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.
