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| Vanguard 1, showing all its components. Credit: Naval Research Laboratory |
[A] case could be made that the best means of preserving the heritage value of these satellites [Vanguard 1, Syncom 3 and FedSat-1] would be to remove them to Earth, when such an operation becomes feasible. Here, they could form part of a museum collection and be accessible to the public, while also protected from the destructive impacts of other orbital debris themselves. In essence, these satellites and other retrieved objects would become souvenirs of a faraway and inaccessible place, something to remember orbit by.
If space objects are considered as isolated artefacts, then their cultural heritage value inheres in their physical characteristics. This value may be considered to be intact if the object is intact, even though removed from its original location, However, the question alters significantly if we include the relationship of the artefact to other artefacts and to its physical location. In this case, its significance is assessed as part of a cultural landscape. This question hinges on the importance of place. Rather than regarding spacecraft and orbital debris as unrelated objects in an empty substrate, they can also be regarded as related by location, history and function. They are not separate from the space they inhabit, but part of it. They form a new kind of cultural landscape.
On Earth, a cultural landscape approach has come to replace older ideas of the division between nature and culture in the field of environmental management. This is most obvious in the reformulation of the notion of “wilderness”. It is now recognised that most wilderness areas of 11the world are in fact the homelands of Indigenous people, and the record of human occupation cannot be erased to return the landscape to a mythical state of nature that has not existed for the last 2 million years (eg Denevan, 1992, Jacques, 1995, Taylor, 2000). Rather, the interaction of human and natural processes has resulted in the topography, vegetation and visible features of the landscape. Together, the landscape created by both natural and human processes has been called a cultural landscape [22, 23, 24]. Cultural landscapes are
… illustrative of the evolution of human society and settlement over time, under the influence of the physical constraints and/or opportunities presented by their natural environment and of successive social, economic and cultural forces, both external and internal [25].
The World Heritage Convention recognises three processes that can create a cultural landscape:
These landscapes are deemed to be worthy of preservation because they capture the interaction of human and natural processes. I argue that orbital space is just such a cultural landscape. It is an organically evolving formation in which spacecraft and space debris contribute their physical properties to an environment also containing plasmas, cosmic rays, electromagnetic storms, meteoroid swarms, etc. Space debris is now as much part of this environment as is the debris from the creation of the solar system. There’s no going back.
• Design or intention, for example, in the case of gardens, parklands and urban landscapes;
• Organic evolution, resulting from human actions within the natural environment, both past and ongoing;
• Association with religious, artistic or cultural meanings rather than evidence of material culture alone.
These landscapes are deemed to be worthy of preservation because they capture the interaction of human and natural processes. I argue that orbital space is just such a cultural landscape. It is an organically evolving formation in which spacecraft and space debris contribute their physical properties to an environment also containing plasmas, cosmic rays, electromagnetic storms, meteoroid swarms, etc. Space debris is now as much part of this environment as is the debris from the creation of the solar system. There’s no going back.
If space objects are seen as part of a cultural landscape, then their location is an important feature of their heritage significance. It’s important that orbital objects are up there: once they come down, their meaning changes. But the spacescape is not simply a distant and (largely) invisible location. Space objects are linked to place, processes and people on the surface of the Earth. The spacescape is a three-tiered vertical landscape, starting from designed space landscapes on Earth (launch facilities, tracking stations, etc), organic landscapes in orbit and on the surface of celestial bodies (satellites, rocket stages, landers, debris), and beyond the solar system, the rich associative landscape of the night sky [15].
A cultural landscape approach offers a framework for studying the relationship between places, associations and material culture:
Cultural significance is embodied in the place itself, its fabric, setting, use, associations, meanings, records, related places and related objects. Places may have a range of values for different individuals or groups [4].
For each of the three satellites I have investigated, place is an integral part of their significance. Vanguard 1 was not the first satellite, or even the first US satellite; but it is the only satellite of the early generation that remains in orbit. No model or unflown satellite is interchangeable. Similarly, Syncom 3 is significant because it is in GEO. From its location, Syncom 3 hooked the world up to watch an international event, foreshadowing events such as the Live8 concert in 2005. FedSat represents Australia in space through its name, the song, and the voices on the CD. Sure, we can hear them on the CD deposited in the National Museum, but what matters is that those now-silent voices have left the Earth on a different journey. In space, their words carry a meaning they could never have on Earth.
References
Denevan, W.M. (1992) ‘The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492’,Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82: 369–85.
Jacques, D. (1995) ‘The Rise of Cultural Landscapes’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 2: 91–101.
Taylor, K. (2000) ‘Nature or Culture: Dilemmas of Interpretation’, Tourism, Culture and Communication 2: 69–84.
[4] ICOMOS Australia, Burra Charter http://www.icomos.org/australia/, 1999
[15] Gorman, A.C., “The cultural landscape of interplanetary space” , Journal of Social Archaeology Vol 5, No 1, 2005, pp 85-107
[22] Hirsch, E. and O’Hanlon, M. (eds) The anthropology of landscape: perspectives on place and space, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995
[23] Von Droste, B., Platchter, H. and Rossler, M. Cultural landscapes of universal value. Gustav Fischer Verlag Jena, New York and Stuttgart, 1995
[24] Knapp, Bernard, and Ashmore, Wendy (eds) Archaeologies of landscape: contemporary perspectives. Malden: Blackwell, Malden, 1999
[25] UNESCO Operational Guidelines for the implementation of the World Heritage Convention, http://whc.unesco.org/nwhc/pages/doc/main.htm Sections 35—42, 1998
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