SPACE AGE ARCHAEOLOGY

How telecommunications technology affects our conceptions of space

2012-01-26T21:51:00.000+10:30

I often think about how our conceptions of space have changed as we look deeper into the far reaches of the universe, and as satellite navigation technologies influence the way we move on the surface of the Earth.

Oliver Sacks once wrote an article about how a man blind since early childhood fared when he recovered his sight. Vision created such a profoundly different way to apprehend the world than touch and hearing alone. As Sacks explained it, when we look at a cat, we see all its constituent parts at once: the head, ears, tail, legs, torso, fur, whiskers. We see that the right kinds of bits are there in the right kind of relationship to each other and in the right proportion. It is a simultaneous way of knowing. If you had to identify what kind of animal it was by touch alone, though, how would you do it? His patient would touch each part separately, and would only know if it was a cat if after feeling enough of them, this was the most logical conclusion. So this is a chronological way of knowing. I found this a very compelling description.

I think something similar has happened to people who now rely on navigation devices in their car, like taxi drivers. Whereas once you might have had some kind of map projection in your head, where in your mind's eye you could visualise your destination and then think of a way to get there, now it seems that you listen to the instruction and then follow it, bit by bit, just like the Sacks' patient. "In 500 metres, turn right". It's more like touching than seeing. So it produces a different conception of space: in fact a more closed-in one, where you are only aware of your immediate environment.

Perhaps this works for the much-speculated-about ability of Aboriginal people to paint or represent country from an aerial view, when they haven't seen it from the air. It's hard for us to comprehend this because even before GPS, our way of interpreting spatial relations was based on maps with Cartesian coordinates.

So you can imagine I was very interested to see this Scandinavian project looking at the way the telegraph changed people's conceptions of space in the late 1800s. This is how they describe it:

Distant news and local opinion: How the Telegraph Affected Spatial and Temporal Horizons in Northern Scandinavia, 1850-1880

Image courtesy of CMYBacon

The electric telegraph lines constructed across Europe starting in the late 1840's profoundly changed conditions for long-distance communication in the region. This project analyses the effects of the electric telegraph on northern Scandinavia.

Focus is on the relationship between time and space in 7 newspapers from Norway, Sweden and Finland. By investigating 1) the motives behind extending telegraph lines to these regions, 2) the ideals associated with the technology itself, 3) the representation of time and space in the news and 4) the spatial and temporal references of the concept “public opinion”, the study gives a new perspective on the development of communications in this area. Using the spread of technology as a lens through which we may observe societal change, this work will produce a transnational history relating the idiosyncrasies of northern Scandinavia to the common developments affecting Europe during the second half of the 19th century.

Published on nordicspaces.com on April 28, 2010

http://nordicspaces.com/distant-news/

I think this is really interesting stuff. I don't know if I would have chosen newspapers as the primary source to address the spatial/temporal - but the point about newspapers is that they will, presumably reflect public sensibilities, and the news reported will change radically as events further away become reported more quickly. So what people read will shape the boundaries of their conceptual world. Herodotos for the 19th C, and perhaps with as many marvels.

The modern ruin: trace fossils of high technology

2012-01-20T20:26:00.000+10:30

As I've mentioned before, science fiction writers seem to be particularly good at grasping the heritage issues of the present and future. Frequently in these stories, the decay of high technology is used as a metaphor for a postmodernish dissolution of identity. (One of my favourites in this regard is J.G. Ballard's Terminal Beach. I still have trouble seeing him as anything other than a science fiction writer).

The following comes from the short story Open Veins by British writer Simon Ings. It is an uncannily accurate description of a number of former military or space sites that I've been fortunate enough to visit.

The site bore little mark of its military past. The hardened bunkers, the offices and barracks, had been ripped out years ago. The radar arrays and satellite dishes had all been dismantled, leaving large, low concrete platforms, their smooth grey surfaces punctuated by rusted spars, irregular brick walls, depressions and score-marks: the tracks and spoor and burrow-mounds of artificial life. The single concrete runway was crazed and weed-lined and there were shreds of cable rotting in the verges. (Ings 1997, reprinted in Dozois (ed) 1998 p 546).

Cables or worms? Orroral Valley NASA Tracking Station, ACT. Author's image.

(What's that, I hear you ask? Does he mention cable ties? Well no, but I'm sure he was thinking about them).

