This talk examines the material relations through which contemporary human engagements with outer space are being produced across four constitutive sites: mines, discarded electronics, launch sites, and asteroids. Drawing together literatures on waste, discard, supply chains, and frontiers with fieldwork in several mining and/or launch sites in China, Sweden, the United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it argues that waste-making is constitutive of a set of contemporary space activities and shapes the manner in which the immensity of the cosmos is understood and engaged by diverse publics. The talk presents a conceptual architecture and also reflexively examines the potential epistemic violence of waste-making as a spatial analytic to link Earthly and outer space geographies.

Dr. Julie Michelle Klinger (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware, and a member of the International Standards Organization Technical Advisory Group 298: Rare Earth Supply Chain Transparency and Traceability. Dr. Klinger and her research team are supported by the National Science Foundation, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Ford Foundation to conduct grounded yet global-scope research on competing uses for energy-transition metals, materials, and infrastructures. She has published numerous articles on rare earth elements, natural resource use, environmental politics, and outer space, including the award-winning 2018 book Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley.