This paper traces an intellectual and geographical arc of thinking about outer space in the tropics, connecting Peter Redfield's Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (2000), Sean T. Mitchell's Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil (2017) and Asif Siddiqi's Cosmic Fragments: Dislocation and Discontent in the Global Space Age (2025). The paper examines how the authors explore the social and political dislocations of spaceflight in order to develop the contemporary European, Brazilian and Indian satellite launching facilities near the equator and how scholars have begun to account for forgotten actors and locations in Cold War space history. The paper argues for renewed attention to the tropics as both a geopolitical site and epistemic location of global space activities – shaped by enduring inequalities in space access, launch and data sovereignty, and by the evolving nature of space hegemony and dependency – and calls for new studies of space technology and resistance in the battles to define the limits of sovereignty, territory, and autonomy in an unequal Global Space Age.
Rob Krawczyk (Fri,) studied this question.