Leaving Earth Behind: The Semiotics of the Failing Planet in NewSpace Online Corporate Imagery

Computer-generated imagery (CGI) of Earth published online by the private space industry, or ‘NewSpace’, produces understandings of a failing planet to justify the commercialisation of space and terrestrial extractivism. Drawing on the iconic blue-marble genre of 20th-century NASA Earth photography and more recent digital globe imagery linked to modelling and spectacularising climate crisis, NewSpace CGI contributes to an emergent ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ – a collectively held technology-driven vision of the future with practical applications – that anticipates departure from Earth for some by allowing for disaster capitalism on a planetary scale. Semiotic analysis of a sample of images obtained from the Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic websites in 2019-20 identified three representational themes that reconstruct Earth as anachronistic and inhospitable: a parting perspective in which Earth is depicted as a point of departure; Earth as incidental to futuristic space technologies; compulsory ultrablue colouration that evokes an untenably pristine environment. Together, these formal and stylistic elements constitute a new convention for Earth representation common across the NewSpace sector that crystallises a broader shift in the ontological status of Earth in the context of 21st-century climate crisis, from home planet – a place of return – to failing planet of origin that must inevitably be left behind. The research makes a novel contribution to the understanding of sociotechnical imaginaries by showing how detailed semiotic analysis of corporate imagery provides useful insights into how they emerge and whose imaginaries matter.