Abstract
Artefacts produced in the space industry rank among the most sophisticated and costly things ever manufactured by humans. The lifecycle of many of these artefacts is short, since they are 'used up' in their designated missions.
A closer look nevertheless suggests that this 'using up' is never ideal: many artefacts live a second life as debris fallen from the sky. This paper focuses on the fate of second stages of rockets launched from Baikonur and falling back to the earth in the vast and allegedly 'empty' spaces of the Altai Republic (South-West Siberia).
In the context where the secrecy regime reduces even public health studies to the sole perception of risk enquiry strangely bypassing the debris themselves, it seeks theoretical and methodological ways of bringing materiality of the debris into anthropological analysis.