Introduction

Singapore in Space: The Technopolitics of Satellite-Making in the Tropics  aims to follow space workers as they build and market satellites in Singapore. Singapore is positioning itself as a global hub for Very Low Earth Orbit satellites flying in formation to provide communications, imaging, and climate monitoring. Singapore is home to 50 space companies, comprised of local space start-ups, international companies, government defence organisations, and university satellite centres. I describe the international networks (flying formations) of space workers engaged in making and marketing satellites in Singapore, exploring how financial and geopolitical imaginaries are forged by New Space, government, and media actors.  How is space promoted, publicised and broadcast by the Office for Space Technology & Industry? What moves and motivates private space companies to make satellites in Singapore? How do experiences of repair and failure figure in the ‘conjuring’ of space imaginaries? How does smallness and city-state-ness figure in Singaporean space imaginaries? How do air-flight and the mobility of space workers overseas inform comparative visions of ‘Singapore in space’? Through British and Singaporean archives, I examine how financial and geopolitical imaginaries of the space satellite are entangled with older, imperial formations of technoscience spanning the Indian Ocean. The project attends to an understudied geography of outer space in Southeast Asia. Methodologically, the project is a qualitative study that plans to employ ethnography (interviews and participant observation), archival research, and visual methods (map visualisations and documentary film).

ST-1

In 1998, Singapore’s first satellite (a communications satellite the size of a bus) was launched aboard an Ariane Rocket from French Guiana. The satellite, ST-1, was built by Singapore Telecommunications and Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom for $240 million. In 2023, seven small Singaporean satellites were launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in southern India. Several of the satellites were built by start-ups such as NuSpace and by the university satellite centres at NUS and NTU for a fraction of the cost of ST-1. They were launched as part of a ride-share agreement on the launch of a primary satellite DS-SAR, a 352kg radar imaging earth observation satellite developed by Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency and ST Engineering. The July 2023 launch might form a good pilot study. Speaking to someone from the NUS Satellite and Technology Research cluster about the 2023 India launch might allow me to assess the feasibility of approaching private space start-ups to ask about satellites. What do they think I might be able to find out? What is my research precisely about? In Inventing Accuracy, Donald MacKenzie explores the complex social construction of accuracy in ballistic missile systems. Am I looking at the invention of accuracy to fly small satellites in formation? Very technical, unlikely. If looking at financial and geopolitical imaginaries, define these imaginaries to an interviewee? Focusing on how space imaginaries are forged by New Space and government actors in Singapore might involve talking to different groups of space workers (engineers, marketers, civil servants, students).  I will also have to convince geographers in the department that this project is doable. The ruggedisation that rockets and satellites undergo to withstand the launch and orbital environments is a good metaphor for the ruggedisation that the research plan will have to undergo.

What moves and motivates private space companies to make satellites in Singapore? Future-proofing the nation and having a sovereign small satellite manufacturing and launch capability might not be as important to a company as the access to Asian markets. An expat engineer might be more motivated by the good food, weather and Changi airport access to beaches in Southeast Asia. There is a broad literature on ‘anticipation’, how futures are made to matter such as Anna Tsing’s work on ‘conjuring.’ In Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Tsing explores how North American investors and mining companies in Indonesia’s rainforests are engaged in ‘a kind of conjuring, a dramatic performance. Economic projects cannot limit themselves to conjuring at different scales – they must conjure the scales themselves. How is space promoted, publicised and broadcast by the Office for Space Technology & Industry? How does smallness and city-state-ness figure in Singaporean space imaginaries? Methodologically, I might look at different research data: brochures, booklets, photographs, videos, the websites of companies. How do the companies and government advertise their activities, and for what publics? International investors, students, the government, the general public? By exploring the financial and geopolitical imaginaries of Singaporean space satellites, this might open space to ask space workers how they envision the future? This could be their own future, the space sector’s future, and Singapore’s future. Where do they see Singapore in space in x  no. of years? Where do you see yourself in x no. of years? Do you think Singapore can become a hub for Very Low Earth Orbit satellites? How do you see Singapore in relation to other space nations? Do you envy space workers in the United States? Where did you study or learn your craft?