He could easily be describing the former Orroral Valley NASA tracking station here, a site characterised by the concrete footprints of long-gone satellite dishes and interferometry arrays, which appear smooth and featureless until you start to examine them closely. Then you see the grooves left by blades on earth-moving machinery; holes where pipes, cables and wires vanish under the floor, weathered ledges and grooves where walls once were. Ings likens these to the phenomenon known as the trace fossil: the preserved remains not of some ancient creature, but of the impressions its activities leave in the deposit that becomes transformed into stone. They're signs, not the thing itself. It's an appealing metaphor, to imagine the cables as polychaete worms burrowing into ground, the bolts left on the antenna footings as anchors for some floating jellyfish in its sessile phase, the hardened bunkers as coral polyps.

This flourishing fauna has come to a sudden end, ripped out and dismantled. It's not just abandoned but actively flattened down to ground level. This level of destruction is frequently the fate of modern industrial sites, a major contrast to ancient ones which are more likely to be just abandoned. Or at least, this is argued to be one of the things that makes the archaeology of the contemporary past different. On the other hand, it's the same middle-range theory, the same taphonomy, that all archaeologists grapple with. While Ings says that his fictive site bears little mark of its military past, the signs should be there for those who know how to read them.

References
Ings, Simon 1998 Open Veins. In Gardner Dozois (ed) The Mammoth Book of New SF 11. London: Robinson pp 544-558

Surviving space junk re-entry: a beginner's guide

2012-01-16T02:19:00.003+10:30

Given how frequently space junk re-enters the atmosphere, it's surprising that there is not more information about what to do in this event. So I am putting together here a small guide just in case you happen to be in this situation.

1. Don't panic: it is highly unlikely to actually fall on YOU.

You'll have heard all the commentators saying this, but it really is true: the odds of it being YOU that is the site of impact really are extraordinarily low. In the entire history of human space exploration, there is only one recorded instance of someone being hit by space junk. According to the Centre for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS) this was Lottie Williams of Oklahoma, who was hit by a piece of a Delta II rocket as she was taking a walk one day in 1996. She was unharmed. When Skylab re-entered over Western Australia in 1979, there were no claims for property damage made and no-one was hurt. There's just so much ocean, desert and ice - and this is usually where stuff lands. There has never been a recorded re-entry over a city or town.

The problem is, of course, that it is very difficult to predict re-entry points as there are so many variables to take into account. So it's not easy to be prepared.

But let's just say you are likely to be in the debris footprint area. Here's what you can do.

2. Secure your pets or animals

It's just like fireworks: animals don't like it very much. The fragments may be traveling at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour as they come screaming into the upper atmosphere, (which then slows them down until they fall vertically). The pieces are compressing the air into pressure waves and the energy builds up until it creates an exploding sound or sonic boom. The sonic booms can be frightening for humans too. Take the same precautions for household pets that you might on New Year's Eve. Keep them inside if possible, and remain calm around them. Don't use a chain or slip collar to restrain them. Some recommend playing them classical music (or something else soothing) as a distraction. There are many websites where you can find out more about this.

3. Do not touch fragments of re-entered spacecraft.

In its journey through the atmosphere, the spacecraft or the pieces of it are subject to extreme heating caused the friction of the atmosphere, through which it may be travelling at hypervelocity. Depending on the materials, some may still be burning when they land. Even when cool, there may be jagged and sharp edges that easily cut you.

Moreover, there are many toxic or radioactive elements that may be part of the fuel, the structures, or the experiments flown on board the spacecraft. If you handle them without knowing what you are doing, they may poison you. These include the fuel hydrazine and the metal beryllium. Let the authorities deal with it.

You're probably pretty safe with a titanium or steel pressure spheres, the most common spacecraft part to survive re-entry. However, despite titanium's traditional reputation as an inert metal, there is some recent evidence that the corrosion products of titanium may be harmful. Don't take unnecessary risks.

4. Be ready for fire

If burning fragments are falling all around you, it's not impossible that one may land on your house or the building you're in and set it alight. And when you go outside, there may be more. Do what you would normally expect to do in such an emergency: call 000 (or the fire department in your country); make sure you know where everyone is; evacuate the building (it will be safer outside) and do not go back inside. If you have a fire plan, put it into effect. This may if course involve removing animals or releasing them.

5. Notify the relevant authorities

There's a few people who need to know. Your local, regional or state government may have to play a role in coordinating relief, or recovery of debris, so let them know. It's also a matter of international relations. The country it lands in will have to notify and communicate with the launching state about recovering fragments (these are used to analyse what happened) and perhaps to talk about compensation. If your country has a space agency, they also need to know.

Debris is often found months or years later; and when it's not a high profile re-entry like Skylab, UARS or Phobos Grunt, it may not be obvious which re-entry it came from or who owned it. It's up to the government to find out. (Dr Space Junk has provided this service on occasion).

