The word “satellite” has the meaning of “follower or attendant of a superior person”. This term came into English from Middle French satellite, from the Latin satelles “attendant, companion, courtier, accomplice, assistant”. However, it seems that the Latin word came from the Etruscan “zatlath”, where “zatl” is the axe, and the suffix ath is a morpheme that indicates “who is doing”. The meaning is therefore “he, who wields the axe”, the Latin “lictor”, the bodyguard to magistrates.(Sparavigna, 2016: 1)
1The spatiality of power in the Anthropocene is only inadequately expressed by the notion of the globe. With respect to the economy in particular, the distinction is breaking down between geopolitics and astropolitics, and the latter can no longer be confined to a discipline concerned with using science fiction to “get a glimpse of”(Wright, 2019: 15) the shape of extraterrestrial warfare, but is becoming crucial for understanding the flow of capital as well as the ways in which terrestrial warfare is waged. Space history no longer belongs to the future or to the category of the future past (Koselleck, 1979), just as it is no longer appropriate to treat extraterrestrial space as an infinitely extended and featureless cosmic alterity, as the environmental dimension of debris-clogged orbital space has become a clear and distinct concern. The increasing dominion of terrestrial powers over astrographically delimited zones of congested extraterrestrial space needs to be integrated into the horizon of political analysis, just as the extraterrestrial needs to be included within accounts of the great acceleration of anthropogenic globalization that has taken place since Sputnik (McNeill and Engelke, 2014). But leaving the global absolute behind implies accepting a paradigm shift within historical and political analysis. This paper explores how we can think this new spatiality, with a particular focus on how moving beyond the globe impacts how we think about the biopolitical dimension of sovereign power.
2More narrowly, the following traces a process that Alexander Geppert and I have called “satellitization”(Geppert and Tabas, 2023). It provides an ex-orbital account of the history of the planet and its satellites which lays stress on the idea that the New Space age is in no way a return to space exploration, but rather marks the consolidation of the terrestrial dependency on satellite infrastructure. It places particular emphasis on the current scramble to develop space-based space surveillance (SBSS) systems and other attempts to control space from space, systems which enable the exercise of control over “astrographically” delimited areas of responsibility (AOR) (Shaw et al., 2022), as in effect consolidating practical dominions within extra-territorial space, and so bringing about a change in the spatial logic of sovereign power that has implications for what Foucault (2004a) called biopolitics. Satellites were instrumental in the biopolitics of the period that led up to the 1999 baptism of the term ‘Anthropocene’ (Davies, 2016: 42), and they remain critical to the Earth monitoring efforts within our current moment understood as a period of biopolitical crisis. Yet in the pre-Anthropocene period, terrestrial economic growth was in a pre-Anthropocene era thought to globally align with the aims of biopolitics. This is no longer thought to be the case, but the emergent paradigm of governance for Earth-Space sustainability is sometimes seen as a way forward (Yap and Truffer, 2022). This new Earth-Space paradigm opens a new horizon within the logic of biopolitics, separating its spatiality from the globe, or at least from the living biosphere, while at the same time subsuming earth system data and the limits of the planet within a re-parametered biopolitical machine, permitting at least the hope of a reconciliation between economic growth and planetary life.
3Tracing the emergence of astrographic dominions as a new form of biopolitics demands moving the horizons of the political beyond the globe. That means not only narrating political history since Sputnik in such a way as to re-frame much recent globalization as part of a process of infrastructural extra-terrestrialization; it also involves engaging in a concerted effort to deconstruct global bias within our language and our analytic frameworks. For example, when we think the local as dialectically opposed only to the global, then we forget satellites and the dominion over them, leaving space as a vast and undifferentiated cosmos filled only with heavenly bodies that exercise power over us in ways that are either mysterious or uncontrollable. But, to cite a phrase of Hannah Arendt’s that will orbit back again and again in the following: “the man-made satellite was no moon or star, no heavenly body which could follow its circling path for a time span that to us mortals, bound by earthly time, lasts from eternity to eternity”(Arendt, 1998: 1). Sputnik was, in other words, historical, but it was not on the globe. Historical thinking, to remain historical, must follow, even if biological life remains, by and large, tied to the ground.
4The methodology employed here is interdisciplinary. It draws on at least three distinct disciplines: the post-structuralist analysis of biopolitics, the strategic literature on astropolitics, and the eco-marxist literature on the Anthropocene. The approach applied here is also post-phenomenological. The term is borrowed from Don Ihde (1997). He used it to name a pragmatic approach to thinking which he took to be necessary because global warming had been confirmed by satellite observations, not by phenomenological reductions. This need for epistemic ecumenicalism is a diagnosis shared by Hess (2023), who in the course of his essay emphasizing the value of thinking the environment phenomenologically—from an embodied “first person point of view”—nevertheless concedes the necessity of relying on objective data regarding the states of the changing planetary system at key points in his exposition. Right now, the Global Climate Observing System currently identifies 54 essential climate variables (ECVs). Satellite data address about 60% of these variables, making satellites a vital component for monitoring and understanding our planet’s climate (Meftah et al., 2023). Post-phenomenology thinks with this data, recognizing that if humans require satellites to gather the data, and computers to process and model it, they nevertheless also employ humanistic discursive categories to make this data significant and to grasp its practical relevance. Thus, this text includes significant historical and conceptual analysis of political categories and concepts such as biopolitics and sovereignty.
5Satellitization has been a three-stage process. Each section in the following focuses on one phase, describing paradigmatically different relationships between terrestrial politics and satellite infrastructures. The first phase of satellitization involved often overblown speculations regarding how one might exploit an extraterrestrial technology to augment national power. But misplaced expectations in no way hampered efforts to put additional satellites into orbit. The second phase began when various forms of leverageable information from beyond the globe began iterating between Earth and space, enabling satellite-endowed states to exercise power over the planet. Over the course of this phase, extraterrestrial infrastructure began informing planetary life, and life on the planet took on such forms as to yield additional extraterrestrial infrastructure. The final phase of satellitization began when knowledge of the orbital domain, astrographical as opposed to geographical, became a source of power. Efforts began to be made to exercise that power not from land, but from satellite to satellite. This final phase is still emergent, but its key characteristic is a growing awareness that the limits of sustainable orbital holding capacity are determined by the limits to existing space surveillance capacity, such that the nation that has that knowledge now can be seen to exercise a new form of post-biopower over an orbital dominion.
