This article conceptualizes outer space geographies through the Earthly geographies of extractive supply chains, focusing on mines and discarded electronics (e-waste), in order to examine the material relations through which contemporary human engagements with outer space are being produced. It considers the emergence of billionaires-turned-astronauts within the waste-making practices of supply chain capitalism, critiquing this as a particularly stark example of the politics of sacrifice that need to be centered in debates concerning the present and future of human engagements with outer space. Drawing together literatures on waste, discard, supply chains, and frontiers, and informed by fieldwork in several mining and launch sites on four continents, the article argues that waste-making on Earth is constitutive of a set of contemporary space activities and shapes the manner in which the immensity of the cosmos is understood and engaged by diverse publics. It concludes by reflexively examining the potential epistemic violence of waste-making as a spatial analytic to link Earthly and outer space geographies.

This chapter explores what a Make-up Kit created for the NASA astronaut programme can illuminate about communities in science and the identities that are possible for those participating in the field. The chapter holds in tension the object itself, its uses (both in practice by astronauts and as a museum object), and the users of the object, in order to productively and queerly explore what it means to construct gender and science in relation to each other. 

This chapter aims to demonstrate that feminist approaches to theory, method, and analysis can provide useful contributions for the social studies of outer space. Beyond tracing the history of women within the space sciences and engineering, feminist approaches unveil how intersecting social hierarchies—including gender, race, and class—have been affected by and reinforced through the space sciences, engineering, and space-related popular culture. This chapter particularly focuses on three areas in which explicitly feminist work on space exploration has substantively intervened: labour, technology, and the environment. Finally, it highlights the resonances of feminist frameworks with the greater body of space literature.

This chapter discusses approaches to queering public science institutions including science museums, science centres, zoos, and maker-spaces. It examines queering processes from two perspectives: the institutions’ public spaces (‘frontstage’) and behind the scenes organization and activities (‘backstage’).

This chapter highlights the tensions of queer identities between performative and structural changes in the institution and implications of performative actions highlighting the exceptionality of queer identities in turn reinforcing norms around acceptable lives and pathways in the process.

On July 20, 2021, Sotheby’s, the storied centuries-old auction house, promised collectors the Moon—or at least the chance to bid on items involved in getting there. Among the eighty-seven lots up for sale was an Apollo Guidance Computer. This metallic box, designed by MIT’s Instrument Laboratory and produced by Raytheon starting in 1966, was an essential tool for navigating the lunar surface and an important forerunner of modern computing. Sotheby’s estimated that this celebrated artifact—frequently studied not only in space history but also in the history of technology—would fetch between $200,000 and $300,000 USD. But when the auctioneer’s hammer hit the lectern, the price had skyrocketed to $746,000 USD. Other items on the block that day included a lunar surface checklist used by Neil Armstrong (sold for $63,000 USD) and Richard Feynman’s personal notes from the Challenger disaster investigation (sold for $44,100 USD). In case there was any doubt, Sotheby’s...