6. Assist in the scientific analysis

Your experience can be very useful. The colour of fragments falling through the sky tells us something about their temperature and sometimes what they are made of; the number and timing of falls helps map the debris footprint; the size and nature of the fragments may indicate what part of the spacecraft they came from and how it broke apart. While you most certainly shouldn't touch recently fallen material, or move it, you can take photographs and GPS coordinates, and estimate the dimensions of the pieces. What you see and experience can have some value when put together with information gathered from other sources.

7. Be aware of the legal situation

There are two international conventions that you should be aware of. One is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which imposes liability for damage caused by space junk on the launching state, and the other is the Space Liability Treaty 1972, which requires that the launching state pay compensation for any damage caused. I don't know, however, if that includes emotional damage - there is some latitude for interpretation. Keeping in mind safety considerations, if you or your property have been harmed by falling space debris, document it as you would for insurance purposes.

The other critical part of the Outer Space Treaty is that the re-entered material is still the property of the launching state, so you cannot sell it on eBay. In the ideal situation, the launching state will try to recover material for analysis. Be co-operative and don't try to pass fakes off as real space junk - they'll know the difference!

OK. This is very rough and ready, but it's a start. One of the sources for these recommendations is the experience of Western Australians when Skylab re-entered in 1979. It was inspired by my series of #Reentrytips on Twitter.

Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen at ACMI. Review by guest blogger Dan North

2012-01-12T16:45:00.002+10:30

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s exhibition Star Voyager: Exploring Space On Screen is a celebration of the historical and future relationship of space exploration and the moving image. Compiling a vast collection of film and archives from the late 1800s until present day, the otherworldly exhibition tells the tale of art informing science and in turn, science informing art.

Descending the stairs into darkness, one arrives amid the moving pictures and parlour tricks of the early 20^th century. It is a world of fantasy and magic where voyagers to Georges Méliès moon bring their top hats and umbrellas to be shot from a canon into space. Mars is host to an array of space operas, involving benevolent giants, and is home to the elaborate constructivist metropolis of the mysterious and beautiful Queen Aelita.

Alongside these fantastic voyages and tricks of the eye are the writings of rocket pioneers Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, documenting the early beginnings of real space travel.

With the first occurrence of a countdown to zero before launch, the startlingly accurate 1929 film Frau im Mond by Friz Lang is considered the first serious portrayal of space exploration. Lang employed rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth as technical advisor to provide an authentic as possible illustration of multi-stage rocket travel. A scene depicting the crew staring back at earth evokes a similar reaction the Apollo 8 astronauts would have had almost 40 years later as they saw their first earthrise. Despite scientific inaccuracies (such as the moon having a perfectly breathable atmosphere) the film was considered so accurate that the Nazi government confiscated Lang’s research and model rockets. A young Wernher von Braun was to be so inspired by Frau im Mond that he painted the film’s logo on early V-2s.

Moving on through other films and artifacts, a Russian film from the 1950s depicts what life on a soviet space station would be like. It’s a strange mash-up of antiquated phone exchange and a submarine - however space is not without it’s creature comforts - everyone has an apartment with a view of the earth. Even your pet-comrade cat sits oddly purring at the window as the stars drift past. The film is presented as a sober documentary- this was to be the future for the USSR. This fictional Russian space station with its rotating wheel design was to be influential on Stanley Kubrick when thinking of his space hotel seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The exhibition design by Minifie van Schaik Architects makes strong reference to the visual vocabulary of real spacecraft. In orbit around walls of gold mylar you’ll find satellite-like pods displaying rare footage of cosmonauts and astronauts, John F Kennedy’s ‘We choose to the go the moon!’ speech at Rice University, unedited footage of Neil Armstrong climbing tentatively down the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module (you’ve likely seen it a thousand times before, but unedited and without soundtrack or sentimental narrative, the raw video of that boot planting on the lunar soil is still quite awe-inspiring). There’s newsreel footage of astronaut poster-boy John Glenn and various depictions of the space race in film - Apollo 13, The Right Stuff and Space Cowboys.

The space race was also the era of th vinyl record. Curators Emma McRae and Sarah Tutton appear to have collected every space related album cover imaginable from Public Enemy’s Fear Of A Black Planet the soundtrack of Plan Nine From Outer Space.

Unique to the exhibition is the short film On Mars 3D. It is too short. You want to see more. The Martian valleys and mountains look incredible and a little unbelievable. Is this really what the surface of Mars looks like? It makes Tatooine look boring. Planetary astronomy was never so cool.

