On 20 January 2018 RocketLab, a space-tech start-up, launched the Humanity Star, a metre tall ‘disco ball’ intended to “blink brightly across the night sky to create a shared experience for everyone on the planet”. The launch provoked a range of responses from the scientific community, with some calling it “graffiti”, and astronomer Caleb Scharf going so far as to say “It’s hogging some of that precious resource, the dark night sky, polluting part of the last great wilderness.”
In this paper I argue that Space has been re-cast by interested Actors from being a wilderness to be conquered, to a wilderness to be cherished and protected from private-sector and ‘non-scientific’ threats. In this paper I build on the previous work of Launius, Siddiqi and others in establishing a global history of spaceflight by contextualising the most recent era of ‘open’ Space in the history of other areas of international governance. In doing this I engage with the nexus between technology and international law by challenging the conception that space is still a ‘remote commons’ which is exploited for financial, technological or military gain. Rather, I argue that Space should better be understood as an open projection space upon which interested individuals or groups position symbols in order to form checkpoints through which to filter access to Space.
