Abstract
Space exploration has been a source of visions of a positive future development of humanity as a spacefaring species, as well as a possible warring domain of humanity as a nation-faring species. In this way, the post-WWII age was defined by a belief that technology can be the cause of either positive or dystopic futures, respectively.
However, the development of political science since then has provided us a different perception of the relation between technology and politics. In this article, we show how Large Technical Systems (LTS) could overcome the imprisonment of identity in a national straitjacket in interstate interactions and could subsequently enable more inclusive cosmopolitan global governance.
We argue that political reality could be determined by technology; it could be that normative theory, injected in decades' long LTSs, determines the available space for political steering. The space domain is specific given its inherently cosmopolitan epistemic space community that has the power through its expertise, ability to mobilize scientific facts, and also policy, to shape not only how LTSs of the future would appear, but also on what normative foundations they would stand.
Space community should become aware of its political capital instead of continuously asking for Global Space Agency involving all. LTS and the space community, therefore, effectively become two vehicles of political change.
We use three cases for this change that require LTS to be addressed: orbital debris, planetary defense, and interstellar travel. The principal problem of ambitious activities in space does not lie, we propose, in a lack of knowledge or lack in technical capabilities or lack of funding, but in the lack of our ability to enable cosmopolitan ideas in political practice.
The novel approach to space policy we suggest in our article builds on the basic principles of cosmopolitan theory, uses the concept of a responsible cosmopolitan state, and the Welsh School of critical security studies, a theory that focuses on security as emancipation rather than security as an absence of identified threat, to argue that security sensitive LTSs are not a burden, but rather an instrument to enable positive political change.