Down a corridor reminiscent of the Discovery set from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (there’s a suspended model of the Discovery in there) you’ll find costumes, props and models from Forbidden Planet, Star Trek, Total Recall and Moon amongst others. Contrasting with their real-life, used-in-actual-space counterparts ,you get a sense of how science has influenced film and vice versa. It’s definitely a reciprocal relationship.

Amongst all the relatively familiar imagery, one exhibit is particularly fascinating for it’s unusual visceral qualities; presenting the smell and the sound of our own star, the sun. Eerie and absolutely alien, artists Joyce Hinterding and David Haines have simulated what we could never possibly experience- a solar scratch and sniff.

The overall effect is a montage of original artifacts, props, film, and photographs- an artistic and scientific orgy of everything that is great about imagining or actually going into outer space. Highly recommended.

Star Voyager is on at ACMI, Federation Square, Melbourne, until January 29.

Dan North is a Sydney-based architect. He is also an amateur astronomer with a life long interest in the history of space exploration and set and prop design for science fiction films.

Cable ties, the taphonomy of plastics, and the modern world

2012-01-08T12:57:00.000+10:30

Truly I need a new life. I'm starting to notice cable ties everywhere. I was waiting at a bus stop last week when I spotted a broken cable tie in the dirt, my eye now being attuned to the characteristic L-shape. I picked it up and took it home (unlike other kinds of artefact, those of the contemporary past are usually "rubbish". There is no law against souveniring them). I think there may have been a construction site nearby, but my memory is a little hazy on this point.

Image courtesy of 4Cabling

Examining this orphan cable tie was interesting. The un-cut-off end suggested that it was a very long one indeed, but part of it was missing, as the stub was neither long enough or flexible enough to curve around to meet the opposing break. However, on the remaining length, there is no sign of a manufacturer's label or a patent number. This suggests that it belongs to a later period where cable ties are a generic technology, rather than proprietary.

The wear on the cable tie suggested that it had been lying around for some time; they are pretty robust little beasties, after all. I might interpret it as trampling wear, and abrasion from the stony/gravelly surfaces of the dirt and road where I found it. The flat surfaces are scratched and the smooth edges are roughened and squashed a little. I don't recollect noticing this on the Orroral Valley cable ties, which were located in lovely soft sandy silt. Clearly this is another feature that needs recording in future fieldwork. This makes me think that it might be useful to examine a bit more closely the ways in which plastics deform and deteriorate. A taphonomy of plastics.

There's very little literature specifically about cable ties that I have been able to track down as yet, although I have no doubt that I shall find more once I get deeper into the technical journals. However, this is for me exactly the justification for taking an archaeological approach: the documents that tell the story of how they became such a ubiquitous feature of everyday life do not exist. No-one is, for example, going on a hiking trip, or building a house, and choosing to focus on the role of cable ties in what they write or photograph about their activities.

They're not just a useful string or wire substitute though - artists and crafters are using cable ties to make all sorts of fabulous things. That might have to be the subject of a separate post.

I'll be talking about cable ties at the workshop "That was then, this is now" in Sydney on the 16th-17th February. How they'll thank me!

Valley of the Cable Ties: the material culture of the contemporary past

2011-12-26T17:06:00.001+10:30

Back in November, me and my intrepid group of graduate students paid a visit to the former Orroral Valley Tracking Station in the ACT.

In the 1990s, what remained of the above-ground structures was demolished, leaving only the concrete footings of numerous buildings and antennas. Near the entrance to the facility, now used by tourists, hikers and other visitors, the grass is cut and the gardens sort of maintained. Deeper into the site, tall weeds and grasses are more prevalent and are invading the antenna footprints.

In general, surface visibility is on the low side, and as you walk about, there's not much evidence of past human activities apart from the big stuff. No obvious artefact scatters; no personal objects; no bits of antenna support lying discarded. Occasionally there's a bit of recent rubbish near the picnic/parking area. The Maralinga nuclear test sites are littered with lovely radioactive garbage, despite three remediation campaigns; by comparison, Orroral has been cleaned up and maintained in a well-ordered fashion.

But I wasn't so sure this tidy surface would yield nothing to the eagle eye of the archaeologist. On my last visit, we found an old scrubbing brush lying outside the canteen building, the sturdy bristly kind with a wooden back, as used in a million domestic and industrial kitchens across the land. I was very keen to do a pedestrian transect survey of the entire site to see what else we could find relating to the tracking station period, and what its spatial distribution might tell us. I imagined we might be able to knock the whole site over in a day with 10 people.

