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Aspirations of Spaceflight and Trials of Infrastructural Capital
Special Issue
By.
Katarina Damjanov
Pages.
29 - 43
Date.
31. Jan. 2026
Abstract
Spaceflight calibrates its purview and scope as governments and private companies set out to envelop bodies of planets, moons and asteroids in the techno-industrial processes of production, extraction and destruction. The increasing departures of flights from Earth propel a range of beings and things, ideas and agendas across the Solar System and beyond, heralding the imperial drive of high-tech powers towards bountiful frontiers and magnifying the centrality of infrastructure for aspirations and attempts to grasp them. The enterprise of spaceflight invites us to consider the evolving arena of inquiry into "new geographies of flying" in its space age, bringing into sharp relief the accumulation and investments of "infrastructural capital" that sustain the off-Earth pursuits of power, knowledge and wealth. Attending to the changing aspirations and capacities of spaceflight as it enters a new developmental stage, I outline its key features and itineraries. I explore the striving and struggles involved in movements of infrastructural capital at the space frontier, an evolving off-Earth geography where mobility becomes a vector of power amidst extreme precarity. Such dynamics suggest the central role of spaceflight in upholding aspirations to take the trials of conquest and control outside the globe.