6If the phases are presented and emerged to salience in temporal succession, they are not, strictly speaking, linear but cumulative. All three are simultaneously part of the contemporary politics of satellitization, and each played a key role in the emergence of the ongoing reconfiguration of the logic of sovereignty set in motion by the growth of the new space economy. Each section begins by outlining the phase of satellitization, then focuses on the technological capacities of the satellites and the politics driving their deployment, before concluding with an excursus on the larger significance of these evolutions.
“There is something that is more important than any ultimate weapon. That is the ultimate position—the position of total control over the Earth that lies somewhere out in space”(Johnson, 1963).
7The first phase of satellitization was marked by prognostications, grand visions of how satellites might be exploited to the ends of power politics. It was also marked by a yawning gap between the power alleged to follow from the growth of space infrastructure and the capacity to influence the forms of planetary life provided by existing technologies. In the first stage of satellization, satellites were often imagined as having the potential to become some sort of “superweapon”(Dienst, 1959: 2), yet they were ultimately only a powerful symbol of power.
8Sputnik just went beep. That beeping performed little of utility for controlling the planet other than announcing the satellite was there. The American first, Explorer I, did slightly more—it discovered the Van Allen radiation belts—but its capacities were still radically limited (Launius and Jenkins, 2014).
9In geopolitical terms, satellites that just went beep were not doing nothing: “Sputnik shock” motivated American politicians to increase their space efforts (Dickson, 2019), it inspired admiration worldwide for Russian technological prowess, and at the very least demonstrated the launch capabilities of both superpowers. A full account of satellitization might detail the evolution of early launches, especially the different experimental strategies employed as engineers sought ways of transforming the potential of satellites into a functioning means of transforming life on planet Earth. But one can quickly enough classify the period by saying that it was dominated by experimentation and geo-orientation. Those who financed satellite launches were primarily interested in planet Earth. This was not at all the understanding of the potential of satellites among early Astrofuturists. Von Braun, for example, had anticipated that satellites would be manned space stations serving as waypoints between Earth and deeper space (Millard, 2017). But planet Earth, and the power over it that satellites seemed capable of delivering, was more attractive. Some thought that satellites would be useful for observation, others thought that they might be weapons, others still thought they should be used as tools for world peace (Singh, 2017: 143). But the consensus was that satellites were going to be about the globe.
10Arendt’s 1958 book, Conditio Humana, began by hailing the launch of Sputnik as a historical event “second in importance to no other” (1998: 1), then went on to provide an account of political modernity focused around what she called the quest for the Archimedean standpoint. This had been—up until Sputnik—a purely theoretical leverage point, ever located “willfully, and explicitly, outside of the Earth” (11). Yet if such viewpoints from nowhere were theoretical fictions, she also believed that they explained the power of modern science, having served as the levers for changing what Mészáros has called the “social metabolism” (2018) of human societies. They revolutionized social and ecological relations. They led to what we now call the Anthropocene. As Arendt put it: “we have found a way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean point”(1998: 262).
11One example of how such a view from the outside could fuel domination is to be found in cartography. Arendt detailed how the mapping and navigation charts of the early stages of the modern age “shrunk” the earth into a “ball,” thus anticipating the “the technical inventions through which all earthly space has become small and close at hand”(1998: 250). Mapping always involved imagining a view from the outside. The power of the map flowed from the efficacity of this abstraction. As Lacoste (1985) once noted, the first purpose of doing geography is war, and a good map could play a critical role in battlefield strategy. More generally, over the era in which globalization was carried out by sea and land, accurate maps aided attempts to expand influence by conquest or commerce. This doubtless explains why the iconography of the globe, and the trope of the global gaze, as Cosgrove has so exhaustively illustrated, was associated with sovereign power and dreams of “dominion over the terrestrial globe”(Cosgrove, 2001: 5). Yet we must not forget that the symbolic power accorded to the global view was also political theatre. The potential to exercise power given a gaze on a globe is only actualizable if one knows how to exploit the data. Thus, even photographic images of the Earth, which the Americans had possessed since 1946 (Edgington, 2012), well before the famed 1972 Blue Marble image, were limited in their power (if not their perceived promise) to actually remake life on Earth. Contrary to the icons, it is not the possession of such images alone which allows Archimedean leverage over the globe. The deciphering of the messages, as well as much misreading, would occur within the second phase of satellitization.
12It is worth observing a fundamental disanalogy between the traditional iconography of power, the idea or ideal of the Archimedean point, and the satellite viewpoint. Within traditional representations of the global view, the figure of the sovereign is at once on the globe, and yet is depicted as at once outside of it and greater than it. Consider the iconography of the frontispiece of Hobbes Leviathan. This is often taken as illustrating the “idea of the work” (Agamben, 2017: 265), which would in turn make it a leading iconographical candidate to paradigmatically illustrate modern biopolitical sovereignty. Bosse’s drawing presents an inversion of more traditional imperial iconography. It does not depict the sovereign holding the globe as seen from a third person point of view but rather the personification of sovereignty as seen from the point of view of the globe. But we can nevertheless see that he looks down upon a globe, because its curvature distinctively forms part of the horizon of the image’s foreground. The place on the outside is occupied by the sovereign, whose body is relatively smaller than in some representations—presumably to signify that he is the creature of a nation and not of a global empire—yet into his body is compressed the people, all of whom are staring back at the globe, as if to confirm that it is through knowledge of the planet’s nature that sovereign power within that nation can be both derived and justified.
13Now let us think about the satellite view on the planet. There is no longer space to imagine and represent that figure without rupturing the spatial logic opened by the world historical event that was the launch of Sputnik. Sputnik takes the place of the Leviathan, but is not the Leviathan, is not, as the Leviathan was, an imaginary artificial construction, but is an artificial thing that is not imaginary, to which people attribute great power, which, unlike Hobbes’ Leviathan, it must deliver by mechanical means. Where the faces of the people might have been, there is now the thing, Sputnik. Employing remote sensors, it sees what the people might have seen, but it sees for them, or they see through it, even if it is also not them, and the viewers only belong to a single nation or group. Arendt, though she stood at the very dawn of the Space Age and so had no sense of the significance that this would have, obscurely grasped this point and its importance, announcing, with great pregnancy, and with no little ambiguity, that Sputnik was “no heavenly body” (1998: 1).
