ABSTRACT

The global space industry brings to mind the horizons of science and technology, large rockets, and heroic astronauts. The land and infrastructure used to launch things into the cosmos, however, is far less seen. Since the mid-1950s, large territories or ‘fall zones’ in the Kazakh steppe have been used for jettisoning stages of inter-continental ballistic missiles and other kinds of carrier rockets from the Soviet launch complex, in the south west of the country, known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome. In this article, I explore how land leases and use agreements between the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union have upcycled this Soviet era site into a private enclave for the accumulation of capital and waste of a now global space industry. As during the Cold War, launches from Baikonur depend upon thousands of miles of downrange land in Kazakhstan to be catchment areas for toxic fuel and rocket debris that falls from the sky during each and every launch. Here, I introduce the concept of an ‘inland-offshore’, to explain how post-Soviet land and infrastructure lease agreements have created offshore-like political and economic privileges and extraterritorial landscapes of proprietary governance.

摘要

全球航天工业让人想起科学技术、大型火箭和英雄宇航员的视野。然而，用于将物体发射到宇宙中的土地和基础设施却鲜为人知。自 1950 年代中期以来，哈萨克草原上的大片领土或“坠落区”已被用于从位于该国西南部的苏联发射场发射的洲际弹道导弹和其他类型运载火箭的弃置阶段，众所周知作为拜科努尔航天发射场。在本文中，我探讨了苏联解体后俄罗斯联邦和哈萨克斯坦之间的土地租赁和使用协议如何将这个苏联时代的场地升级为私人飞地，用于积累资本和浪费现在的全球航天工业。就像冷战期间一样，拜科努尔的发射依赖于哈萨克斯坦数千英里的下游土地，这些土地是每次发射期间从天而降的有毒燃料和火箭碎片的集水区。在这里，我引入了“内陆-离岸”的概念，以解释后苏联时期的土地和基础设施租赁协议如何创造了类似离岸的政治和经济特权以及所有权治理的域外景观。