ABSTRACT
Departing from a fragment of meteorite on display at the Greenwich Royal Observatory, this chapter thinks through the relations between museums, rocks, outer space and extractivism. Tracing the significance of the Observatory for Britain’s imperial history, and outlining the role of geological thought in both museum exhibits and colonial extractivism, the chapter highlights how alien matter is imbricated in complex histories and futurities of resource mining. Throughout the chapter, I draw on the notion of the ‘portal’, which I conceive as a ‘trans-planetary’ device, to trace how the meteorite is connected to imperial histories that extend beyond our orbit. Then, zooming in on the Observatory’s sober meteorite exhibit, I outline how museum-goers are sensitised to this imperial matrix and invited to apprehend alien matter as a familiar – and by extension extractible – resource. In so doing, the chapter develops a grounded ethnography of outer space and formulates propositions to think about our entanglements with related geologic and extractive processes that take place on and beyond the Earth.