You'll already have guessed that my expectations were confounded.

We started at what I thought would be the easiest part of the site, below the main 26 m antenna, which is fairly thickly grassed with few weeds. This was possibly the narrowest section of the main site, defined by fences, and with no buildings to confuse things. I really didn't think there would be much there; I thought it would be a nice, quick demonstration of the principles of surface survey.

The team walked 5 m apart, slowly observing the ground within their swath of vision, and placed a pin flag at every location where they saw human material or animal scratchings/burrows. The latter was so that I could get an idea of how disturbed the surface was. We had 100 pin flags (these are spikes of metal with a coloured plastic tag on top) and I thought these would last us a good while. The line would move from one boundary fence to the next in formation, flagging everything of interest, and then we would look back and see how material was distributed by the density of the flags. Then, in small groups, the team would fully record each artefact or trace, including its coordinates, material, dimensions, shape, colour, likely function if known, etc etc, removing the flag as each location was completed (and leaving the artefact in situ). We'd then move on to the next 50 m traverse.

From L to R: Joan, Rob and Susan in their 5 m transects.

Well. Once you start looking ...... the 100 pin flags were running dangerously low before we had even reached the opposite fence. There was stuff everywhere, despite the low visibility as you see in the image above. I was amazed, and so were the students. There were bits of concrete, star pickets, bricks, lead, tin cans, insulation, wire, nails, leather, cable trenches (some of the rabbit scratches turned out not to be, once you examined them closely), metal steps, pipes, and much more. When we made a list of all the observed artefact materials or types, there were over 30.

Southwest from the antenna footing, showing the location of pin flags

This was all great, obviously, although now it was clear that we would be lucky to get through half of this small area in a day, let alone the whole site. But the best was yet to come.

In the picture below, you see an erosion scar with a high density of artefacts, as evidenced by the density of pin flags.

Artefact density in the erosion scar (with Lance, Tom and Steve)

Obviously visibility was highest in this exposed area, and so we would expect a higher density of artefacts than the surrounding grassed areas. Some, at least, were being washed down or out of the slope; the presence of a small culvert under a path nearby attested to the movement of water through this area. But it was the content of this artefact scatter which was the biggest eye-opener.

Pretty soon, as the teams moved systematically through recording the artefacts, we became aware that there were quite a few cable ties present; so many that some people suggested that there was no need to individually photograph and measure every one. Tempting though that thought was .... I stuck to my guns. This was the methodology and we were going to follow it to the letter.! There was a little grumbling. Why record the same features on so many of them, when they were all identical? What would we learn?

Again, once you start looking...... the first thing to note was that these were used cable ties, not new ones. They had been removed from something. One team observed a tie that had been torn apart, as the edges were jagged. I then instructed everyone to pay attention to the ends and record their state. Three variations then became evident: some had been torn, some cut, and some melted. This tiny observation on a discarded piece of plastic translated into a decision and an action taken by a real person in carrying out a task.

From this starting point, as we compared the cable ties that occurred across the erosion scar, other variations emerged. There were different colours: black, white, translucent. There were different lengths and different widths, from the very skinny and short to the very long and thick. The length, and thickness could be an indication of the diameter and load that the tie was used for. Some had had the loose ends trimmed off. Some had patent numbers on them, or manufacturer's labels. Some were lying flat on the surface; others were actively eroding out, standing upright in a layer of silt.

I was delighted. This ubiquitous, seemingly simple object was raising all kinds of questions about how and why the cable ties had been used. How did they get there? Were they associated with the tracking station? What date were they? When, exactly, had cable ties been invented? None of us knew. We all knew what they were, but we knew absolutely nothing else about this very modern artefact type.

By this time someone had decided to start substituting cable ties in film names - such a shame that we had no mobile coverage or there would have been a great Twitter hashtag in it - #cabletiemovies - such gems as The Texas Cable Tie Massacre (Jonathan) and The Valley of the Cable Ties (Susan) raised much hilarity. (My own effort: The Cable Tie, being a film starring Jim Carrey). But I could tell that despite their ostensible skepticism, everyone was getting caught up in the cable tie story. I decided to have a brainstorm session.

First we considered when cable ties were invented. (We couldn't just look this up; out here our phones didn't have reception. The whole point of locating a satellite tracking station in this valley was its radio quietness). Like many things that people assume are very modern, I thought perhaps cable ties were quite old, 1850s or something like that. Others thought they might be 1950s or 1960s. Rob pointed out that an omega-shaped clip used to be used to secure pipes and cables to structures. Another question was mass production. While the technology may be old, their accessibility may be recent. Early cable ties, he proposed, may have been expensive, and those at Orroral may have all been imported from the US. Perhaps they were not throw-away technology in the early days.

