Australia
day 21
25.2744° S, 133.7751° E
Date: 27 May 2025
I am Charity Edwards, I am 51 years old and live in Naarm, also known as Melbourne, in Australia. I am an architect and geographer. I Speak Up for so-called Outer Space. Let me tell you a story. I think I was in my twenties when I heard something that broke my world. I was resentful as I had realised my intergalactic travel dreams, fed by a lifetime of sci-fi TV and film, were just that. A fiction that hid the extractive reach of mining and colonisation of other worlds. We weren’t going to explore - we were going to exploit. And then I heard a young astrophysicist say: we don’t need to go into outer space, we’re already there.
Other stories, I learnt much too late. As a non-Indigenous architect and beneficiary of uneven power structures embedded in/on stolen land, I remain indebted to Bawaka Country et al. and others who described obligations between Sky Country and beings who reside there, and Indigenous cosmologies that rejected the separation of Earth from outer space as yet another terra nullius logic. [i] For Yolŋu see the sky modifications we made as acts of erasure: damaging relations throughout the cosmos by disrupting dwelling places of their kin, curtailing existing knowledges, and ultimately, restricting possible futures to be imagined by all. I should have listened while I could. In 2020, they wrote a text called ‘Dukarr Lakarama: Listening to Guwak, Talking Back to Space Colonization’, and warned, “Land, Sea and Sky Country are all connected, so there is no such thing as ‘outer space’ or ‘outer Country’ – no outside. What we do in one part of Country affects all others.”[ii]
Four years ago, in 2021, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs’ Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space listed 7859 items orbiting Earth. That is, a total of 7859 since records began in 1957, with the arrival of Sputnik I. By 2022, Space X had launched 2700 new satellites, at a pace of 60 every fortnight, to create their 10,000 strong megaconstellation Starlink. As just one of the now four megaconstellations in operation, our current enclosure in 2025 stands as a result of more than 65,000 satellites encircling the planet. And still, there is no way to stop this remaking of the outside, over and over again.
I come back to the present, to the close of 2025, where cumulative emissions from megaconstellation rocket launches have once again weakened our planet’s ozone layer, adding hydrogen chloride and alumina directly into the atmosphere - and, where the cheap aluminum casings of Starlink and other satellites, which were only designed for 5 year lifespans, now plummet back to the Earth at a rate of two tonnes of material every day. Much of that burns up in the atmosphere upon re-entry, lighting up the skies 24 hours a day, contributing alumina again into the ozone layer, and opening up a thousand new holes to wreak havoc. Some debris remains up there too, adding to space junk collisions and filling up the graveyard orbit. We have created a fully imploding contaiunmetn system, ensuring we cannot get out and no others can get in. So, as another kind of missile, I launch this story into the encircling noise. And bon voyage.
[i] Bawaka Country, including A Mitchell, S Wright, S Suchet-Pearson, K Lloyd, L Burarrwanga, R
Ganambarr, M Ganambarr-Stubbs, B Ganambarr, D Maymuru, & R Maymuru, "Dukarr Lakarama:
Listening to Guwak, Talking Back to Space Colonization" Political Geography 81 (2020) pp 1-19.
[ii] Bawaka Country et al. p 2.
Other stories, I learnt much too late. As a non-Indigenous architect and beneficiary of uneven power structures embedded in/on stolen land, I remain indebted to Bawaka Country et al. and others who described obligations between Sky Country and beings who reside there, and Indigenous cosmologies that rejected the separation of Earth from outer space as yet another terra nullius logic. [i] For Yolŋu see the sky modifications we made as acts of erasure: damaging relations throughout the cosmos by disrupting dwelling places of their kin, curtailing existing knowledges, and ultimately, restricting possible futures to be imagined by all. I should have listened while I could. In 2020, they wrote a text called ‘Dukarr Lakarama: Listening to Guwak, Talking Back to Space Colonization’, and warned, “Land, Sea and Sky Country are all connected, so there is no such thing as ‘outer space’ or ‘outer Country’ – no outside. What we do in one part of Country affects all others.”[ii]
Four years ago, in 2021, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs’ Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space listed 7859 items orbiting Earth. That is, a total of 7859 since records began in 1957, with the arrival of Sputnik I. By 2022, Space X had launched 2700 new satellites, at a pace of 60 every fortnight, to create their 10,000 strong megaconstellation Starlink. As just one of the now four megaconstellations in operation, our current enclosure in 2025 stands as a result of more than 65,000 satellites encircling the planet. And still, there is no way to stop this remaking of the outside, over and over again.
I come back to the present, to the close of 2025, where cumulative emissions from megaconstellation rocket launches have once again weakened our planet’s ozone layer, adding hydrogen chloride and alumina directly into the atmosphere - and, where the cheap aluminum casings of Starlink and other satellites, which were only designed for 5 year lifespans, now plummet back to the Earth at a rate of two tonnes of material every day. Much of that burns up in the atmosphere upon re-entry, lighting up the skies 24 hours a day, contributing alumina again into the ozone layer, and opening up a thousand new holes to wreak havoc. Some debris remains up there too, adding to space junk collisions and filling up the graveyard orbit. We have created a fully imploding contaiunmetn system, ensuring we cannot get out and no others can get in. So, as another kind of missile, I launch this story into the encircling noise. And bon voyage.
[i] Bawaka Country, including A Mitchell, S Wright, S Suchet-Pearson, K Lloyd, L Burarrwanga, R
Ganambarr, M Ganambarr-Stubbs, B Ganambarr, D Maymuru, & R Maymuru, "Dukarr Lakarama:
Listening to Guwak, Talking Back to Space Colonization" Political Geography 81 (2020) pp 1-19.
[ii] Bawaka Country et al. p 2.