From exploration to exploitation? New frontiers of space and society

This introductory article presents an approach to the underlying communication issues of projects for exploring the “new frontiers” that institutions and companies develop from and within their specific perspectives. A range of stakeholders (public research institutions, communication companies, New Space actors, foundations, media., etc.) develop multiple political and economic dynamics for the purpose of creating new private and public markets. Referring to the articles, we place the concept of “new frontier” in its historical context and consider its implications in institutional policies in France as well as on an international scale. These new frontiers are first of all physical; the space sector, strongly structured by political-industrial-scientific strategies, is symptomatic of the construction of combined public-private strategies that aim to drain financial, symbolic and political capital. They are also social and cultural; the logic of exploitation underlies and is deployed in power relationships at the regional and international levels, as well as in strategies for collecting and processing individual data.