Dear all,
For the last session of the year of the seminar on Digital Materialities, we
are privileged to welcome Mia Bennett (Department of Geography, University of
Washington Seattle), with a presentation entitled:
Polar frontiers, polar orbits: The spluttering launch of Arctic commercial
spaceports.
Join us on Wednesday, June 18, 2025, from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. (CET) at CNAM
(Paris, 3rd arrondissement) and online!
You can register directly via this link:
https://evento.renater.fr/survey/seminaire-materialit...-uxql11mf
All information about the seminar is available here:
Digital materialities
Abstract: A rush is underway to build spaceports across the Arctic and
sub-Arctic. These infrastructures are intended to support the commercial
satellite sector and launch satellites into polar orbits. Since
Earth-observing satellites pass more over the polar regions than anywhere
else, the Arctic bears a disproportionate burden of the construction of
spaceports and ground stations, whose antennas downlink data from overpassing
satellites. Spaceports are being built in northern Norway (Andya) and
northern Sweden (Kiruna/Esrange), while seven spaceports are proposed in the
Arctics nearest neighbor, the UK, which seeks to be the global leader in
spaceports by 2030. Arctic spaceports are remote and often build near or on
rural and Indigenous lands. This distinguishes them from traditional portal
infrastructures like maritime ports and airports, which are built in urban
hubs to connect people. Spaceports are instead being constructed to move
objects from Earth into orbit. Governments and investors alike are promoting
them as transformational infrastructures that will upskill economies and
rocket countries into the New Space Age, which commercial actors dominate. Yet
the little-used Pacific Spaceport Complex, which opened on Kodiak Island,
Alaska in 1998, offers sobering lessons in the realities of spaceport
development and impacts on local communities. Current plans to expand
operations notably, without the construction of any additional accommodation
face local pushback due to frustration with launch-related road and beach
closures, explosions, and pollution. In this talk, I will compare the
off-Earth mobilities that spaceports promise versus the terrestrial ones they
uproot.
We look forward to seeing you there!
The organizers, Valentin Goujon, Adrien Tournier, Hugo Estecahandy
--
Adrien Tournier
Doctorant au sein du laboratoire HT2S du CNAM
https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/
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