance to space extraction in postcolonial and Indigenous territories, such as Cockpit County in Jamaica, or in Linden in Guyana.

Looking at satellites, Bennett et al. highlight gross inequalities that affect the production of satellite imagery in terms of design, ownership and data use (Bennett et al., 2022: 46). Satellite ownership secures power over the sharing of benefits that derive from these technologies; however, it does not require obligations towards their care. Currently, the United States owns over half of the total number of satellites in orbit, with Space X’s Starlink megaconstellation, whose function is providing broadband services, acounting for most of them. The launch of megaconstellations in Lower Earth Orbit (LEO) by companies such as Space X and OneWeb means that hundreds or thousands of new satellites are joining space junk in increasingly crowded orbital environments. ⁶ Debris consists of the remains of defunct satellites, discarded parts of space rockets and other anthropogenic waste that floats above the atmosphere. ⁷ Debris is not the result of generic ‘human’ activities but the product of economic processes that favour the Global North. ⁸ As geographer Julie Klinger summarises: ‘very few countries are responsible for the vast majority of orbital pollution. This is a form of environmental injustice insofar as the polluting activity of one subset of users reduces accessibility for subsequent parties’ (Klinger, 2019: 21; emphasis added).

With reference to the critical work of anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler (2008, 2013), I suggest that space debris embodies the (post)colonial environmental damage that connects together the soil and the sky. ⁹ Stoler uses the term debris to refer to the traces of imperial formations that remain present in the environment, as well as people's bodies and knowledges. Opposing a static understanding of material debris, she highlights the continuous processes of ruination that actively shape modernity: ‘Like ruins, debris is constructed, ruination is made. Debris speaks to something else. Leftovers are assigned as detritus because they are rendered into neglect or valorised for insistent remembrance’ (Stoler, 2013: x). Looking at the power dynamics at play in the production, use and discarding of space objects, debris provides an opportunity to move beyond a deterministic idea of waste as the inevitable (thus often considered acceptable) consequence of consumption.

In an article on debris as media waste populating the space commons, media scholar Katarina Damjanov affirms: ‘The waste footprints marking the human technological conquest of space, orbital debris conveys the dark side of our medianatures beyond the globe’ (Damjanov, 2017: 168–9). Damjanov sees this ‘dark side’ of technological entanglements both as an unwanted side-effect of mediation and a consequence that remains out of sight, as in Parikka’s staging of the anthrobscene – the age of unsustainable, ethically dubious and hidden practices, from mining to wasting, that sustain high energy economies and highly mediated lives (Parikka, 2014). However, far from being just a collateral damage of technology use, debris is the product of postcolonial extractive relations, and therefore enmeshed in ongoing capitalist processes of environmental ruination. Extractivism and waste-making constitute our material relationship with outer space (Klinger et al. 2025).

Property and the Creation of New Wastelands

As Liboiron states, dispossession and property are privileged tools in the enactment of colonial futures. The previous section showed how space is produced through resource extraction and dispossession in the Global South while disproportionate technology ownership is held by North Atlantic countries. This section focuses on the property of space assets enabling the commodification and occupation of orbits. Bringing the governance of outer space in discussion with colonial legal inheritances shows that the practice of the law, with its rhetoric and bureaucracy, enforces property as a hegemonic relation with the sky. Tackling property as a type of relation that is exclusionary in its very constitution, I suggest that current space relations are antithetical to the principles of benefit sharing and reciprocity of the Outer Space Treaty and that frame space as commons. Moreover, a renewed understanding of the colonial legacies underpinning the law and practice of space occupation is necessary to rethink resistance against inequality, exploitation and environmental degradation. A degradation that can be said to be ‘ex-orbitant’ (Clark, 2005): it exists beyond the planetary atmosphere, and shows that the earth is open to the cosmos through biophysical, social and cultural processes.

