Satellite Beyond Borders: Canada and the World in the Global Space Age

From 1965 to 1990, the space age brought Canadians into contact with a decolonizing and globalizing world. In this dissertation, I examine Canadian international history through the lens of satellite infrastructures. Over these decades, Canadian border-crossing engineers, earth stations, and satellites contributed to the daily work of globalization. At the same time, domestic Canadian space projects were structured by and intervened in global ideas about satellites’ uses. I present five case studies of real and proposed infrastructures – including global, domestic, and experimental satellite communications systems and “peacekeeping” satellites. From low-Earth and geostationary orbit, these spacecraft established connections between Canada and the world that contributed to an unequal world order in the 1970s and 1980s. The satellite’s-eye-view, however, also provided new tools for Canadians, including engineers, Northern communities, medical researchers, Indigenous communications societies, peace activists, and international lawyers to challenge the distribution of national and global power. While popular understandings of the space age are tied to human spaceflight, I argue that it was in the more mundane work of imagining, building, and using communications and remote sensing satellite infrastructures that a wide range of Canadians learned to see outer space and its technologies as part of their everyday lives. In the process, they entangled Earth and orbit, blurring orbital and international borders. Satellites were flexible: their use could both upend and extend colonial communications networks and superpower hegemony. But the orbital playing field was never equal. In practice, the globalization of satellite infrastructures reinforced the dominance of “space powers” from the Global North, sharply limiting democratic visions of the space age. This dissertation brings the history of technology to bear on histories of Canadian international relations, settler colonialism, peace activism, and medicine in the late twentieth century. From this perspective, I contribute to the important project of unearthing the deep roots of the space-based infrastructures on which our daily lives now depend.

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