Astropolitics: Technology, Sustainability, and the New Space Race

About this course

Humans have always been starbound. But what was once a distant realm of the sacred is now a place we can reach and travel. Space is a frontier, a market, a research laboratory, and a potential industrial zone full of opportunities and resources – satellites, data, minerals, power, planets – that are of great interest to not only national entities, but also commercial actors.

In this course, we unpack the history and future of this complex geopolitical development. We explore the new space technologies and the private actors that produce them, nations and the emerging battle over ‘digital sovereignty’ between them, as well as the tech-titans, whose commercial monopolies and grand civilizational ideas push much of the current space race forward. We will unpack the ideas, religions and mythologies that surround human perceptions of the universe and the not just legal, but profoundly ethical – even existential – choices that will surround human expansion beyond Earth in the future.

Faculty

Vibeke Schou Tjalve

Faculty

PhD in Political Science 2005 (University of Copenhagen, KU). Vibeke is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, DIIS. Prior to that, she has held research positions at the Center for Advanced Security Studies, KU (2009-12), the Center for Military Studies, KU (2006-2009), and the Center for American Studies, University of Southern Denmark (2005-06). In 2010-11 she was a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and over the past for years, she has been an affiliate researcher at the Center for Right Wing Studies, Berkeley, University of California. Vibeke is the author of a wide range of articles, book chapters and books on American and European history, democracy and foreign policy.