Outer Space Exploration as a Sociological Problem

To date, the topic of Space goes beyond the natural sciences and is increasingly studied by humanitarian and social disciplines. Space exploration by mankind adds a new space of social communication. Space is essential for its development features in several ways: first, the impossibility of survival of biological organisms without special equipment that supports vital functions; secondly, the huge distances and difficulty of movement; and third, the availability of the Space vacuum that is a much larger space of space objects. The study of mankind’s going beyond the Earth from a sociological position is the subject of a new sociological discipline, that of astrosociology. Astrosociology is defined by the author as a branch of the sociological discipline that is related to the sociology of space which studies the social actions, connections, and collective representations of people which arise in the course of Space exploration and appropriation. The task of astrosociology is to answer the questions of how will the space of social interactions change after mankind enters Outer Space, and how will these interactions change and continue to change in the case of the physical presence of social actors in Outer Space. The theoretical problem of astrosociology is formulated by the question of to what extent will existing sociological theories allow to investigate the changes of communities and interactions of social actors mediated by the exploration and appropriation of Outer Space. In order to provide astrosociology with theoretical resources, the author analyzes the sociological theory of space, the theory of globalization and mobility, and the actor-network theory. The analysis allows us to come to a preliminary conclusion about the presence of modern sociology of theoretical resources for research from the sociological standpoint of the human spacewalk.