My thesis argues that the ISS is a symbol of surprising and enduring collaboration, a legacy of space age spanning cooperation between the US and USSR/Russia, and a more-than-terrestrial diplomatic assemblage. It examines how law, infrastructure, modularity, docking systems, atmosphere, and affect help sustain collaboration in orbit even when politics on earth are unstable.

As a continuously inhabited, interdependent, and segmented structure enabled by Cold War legacies and post-Soviet pragmatism, the ISS allows cooperation without consensus—a crucial capability when navigating competing political interests. The main contributions of this research centre on the excavation of the historical legacy of US-Russian space diplomacy as reflected in the traces of memos, agreements, and technical reports within digital archives. The research considers how the context of outer space challenges terrestrial diplomatic relations by identifying how the affective atmosphere of outer space deterritorialises state assemblages, such as the US and Russia, and reterritorialises them through the ISS (p. 3)

‘more-than-terrestrial’... refers to the entanglement of material, political, and affective relations between Earth and outer space that challenge the binary of on-Earth and off-Earth. This framing foregrounds the continuity between the terrestrial and orbital environments and infrastructures and the ways in which outer space is shaped by, and shapes, life on Earth. The ISS, while located off-Earth, remains intimately connected to Earth in material, political, and affective ways. Further, as humanity increasingly incorporates orbital infrastructures and extends its sensing capacities beyond Earth, the materiality of the Earth itself becomes more-than-terrestrial (p. 20)