Critical legal scholar Bhandar’s (2018) Colonial Lives of Property is a fundamental tool to untangle the strands that make up the current articulation of space as a resource and a backdrop to other productive activities. In her analysis of the distribution of land to First Nations in British Columbia in the 1800s under colonial administrators such as Joseph Trutch, Bhandar demonstrates that possession on the basis of the utilitarian principle of use, or better use of land, was crucial for rationalising the progressive land dispossession of Indigenous communities. A Lockean worldview, by which working the land and enhancing its economic productivity were an expression of rationality, informed Trutch’s decisions to redraw reserve boundaries based on the land’s state of cultivation and on the type of cultivation carried out (Bhandar, 2018: 53). The idea of improving lands in line with the standards of European cultivation positioned Indigenous land uses as unproductive and opened up ownership to the English by playing into discourses of their racial superiority. As property was complicit in fabricating racial difference and gender identities, upon which access to property was dependent, the system that persists today, made up of legislation as well as discourses and practices, is better understood as a racial regime of ownership. In proposing three interconnected points about property, Bhandar demonstrates: ‘the noninevitable yet nonarbitrary nature of this juridical formation; the (consequential) necessity for this formation to be continually renewed in the colonial drive to appropriate indigenous land; and the recombinant nature of the constituent parts of the racial regime of ownership’ (Bhandar, 2018: 9). Taking the cue from her, it is possible to trace how in the New Space Age, ownership of technologies enables control over the use of ever wider swathes of outer space.

The technocratic nature of the legal system and processes of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the oldest UN agency, created during the 1860s to help facilitate communications and now in charge of assigning satellite orbits, has an active role in entrenching deep-rooted geopolitical power dynamics. As both orbital shells and radio frequencies are assigned on a first come first serve basis, the current ‘space grab’ through megaconstellations and satellites is rewarding the world’s most powerful and older spacefaring nations and a small number of their private firms. The existence of a time window within which to effectively occupy a registered slot has the effect of facilitating applications from countries with existing technological advantages. This argument is not fully new. Already in 2009, geographer Christy Collis warned that the finite space of the Geostationary Orbit (GEO), which is strategically important because it follows the direction of earth’s rotation, eliminating the need for recalibration of earth-based infrastructure, had been unevenly occupied for decades. Referring to the International Telecommunications Union procedures, she noted: ‘Developing states argued that . . . states with economic and technological power could, and would, help themselves to the GEO [Geostationary Orbit] in a first-come-first-served rush of satellites, and that states with less money would effectively find themselves locked out of the GEO’ (Collis, 2009: 52). This current uneven occupation is the result of the commodification of orbits, which are assigned after being subjected to planning permissions and ‘built upon’.

Collis calls the Geostationary Orbit a most valuable real estate, implying that capitalist accumulation has been taking place in orbit at least since the 1960s. In fact, parallels between satellites and houses have been variously used, including by supporters of the privatisation of orbits. Legal scholar Ian Blodger’s ‘Reclassifying Geostationary Earth Orbit as Private Property: Why Natural Law and Utilitarian Theories of Property Demand Privatization’ uses the housing analogy in conjunction with John Locke’s theory of property. It suggests that privatising portions of orbits is not only justified, but desirable:

the satellite is no different from a house built on Earth since both are bound to a fixed point, and improve the area generally. . . . pouring concrete in an Earth-bound location is the same kind of action taken by placing a satellite in a location bound to Earth, just farther away. Placing a satellite in orbit is similar to transporting materials from one area and erecting them in another location which does confer a property right under Locke’s theory. (Blodger, 2016: 430)

This reference to Locke asserts property as a favoured mode of relating to space. ¹⁰ Moreover, the example of the house and its plot is useful to note the contiguity and possible slippage between the owning of space objects and having jurisdiction over space. The thin line between these two is increasingly blurred by the expansion of satellite networks. Megaconstellations, which extend over ever-larger parts of space, de facto enable control over large areas in space. ¹¹

With Bhandar, territorial control based on property appears as a European construct, whose colonial history has disproportionately disadvantaged colonised and Indigenous peoples through dispossession and the erasure of other modes of relating to environments. This mode of territorialisation also extends to claims to the sky and has the effect of disregarding Indigenous rights and the interests of countries in the Global South. While proponents of space colonisation hasten to point out that no Indigenous people live in space, the occupation of orbits violates Indigenous rights on earth in several ways: because dispossession of Indigenous lands is built into the fabric of space objects; because space objects alter the night sky, which has a particular importance in Indigenous cultures (Venkatesan et al., 2020); because it constitutes a foreclosure of future more just and equitable relationships (Bawaka Country, 2020).

