Governing Space Settlements

Darshan Vigneswaran

University of Amsterdam

This talk explores how crews are governed in space. International coalitions - Artemis and ILRS - are planning to establish a sustained human presence on the Moon. In response, legal theorists and political philosophers have sought to forecast the rules that might govern the people will inhabit these habitats. Who will get to go? What rights will they have? What sort of decision-making autonomy will they possess? Most previous work have built images of a future lunar governance by drawing inspiration from past examples of human settlements in distant and extreme environments on Earth. This paper chooses a more empirically grounded approach, developing baseline understandings of possible governing arrangements through a study of the governance of past crewed missions to space. Drawing on ethnographic research into astronaut testimonies and participant observation at the COL-CC, I explore how questions of belonging, rights and autonomy have been addressed in the everyday management of crewed missions. The main insight of this research is that the extreme threats which the lunar environment poses to human life strictly curtail the sort of inclusivity, freedoms and autonomy of crews on long-term missions, making analogies to previous forms of Earthly governance superficial or redundant.

The talk concludes with insights from our ongoing research aimed at improving the interpretability, reliability, and validation of learning based state estimation systems for flight critical space applications.