“The American way of life is fueled by space” (Dickinson, 2021).
14The second phase of satellitization arrived when satellites began transforming terrestrial forms of life. It came to fruition at the point when one could say, without absurdity, that the American way of life was fueled by space. Arguably, the first satellite reconnaissance missions marked its onset. By 1968, Johnson, then President, remarked of the photos of Russia provided by the CORONA satellites:
I wouldn’t want to be quoted on this, but we’ve spent 35 or 40 billion dollars on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge we’ve gained from space photography, it would be worth 10 times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn’t need to do. We were building things we didn’t need to build. We were harboring fears we didn’t need to harbor. Because of satellites I know how many missiles the enemy has.(Clark, 1968)
15In that atomic-age context in which American geopolitical strategy was increasingly being understood in terms of what Schelling had called “the influence that lies in latent force” (2020: 31), knowing the others’ latent force—or lack thereof—was a source of influence and thus power. Yet images of the enemy and their relative strength were only the beginning of the new forms of power-knowledge relations generated by the second phase of satellitization. They are not the most relevant for attending to biopolitics. What Americans and other powers produced via satellization were infrastructural dependencies: situations in which it was not the destructive power of arms, but a dependence on American satellites for everyday life, including access to information regarding the vital processes of the planetary system, which offered the keys to dominance. The culmination of this influence, the point at which it was translated into sovereign power, occurred when space services became system critical to citizens and governments around the world. Many commentators now suggest that such a state has been attained with respect to both cyberspace and the global economic system (Dawes, 2018; Klein, 2023), to this list should be added planetary environmental monitoring. These existential dependencies constitute the basis of ex-orbital biopolitical governance.
- 1 On this see (Lai, 2021; Craven, 2019). The question of whether orbital space is a global common is (...)
- 2 It is interesting to note that work on biopolitics from the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, most nota (...)
16The Outer Space Treaty, which was embraced by both the United States and Russia, and which forbade sovereign claims in orbital space, (now, arguably) establishing it as a global common, should be seen as part of this strategy.1 This ceding of territorial claims enabled “legal overflight of any location on the Earth”(Raymond, 2020: vi). This is now recognized as one of the foundations of American space power, because this means that power over the orbital domain is power over the entire planet. One way of glossing this is to suggest that the politics of satellitization enabled a new form of (post)colonialization. Thanks to satellites, powers no longer needed to annex territories to exercise biopolitical power over them. They could use the de jure common, but de facto exclusive, control of orbital space above to liberally dole out ‘benefits’ which were also dependencies.2 This post-globalization of the political order is a function and culmination of the second phase of satellitization. To the extent that biopolitical sovereignty is entangled with space infrastructure, it seems fair to say that if humankind in the Anthropocene does not live in space, it does live with space, or in such a way that the current state of life on the globe could not have been attained without the Archimedean leverage exercised by satellites.
- 3 It is true that subsequent technologies such as undersea fiber optic cables later performed these f (...)
17Satellitization brings about a rupture within the logic of globalization. If that phenomenon was already manifest in the 19th century, and was fueled by technologies such as steam locomotives and global shipping (Osterhammel, 2011), those technologies could not have brought about the specific form of capitalist order that emerged on the planet over the course of the late twentieth century. For example, the compression of planetary time-space such that distances have seemed to become ever smaller as information moves more rapidly around the globe, what Münkler has described as a “space revolution [Raumrevolution]”(2023: 18) (a term first employed by Schmitt (2008) to describe the effects of naval technology on the globalizing political order), has been massively inflected by satellite infrastructure. While the likes of Arendt and Jünger had talked about the globe shrinking before the Space Age, space technology allowed forms of time space compression that are literally unthinkable in terrestrial terms. In 1872 Verne presented an eighty-day global circumnavigation as a wonder, while today astronauts circle the planet 16 times per day aboard the ISS. In terms of data transfer, Space X’s constellation can transmit a message around the globe 40 percent more rapidly than land-based fiber optics. Moreover, the role of space technologies with respect to time-space compression was in no way concealed, it was rather dramatized as part of space politics. As the media theorists Evans and Lundgren (2023) have pointed out, communications satellites helped to raise cultural awareness of time-space compression by enabling live global television emissions which precisely announced to viewers that they were global and live because they were being transmitted by satellite.3
18Nevertheless, there is an ironic face to this spatial revolution. As everything accelerated on the globe, the post-global technologies which enabled these accelerations seemed to recede from view, scholars talked of globalization, rarely pausing to remark the difference between the old and the new globalization, and when they did tending to suggest that the new globalization emerged precisely as a result of the devitalization of space resulting from the “end of the interplanetary adventure”(Virilio, 1999).
19The second phase of satellitization largely overlapped with the rise of the United States to global hegemony, which also overlapped with the emergence of new concerns about the ecological future of the planet. If Russia had led in the early phases of satellitization, and if many other nations, England, France, India, and China eventually began seriously investing in satellite technologies, the United States emerged as, and remains, the leading space actor.
- 4 I leave aside the categories associated with space-based weapons and newer satellites associated wi (...)
20Focusing on those satellites that most impacted everyday life on Earth, it is possible to establish three broad functionally differentiated families of orbital infrastructure, each broadly bifunctional or dual-use, insofar as they have both civilian and military applications.4 These are: satellites that observe the Earth and so produce geospatial information, so Earth System Science and GIS in the civilian version, and GEOINT for the military version; satellites that communicate information around the Earth for both military and civilian purposes; and satellites such as GPS and Galileo that use their orbital positions to generate logistically useful information.
21With respect to the civilian uses of satellites, the American government pursued a politics arguably similar to the commercial strategy employed by the leading actors in what Zuboff (2020) has called “surveillance capitalism.” It offered services for free, and in so doing reinforced its own ideology, power, and leadership. This approach paradoxically seems to function for market domination by working against the market. Communications infrastructure provides an edifying case in point. At least since Eisenhower, achieving dominance in satellite communications had been a government priority (Butrica, 1997). This dominance was accomplished by as early as the 1970’s. By that point, the US had global communications coverage, while Russia, its closest competitor, had only national coverage (Gosselin, 2021). This enabled America to exert influence on its allies who lacked such infrastructure by extending assistance, as was the case for Britain in the Falklands conflict (Bowen, 2022). As Parks has shown, American satellite infrastructure also exerted pro-market soft power by beaming images of the American dream—the hit T.V. show Dallas—even into the Outback (Parks and Schwoch, 2012; Parks, 2005). This was accomplished because America pursued open-source and common use politics. Kennedy actively opposed the commercialization of communications constellations, for fear that this would yield a concentration of satellites over the U.S. and Europe, leaving the rest of the planet vulnerable to Soviet propaganda (Slotten, 2002: 330). One sees a similar open access strategy at work with GPS and also with environmental sensing data (Borowitz, 2017). As is sometimes said of the internet, ‘if it is free, you are the product,’ in this case we might modify the logic, saying of satellite data, that if it was free, it was because the users were now subjects.