In relation to states in the Global South, when sovereignty claims to orbital space were made based on principles other than use and occupation, these were deemed inadequate to grant access to orbits. The argument of ‘better use’ was used to dismiss their claims. This is the case of the 1976 Declaration of The First Meeting of Equatorial Countries, or the ‘Bogotá Declaration’, through which seven equatorial countries affirmed their sovereignty over those portions of geostationary orbit located over their territory. ¹² Referencing the principle of contiguity, they affirmed that the geostationary orbit is part of earth: its fixed alignment with earth which makes this orbit a strategic territory is a phenomenon related to gravity. Most states rejected the Bogotá Declaration and their reasons are worth noting:

The UK stated that the GEO was a part of space and therefore unavailable for claim under the Outer Space Treaty, and Belgium insisted that the equatorial states were unable to ‘effectively occupy’ their GEO [Geostationary Orbit] claims and were therefore unable to ‘perfect’ those claims at law. (Collis, 2009: 56)

Technological power facilitates property of assets, which in turn guarantees access and use of space. In this light, satellites and megaconstellations in orbital environments have emerged as both critical infrastructure and modes of territorial occupation. The limited presence of assets from the countries of the Global South in space, and the obstacles in the way of all claims made to space that were not based on physical occupation, are the effects of a racial regime of property that appears to be at play in the international governance of outer space, from orbits to deep space.

This reflection on the exclusionary power of property, which relies upon the physical occupation of space, extends to space debris. Their orbital occupation marks the consolidation of new outer space enclosures. Damjanov notes that, just as common lands were fenced and bordered during European colonial occupation, the branding of common spaces as waste/wastelands reverberates through space:

The accumulating orbital debris signposts the curious etymological interplay between the words waste and commons; in Middle English, ‘waste’ (from the Latin vastus, meaning empty or desolate) designated the unoccupied, uncultivated land that was to be shared as commons. Just as the commonly shared European ‘wastelands’ were gradually enclosed and transformed into property between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries . . . orbital space has been similarly appropriated by states and corporations. (Damjanov, 2017: 172–3)

Debris appears as modes of wasting space that actively stand against common access and impinge upon the possibility of the sky being a future common. In the previous section, I described debris as the residue of colonial extractive relations that make up technologies. Here, the emphasis on property and occupation of space has brought to the fore the coloniality inscribed in the right to own space and the exclusive possibility to waste it, or create waste.

Referencing Bhandar, Liboiron refers to waste as a settler colonial technology that is the evolution of colonial property (Liboiron, 2021: 72). He also affirms:

Pollution . . . and actions to mitigate pollution are not only examples of, symptoms or metaphors for, or unintentional byproducts of colonialism, but rather, are essential parts of the interlocking logics (brain), mechanisms (hands and teeth), and structures (heart and bones) of colonialism. (Liboiron, 2021: 15–16)

In the context of the New Space Age, space debris is both the means and product of the rearticulation of a colonial regime of property. In summary, reading Liboiron’s work on pollution as a tool of colonial occupation together with Bhandar’s reflections on the exclusionary power of property has had three effects: firstly, it has highlighted the relation between technological occupation of space and its territorialisation. Secondly, it has shown that property is exercised through the right to waste, which is antithetical to an ecological ethos that attends to caring for the interconnections within and beyond our planet. Thirdly, it has paved the way to seeing how anticolonialism, framed as resistance to historically created ecological devastation, and anticapitalism, which fundamentally rejects property as a mode of relation, are fundamental to rethinking outer space commons.

Discarding Coloniality and ‘Commoning’ Space

The interrelation of capitalism and colonialism in space is visible in the rights to own and waste space objects. Earlier in the article, I suggested that using a political ecology lens puts the spotlight on entangled forms of exploitation and can be a good starting point for rethinking resistance. This final section focuses on the limits of types of resistance reclaiming space as global commons and asks what political exclusions they may conceal. In relation to activist movements in settler states reclaiming the commons, Max Liboiron and Dene scholar Glen Coulthard have challenged their implicit disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty; in Canada, like in other settler colonial states, the commons literally belong to First People (Coulthard, 2014). Similarly, taking stock of critiques to the Occupy movement in the US, Craig Fortier’s Unsettling the Commons warns:

A commons fought for, envisioned, and practiced by non-indigenous radicals that ignores the historical context of settler colonialism can and often does threaten to interfere with processes of Indigenous decolonization and resurgence. (Fortier, 2017: 33)

Placing these critiques at the centre of rethinking outer space commons draws attention to the fact that, like land, orbital environments cannot be considered as blank slates.

