Outer space ethnographers face particular challenges, such as studying the inaccessible and handling subjects almost “too big to fathom” (Alter 2018). The intricacies and complexities of relations across extra-/terrestrial environments and cosmic scales can be difficult to grasp. At the same time, many Social Studies of Outer Space [SSOS] scholars stress an urgent need to reimagine “humanity’s place–and humanity’s time” in the cosmos (Salazar and Gorman 2023). In response to these concerns, this presentation explores the potential of the video essay as an artistic research strategy for SSOS. Video essays are hybrid audiovisual research objects that are mostly screened online via social media and academic platforms as well as experimental video festivals and exhibitions. They are characterised by their open-ended exploration of ideas, a pronounced subjectivity of their maker and emphatic articulations of their thinking process. These qualities combine in dialogical, discursive and poetic gestures made in montage: in recombining images, sounds, and words to “produce new meanings” (Vidolke 2024). This presentation shares video essays including Clear Ideas (Popper 2019) and Capricorn Sunset (Binotto 2022) to describe aesthetic methods and critical approaches, which can enable outer space ethnographers to produce meaningful academic analysis and artistic interventions. Facing the manifold and complicated formations of pressing Earth-Space issues, montage is a means to be multidimensional in weighing divergent worlds (Reid 2023) and making knowable the research subjects which escape linear narrations (Law 2002). In attending to the imaginative and performative aspects of technoscientific projects, video essays can further contest outer space futures as social and cultural constructions. Thinking with and through fragments of image and sound, they can open up and play with gaps (Rascaroli 2017) in heteronormative space imaginaries, performed by state and industrial actors, to counter the neocolonial and capitalist framings they are based upon.