22From the point of view of biopolitics—a concept which we will clarify below—and certainly from the point of view of the Anthropocene, the most important aspect of satellitization was Earth observation. From the very first, the civilian side of space surveillance included weather satellites and studies of the planetary environment. Satellite images were superior to airplane images for these tasks, as they were repeatable and global, and so allowed scientists to track changes over time. Thanks to the globality of their data, as Edwards has noted, constructing data-driven planetary climate models became feasible (Edwards, 2010: 11). As a National Academy report from 1982 explained: “with the recognition that the solid earth, its oceans and atmosphere, and its life forms are governed by processes that act on a planetary scale has come an awareness that further understanding of these processes will require coordinated global observations and theories that integrate these observations. Many of the needed measurements can be made naturally and most efficiently from space. The view of the Earth from space is necessarily global in perspective” (Board, 1982: 1).
23Early LANDSAT satellites catalogued renewable energy resources, tracked the movement of water on land to learn about the hydrological cycle, and measured land use (Leshner and Hogan, 2019). All of this can be understood as aimed at not only producing scientific knowledge of the Earth, but also at demonstrating that space assets could be useful for rendering land more productive. By the early 1980’s, and in the wake of deep space explorations that had determined that Mars and Venus were both far less habitable than had been initially believed, but had also shown they had undergone long-term climatic change away from what had likely been conditions more propitious for the formation of life, NASA began transferring its expertise in planetary modeling techniques, including the method of studying the planet from the outside that had been the default approach when studying alien planets, towards the study of the Earth itself (Grinspoon, 2016; Frank, 2018; Lorenz, 2019). Presumably the expectation was that knowledge of the globe would yield global economic growth and reinforce American sovereign power. As one report explained: “Earth science, by its very nature, is charged with societal goals that are equal in importance to the scientific goals. The Earth supplies man with much of the energy and all the raw materials that he consumes at an accelerating rate; a major goal of earth science is to characterize the global inventory of resources and to understand the process of resource emplacement”(1982: 9). To fulfil the objective of understanding life of the planet, what Margoulis and Lovelock were to call Gaia, in her words, “symbiosis as seen from space”(1998: 2), US-funded scientists set out to use satellites to study the global atmospheric circulation, atmospheric and climate history, ocean dynamics, atmosphere ocean interaction, the global ice and hydrological cycle, major chemical cycles, plate dynamics, evolution of the earth’s crust, sedimentary cycles, the earth’s internal structure, and the earth’s magnetic field. Quite rapidly, the focus shifted to include the study of the role of human beings within these changing systems. A key step along this path was the creation by NASA of the Bretherton Model, the first attempt to study the planet that explicitly foregrounded the place and the role of human beings (Steffen et al., 2020). Also critical was the launching of Mission to Planet Earth, an initiative that had the goal of obtaining “a comprehensive scientific understanding of the entire Earth System, by describing how its various components function, how they interact, and how they may be expected to evolve on all time scales” (Ride, 1987: 7).
- 5 It is interesting to note that the analytic standpoint assumed by Hardt and Negri, no doubt in part (...)
- 6 In this sense, space technologies played a significant role in the discovery of climate change, mov (...)
24It seems fair to suggest that the expectation was that this research would contribute to American power by aiding all nations of the planet to benefit from American data as it was translated into what came to be known as sustainable development.5 However, the ultimate irony for American power was the confirmation that human beings, and in particular those human beings who lived in the most technologically advanced carbon-fueled civilizations, were effectively deregulating the climate (Conway, 2008; Edwards, 2010; Grevsmühl, 2014; Leshner and Hogan, 2019). We now call this discovery the birth of the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty, 2021).6 That said, in 1982, long before the popularization of the term Anthropocene, the NASA scientist Jack Goody had made essentially the same point: “Earth is a planet characterized by change, and it has entered an epoch in which one species, the human race, has achieved the ability to alter its environment on a global scale”(Leshner and Hogan, 2019: 58). The role of satellites within this discovery thus has a kind of poignant irony. While they discovered the greatest threat to the biopolitical legitimacy of sovereign power, they also provided the last avenue for its salvation, for satellites themselves when deployed at a reasonable scale, pose acceptable dangers to the planetary environment (Chevrier, 2023: 133), while the data that derives from them is of massive value for protecting the planet against the existential risks unleashed by the carbon economy, and for this reason provide biopolitical legitimacy to the nations that possess them.
25The term biopower was introduced by Foucault in the 1970’s as a way of thinking about changes in the logic of sovereign power over the course of the modern era in light of the same developments in technoscience that had interested Arendt (Seguin, 2019). Foucault understood the life sciences as having brought about a paradigm shift with the logic of sovereignty from “the old right [droit] to put to death [faire mourir] and allow to live [laisser vivre]” towards a new capacity in which sovereigns were able to “make life [faire vivre] and abandon to death [rejeter dans la mort]”(1976: 181). Foucault in no way invented the term. It was already being used by German geopoliticians such as Von Kohl in the 1920’s to describe a politics oriented less towards spatial expansion (“geopolitics”) than towards vertical growth (Lemke, 2016: 10). One source that has been pointed to as crystallizing this new paradigm is Leibniz, who wrote that “the power of a land [regionis] consists in ground [terra], things [rebus], and men”(Vogl, 2015: 25), a statement which would seem to amount to the claim that having more things and men equates with having greater power. As Vogl has shown, the dominant interpretation of what counted as a good approach to rule within the biopolitical thinking of the modern vision of politics was one in which the “growth of capital” and the “growth of the population” (2015: 60) are seen to be complementary categories which the art of rule sought to coordinate. In the pursuit of this double growth, modern states sought to leverage scientific and economic knowledge in the biopolitical pursuit of development, which in this context ought to be understood as a means of legitimating the existing order regardless of the existing inequalities and injustices that it manifested, since when such growth appeared, the state could seem to have been blessed by providence, and could also be seen to be developing in such a way as to allow the negative effects of inequality to progressively be mitigated. The allusion to providence here, a clearly theological category, is hardly coincidental. This theological political dimension in biopolitical governance, as well as its links to the employment of space science for the planet, lies at the heart of the arguments made by American theologian Kenneth Cauthen in his Christian Biopolitics: A Credo & Strategy for the Future (1971). For Cauthen, making life by using space technologies for the flourishing of the planet is precisely the governmental strategy sanctioned by Christian theology. As we will deal with it here, the pursuit of biopolitical power ought to be understood as a legitimation strategy. That is to say that if a pretender to sovereign power can stimulate growth, then that power’s claim to rule appears legitimate.