First, activism for outer space commons must reckon with the unequal relations, discussed so far, that have created the current population of debris and functioning technologies, floating with other space matter. Second, it must foreground the critiques of outer space commons that have already been raised by Indigenous researchers and communities. Referring to Sky Country (Australia), a collective of authors writing under the name Bawaka Country pointed out:

Legal frameworks based on the principle of res communes may appear to be oriented towards protecting space. But they violate Sky Country in a different way: they annex it as the property of the nebulous category of ‘humanity’, defined in large part by the UN, and rooted in Western liberal values and modes of governance. (Bawaka Country, 2020: 4)

The racial regime of property and the humanism that underpin the legal language (claims that space must benefit all humankind) need to be undone. But how can property relations, which place emphasis on power and individuation, be provincialised in favour of concepts such as guardianship, and care? And can this be done without disregarding or tokenistically appropriating Indigenous imaginaries and knowledges?

The cultural history of space as commons provides examples that can help decentre state conflicts derivative of the space race of the 1950s and 1960s and open up counter-imaginaries of space relations. As Mai’a Cross demonstrates, activist and cultural movements have long claimed space as a domain of peaceful cooperation. In fact, claims to space as commons precede the Cold War and began within the Spaceflight Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. This history and the cognitive labour that goes into space innovation and missions, rooted in international cooperation, can themselves constitute a mode of ‘commoning’ (Cross, 2021). Without disregarding the hegemonies at play in current configurations of power – including the birth of US Space Force in 2019 and shows of force through the destruction of satellites – looking at ‘commoning’ practices can be contrapuntal to existing power dynamics.

Instead of holding onto a contested legal category of space as commons, I here refer to commoning as a social process in which reimagining forms of togetherness and activism can sow the seeds for anticapitalist and anticolonial futures (Fournier, 2013). De Angelis refers to commoning as a verb used to refer to activities carried out by commoners in the forest. For every attempt to enclose the commons, new modes of resistance emerge to combat the new formations of capitalist expansions.

Capital needs the commons to deal with the crisis as much as social movements need to confront capital’s enclosures of the commons in order to construct serious alternatives and prevent capital’s attempts to co-opt the commons. Hence, it is crucial not only to defend existing commons from enclosures, but also to shape new commons as they become a crucial terrain of struggle (De Angelis, 2013).

This view is in line with political philosophers Hardt and Negri’s (2011) conception of the commons in Commonwealth, where a society built on the principle of ‘the common’ is seen as already evolving from the informatisation and ‘cognitivisation’ of production. However, commoning outer space enlightens the patchworked, differentiated, and contextual nature of contemporary struggles for the conservation of the sky. These are being fought in sites such as international courts, universities and Indigenous territories, and by different actors. Their concerns include the environmental impact of space technologies on earth and in orbit, as well as aggressive resource exploitation (asteroid mining, colonisation, terraforming, etc.).

In particular, reclaiming the night sky as ‘common heritage’ has informed the repertoire of resistance against megaconstellations. Environmentalists, astronomers, amateur stargazers, and Indigenous leaders have protested against light pollution scarring views of the night. The light reflected by satellites and debris can be seen with the naked eye, interferes with scientists’ activities and modifies ancestral views of dark skies. The controversy over preserving the night sky has found a battleground at the United Nations’ Committee for Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), where The International Astronomical Union and member states Chile, Ethiopia, Jordan, Slovakia and Spain have made recommendations to protect our Dark and Quiet Skies for ‘the benefit of humanity’ (Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, 2021). Their submitted paper lays out in detail the possible damage caused by light pollution and proposes a set of recommendations to minimise the harm. However, the technical and scientific language of this submission leaves little room for the expression of societal perspectives or for discussing how light pollution affects different knowledge systems.

Rangi Mātāmua, a Māori cultural astronomer at Massey University, Manawatū, expressed concern for the impact of these environmental changes on Indigenous peoples’ stories and cultural practices: ‘From a cultural point of view, it is a desecration’ (Sokol, 2021). Hilding Neilson, an astronomer at the University of Toronto and a member of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, agreed that large satellite constellations are a cultural threat, and launching them should require consent from sovereign groups on earth. ¹³ However, in the attempts to modify international governance, the monolingualism of science and law – which remain the main informants of policy-making – threaten to keep these conversations and resistance within ‘the cognitive box of imperialism’ (Simpson, 2011: 148).

