Andrea RUSSO* 1,2 and Davide COCO 3 1Sorbonne University, ISCD, Paris, France
2University College Dublin, Ireland
3University of Rome, Sapienza University, Italy
*Andrea.russophd@gmail.com , Corresponding author
Abstract
We present a quantitative method to quantify the geopolitical impact of a space mission, based on data logs of previous mission, and evidencing how even if some missions succeed, they can also bring negative effect to the sponsored country. The objective of this research is to study how the success or failure of a space mission can bring geopolitical benefit or loss to a country. By retrieving various data, including sentiment from #hashtags related to the considered space missions, national budgets for space exploration, and the reliability of space launch systems, from social networks, public institutions, and online repositories, we propose an equation to evaluate the geopolitical soft power importance of a space mission for a particular country or space agency. The goal of this paper focus on estimate the potential impact of a space mission on the public opinion and international relationships, which can be either positive or negative, as even successful missions may negatively affect the international relationships and negotiation with some countries and their partners.
Keywords: Geopolitical dynamics, Soft Power, Space Mission, Political dynamics, Twitter
Since the end of World War II, the proposal of ambitious space programs by governments and national space agencies has always been a means not only to push forward space exploration and research but also to alter the prestige and geopolitical influence in the international context. For instance, the social policy action by the 35th United States president John Fitzgerald Kennedy to invest $25 billion (1961 US dollar value) in the Apollo mission [1] was not only a social investment to the increase public work with high qualification skills, but also a geopolitical plan action against the URSS space expansionism.
Geopolitical value appears since the first space missions, for instance, after Russian first space satellite ”Sputnik 1” successfully orbited the Earth. The Space Race that characterized the 20th century, was actually a geopolitical and propaganda race to determine which country would have finally had access (and conquered) the “new and endless world above us”. This geopolitical space race has been sustained by a huge effort from a social policy prospective. The $25 billion USD for the Apollo mission on 12th September 1962 (same day of the “Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort” speech by United States President John F. Kennedy to further inform the public about his plan to land a man on the Moon before 1970), are the equivalent of $231 billion USD on 7th February 2022 [Appendix A].
Nowadays, superpowers like the United States, China, or the Russian federation, have increased the frequency of space missions to show their presence and value in a geopolitical and international perspective. The surge of space missions’ proposals in the last decades was due also to the cost of access to space, which significantly decreased thanks to the development of reusable launch systems, performing hardware, and IT and IoT improvement.
Space missions have attracted huge money investments by public and private actors, with a social and business impact, due to the their potential economic return and their socioeconomic impact, as the design of a space mission encourages public high quality work and many public services originate from space activity (GPS, global mapping, high speed connection, global communication, and many others) [2].
Aside the aforementioned result, thus the spin-offs of space services to the population, can we also define space missions (both research and security missions) as soft power, given the geopolitical effects obtained from science development/result and IT infrastructure-related services?
A prime example of defense investment by the US from the “Pentagon” is the X37-B, a small shuttle designed to protect key satellite infrastructure from Russian and Chinese physical and cyber threats [3]. Originally developed as a prototype for national defense, this technology is now evolving into a tool of soft power, as states antagonistic to the US are struggling to develop comparable capabilities. These satellites are crucial not only for military operations but also for projecting US influence globally, intertwining security strategies with the exercise of soft power—both for the US and its allies.
In fact, designing a space mission is an extremely difficult task, with a high probability of failure due to the complexity of aerospace systems and the harsh conditions under which they are supposed to operate. The launch system plays an essential role in a space mission, as rockets must be “perfect” systems that respond seamlessly to all the perturbations that they experience during the atmospheric ascent up to the release of the payload into space [4, 5]. Every phase of the ascent trajectory must be carefully studied and planned before flight, as the margin of error is extremely small, even for the apparently simple scenarios. The technical-scientific difficulty of space missions varies greatly depending on the objective, e.g. the range of possible scenarios increases enormously when it comes to orbital flights from one planet (or celestial body) to another. While for a flyby, the short passage of a high-speed probe near a celestial body, is seen as an extremely critical moment compared to the simple time spent cruising. On the other hand, the orbit insertion of a probe around a celestial body is a more critical moment than the flyby because it requires several active maneuvers that involve multiple simultaneously operating systems on which the entire mission depends. In a similar way, landing on a planet or asteroid is even a more critical
accomplishment, as it involves much more complex operations.