26In this light, consider the opening lines of Our Common Future, the first U.N. Report on Sustainable Development. One finds evoked the critical importance of “seeing the planet from space for the first time,” and likewise an insistence on how this vision from orbit has allowed us to “look deeper into and understand natural systems” by “studying the Earth as an organism” so that we can “reconcile human affairs and thrive in the process” (1987: 11). All of this suggests a global consent to the idea that American remote sensing technologies could be used as an Archimedean lever to reinforce its quasi-colonial power just so long as this fostered perpetual growth, with growth here comprehending both the economic and ecological resonances of the term. By initiating and participating in such efforts, America and other developed powers were putting a new satellite-empowered twist on the biopolitical dimension of the sanitation and nature-preservation efforts that had already been present in 19th century colonial governance (Osterhammel, 2011; Blanc, 2020).
- 7 The relative (lack of) success of these efforts has been noted by several critics, perhaps most not (...)
27Noteworthy is the clearly biopolitical dimension in the forms of modernization through space expansion pursued by many post-colonial nations. In this regard, the Indian space program (ISRO) is particularly exemplary. As Yash Pal (former Secretary General of the Second United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (1981–82), and one of the founders of the Indian Space Program) bragged, ISRO was “probably the only rocket programme in the whole world which was started not by the army” but rather by an agency whose vocation was “people, education, and agriculture”(Organization, 2015: 78). What this meant in practice was that India employed the orbital viewpoint to drive what it called the Green Revolution. Indian scientists studied their territory from space, seeking ways of making the land more productive by analyzing yields, tracking plant diseases, and measuring exploitable acreage, before transmitting this information to villages via instructional television shows (Organization, 2015: 485). What this yielded was not necessarily legitimation thanks to growth from space—because the flourishing only arguably arrived, but nevertheless a clear attempt at accomplishing this.7
28Yet the limits and difficulties associated with such projects came to the fore in the Anthropocene. For much of the modern period, it was assumed that that the economic and the ecological faces of biopolitical power, when pursued through scientifically informed governance, were compatible: to grow the one, was to grow the other, with all seeming incompatibilities being resolvable through progress ad infinitum, with all this progress magically yielding support for biopolitical states. But with the dawn of the Anthropocene, and this was particularly clear given the evidence provided by space data, it became clear that far too much of what had been counted as economic growth had been a product of an unsustainable and ecocidal relationship with fossil fuels (Foster et al., 2010). To return to the quote that we have placed in exergue, if the American way of life is fueled by space, it is also, and perhaps more literally true that it is fueled by oil. Indeed, it is little exaggeration to say that the socially dominant order was made up of, to use Stephanie LeMenager’s felicitous phrase, “living oil”(2014). This introduced a logical contradiction within the order of the world that particularly bore on the logic of biopower as providing a form of sovereign legitimation. In effect, the economically advanced nations of the world, and above all the United States, were now no longer making life on the planet with their growth, the carbon democracy (Mitchell, 2013) that they had pursued had instead been unmasked as a way of making death. As Bonneuil and Fressoz put it in a book that has been critical to introducing the Anthropocene idea to a broader audience, “the Anthropocene is the sign of our power [puissance], but also of our impotence [impuissance]” (2013: 1). However, if certain aspects of their reign now appeared illegitimate, they still had a sole source of justification within their technological armory which remained life-engendering, and so legitimacy producing, and that was their space technology.
29Thus, in the wake of the Anthropocene, satellites and space expansionism now seem to offer up a horizon of salvation not only for protecting the planet from the existing order and its need for market growth, but also to offer a horizon for that order to save itself by pursuing such growth. Satellites and the emergence of a space economy thus open up a horizon for negating the negation of biopolitical legitimacy emergent as a product of attempting to use satellite data to model and monitor the planet. In other words, if the economy and ecology were no longer compatible on planet Earth, then states, to remain legitimate, would need to sponsor the growth of the space economy, which would bring about a decorrelation of the now apparently incompatible spheres of the economical and the ecological. Within this new order, the private investors whose wealth had come at greatest cost to the planet could now appear as its saviors. I quote Jeff Bezos:
Earth will end up zoned residential and light industry. It’ll be a beautiful place to live. It’ll be a beautiful place to visit. It’ll be a beautiful place to go to college and to do some light industry. But heavy industry and all the polluting industry—all the things that are damaging our planet—will be done off Earth.(2020: 249)
Noting this emerging decorrelation between the extraterrestrial sphere of capital and the planetary sphere of most urgent ecological concern has important implications for the analysis of the political implications of satellites.
30Consider Paul Virilio’s (1999) essay “Global Tele-surveillance.” Written in response to the creation of the American National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), it argues that the satellitization of the planet is catastrophically creating a “panoptic and totalitarian” planetary order, one dominated by the “globalitarian vision” of American free market liberalism. Despite being written in the same year as the coining of the term Anthropocene, Virilio shows little awareness of climate change, and no sense of the key role that was even then being played by satellite data in fracturing the belief in the spirit of the spatial compatibility of economy and ecology. He also, and this is critical, treats the globe as the ultimate and all-structuring limit for thinking the political, deriving this conclusion precisely from his interpretation of the significance of space history. As he had already written in 1976: “since the lunar missions…there are no other lands for a single humankind, the world, disappears as an infinite horizon of all possible experiences, and reappears as a teleological field” a closed “miniaturized earth”(Virilio, 2023: 128). This paradoxical derivation of history from space while denying historicity to space is reflected in Virilio’s choice of analytic models, the panopticon. Foucault, in Surveiller et punir, a 1975 book dedicated to exploring the relationship between observational knowledge and power, explained the panopticon as an apparatus capable of producing disciplinary power (what he would only later call biopower), by producing an asymmetrical relation between power and knowledge:
A panopticon is closed space, cut up, monitored at all its points, where individuals are inserted in a fixed place, where the slightest movements are controlled, where all events are recorded, where an uninterrupted work of writing connects the center and the periphery, where power is exercised without sharing, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, where each individual is constantly identified, examined and distributed among the living, the sick and the dead – all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary system (1975: 230).
