Symbiotic Juno mission in orbit around Jupiter, 2022.
Fungi, lichens, shells, biofilaments, feathers.

Sympoietic-Relation-Ship Station, 2020.
Fungi, corals, trees, lichens, algae, animals.

    The Multispecies Union Space Agency (MUSA) is a speculative space agency. It imagines a future in which humans, with the help of technology, join the seven kingdoms of life (bacteria, archaea, protozoa, chromista, plants, fungi and animals) on a long-term, symbiotic mission to explore space.

    Until now, space exploration has mostly involved humans and their machines. MUSA asks what we might learn about the world, and the universe, by exploring it together with beings profoundly different from us. It sets aside the hierarchies of human-centred space programmes: humans are not the goal of the mission, nor its main drivers, but equal participants in a complex, interdependent system.

    At its core is sympoiesis, or “making-with”, as Donna Haraway calls it: no species exists in isolation, and new forms of life emerge from ongoing symbiotic relationships. MUSA’s spacecraft, the Sympoietic-Relation-Ships, are living organisms in their own right, shared by fungi, corals, lichens, trees, algae and animals. One hosts methanotrophs, bacteria that break down methane, around an artificial hydrothermal vent. Another builds artificial glaciers in orbit, collecting water from regions in winter and slowly releasing it where spring needs it most.

    Rather than a blank canvas waiting to be colonised, space appears here as a fragile ecosystem that asks for care. MUSA invites us to recognise ourselves as a “we”: humans and non-humans living together on a sublime and vulnerable spaceship.

Sympoietic-Relation-Ship, 2020.
Methanotrophs, snails, mussels, sponges, tubeworms, crabs.

Sympoietic-Relation-Ship, 2021.
Ice, lichen, caribou, moose, livertape worm.