Space cooperation: The case of the European Space Agency, Italy and Argentina since the 1990s

Space exploration has been one of mankind’s great desires for centuries. With the arrival of the 20th century, and mainly due to technological advances, humans finally had at their disposal the means to travel beyond the Earth. Historically, the first goals in space were achieved by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the mid-twentieth century during the conflict known as the “Cold War”. However, the space competition was not only an American-Soviet affair; in parallel, although much more moderately, different European countries began to develop their own policies to invest in research and space-related activities. Similarly, since 1950, Argentina began to develop its technological capacities in the space field through various state institutions and agencies that were consolidated over the years. Consequently, during the last 50 years, international actors have been collaborating and competing in this area not only to achieve their own domestic goals of greater technological development but also to gain a seat in the international space concert, a seat that confers economic, political, and military power. Therefore, the main goal of this thesis is to investigate, from the perspective of international relations, the cooperation in the field of space development among the European Space Agency (ESA), Italy, and Argentina since 1990. For this reason, several topics such as technoscience, and science and technology in international relations are presented and studied in the main body of the thesis to enable us to achieve a better comprehension of the work done