The EDB and OSTIn

Connected to this is the question of how the Singaporean government attracts overseas space talent as well as Singaporean engineers from overseas? In February, the Straits Times reported on a statement by the Economic Development Board (EDB), made at the Singapore Airshow, that the aerospace industry in Singapore is expected to hire more than 2,500 workers in the next three to five years. There might be different styles of interviews. Some might focus on the industry as a whole and how financial and geopolitical imaginaries of Singaporean satellites are imagined. Others might be semi-structured interviews focused around the logistics of a specific launch where I ask the interviewee to describe the build up to the launch date, what did you do, where did you go? This might be mapped in some way during or after the interview. Some topics such as delays and failures might be more sensitive if making the company appear bad. As I am interested in how imaginaries are conjured, I could also explore how the interviews are performances and by what character types (e.g. the masculinist Musk-like pioneer). Making fieldnotes to compare and revisit using a transcription software would enable a broad picture to be assembled.

In February, the Straits Times also reported on another story: “Technology developed in Singapore will be part of the world’s first commercial manned space station that could be orbiting the earth by August 2025.” The deal between US aerospace company Vast, which is building the private space station called Haven-1, was announced on the sidelines of the Global Space and Technology Convention at Sheraton Towers Singapore. I attended the second day of the convention which showcased many active links between Singaporean space companies and partners in India, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The Office for Space Technology & Industry (OSTIn) organised the conference. OSTIn is a key actor. OSTIn was set up in 2013 by the EDB and in 2020 received an expanded mandate to serve as Singapore’s national space office. Its mandate is to ‘develop the space industry, grow international partnerships, and work closely with local and international satellite industry players to realise their business and innovation initiatives for Asian markets.’ (OSTIn’s history is detailed here). In 2022, the Singapore government invested $150 million in space R&D, establishing the flagship Space Technology Development Programme (STDP). Singapore also joined the Artemis Accords, becoming the 18th country to join the American-led guidelines on responsible space exploration, and in 2023, joined the Committee on Space Research, becoming the 46th national member.

A focus on OSTIn might enable me to ask more fundamental questions such as why are space companies located in Singapore? Tracking mention of ‘space’, ‘satellites’ and ‘Singapore’ in regional newspapers might generate further research data and leads which could be analysed using multimodal discourse analysis. At NUS, there are modules on space for students (EG2311 Introduction to Space Systems; EE3105 Beyond Sky – New Space Technology and Applications; ME5417  Autonomous  Spacecraft Dynamics and Control). Alumni networks of former students now working in space might form a key sampling technique while Mannheim’s work on generations could be used to explore how future generations are being engaged in space by the government and academia. This could be supported by methods developed in museum studies and field visits to Science Centre Singapore.

Literature Review

In 2000, Peter Redfield published Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. The book was converted from PhD research. Redfield first considered French Guiana having come across a set of old books in the Berkeley and Stanford libraries. Redfield describes the resulting work as ‘an account between empiricism and theory, based partly on fieldwork, partly on archival research, and partly on the work and thought of others: an assemblage constructed from notes taken on trips to French Guiana between 1990 and 1994, from notes taken in archives in both France and French Guiana, and from research conducted in a number of public and private libraries. Redfield would also consult materials provided by the Centre Spatial Guyanais (CSG) such as brochures from the various space agencies, the in-house CSG/CNES publications Latitude 5 and CNES QUI SE PASSE. Newspapers and television station broadcasts were also investigated.