31Without calling into question the adequacy of the panopticon as a model for thinking the imaginary of power in other contexts, especially in periods in which the view from the outside was virtual and came down to differences located at the level of the possession of theoretical knowledge, it is vital to lay stress on the difference made by the empirical occupation of that outside place by satellites. When the outside in which the sovereign is located is an abstraction, the masters, as was the case in the old iconography of imperial power over the globe, stand on the outside and on the inside. In the new satellite order, they do not do this. They are inside their panoptic prison themselves, and what is outside is a thing, and not a thought construction. They both submit to the power of their satellite and find themselves alienated from their power by this extraterrestrial thing, a phenomenon that we have seen became manifest in the spatial splitting of economy from ecology. In this model, an absolute asymmetry in terms of the relation between knowledge and power is assumed, but as we have seen, within the (post)colonial biopolitics of sustainable development, as well as within the broader logic of platform dependency deployed in surveillance biopolitics, it is sharing information which enables the politics of influence and the ultimate consolidation of sovereign power through the latent threat of critical infrastructural dependencies. Virilio, however, takes up Foucault’s figure as a transcendental operator, not grasping that the process of satellitization does not quite fit within the model, and thus not grasping the ways in which satellites bring about a historical shift within the spatial logic of knowledge-power relations. He thus writes:
With this domination from an orbital point of view, the putting into orbit of an infinite number of observation satellites tends to favor the global vision. To “direct” your life, it is no longer a question of observing what is happening in front of you but above you. The zenithal dimension outweighs by far – or rather from above – the horizontal, and this is no small matter since this “Sirius point of view” then erases all perspective (1999).
32Virilio is not wrong in laying stress on the epistemic authority granted to the satellite gaze. More recently, Chateauraynaud and Debaz have also claimed that within contemporary culture satellite data forms a kind of “transcendental”(2019: 21), a truth whose truth is not questioned, and our analysis of satellite data within the constitution of the Anthropocene as a new biopolitical paradigm only reinforces this diagnosis. Yet the term transcendental also misleads: the power of the satellites flows from the fact that their view precisely is not a transcendental or speculative viewpoint, a view from nowhere. This immanence matters in ways that undercut Virilio’s analysis. He holds the satellite view outside of the sphere of history, aligning their local positions in orbital space with an alien from the speculative fiction that is Voltaire’s Micromegas. Yet the satellites are neither figures from science fiction nor alien gods, they are, as Arendt saw perfectly, “no heavenly bodies.” It is on this point that Virilio’s analysis collapses. Virilio’s suggestion that an “infinite” number of satellites tends to produce an ever more total “global vision” may be true in metaphysics, but in orbit, what it leads to is Kessler syndrome, a chain reaction in which satellites strike one another until all have been rendered inoperative. It is this problem, establishing the limits to growth with respect to satellites in orbit, that stands at the core of contemporary developments in extraterrestrial post-biopolitics. Grasping this point implies definitively leaving the global absolute behind.
And if we want to realize (concrétiser) this objective of sovereignty, the only way to go (passage obligé), the sovereignty of sovereignties, is space (Macron, 2022).
33A third phase of satellization has begun: satellites orbit with the vocation of observing and obtaining knowledge about other satellites and their orbits. This marks a break with previous surveillance satellites, which were—except in the case of space telescopes—launched with the aim of producing global information. Their launch implies a further shift in the logic of knowledge/power relations. A new Archimedean leverage point has emerged, one that no longer overlaps with the global viewpoint but ex-orbitally supplements it. This initiates a new development in the logic of biopower, which becomes post-biopower. This form of sovereignty remains biopolitical to the extent that the primary aim of observing satellites from other satellites is to ensure their ‘health’ and ‘protection,’ with the health and protection of the global order now depending on the health of this abiotic zone. That said, language in part fails us here: for if what we are talking about is a logic that resembles biopolitics, it is also critical to remind ourselves that the health, security, and sustainability of orbital space can only metaphorically be described in terms of health and life. Moreover, at least in part what is kept alive by protecting these satellites is not the life of the planet, but the life of the form of social life dedicated to the belief in economic growth, such that preserving the ‘life’ and ‘health’ of orbital space amounts to preserving many of the structural inequalities currently ordering everyday lives on planet Earth, which is not to say the catastrophic annihilation of ‘life’ in space would not cost lives back on the home planet.
34The desire for space domain awareness dates back to the earliest phases of satellization (Sturdevant, 2008). However, the specific employment of satellites as opposed to land-based means of monitoring the space domain is so recent that most of the technical details are classified. The first American effort at Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) took place in 1996. That was a test meant to validate the feasibility and efficacy of using satellites to provide better data on orbital trajectories (Sharma et al., 2002; Gaposchkin et al., 2000). That test was sufficiently successful that the US launched the SBSS Block 10 in 2011. A larger block of four satellites—Block 20—was later cancelled. Yet that was before the New Space boom. The reasons typically given for this acceleration are various—running from reusable rockets to the nanosat boom in LEO—all of which have significantly reduced launch costs (Pasco, 2017). The effect of this has been increasingly crowded orbits associated with a globalization of space (Moltz, 2014), with this being doubtless a product of both an awareness of the economic desirability of orbital investments, and a growing recognition among other nations that depending on American space assets poses a risk to security and sovereignty (López and Cerda, 2024). In any case, efforts to launch SBSS systems and to reinforce terrestrial approaches to space asset surveillance are accelerating. In 2023, the United States Space Force launched the Silentbarker constellation. Unclassified documents state that they have the “capability to search, detect, and track objects from a space-based sensor for timely custody and event detection”(Force, 2019). Other space-to-space observation, or even space-to-space direct action systems exist or are under development in other countries. The Russian Cosmos 2558 is known to have SBSS capabilities, while the EU and France are developing a system called YODA (Friedling and Veber, 2023). China likewise has space junk removal satellites and has at the least conducted studies towards the construction of a SBSS constellation. Commercial SBSS systems are also springing into existence. MAXAR Worldview 3 satellites are equipped with cameras which allow them to photograph other satellites, with the explicit aim of allowing operators to assess, and hypothetically to repair from orbit, space-debris generated damage.
