There has been a proliferation of private actors coming to be involved in Outer Space, a sector dubbed the ‘NewSpace Economy’. Amongst the operations these actors are becoming involved with, plans for asteroid mining have had persistent traction within the sector for over a decade.

Private and State actors are advancing discourses aimed at enclosing Outer Space. These actors have sought to dominate the imaginative landscapes of Outer Space futurity through multiple media, drawing upon colonial narratives of frontierism, human-environment relations, and private property: themselves informed through and subtended by the expansionary logics of capitalist relations. The hegemony of these discourses contributes to, and is itself fuelled by, the disimagination process whereby alternative cultural histories are erased, eroding critical capacities to imagine otherwise.

With this context in mind, this paper explores the futures of Outer Space being (re)created by corporate actors and how this is contested by different actors.