After all, as Caffentzis and Federici highlight, international governance of the commons has at times been a vehicle for exploitation, rather than an alternative to it: ‘The United Nations too has asserted its right to manage the world’s main eco-systems – the atmosphere, the oceans, and the Amazonian forest – and open them up for commercial exploitation, again in the name of preserving the common heritage of humanity’ (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014: 97). Similarly, the practice of international law, where readiness to occupy orbits has been a pre-condition for more orbital use, and international programmes linking outer space and environmentalism, such as space initiatives supporting the Sustainable Development Goals, have encouraged the satellite economy, instead of drawing attention to the overcrowding of orbits and their unequal effects. Resistance to capitalist regimes of property and to the failure of international policymaking to curb space pollution needs to be premised on the decolonisation of this single view of humanity that will benefit from outer space. This means ‘discarding’ extractive colonial fantasies that have imposed ownership as a mode of relating to beings and environments, and embracing what Liboiron calls an ‘ethics of incommensurability’. This ethics of relation recognises the heterogeneity of actors involved in the struggle over space; it does not ‘paper over’ differences but constructs forms of solidarity through cooperation across what may be incommensurable value systems, worldviews and obligations (Liboiron, 2021: 24). This openness to different communities, values and attachments to outer space is crucial to the possibility of commoning outer space. Against blanket statements about space assets benefiting all humankind, such openness suggests there are modes of imagining environmental futures that can provincialise property.

Challenging the anthropocentric legacies of environmentalist arguments, Gray and Sheikh build upon Frantz Fanon’s scholarship to propose that the earth itself is ‘wretched’, having been commodified and used as a resource for extraction of minerals, a grave for the lives lost due to colonial and postcolonial violence, and a trash dump for discarded materials. They highlight ‘the need to go beyond . . . humanism to think about the multiple human and nonhuman cohabitations that constitute the soil and, more broadly, our more-than-human commons’ (Gray and Sheikh, 2018: 164). Because of the ways in which the sky is embedded in colonial and capitalist histories, it is crucial to extend these critiques of ongoing processes of ruination to orbits and beyond. In this view, the materiality of waste is both a tool of occupation and a challenge for the resource-thinking of established socio-political and environmental orders. If the sky is wretched, a call to commoning requires us to discard coloniality, its adjacent humanism, and think of space junk as a vector connecting earthly histories and spaces. It becomes necessary to acknowledge the continuity between state-driven and commercial exploitation of the finite space of orbits, and to co-exist with and tend to currently compromised planetary-orbital environments. In Cath Le Couteur and Nick Ryan’s short film Adrift (2016), the oldest piece of space junk, a solar-powered satellite lost in 1958, tells the story of more-than-human entanglements from its perspective. It talks of collisions, crowding, but also about the places of its making as home. Earth and sky appear entangled, and the extraglobal ecologies of ruins provide an opportunity to think about more-than-human futures in common. One could imagine a continuation of this work, in which a contrapuntal dialogue emerges with stories about the satellite told by different communities on earth, where pollution and harm are juxtaposed with possibilities of repair and care. This attempt to move away from a singular story and the hegemony of a history of technological exploration rooted in the Cold War is also an opportunity to open up composite imaginaries of future space commons.

Conclusion

The increasing commodification of space into owned ‘assets’ and the rootedness of the space economy and governance within colonial relations and worldviews are an obstacle to environmental justice on our planet and beyond. Due to the rapid increase of technologies in orbit, space debris has emerged as both a consequence of the colonial occupation of orbit from a small group of space actors and as a tool of occupation in itself. This ‘re-articulation’ of a racial regime of ownership active on a cosmic scale has created new orbital wastelands and visible changes to the dark sky. While considering space as a common domain can be a useful starting point to oppose this environmental ruination, it risks falling short of providing anticolonial strategies for resistance. Without tackling unequal ownership and wasting of space, governance proposals based on ‘common heritage’ will not bring about more just environmental futures. Taking stock of postcolonial and Indigenous critiques of discourses on ‘reclaiming’ commons, future-making imaginaries and strategies of commoning outer space must discard coloniality, humanism, and make room for unexpected alliances that challenge hegemonic orders and ideologies. This article has taken a small step in this direction by highlighting how the privileging of economic abstraction over other modes of relating with complex ecologies has led to the current orbital crowding and pollution. Against the universality of ownership, ‘commoning’ has emerged as a possibility of connecting different and emerging instances of resistance, from community-led protests against light pollution to scientific efforts to declutter orbits. Beyond this article, commoning outer space is an open invitation to bring together instances of resistance against space exploitation, as well as the romanticisation of outer space as wilderness – a stance that effectively disregards its current state of pollution. It is the hope of fostering a multiplicity of relations with outer space based, among others, on awe, spiritual connection, kinship and interdependence between beings and environments.