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

我的研究是基于苏联和当代俄罗斯太空探索的人类在太空中的存在，并与特定的地方，地面基础设施和社会政治背景（后）苏联俄罗斯的同时纠缠的愿望。我的人种学研究重点是位于阿尔汉格尔斯克州的俄罗斯北方普列谢茨克航天港的放射性尘埃区，火箭助推器在发射进入轨道后被丢弃在那里。从20世纪50年代起，这些区域已经变成了广阔的国家内陆，实际上变成了散落着太空碎片的垃圾场。对于生活在沉降区附近的经验丰富的猎人来说，它们呈现出一种非常模糊的景观，同时通过无形的污染威胁着他们的健康和福祉，并提供手段，以维持他们的家庭，通过抢救碎片和提出索赔的国家作为社区的健康受到影响。因此，无核武器区既是一个熟悉的领域，也是一个未知的领域。后苏联时代的危机和不确定性在这些帝国历史、民族国家、外层空间和污染的边缘融合的边疆地区加剧。我的项目探讨了当地社区如何居住和谈判这种不确定的边界、空间和材料，以及这种边缘工作可以告诉我们他们所属的更大的政治。这些边界和废物是如何相互构成的、多尺度的和多价的？将空间探索的重点带回地球表明，外层空间的边界也牢牢植根于地缘政治边界。空间基础设施通常建在地理上和政治上边缘化的土地上，或者是通过疏散和毁灭过程建造的。Lerner，2010）。

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).