What were so many cable ties doing near the main antenna? Were they associated with the dismantling of the antenna? Steve imagined a bunch of blokes climbing all over the structure cutting the ties off, as they took it apart to be transported to Tasmania (where it became part of the Mt Pleasant Observatory). The prevailing wind over the last couple of days had been from the north east; if it had been so in the 1980s, then perhaps the cable ties were just whisked off to the ground, scattering over the grass to the south west of the antenna. It was a plausible theory.

Joan, however, drew our attention to the huge numbers of kangaroos throughout the area (they were all over the site - and of course Canberra is renowned for being the one city in Australia where you can actually see a mob of roos hopping through the streets!). What if the national park had culling programs? The cable ties might be used to tie the feet of the corpse together so it could be transported. (Sorry to raise this gruesome topic).

It was Tom who had first noticed the melted ends of some cable ties, and he told us that cable ties were commonly used by hikers and backpackers to secure their baggage. They would then burn them off with cigarette lighters. Just to the right of us was a path that already we had seen several groups of outward bounders travel down to the other end of the valley. These groups of high school students were camping up near the old canteen, and every day two different groups would walk right past our erosion site. However, as someone else pointed out, they were just walking through: you would expect to see old cable ties more at camping locations.

So we had some reasonable hypotheses here, and would need to do some research to discriminate between them. It was no good making assumptions that antenna cables = cable ties. We had also to consider that many may have washed down from further upslope, and may not have blown down from the main antenna at all. A key piece of evidence was clearly going to be the distribution of cable ties over the whole site. What features were they most associated with?

We didn't get a chance to do any more transects, but we did investigate the 9 m antenna footing with a group of home school children who came out to visit us. Around the footing, we found a sparse scatter of cable ties. So clearly they were present elsewhere at the site, although the association with the actual antennas was not certain since we had only looked at two of them.

Later, we had a wonderful morning out at the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex with Glen Nagle. Towards the end of his talk to us, he asked if anyone had any questions. I saw a few significant glances exchanged between the students. Hello, I thought. I was pretty sure they wanted someone to ask about cable ties - but no-one wanted to be the patsy! Joan, though, was made of sterner stuff. The glances coalesced into consensus and Joan gave a wry smile before asking Glen how common cable ties were in the construction and operation of the antennas at Tidbinbilla.

Glen Nagle tells us about the history of the Tidbinbilla tracking station

Now, I thought, my moment of vindication. I was a little disconcerted when Glen roared with laughter! But when he recovered, he had some interesting insights. On the main 70 m dish at Tid, he said, there would be 1000s of cable ties. They were in fact an OH & S issue, and one of their engineers was meticulous about enforcing this - if the ends are not cut off, then they can easily take an eye out, as had happened to one unfortunate employee. So we had another factor to consider in our assessment of the cable ties from Orroral. Then he sent his off-sider to the office to get us all a genuine Tidbinbilla cable tie! I was in seventh heaven.

It wasn't until Susan got to the airport and logged in that we found out when the plastic mass-produced cable tie was invented - 1958, as it happens, by the US company Thomas & Betts, to use for securing wire harnesses in aircraft.

Of all the things I expected to get out of using a very "traditional" archaeological technique on a space site, the discovery of cable ties was certainly not amongst them. My initial field seasons to Orroral had led to me realise the importance of cables, as opposed to the fancy, obvious stuff like antennas (and don't get me wrong, I'm still completely in love with antennas), but it took the application of the archaeological eye and a systematic approach to recording to tease out the implications. It's so obvious when you think about it. Glen, once he had recovered from his hilarity, agreed: there is another story to be told about technology through cable ties, and part of that story is their dissemination throughout contemporary culture, their adaptation to all kinds of uses, leading to their virtual invisibility.

As far as I'm concerned, cable ties are the quintessential artefact representing the potential of the archaeology of the contemporary past.

I will make them visible again.

Postscript
A few weeks later, I'm having dinner with the president of the Australian Archaeological Association, my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis, in a regional Queensland town on a Sunday night. There's not many places open and we have to settle for a cafe which is also hosting a Christian a capella group. "Lynley", I say, "I have to tell you about my recent discovery concerning cable ties!" "Keep your voice down", she replies. "There's a lot of elderly Christians about who may not be comfortable overhearing such a conversation". I'm nonplussed. Why would anyone care? Then I realise: she assumes I am about to impart some revelation concerning kinky sex. And this, sadly, is the immediate association that many people have with cable ties: restraint, whether in the boudoir, down at the police station, or in a hostage situation.