But give to the great inherent complexity of aerospace projects, international cooperation allows for mitigating the risks and costs (both financial and time-related) of space missions. There are several examples that show that the cooperation among national space agencies or research institutes has brought benefits to all the parties involved, not only relative to the economic return of scientific discoveries and patented technologies, but also to a positive outcome in terms of reputation and geopolitical prestige associated with these missions. In fact, besides the technical aspects, the organization and management of a space mission are also quite challenging because every political interaction or action during the mission has a series of emerging behaviors in international affairs, and nonlinear interactions affect also reactions on political, economical, and security layers, which go beyond the space system [6, 7, 1, 8, 9].
Therefore, space missions involve varying levels of difficulty, where even minor mistakes or marginal defects can result in the loss of an entire mission. For this reason, space exploration often becomes a show-off of technological prowess and technical ’savoir-faire’, which can serve as a tool of soft power when specific goals are achieved.
Improving the success rate of space missions implies, from a geopolitical standpoint, an improvement of the international status. However, on the other hand, a failure can damage the relationship among international partners. The success of the Apollo 11 mission by NASA made the United States the winner of the space race and raised its geopolitical value even though many milestones were reached earlier by the URSS (first orbiting satellite and first human in space, to name a couple). Recently, numerous space missions were successfully launched and fulfilled their planned goals or even performed beyond expectations, receiving positive reception from the public opinion and altering (or consolidating) the international status of the involved countries. But even when a mission succeeds, there may be criticism from the society or even consequences and repercussions from others international actors, affecting the geopolitical status and international relationships of the sponsoring country.
But these social and governmental dynamics can be observed in online platforms, where people discuss and institutions update citizens. During recent years, social science has acquired methods and skills to collect data and use it like hard science to highlight and identify social patterns or social dynamics [10, 11]. Therefore, online social media platforms provide a powerful tool for collecting data and evaluating social interactions across a wide range of fields, such as security [12], disaster response [13], and social influence in different networks. For instance, the analysis of social media content has been used to understand who exerts significant influence in security debates, demonstrating how these platforms can be leveraged to monitor and assess discussions in sensitive areas like national security [14]. Additionally, Twitter has proven to be a critical tool in analyzing societal responses to crises, with research examining messages generated during humanitarian crises and natural disasters, highlighting the value of social media as a real-time data source in emergency contexts [15]. Beyond crisis response, social networks also offer the opportunity to quantify influence in everyday communications. A framework has been developed to assess social influence specifically within mobile social networks, with implications for understanding how information spreads [16] evidencing also possible predictable information cascades [17]. Also, the use of semantic and sentiment analysis algorithms applied to Twitter content has shown how such techniques can offer valuable insights into political movements and public opinion, providing promising perspectives for future studies on political and social activities on social media [18]. These studies highlight the importance of online social media platforms in gathering and analyzing social interaction data across various domains,
from security to disaster response and political movements.
In this work, more precisely, we acquired data from social networks like Twitter (currently known as X ), to evaluate the sentiment of space missions, which highlight the social reaction about the related space event. The sentiment analysis has been used by many others scientist over different research areas, and, if combined with a high quality computational method, it could highlight important patterns related to social events.
This paper therefore builds on works studying geopolitical dynamics, but there are few papers in the contemporary literature studying how space dynamics can bring an advantage or disadvantage in the case of failure or success of space missions in the geopolitical sphere. This paper serves to fill this gap.
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