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The article deals with the process of the transformation of outer space into a warfighting domain in the 21st century. During the Cold War, outer space was a place of understanding and peaceful competition between superpowers. Militarization has existed since the beginning of the Space Age, excluding the weaponization of space until the beginning of the 21st century. The absence of an international regime to prevent the weaponization of space and technological advances opens up new opportunities for states in their quest to increase power. The theoretical paradigm is a realistic perspective of international institutions as a reflection of the most powerful state’s minimum consensus on a mechanism for reducing their costs. Successfully tested anti-satellite weapons open new questions about the defense of vulnerable space installations from enemy attacks. The authorʼs prognostic thesis refers to the new race in space weapons and the matter of time when lasers, plasma weapons, kinetic bombardment, and other types of space weapons will see the light of day. The strategic balance will remain untouched until the invention of a superior space weapon able to neutralize the existing offensive capacities of the states and erase the second strike capability appears. The author concludes that international institutions cannot limit the ambitions of states in conquering space because they do not want to give up that potential, but that a limited space war is unlikely.

This article proposes the notion of space media as a way of defining media that connect humans with outer space. It is suggested that six areas related to contemporary media theory are particularly relevant to understanding space media: epistemology, anthropogenesis, planetary mediums, infrastructure, imaginaries, and remains. The article further suggests that the field of media studies needs to take account of outer space and, as a result, alter its own current practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human space travel has largely been understood through a physiological and psychological lens but rarely sociologically or anthropologically. Drawing on astronaut testimony, experiences of microgravity environments, laboratory experiments and art practice this paper argues that gravity, or rather its absence, offers a unique vantage point through which to consider the human relationship to emotion, cognition, and the curation of social relations via experiences of the body in different gravitational environments. The analysis draws attention to the contextual, embodied and contingent moments of social relations through using a holistic materialist position with theories of affect and work on the anthropology of the body. An anthropology of gravity recognises the ethno-physical conditions of space-living by showing that microgravity environments disturb the habitual affective landscapes of human interaction. It suggests that body, emotion, social relations and environment can be better understood when they are contextualised by the underlying forces that operate subtly throughout them; forces that are more fully understood once they are no longer present. • One's ability to 'know how to feel' in social interactions is informed from the ethno-physical conditions of the environment. • Physics, in addition to cultural context, influences the anthropology of the body in movement. • Gravity is positioned as a force that underpins the ways the human body can convey emotion. • Microgravity affords opportunity to study how affect and emotion can fail in different physical conditions. • Microgravity distorts normative body alignments, affects and gestures, and can impact upon social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]