Making the Ariane Rocket: Negotiating relations between European integration and the future of Europe in space

Project Information

FutureSpace

Grant agreement ID: 101076020

DOI

10.3030/101076020

EC signature date 20 December 2022

Start date 1 September 2023

End date 31 August 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 476 276,25

EU contribution

€ 1 476 276,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FutureSpace (Making the Ariane Rocket: Negotiating relations between European integration and the future of Europe in space)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

When we think of European Integration practices, we rarely consider how they might extend to Outer Space. The FutureSpace project examines how European visions of integration are shaping Europe’s future in space, and how imagined space futures influence politics and society back on Earth in a New Space age, characterized by a diversification of relevant actors and ideals.

The research centers on the Ariane rocket. Since 1976, Ariane has represented a distinctly multinational and European project—thirteen European countries working together to build a rocket that embodies a vision of peaceful, collaborative space exploration. However, today this vision faces profound challenges as Europe navigates tensions between maintaining a unifying space programme and responding to the commercial and strategic pressures in the New Space age. Related challenges include launcher autonomy and negotiations on moon exploration, which will likely impact European space politics and beyond.
Using a multi-sited ethnography and interdisciplinary approach that brings together social scientists and aerospace engineers to investigate both the material and imaginative dimensions of how Europe is building its future in space.

Specifically, FutureSpace investigates three key questions: How does European integration materialize through space activities? How do European actors mobilize visions of Europe's space future through technological and political choices?

How are ideas of "Europeanness" embedded in Ariane, and how do these inform political negotiations, engineering choices, and future imaginations?

The project aims to understand how large European space infrastructures connect with European integration practices, demonstrate how geopolitical relations shape European technological and economic choices, and show how collaborative European approaches might offer alternatives to entrepreneurial and nationalist space programs.

Project Objectives

Offer novel conceptual insights into how large European socio-technological space infrastructures are entangled with practices and visions of European integration

Provide detailed, empirically grounded understandings of how European actors mobilize visions of Europe’s future in space through their technological, socio-political, and economic choices, and how these are shaped by broader geopolitical relations

Contribute knowledge on how the European collaborative approach to space infrastructures offers a powerful alternative to both entrepreneurial and nationalistic space programs

Develop an innovative interdisciplinary methodology linking social science and aerospace engineering to symmetrically examine material and imaginative dimensions of future space projects.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The FutureSpace team aims to map how Europe's ambitions in outer space connect with European integration and identity. Using an innovative approach that combines social science and engineering perspectives, the project explores a fundamental question: how do space projects shape, and reflect, visions of what Europe is and could become?

The FutureSpace team is developing a novel framework called "Topography of Earth-Space relations"—a detailed multi-dimensional mapping practice that traces how Europe's approach to space involves material practices, imaginative resources, and political decisions. This framework guides the team’s understanding of the connections between space technology and European integration. To apply this framework, the team conducted extensive fieldwork across five European countries, including production sites and space technology centers, as well as ethnographies at major space policy conferences to observe how policies and visions are debated and negotiated. The team conducted over 40 in-depth interviews, gaining direct insights into how space technologies are envisioned, built, and governed. The FutureSpace team then created detailed visualizations of the networks of organizations, institutions, and actors involved in European space debates, particularly around the Ariane rocket program. These maps reveal shifting coalitions, competing visions, and how different players shape Europe's space future and will be made available at the end of the project. The FutureSpace team also examined how European space infrastructure projects embed specific political values and governance practices, revealing the deeper politics embedded in seemingly technical decisions about how Europe organizes its space activities. In addition to over 14 international conference presentations, Klimburg-Witjes and her team have published three peer-reviewed articles within the first two years, with several more under review.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The FutureSpace team's fieldwork across Europe provided unique insights into the controversies regarding the future of Europe in space. Through a multimodal controversy-mapping technique refined by the project team, the project was able to capture the complexity of these debates—revealing competing interests, conflicting visions, and the tensions embedded in how Europe collectively decides its future space. This approach goes beyond traditional policy analysis by making visible the intricate networks, shifting alliances, and competing logics that shape visions and decisions about European space infrastructure.

The FutureSpace team complemented this mapping work with innovative foresight and speculative design methods that reveal how European space policy makers, industry stakeholders and aerospace engineers envision possible futures. Rather than relying on conventional foresight techniques such as scenario planning, the team employed participatory futuring workshops, multi-temporal ethnographies, and collaborative imagination techniques conducted directly at production sites and policy conferences. These methods enabled stakeholders to articulate their aspirations and uncertainties regarding Europe's role in space in ways that interviews and surveys could not. By linking speculative design with ethnographic observation, the FutureSpace team traces how specific future visions emerge from specific technical practices, institutional constraints, value constellations, and geopolitical anxieties.

The concept of topography developed by Klimburg-Witjes and her team is likely to provide valuable insights for the growing number of disciplines—including geography, anthropology, environmental studies, and international relations—now engaging seriously with space activities and their terrestrial entanglements. Beyond offering theoretical innovation, topography provides scholars with a framework through which diverse case studies can speak to one another, revealing broader patterns and relations that exceed what any single site or study can expose. Topographical thinking enables researchers to trace how Earth and space are co-produced across multiple registers simultaneously—not as separate domains that occasionally bridge, but as mutually constitutive terrains demanding new spatial analytics. This approach fundamentally challenges how we understand the relationship between planetary and extraterrestrial futures, offering essential conceptual resources for understanding Europe's place in the new space age.