by Dr Stefan Selke, Professor of Societal Change and Founder of the Public Science Lab, University of Furtwangen, Germany
Imaginations about the new space age are increasingly finding a ready-to-receive audience. Corresponding future narratives exist in the form of visions, progress stories, meta-analyses, political-normative models, media reports but also fictional representations. These narratives are associated with the expectations of a wide range of actors and stakeholders, mostly business and politics. This article therefore focuses on publics of contemporary societies.
The legitimisation of space exploration
In the debate, promises of progress are repeated with hypnotic redundancy, mostly in the form of an “exhibition of potential achievements”. However, one central aspect is usually a blind spot: while private space actors (SpaceX, Blue Origin, Axiom etc) are not dependent on societal legitimacy and acceptance, national (e.g. NASA) and international space agencies need broad and sustained support from society. This situation is particularly challenging for the European Space Agency (ESA) and its 22 member states. Therefore, future space exploration requires more than just a “return on investment” as a legitimising basis for taxpayers. The main reason: future generations will ask profound questions about the “why” of space exploration. And contemporary space agencies do not yet have adequate answers. These questions concern the elementary, yet neglected distinction between the usefulness and the public value of space exploration – use and value are not synonyms! This is particularly evident where an independent European path into space is being sought, e.g. in ESA’s current mission statement “Revolution Space”.
European autonomy in space
In order to secure Europe’s autonomous path into space, a differentiated understanding of autonomy is needed. Therefore, a distinction must be made between operational, strategic and moral autonomy. This necessary distinction is a blind spot to date.
Operational autonomy is quite trivial. It can be ensured with technological innovations and political alliances. These efforts are held together by the rhetoric of usefulness: benefits, spin-off, output, return on investment. The crucial point is that these arguments are only attractive from the (more or less) self-referential internal perspective of the space agencies and their direct business partners. What is ignored is that they hardly generate any public resonance in society at large.
This is precisely why strategic and moral autonomy are non-trivial challenges. To achieve the goal of comprehensive European autonomy in space, findings from similar fields of research should be considered: the necessary distinction between benefits and values also arises in the context of the public use of scientific knowledge or in the implementation of artificial intelligence in everyday life. The basic insight here is that a pure focus on usefulness generates unwanted public reactions and conceptional pathologies. Economisation, privatisation and commodification obscure the public reception of any given innovation. However, this perspective is essential for sustainable societal legitimation.
The public value of space exploration
The focus on (one-dimensional) operational functions and innovations leads to a narrowing of perspective. Here, the means (i.e. the technical tools) come to the fore and the goals recede into the background. However, the (multidimensional) public value will only become visible when the end-means relationship is reversed.
This necessary change of perspective requires a deeper reflection of the epistemological status of space exploration. In recent decades, space flight has changed from a technical experiment to a political demonstration and eventually to a cultural symbol. This is also associated with changes in the expectations of the public. As a next step, space exploration could be regarded as a catalyst for new collective orders. However, the shift from traditional world orders to an “explorative modernity” in the context of a transformative-civilisational meta-perspective is still a research gap.
Space agencies as agencies of the future
As a prerequisite for this, space agencies should also define themselves as future agencies. On this basis, they could participate in the shift from a collective survival design (in the context of regressive fear-driven adaptation narratives) to a universal world design (in the context of progressive narratives of departure). In a nutshell, this includes the development of new central social concepts (beyond technological progress), the promotion of new cultural orders and symbols as well as the collaborative formulation of a progressive “deep story” as the basis for a coherent, planetarily accepted narrative of meaning for human existence in the 21st century.
It has been done before: in the mid-1980s, the US National “Commission on Space” published the report “Pioneering the Space Frontier”. The result is still unique because the commission not only developed technological scenarios, but also named “civilisational values” for space programmes. The introduction, “Declaration for Space”, addressed the human dimension of space exploration. On the one hand, the report attempted to predict the future, but on the other, it was already designing it. A best-practice example of what is called “transformation by design” nowadays.
To reach this level, space agencies would have to focus less on aspects of operational autonomy. Instead, they could focus on their responsibility to dynamically stabilise societies and the planet in transition. In the context of European history and the European canon of values, it would then be possible to speak authentically of strategic and moral autonomy.
Given the importance of the public perspective for a future-proof legitimisation of space exploration, it is surprising that space agencies do not have corresponding social science-oriented research departments. It is precisely through the application of innovative methods of collaborative transformation research (e.g. a so-called “public vision assessment”) that a multidimensional understanding of European autonomy – this time considering the public value of space exploration – could be created and consolidated. Such an approach would not only provide answers to all future generations about the societal implications of space flight but would actually initiate a “revolution”.