Happy Christmas from Dr Space Junk

2011-12-10T08:24:00.001+10:30

I'm organised this year! This collage is from my Facebook status updates, those (mostly) with a space theme, of course.

If the text is too small to read click on the picture to get a larger version. That's if you really want to know my innermost thoughts.

Communicating the archaeology of the contemporary past: an experiment in methodology

2011-11-26T21:26:00.003+10:30

Recently, I took some graduate students out to one of my favourite places, the former Orroral Valley Tracking Station in Namadgi National Park, Australian Capital Territory. We did some normal archaeological things (pedestrian transect survey, mapping with DGPS, RTK-DPGS and baseline-offset), but I also wanted to do something different, to see if methodologies touted as being distinctive to the contemporary past had anything to offer us as archaeologists.

This is what I asked the students to do:

All that remains of a once vibrant facility where over 100 people worked in shifts around the clock is now concrete footings: the spikes and sky-gazing arcs of numerous antennas are represented by flat surfaces over which a person can walk without really registering what they are - as we observed with numerous Outward Bound hikers, who filed over the main antenna footing as if it were only a changing texture underfoot. They seem to barely notice the interpretive signs. There are two generations of interpretive signs at Orroral; most people agree that the older ones are not very effective, but the more recent ones, which are far more informative, are only present at a few places near the most accessible parts of the site. There's a lot of scope to do more, and this was also something I wanted the students to think about too.

So what happened? Was this experiment worth it? Most definitely, but not necessarily in the ways I was expecting. And I wasn't really sure what I was expecting!

A few students took a little while to feel comfortable with the fact that it was THEIR instincts that were important here, and what appeared to be stupid to them was really exactly what I was looking for. Some were initially cautious, but no-one refused to do it or made too much of a fuss about it, despite the fact that it wasn't being assessed.

The first result was that approaching the site in this way caused the students to be very observant, paying attention to the meaning of ephemeral traces and relationships between structures. They saw things that I had never paid any particular attention to, even though I was far more familiar with the site than they. Helen wrote an evocative piece about the fading white paint outlining parking places outside buildings such as the Minitrack Operations Building, a presence implying the absence of cars and workers. She noted that while these lines were "Ephemera appearing on no plan or map or survey, they have yet outlasted the buildings and hardware and people". Tom used photographs, from the interpretation panels, of the tracking station in operation and located the same perspectives now, juxtaposing the vibrancy of the peopled landscape with the silence of the concrete footings, and the decades of tree growth since the original photographs were taken. Steve put the people back in: on the flat floors without walls, he posed his fellow students carrying out activities that would once have happened in that building: serving food in the canteen, sitting on a toilet, processing data in the operations building while looking at the view out to the 26 m antenna, sweeping the concrete curtain around the dish's base.

Cultural significance is not just about historic events and people; it's also about the senses, or what the Burra Charter (1999) defines as aesthetic significance (NOT to be confused with aesthetics). Some students chose to engage senses other than sight, using both the real and imagined sounds of the site to evoke Orroral as it was in the past and in the present. Joan put a schematic engineering drawing of the 26 m antenna together with a broadcast from space: the voices of the astronauts communicating with ground control as the dish provided comms for a space shuttle mission, thus giving life and rapid movement to this monolithic structure. Jon showed a picture of the almost desolate, windswept northern end of the site, the valley enclosed by a bowl of alpine ranges that isolate it from radio interference, and played a recording of the wind and solitary bird calls: the loneliness of the abandoned tracking station that once spoke to the stars.

Poetry featured too. Lance asked us to close our eyes while he recited his words, removing us from the large common room and into his private vision; Susan used a whiteboard to draw the features of the site as she wove the outline of a yet-to-be-written poem together from fragments of the past and the present, a work in progress.

Susan, Liam and the poem taking shape on the whiteboard

John, our intrepid technical officer, emerged in his fluoro vest, set up the dumpy level tripod, tipped a bag of rubbish on to the floor, and lay down with his hat over his face: the postprandial nap amidst the wreckage of lunch. The rubbish had been collected from the site: he had very carefully picked up drink and food containers on which the use-by date was after 2011, reasoning that they were actually rubbish and not artefacts as they half-existed in the future. In this careful act he has captured all the paradoxes of the archaeology of the contemporary past, and I think he was a little taken aback when I insisted that we keep his collection for analysis .......

