Mining and/in outer space: Verticality, analogy, and infrastructural mediation in subarctic Sweden

Abstract

Space activities in subarctic Sweden are predicated on older infrastructures of underground resource extraction. The ongoing expansion of the country's rocket launch site outside Kiruna relies on the Swedish state's historical construction of the region as a resource frontier. Yet fieldwork among space actors and reindeer pastoralists reveals that relations between mining and space are also invoked ethnographically: in oppositional terms, by herders for whom the impact area of the launch site serves to hold mining companies and other land users at bay; in a positive sense, among space enthusiasts who call for potential synergies between the two industries; and analogically, by actors who envisage extraplanetary futures vis‐à‐vis mining and the subterranean. While the grounding of outer space in earthly milieus is a recurring analytical procedure in the social sciences and humanities, these empirical‐ethnographic connections and comparisons encourage an anthropological approach that also attends to the way Earth is occasionally rendered extraterrestrial‐like.