Outer Space Driftwork

Bronislaw Szerszynski
Nigel Clark

The dominant way of thinking about moving through outer space involves burning fuel to produce thrust which propels a craft. This form of mobility derives from the 1000-year-old technology of gunpowder which inaugurated ultra-highspeed combustion on Earth, though in a much deeper sense it inherits and intensifies the directional locomotion of animals – powered by energy stored in their bodies. Much of the current prioritization of point-to-point travel and bounded missions with single objectives reiterates long military histories of attempting to get projectiles to hit well-defined targets, which is closely related to claiming, defending and extending territory. But how might we reimagine ‘interplanetary motion’ in ways that break with these militaristic and territorial imperatives?

We can take inspiration from a range of ‘intraplanetary mobilities’ that have emerged within our own planet. Many living and nonliving things move by some variation of driftwork – which involves taking advantage of the flows and circulations generated by environmental gradients in the planetary body. Certain non-combustive forms of propulsion being explored for human space travel can be seen as forms of driftwork. Gravity slingshots, for example, evoke the dynamic soaring of birds, while magnetic solar sails recall the Velella velella jellyfish with its sail that moves at an angle to the wind. Other forms of propulsion envisage the momentum of a spacecraft being changed by its interaction with external electromagnetic or gravitational force fields. Such reimaginings of mobility, we suggest, might also be linked to nomadic, generous, or hospitable alternatives to ‘territorialising’ outer space.

Territories