Tear gas in orbit

Abstract

AbstractWhat does outer space smell like? On the one hand, space scientists have used scent as a hint to discover the molecular histories of the cosmos. On the other, Palestinian astronomers, who regularly encounter Israel's vertical military arsenal, joke that it smells like Israel. Based on three years of fieldwork in the occupied West Bank, this article follows these astronomers and reveals how colonial experience can emerge in faraway realms, even past our planet. I position the space sciences alongside these Palestinian perspectives, arguing that such encounters with a superterranean state reveal the increasingly extraplanetary contours of colonial struggle. The Israeli‐Palestinian conflict, in other words, orbits earth. Scale thus emerges not as something that divides the (space) sciences, colonialism, and everyday sensory encounters into separable domains, but as a relational concept through which we can better grasp the dimensions of colonialism, politics, and power today.