Astropolitics

Humanity is on the verge of another historically significant migration: the first wave of the human settlement of space. In the end, settlement policies will reflect the physical realities of space, but they will also be dependent on the political and economic realities of Earth. Unlike the space race of the 1960s, today, there are many different actors: the United States, China, Europe, Russia, Japan, India and also non-national possibilities such as Elon Musk’s Space X. Quite apart from what might be scientifically or technologically possible, politics will be the deciding factor when and how we are going to the Moon and Mars. In this sense, astropolitical research seeks to explore, understand, and scrutinise the reasons why humanity is doing things in outer space, whether for military, economic, scientific, or exploratory purposes.

This course deals with the geopolitics of the outer space and its relevance for the understanding of the world´s politics. Students taking this course obtain basic knowledge about the relation of power and space in the outer space domain and the basic factors affecting political decisions in the outer space. The main goal of the course is to enable its students to understand basic astropolitical realities and to be able to analyze political decisions related to the domain.