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Putting social science on the space agenda
Professor Victor Buchli (UCL Anthropology) used funding from UCL and Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) to get social scientists more involved in the study of space.
19 February 2025
The exploration of space has traditionally been led by national space agencies. In academia, the study of space has mostly been undertaken by academics in the ‘hard sciences’ such as physics. However, with the increasing commercialisation of space programmes, plus a growing understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of space, there are expanding opportunities for a broader range of experts to get involved. Bringing people together from across disciplines has the potential to shape an exciting future for the exploration and habitation of space.
Professor Victor Buchli is an anthropologist focusing on how social sciences relate to wider space research. Keen to build collaborations with experts at other global institutions committed to this area, Victor was supported by UCL Global Engagement to apply for UCL-PSL funding. He successfully received this funding along with Dr Perig Pitrou from PSL, and the collaboration has led to larger scale research opportunities.
Getting social sciences at the table
“This seed funding has enabled us to establish the role of the social sciences in understanding the expansion of human habitation,” Victor explained. “This isn’t just about low Earth orbit, but also into cislunar space, which is the area between the Earth and the Moon. It’s been a wonderful opportunity to get social sciences at the table.”
Society is starting to seriously discuss how humans could inhabit places that aren’t on planet Earth. And with advances in science and technology, it’s starting to feel increasingly possible. “So far, this idea of the extraordinary expansion of human habitation off the planet has been dominated by state or national space agencies,” Victor said. “They’re generally closed off and difficult to get into. But space is moving from a nation-state model to being more commercialised – Space 2.0. It’s opening up, and within that, there’s an opportunity to get the social sciences more involved.”
According to Victor, the social sciences have always been important to the field of space – it just hasn’t been progressed as a research topic previously. “We’re not interested in the ‘secret sauce’ of space travel – the intellectual property and trade secrets,” Victor said. “But we do want to know what’s happening and what it means from a social science perspective.”
Having identified academics with similar research interests, earlier funding supported meetings and collaborations spearheaded by other colleagues that led to the development of The Off-Earth Atlas, a project about how we map our inhabitation of space from a social sciences perspective.
Prior to this, Victor was also successful in securing earlier funding relevant to this field. He is the Principal Investigator of the five year European Research Council (ERC) funded research project (2020 to 2025) called An Ethnography of an Extra-terrestrial Society: the International Space Station (ETHNO-ISS). Along with Dr Perig Pitrou in 2024, he secured monies from the Sophie Germain Funding Scheme, which enables bilateral cooperation between French and British institutions. The purpose of this funding is to establish a larger project examining the inhabitation of cislunar space. Through UCL Innovation & Enterprise, Victor has also secured knowledge-exchange funding to collaborate with Satellite Applications Catapult, which is helping him establish connections with industry. And in 2026, Victor and his collaborators want to apply for an ERC Synergy Grant for UCL, PSL and the University of Vienna, so they can run a much larger scale project on the study of cislunar space.
A research agenda for cislunar space
“The funding secured with the support of UCL Global Engagement has been instrumental in enabling us to get together in workshops to establish the research agenda,” Victor said. “This enables us to make larger and larger bids. Without seed funding like this, it would have been difficult to coordinate researchers across three universities in different countries.”
The early funding also helped the collaborators establish a proof of concept for joint working on space. “We need to be more coordinated in our research and collaboration in relation to how we expand into cislunar space,” Victor said. “This funding has helped us to set that research agenda.”
As one of the directors of the Space Domain at UCL, Victor says UCL is ideally positioned to further the interdisciplinary study of space. “UCL’s ethos is interdisciplinary and we’re constantly drawing on the huge breadth of expertise here,” Victor said. “We’re a large space university – we have labs, equipment and facilities. But crucially, we have expertise in space across a wide range of disciplines. It’s something really unique about UCL, and we believe the social sciences – plus all the other disciplines – should be part of defining the research agenda for understanding human expansion into space.”
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Description: A bright Moon over a cloud-covered Earth, set against a star-filled outer space background.