Redfield did not consider his work ‘an ethnography per se, in the sense of maintaining a constant anchor in a singular and present life-world’ but that it ‘adopts an ethnographic sensibility, and works along a particular seam of more general histories of the present’, allowing for a ‘wider range of mixed subjects and objects, living and dead: people, plants, machines, rain, myths, and bureaucratic files.’ Though less stark than a penal colony and a space centre, there is a different story that might be told in Singapore about the British Empire in Southeast Asia, decolonisation, independence, globalisation, and the construction of space infrastructure during the Cold War. Visiting the archives in London last winter revealed documents relating to ‘space station transmission interceptions from Singapore’, plans for the ‘Sentosa earth station’, ‘military personnel postings to the Falklands and Singapore’ and various other satellite tracking station plans for the Indian Ocean region. Archival research could draw on the postcolonial sensitivities of Ann Stoler, Rudolf Mrazek, and Joshua Barker. While all three work within the context of Indonesia, they open up a set of methodological considerations for an account of “Singapore in the Satellite Age.”

Exploring Dutch colonial archives, Stoler writes, what was secret in such documents was not their specific subject matters but their timing and the interpretive uncertainties about an appropriate government response that gathered around them […] documents marked geheim were often not due to the magnitude of the problem, but the magnitude of dissensus concerning what the problem actually was.’ In this capacity, my archival research might unpack how the satellite and space infrastructure in Singapore was threaded into more intricate and complex moments of geopolitical uncertainty for the small city-nation. The decision to build Sentosa Earth Station in the early 1970s was for instance driven by the government’s desire to facilitate a syndicated and international programming broadcast. In 1974, Singapore subsequently became one of the first countries in Southeast Asia to introduce colour television broadcasts.

Methodology

Space in the Tropics is methodologically concerned with motion. When a Guyanese woman objects to the space centre at a night rally in Cayenne in 1994, Redfield describes how ‘dreams of spaceflight and more earthly independence both linger along a singularly modest stretch of road. But where one embraces outward motion, the other struggles against the inertia of earlier expansions.’ Redfield’s approach to his subject matter is also intimately tied to language. There is a geopoetics in the way he locates his theories, methods and empirics that might be emulated in thinking through my own research. A different provisional title I am working with  tries to capture a similar sense of interest in motion. Flying Formations: The Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Singaporean Space Satellites means to explore how social, financial, geopolitical, and planetary imaginaries are organically ‘conjured’ into being, broadcast in networks, and require active maintenance and repair to keep flying. In this image, there are other works I allude to such as Thom Van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. The work of Adryon Kozel, a PhD candidate at University College London, is also instructive in looking at the social motions of space. Kozel, embedded herself among space-enthusiast groups and media producers at the SpaceX launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas. She then traced how the experience of witnessing rocket launches was captured, curated, and circulated through social media to the wider public, drawing on Durkheim’s theory about one form of social energy as “collective effervescence.” An allusion to motion in my title is angled toward a similar methodological interest in the social energies (or lags) of New Space enthusiasm and activity in Singapore.

Istvan Praet traces how ‘social studies of outer space’ has grown since the early 2000s. In particular the work of Lisa Messeri (2016) and Valerie Olson (2018) would provide two useful touch-stones when considering ethnography. Messeri describes how planetary scientists and astronomers familiarise faraway celestial bodies through specific practices of mapping and visualising, while Olson investigates how North American scientists and engineers imagine and redefine the solar system in environmental terms. Their methods are closely tied to their field sites: a Mars analogue site in Utah, an astronomical observatory in the Atacama Desert, the MIT laboratories where exoplanet hunters visualise super-Earths and mini-Neptunes, an undersea astronaut training facility off the Florida coast, the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. Outside of the United States, the ETHNO-ISS project at UCL is developing remote ethnography as a way to explore microgravity material cultures on the International Space Station. The ruggedisation that rockets and satellites undergo to withstand the launch and orbital environments is a good metaphor for the ruggedisation that the research plan will have to undergo. I plan to develop my ethnographic, archival, and visual methods in close correspondence with these projects along with further reading in Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies, Social Studies of Outer Space, Financial Geography, and Critical Geopolitics.