35It would be hubristic to believe that much can be said regarding the significance of this new Archimedean viewpoint, or the long-term efforts to ‘care’ for space. Yet what the development of such systems does say a great deal about is the evolution of attitudes towards the power of satellites and the historicity of the orbital domain. Simply put, the effort being put into monitoring orbits shows that satellites are no longer out of this world.
36The third phase of satellitization initiates a post-global transformation in the logic of biopolitical sovereignty. To return to Arendt and the metaphor of the Archimedean lever, what emerges as a product of the new phase of satellitization are extraterrestrial spaces and places, I will call them dominiums as opposed to territories, over which sovereign power is exercised. Dominiums, or to use the language of Shaw, Purgason and Soileau of the US Space Force, extraterrestrial Areas of Operations (AOR), are novel because their spatial horizons are “not defined by geographic lines on a map,” as is the case in geography, which, as they note, is Greek for “drawn on Earth,” but rather by domains set by space surveillance capacity which are in effect “drawn on the stars” (2022: 38). Dominia are not cosmic but rather local, and they remain connected at a second degree to the Earth. More to the point, it is not the stars as such which explain their features, but rather information dominance over the domain from where terrestrial information dominance is exercised. Dominia are not territorial. They remain, to a certain extent, commons. Power is exercised over them in the form of cultivated critical dependencies with respect to technologies on which other nations are critically dependent. Nevertheless, it seems not wrong to say, with the French President Emmanuel Macron, that exercising dominance over space now constitutes the “sovereignty of sovereignties” (2022). This statement ought to be glossed in such a way as to bring out its peculiar character. To exercise sovereignty over space is in a certain way to exercise sovereignty over no one and nothing, but ceding sovereign control over one’s space assets is tantamount to losing of control over one’s national territory.
37This phrase expresses a rupture within the biopolitical logic of sovereignty. Within global accounts of sovereign power, at least as it was introduced by Foucault (2004b), biopolitical sovereignty was explicitly linked to territorial security, and so to the land and the life that it supports. Yet within the new space domain there is no ‘terre,’ there is also no biological life. Dominion over space is territorial, and by extension biopolitical only at a second degree. Nothing grows in orbital space, even if pollution does accumulate, and as it accumulates, it takes on a ‘life’ of its own. Yet at the same time, the space domain is not cut off from the logic of the life of the planet, and in particular the logic of capital and capitalization, and in this way, it plays a role within the metabolism of the planetary social order. Growing ‘life’ in space thus emerges as a kind of pharmakon capable of exercising saving power over planetary life, which from all other perspectives seems incapable of reconciling the twin demands of allowing capital to grow and continuing to allow biological life on the planet to flourish. Moreover, a new discourse is emerging whereby the growth of knowledge from space and about space can be said to give life to the planet by giving knowledge about life on the planet. As Mustapha Meftah explains in a recent book entitled L’espace et le NewSpace au service du climat, government support for private space efforts “is a win-win proposition” (2022: 7). Satellite infrastructure can both fuel economic ‘growth’ and ameliorate our understanding of how life on the Earth system grows. Thus, dominion over the extraterritorial domain amounts to a kind of meta-biopolitics which can heal the diremption between the economy and the ecology, but to do this it must also assume the burden of accepting and monitoring abiotic space as a ‘living’ habitat and ‘territory.’
38Orbital space, then, is to a certain extent coming to life. While an abstract awareness that extraterrestrial environments were environments and could be polluted is hardly new (Rand, 2019), and the specific problem of Kessler syndrome was named and so already preoccupied in 1978, the perceived criticality of protecting this domain is only as recent as the Anthropocene-era rush to expand the economy out beyond the globe, which itself was deeply entangled with the acknowledgment that terrestrial life was fueled by space in existentially critical ways. Describing the dynamics at play with respect to the growth of SBSS infrastructure, historian Luca Thannei (2023) has pointed to a persistent gap between what he calls surveillance capacity—the ability to know what is in space and what it is doing there—and existing ways of calculating orbital capacity—in other words, ways of establishing safe limits to and for extraterrestrial growth. The SBSS technology addresses this gap while simultaneously contributing to the problem. Yet the very paradox of a solution to problems creating new problems is precisely critical to grasping the logic of this new post-biological form of biopolitics, in which it is ‘life’—namely confronting problems such as orbital pollution—which drives the ‘growth’ of the space economy (Saint-Martin, 2016). Put otherwise, junking up space is precisely a means of bringing space to life, as it is likewise a means of stoking the need for new forms of surveillance domination and post-biopolitical governance over the orbital domain. As James Shaw, a leading strategist and Deputy Commander of the Space Force has explained, the primary task of that organization is to ensure “space sustainability” for all users (Staff Reporter, 2023). This posture echoes the language and the sovereign logic of biopolitical power as exercised over the globe, but it also constitutes a fundamental rupture with each of its terms because it leaves behind both life and territory.
39Thomas Kuhn, writing in 1965 of the paradigm shifts that constitute scientific revolutions, analogized the experience of encountering a new paradigm to being “transported to another planet where familiar objects are seen in a different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well”(2012: 111). This metaphor is helpful for understanding the post-global paradigm shift that is taking place, this in two senses.
40On the one hand, Kuhn’s idea of extraterrestrialization describes well the situation in which the analyst finds themselves with respect to these new forms of (post)biopolitics. Having arrived on an alien planet, the analyst confronts objects which have no names, or with respect to which existing names only fit with a significant degree of imprecision, and with respect to which other names, those derived from the old paradigm, seem actively misleading. Hardt and Negri (2000), for example, employed the Deleuzian conceptual couple of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to describe the dialectical biopolitical logic of global sovereign power. Yet these terms evoke relationships of take-off and landing, ever returning to the Earth. For this reason, they seem to offer no option to express the kind of extraterritorial, albeit supplemental, domination which is emerging with the third wave of satellitization, in fact directing analytical attention away from these changes and back to the Earth. Such a redirection is partially necessary: the emergence of a new post-geopolitical struggle for the sovereignty of sovereignty only matters with respect to humans on the ground. Yet if we focus our analysis only at that level, we precisely risk misunderstanding the phenomenon.
