Compression-Expansion: Miniaturization, Modularity, and Logistics Beyond Earth

Abstract

If the Cold War space race culminated in a return to Earth, at present we are experiencing a renewed interest in space. Drawing on fieldwork among people working in the space sector in Sweden, this article focuses on some of the imaginaries underpinning this resurgence and the contemporary commercialization of space. Specifically, I hone in on the envisaged potential of miniaturized satellite technology to modify how humans relate to Earth and the cosmos. As I show, the allure of smallness relies on interscalar practices whereby something that shrinks in size simultaneously magnifies its scale of significance, meanwhile pushing the terrestrial infrastructures of space into the background and figuring largeness as an outcome, not a precondition. While this is often achieved with the help of logistical metaphors that conceal the material specificities of low Earth orbit, the proliferation of orbital debris throws such qualities into relief and presents expansiveness as a challenge to be addressed at scale. If space professionals posit smallness as ground rather than figure, emergent threats to their activities dramatically flip the order between smallness and largeness, thereby signaling that to bracket scale in the analytical interest of connectivity and comparison ultimately reintroduces scale as a problem.