Hae Sue Kim

HAE SUE KIM, then a graduate student at University of California, Irvine, California, was approved funding in October 2022 to aid research on “Making the “Korean Space Age”: Ecology of Outer Space Research in Naro island, South Korea,” supervised by Dr. Eleana Kim. This project examines how outer space becomes a site of political struggle in South Korea — not only through state-led technoscientific development and militarization, but also as a contested cosmological horizon. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with space activists, shamans, and science educators, the research explores how alternative visions of space — rooted in ritual, relationality, and mourning — emerge in resistance to dominant narratives of cosmic conquest and privatization. While state and corporate projects frame space as a frontier for extraction and control, activists and shamans envision it as a spiritual environment filled with gods, ancestors, and forces that demand care. Space activists organize protests and educational workshops to raise awareness about the dangers of militarization and the environmental toll of rocket launches. Some are planning a public shamanic ritual at a South Korean space center to highlight tensions between science, the state, the environment, and indigenous cosmologies. This project contributes to broader conversations on decolonizing outer space, environmental justice, and the ethics of technoscientific futures. It calls for rethinking space governance not as a race for resources or dominance, but as a collective ethical undertaking — one grounded in vulnerability, memory, and the possibility of repair across worlds.