DDRIG: Ethereal infrastructure: Placelessness, nature, and low-earth-orbit satellite internet constellations

This Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant supports a project that examines the socio-economic and environmental conflicts arising from the recent emergence of low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. A new generation of LEO constellation operators argue they can overcome existing infrastructural barriers to provide reliable broadband internet worldwide.

However, LEO constellations engender new, overlapping conflicts concerning the viability of LEO internet connectivity, the future of astronomical research, and how outer space will be framed in future environmental legislation. This project will examine how involved stakeholders navigate and contest the claims of ubiquitous, physically unbound connectivity provided by satellite constellations, and connect these to discursive and legal struggles over the environment and outer space in this era of large-scale outer space commercialization.

Results from the project will be used to inform ongoing policy debates over regulation of outer space.

The study addresses the following research questions: How do LEO operators, government bodies, astronomers, environmental activists, and rural communities conceptualize place and nature during LEO infrastructure development? How are satellite operators, astronomers, and rural communities negotiating novel place-based challenges arising from the material presence of satellite constellations in low-earth-orbit?

How are understandings of outer space as a human or non-human environment linked to environmental activism and the technological life cycle of LEO satellite infrastructure? This project combines theoretical frameworks from Science and Technology Studies with multi-sited ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and documentary analysis. It will examine the deployment, operation, and regulation of LEO satellite constellations and the responses to these from the professional astronomical community, environmental activists, legislative bodies, and rural communities to provide a comparative account of how place, nature, and the environment are being conceptualized by these actors, and the larger consequences of these conceptual choices.

In doing so, the research highlights issues of digital and environmental inequality along the LEO constellation supply chain and will be of interest to lawmakers, computing professionals, and scholars committed to creating more sustainable networking infrastructures.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.