Bunch, Giles; (2025) Training Ground Support: Labour and value in European human spaceflight. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This is a study of the processes by which labour becomes determined as value-producing. The work describes and analyses training and organisation as elements comprising a broad system of value-production at two centres connected to European involvement in the International Space Station. Fieldwork was carried out at the European Astronaut Centre and the Columbus Control Centre in Germany, the primary data from which contains two key components. The first is training, the descriptions of which are based on my participation in courses designed for newly recruited Ground Support Personnel and instructors, on observations of simulations, and interviews with instructors, trainees, and managers. The second element focuses on the organisational dynamics in this context and looks at the political-economy of the European Space Agency and the organisational structure of teams at the fieldsites. The work integrates these components into an encompassing description and analysis of how value is produced and the ways that labour is socially recognised as value-producing. The thesis takes up the school of value-theory developed by anthropologists working in the Chicago anthropology department in the late 20th Century, engaging in particular with the work of Terence Turner, and incorporates anthropological renderings of Marx’s ideas on value which have been developed by specialists in socialist economics. The study is a major contribution to the field of social studies of outer space, offering, as it does, an uncommon analysis of value in a comparatively understudied and difficult-to-access community. The thesis also offers an approach in social anthropology for transcending genres related to studies of ‘training’ and ‘organisation’, offering instead a more integrated analysis of production and value.

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