Space Junk

There are currently over 40,000 pieces of space debris ten centimeters or larger orbiting the Earth. The amount of debris increases each year and will continue to grow as more private sector and national entities enter the field of spacecraft launch, orbit, and recovery. RemoveDEBRIS, a consortium of European and African research centers, is performing experiments in capturing space debris with the aim of building technological capacities for effective capture at scale. This project is reminiscent of the approach to recycling on planet Earth. Recycling capabilities have grown exponentially in recent decades as corporations and municipalities invest in infrastructure to capture, segregate, and process even hard-to-recycle materials and identify new markets for post-consumer materials. But scaling up the capacity to capture and manage discard is, Liboiron and Lepawsky argue (2022), inevitably a project that enables waste and wasting in the Wasteocene (Armiero 2021). Like existing earthly recycling systems, emerging space debris systems are potentially false solutions to the problem of disposability, (seemingly) required for everyday luxury in the contemporary. 

Space Junk is an artistic intervention in the form of a design fiction. Set in 2044, the piece evokes a near future in which space debris removal systems have developed along the same lines as container redemption and recycling systems. Composed of docu-fiction and speculative artifacts, Space Junk is a multi-media piece that invites the public to contemplate the quotidian fault lines built into an imagined space debris retrieval system. This fictional infrastructure is built on insights developed through four years of ethnographic research by Hegel on waste picker (recycler) livelihoods and advocacy in New York City. The piece address questions around the meanings of, access to, and control over discard, including the challenges of governance, corporate control, and the nature of autonomous livelihoods in late capitalism. It is also incites us to consider shared responsibilities of care for the commons. Simultaneously, these speculations trouble the fantasy that discard can ever truly go ‘away’, even in the vast away of the solar system and beyond.