Oliver Dunnett – The geopolitics of British outer space in the mid-twentieth century

Event date: 8 December 2010

Bedford Square London

WC1E 6DP

Royal Holloway University of London Department of Geography

Vertical Geographies

Recent geographical scholarship has highlighted the importance of ‘verticality’ – aerial and three dimensional perspectives – in conceptualizations of space, territory, sovereignty and power. Within the subdiscipline of critical geopolitics, this interest has been, in part, provoked by recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan and mobilized though broader discussions of warfare, surveillance, air (and space) power, communications technologies and military hardware.

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Oliver Dunnett (University of Nottingham)
The geopolitics of British outer space in the mid-twentieth century

Recent work in historical geography has increasingly engaged with outer space as a realm for geographical enquiry. In particular Denis Cosgrove encouraged a return to a cosmographic tradition of geography that incorporates three-dimensional notions of space which would not be limited to the Earths surface (Cosgrove, 2008, Geography and Vision). My paper will focus on the British Interplanetary Society, which was established in 1933 to promote British involvement in outer space. I aim to demonstrate how the vertical geographies of what I term British outer space were from the outset characterised by international connections. These networks developed throughout the 1930s despite increasingly tense situations on the world stage, and display a non-state-centred concept of internationalism, united around the principle of space flight. Following the Second World War, however, I shall demonstrate how this concept came to be replaced by the parallel notions of Commonwealth and European space projects, as the technical know-how of space flight became increasingly sophisticated.

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