41It is regarding conceptual quandaries like this one that Kuhn’s comment is equally interesting. In 1965, the space race was in full swing. The anticipated future in space then correlated with the one that Kuhn himself imagined: landing on an alien planet. With respect to such landing, as is currently the case with the impending return to the moon, terms like deterritorialization and reterritorialization, even notions such as globalization, fit reasonably well. Yet what Kuhn did not anticipate, and in a way what our concepts make it hard for us to grasp, is that there are other forms of political order and power relationships that emerge within radically alien environments and with respect to novel technologies such as the satellites. When we rely on our anticipations—and our logics for categorizing the world, on our given notions of life, of territory, even of power—we may be blinding ourselves from grasping what is happening right there above our heads.
To return once again to Arendt, satellites are not heavenly bodies. They are also, and for this very reason, not out of time, out of history, and what we see here is that they are now, in the form of space junk, making clear their own historicity, their own difference from the unchanging and celestial.
42One might think from the preceding that it is the satellite which has now stepped into the place of the sovereign. But it would be too simple to say that the planet is enslaved by satellites, just as it is far too naïve, as Deudney (2020) has shown, to suggest that we will be saved by space expansionism. This paper has addressed confusions regarding the temporality of New Space and the spatiality of the Anthropocene. The principle target has been the figure of the globe, which all to many—to quote Cosgrove—take to be “interchangeable” with the planet earth, with the two terms differing not in terms of spatiality or history, but only in “resonance”(2001: 7). If the analyses above are correct, such ideas introduce analytic bias, and in so doing they lead to a misunderstanding of not only the spatial horizons in play in the politics that led up to the Anthropocene, but also prompt us to misunderstand the spatiality of the logics of power playing out in the present moment.
43In this light, I want to close by proposing a slightly different way of representing the planet that is doubtless more appropriate for understanding the spatiality of the political, including the politics of life, in the Anthropocene. It resonates with a great deal of recent discussion on the place of outer space within the iconography of the Anthropocene. This has often focused on the 1972 Blue Marble photo, sometimes called the photo of the century, and highlighted as an iconic representation of planetary ecological consciousness (Poole, 2008; Heise, 2008). Bénédicte Ramade, for example, has claimed that the extraterrestrial viewpoint is “the worst possible point of view [s’il s’agit du pire point de vue qui soit],” because it is “derealizing [dérealisant],” and this has “logically led the public to feel a lack of responsibility [à se déresponsabiliser]” for the plight of the planet (2022: 254). The environmental historian Sebastian Grevsmühl has suggested that the “visiotype of the Earth seen from space” “invites a radically simplifying interpretation of the world, a grotesque reduction of complexity”(2014: 210). The philosopher Emile Hache, for her part, has speculated that it is perhaps because we habitually employ what she, referring to work done by Frédérique Aït-Touati (2011), calls the “exterior point of view [point de vue extérieur],” that we “no longer have the right metaphors [des bonnes metaphors], and the right [bon] stories and right [bon] concepts” to respond to the Anthropocene (2014: 12). Finally, Jason Moore has highlighted that this icon represents a persistence of the “Promethean gaze,” manifesting the continuing power of the unholy “trinity of science, capital and empire” and a manifestation of what he calls “ocularcentric technics”(2023: 7). All these criticisms continue to think the space of politics as the space of the globe, and they take the locations which are now being contested by space actors as standing outside of politics or our space of responsibility. That tendency is precisely a product of the Blue Marble photo, which shows, in the words of Lazier, “a terraqueous planet suspended in the void” (2011: 606). But already in 1972, the idea that there was only planet and void was misleading. By then orbital space was cluttered with hundreds of Earth-observation satellites. There was already, around the orbital location at which the photo was taken, no void, but a globe and a nascent orbital domain. It was not an image of the outside, but an image from the outside that was already becoming part of the interior of the biopolitical order, just not in ways that—in 1972—were evident. The confusions which the critics attest to precisely speak to this.
44Perhaps the following image would be more appropriate. Unlike Blue Marble, which was taken by an astronaut, it is a computer-generated visualization created by the ESA (2019) to show the mass of satellites and space junk around the planet:
Figure 1
ESA, 2019
45One notes right away that what one sees is not a sphere or a globe. The satellites are concentrated over certain areas, this irregularity reflects global geographies of power and wealth, with the very density and complexity of this mass prompting us to attend to, and wonder about, the ways in which planetary existence and the exercise of power is already massively entangled with the orbital domain. In the image there is little void, and likewise no global overview. What we see is more than the terrestrial planet, but no ‘ultimate position,’ no ‘position of total control.’ The edges of the rotating mass are cropped on the left and bottom image planes, reminding the viewer of the persistent gap between surveillance capacity and orbital holding capacity. The orbiting of the satellites, as this is a video but not a still shot, conveys a kind of ambiguous vivacity, even as those objects—artificially illuminated and out of scale to draw our attention to them—remain mere machines in abiotic space. One reproach against this image is that it is out of date. In 2019 the total number of operating satellites was 9034, while the total number as of the end of 2022 was 14599—with almost three thousand more objects having been launched in 2023 (UNOOSA, 2023). Simply put, we should see more junk, and less planet. Yet perhaps the most important fact about this image is that it is computer generated and made to be shown on a computer screen. It shows a situation that is real, but at the same time which we cannot even hope to see with our bare eyes, even if the light reflected off the satellites does mist the beauty of the nightscape, clouding the constellations from our eyes. Yet the fact that this image itself raises no natural viewpoint on the order of the world matters to the extent that it leaves many questions that need to be asked unreconciled. Where is sovereign power in this picture? In the satellites? In the information? In Gaia? On Computers? In Capital? In the people? In the White House? Out there in deeper space? I propose no answers, but I would suggest that obvious answers, such as returning to the sensual terrestrial viewpoint, are themselves likely dangerous simplifications.
46But let us end with this. If satellitization, to orbit back to Arendt, has been an event “second in importance to no other,” that may at least in part be because we know that satellites and other technological objects are no heavenly bodies, and yet we also know that they have been capable of recreating the spatiality of the logic which rules our world.