Waste Legacy: Cosmos 954
RISO printed Zine, 2026. Limited run.
In 1978, Indigenous and settler communities around Łutselk’e (formerly Snowdrift) in the Northwest Territories in what is currently known as Canada became the focus of an international clean-up effort following the unexpected crash of the nuclear-powered Soviet satellite Cosmos 954. For months, low-flying radioactivity-detecting planes passed over the sub-Arctic snow; medical officials scanned Dene, Métis, and Inuit peoples for radioactive poisoning, and military clean-up forces interrogated adventurers and local trackers in their search for the tiny, sometimes near invisible, pieces of the satellite. The waste of this crash—from specks of radioactive debris to hot and twisted reactor cores—was extracted from the crash site and transferred into archives, museums, and storage facilities. The widely distributed remains of Cosmos 954 and its clean-up now form a constellation across North America, lurking in bodies, storehouses, and memories.
Drawing from the collections and archives at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, this zine is the start of a larger project on legacies of that waste nearly 50 years on.
Research: Dr. Ellie Armstrong and Dr. Kirsty Robertson.
Design: Brittany Forrest.
Download the Cosmos 954 Insert PDF (711kb) and Cosmos 954 Poster PDF (1.8Mb).
This clean-up effort has echoed down the years in legal scholarship, international policy on nuclear reactors in space, and environmental history. To learn more, see:
“Operation Morning Light” Podcast, that focuses on the Dene, Métis, and Inuit community experiences of living near the crash site in the Northwest Territories (hosted by Dëneze Nakehk’o (Denesuline/Dehocho Dene) produced by Imperative, 2022).
“Cleaning Up Cosmos” an academic paper that highlights the conflict of colonial recovery practices with local community knowledge of place (written by Ellen Power and Arn Keeling, 2018).
“Falling Cosmos” an academic paper that tracks how nuclear space debris created a cross-border geopolitical cleanup effort (written by Lisa Ruth Rand, 2019).