Falling back to Earth: Techno-political Terrain of Space Exploration Through the Experiences of Space Metal Scavengers

My research is grounded in Soviet and contemporary Russian space exploration's aspirations for human presence in space and its simultaneous entanglement with particular localities, terrestrial infrastructures and the socio-political context of (post-)Soviet Russia. My ethnographic focus is the fallout zones of Northern Russia's Spaceport Plesetsk in the Arkhangelsk Region, where rocket boosters are discarded after launches into orbit. The zones have become vast, national inlands, effectively turned into scrapyards littered with space debris from the 1950s on. For the experienced hunters who live next to the fallout zones, they present a profoundly ambiguous landscape, which simultaneously threatens their health and well-being through invisible pollution, and offers the means to sustain their households by salvaging debris and making claims on the state as communities whose health has been affected. The zones are thus both a familiar and unknown territory. Post-Soviet crisis and uncertainty are intensified in these frontier locations where the edges of imperial histories, nation-states, outer space and pollution coalesce.

My project explores how local communities inhabit and negotiate such indeterminate borders, spaces and materials, and what such edgework can tell us about the larger polities to which they belong. How are such frontiers and wastes mutually constitutive, multi-scalar and polyvalent? Bringing the focus of space exploration back down to Earth demonstrates that outer space's frontiers are also firmly grounded in geopolitical borders. Space infrastructure is typically built in lands that are geographically and politically marginal - or made so through processes of evacuation and ruination (cf. Lerner, 2010).