Article Review - French Guiana and Space

Review of Peter Redfield’s “Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and Its Place on the Ground”¹

French Guiana is a little-known country in South America that has an outsized presence in space flight – due to its status as a French Territory, proximity to the Equator (requires less fuel to establish a geosynchronous orbit), and sparse population removed from adversarial global space powers, the country is at a unique nexus between wilderness and technology. Europe established their official ‘Spaceport’ in the country where they conduct almost all of their missions in addition to facilitating outsourced launches (including the Russian Soyuz launch vehicle).

Searching for more information about French Guiana leads to a few dead ends, but Peter Redfield, currently Chair in Ethics, Globalization and Development at USC, spent several years writing on the subject. His first book, Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana’, was published in 2000, where he focuses on the relationship between modernity and culture. Others have studied the French Guiana Amazonian savannas, biology research and indigenous social life, but little is written directly linking French Guiana and the European Space initiatives, despite the close connection. Despite the rich possibilities in connecting space technology, indigenous communities, colonialism and international development, French Guiana remains overlooked.

The first ten pages of his article were virtually unreadable, so convoluted with academic jargon and philosophical meanderings about the ‘concept of space’. However, in the second half of the paper he begins to talk specifically about the space race and how French Guiana became involved. Throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s the US and the Soviet Union dominated both the space industry and the market surrounding communication satellites, but Europe had ambitions to enter the fray. Europe collaborated to form a private (although it receives large amounts of government subsidies) space commercialization company called _Arianespace _in 1980. By 2004, Arianespace directed over half of the launches for the commercial market. France, in particular, has long-held ambitions to lead the European drive to space, and many of the initial space launches operated out of Hammanguir, Algeria. Geopolitical events and a French withdrawal from northern Africa shuttered their operations, but they quickly shifted their focus to a little-known country on the northern coast of South America called French Guiana.

France has maintained a colonial presence in French Guiana for over four centuries, and their interest in the country goes in waves. An earnest attempt to transform the jungles and swamps into commercially useful land would begin, fail and efforts would cease for several years, only to begin anew. Part of the consistent failure to develop French Guiana is the location itself, but also poor planning, corruption and lack of integrated vision between the French and the local government. Like other areas in America and South America, there were terrible failures to establish colonies (on the scale of the ‘Lost Colony of Roanoke’), and while repeated attempts tend to succeed eventually, French Guiana time and again was passed over for modern-day Brazil, Venezuela or America. Deportation to French Guiana was a dreaded sentence during the French Revolution, and it was formalized as a penal colony in the late 1800’s through WWII.

The French perspective of the territory changed with the space race – it was the closest site to the equator that the French controlled and had a sparse population, which allowed almost limitless land for a spaceport. Having learned their lessons establishing outposts in Algeria, it was not susceptible to the same geo-political turmoil as other parts of the world, which let the French work unencumbered in the region.

French space development was beset by many failures, but after six years they successfully launched the Ariane rocket in 1979, and most European commercial missions operate from country. Redfield’s major point in this paper is the dichotomy between advanced technology and pristine wilderness. More specifically, the space industry did not erase the wilderness, but used it to enhance its capabilities. But, it also did not operate in a bubble; to get the materials and rockets into French Guiana, France brought in thousands of engineers, contracting companies, civil administrators and managers to oversee infrastructure development in the area. Bridges, port and airport expansions, roads, freight rail and housing all expanded and brought in both skilled and unskilled labor from across the world. As with all development, there are unintended consequences – towns such as Kourou grew from 650 to 14000, bringing an influx of money, but also crime and social conflict. The Guyanese Creoles, who previously represented the largest ethnic group, are now a minority as legal and illegal immigration changes the social makeup of French Guiana. Redfield’s other point is that while technology worked with wilderness to enhance its own characteristics, it still had immeasurable impacts on the region, a point that by itself is a bland statement - anywhere that saw fast development experienced these types of issues.

Redfield was so caught up in trying to write in an unintelligible academic style that the paper actually misses very compelling questions. How does a region without a history of technology development react when it’s suddenly at the center of one of the most advanced technologies? How can French Guyana leverage their unique status to sustainably develop their own economy while still supporting technology development that is imported from elsewhere? What are some of the technological carryovers from the spaceport that the French government could utilize for the benefit of French Guyana? The subject is fascinating, and ripe with potential for further research.

When doing research for this review, I watched a few videos about French Guyana, and learned much more hearing directly from people actually dealing with the impact at the nexus of technology, colonialism, government and social conflict. Redfield’s paper gets caught up in itself but the subject matter has great potential. This is a case where listening to the people of French Guiana, hearing directly about their experience and their struggles, outperforms dry academic material.

If interested in learning more, this documentary is a good starting point.

Footnotes

1. Redfield, P. (1996). "Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and Its Place on the Ground." Science, Technology, & Human Values 21(3): 251-274. ↩