John naps amidst the artefacts of the future

Another principle of contemporary archaeology is making the familiar unfamiliar. When you're looking at recent material culture, we are so used to it that we don't necessarily perceive its role in our lives. But, as Colleen Beck has pointed out, much of the technology of the recent past is anything but familiar. We all know of nuclear testing and the terrible deployments of these weapons, but could any of us identify the components of a test site and figure out what went on there? We all use satellite technology, but could we identify Orroral Valley as a tracking station by the layout and antenna footings alone? These kinds of places, which define the global technologies of the recent past, are frequently inaccessible and mysterious. They need interpreting; they're places that help us make sense of the world we live in.

Jonathan showed a photo of the 9 m antenna footing: much more intimate in scale than the big dish. He talked about popular quizzes where people have to guess what an object is. Asking us to place ourselves in the role of a "lay" listener/viewer, he asked "What is it?". Indeed. What, actually, is this circle of concrete with a sloped half-amphitheatrical wall behind it? How do we describe this structure?

The students connected a place, trace or structure with imagined human actions - and hence stories - creating new avenues for approaching the interpretation of the site and making it real. But the most stunning outcome was when the students presented their pieces before the small audience of ourselves and four visitors, Johnn, Geoff, Adam and Liam, who had joined us for dinner that night. I wasn't sure if our guests would want to stay for this part of the evening, but they were riveted. Afterwards, Johnn said "You should do this for the ABC". He made an interesting argument: because there were nine small snapshots of the site, all highlighting completely different things in different ways, there was something to appeal to the most diverse of audiences. If one approach didn't do it for you, then one of the others was bound to. So in terms of communicating with non-archaeologists, he saw this as a way of engaging the public effectively. The very personal choices the students made about what appealed to them, what caught their attention and how they expressed it, mirrored the diversity of the broader community, creating points of entree into what otherwise might be opaque technology. I was very struck by this insight, that reaffirmed a position outlined in Harrison and Schofield's recent textbook on the archaeology of the contemporary past: that we are the best authorities on the archaeology of us; that the process of autoanthropology or autoethnography is revealing of our own approaches to the material world.

And of course the question you're all asking - was there an interpretive dance? Yes there was, but Chantal was too shy to perform it!

That was then, this is now: contemporary archaeology in Australia

2011-11-03T17:09:00.000+10:30

In this workshop, we're going to explore what makes the practice of contemporary archaeology in Australia distinctive. Naturally, I'll be doing the space thing. If you'd like to be in my session, give me a hoy and we can have a chat about it!

CALL FOR PAPERS:

That was then, This is now: Contemporary Archaeology in Australia

February 16-17, 2012 University of Sydney

This two-day workshop explores the role of contemporary archaeology and the state of research in Australia. It is aimed at exploring the methods, theories and subjects currently informing this nascent field of study. What role might Australian scholars play in advancing this area of research?

This workshop is intended to be a platform for open conversation and discussion of ideas. Students, scholars and professionals are welcome to offer presentations of 15 or 30 minutes.

Topics may include but are not limited to: auto-ethnography, late twentieth and twenty-first century technologies, space archaeology, contemporary graffiti, urban landscapes, mobilities, new methods of archaeological practice (social media, art, performance, re-enactment), the post-human, archaeologies of protest, anarchy, internment, migration and the cold war, the body, affect and the narrative turn, the materialities of contemporary life.

Please send 100 word abstracts to the convenors. Deadline: 31 January, 2012.

Convenors:

Ursula.Frederick@anu.edu.au

Annie.Clarke@sydney.edu.au

In praise of ComRadSat and community broadcasting from space

2011-10-30T22:32:00.002+10:30

For many years, I was a broadcaster in the community radio sector. I loved it. I started out with 2ARM in Armidale, NSW, Australia's oldest community radio station, which began in 1976. I won't bore you with the details of the shows I worked on, but suffice it to say that I met people I consider among my dearest friends in the world (even if we rarely communicate - I still completely love you), acquired a rather massive CD library, and had an absolute ball. I also worked with the University of New England on their distance education radio shows through 2SER in Sydney. This was one of the few times I did talkback, and let me tell you, it's hard, hard work (fancy talking evolution to a born-again Christian student live on air with no preparation? Well, never again, thanks very much). Then there was a hiatus of a couple of years, and I found myself on Radio NAG in Yeppoon, Central Queensland, with my first solo show, The World According to Alice. (I made my first website for that show too!) Again, I had the most fantastic time working with such wonderful people (ditto as above. I do love you even though I am a terrible emailer sometimes).

And I threw it all away to pursue space archaeology. This happened maybe a year after the beer/verandah/satellite episode described in this post on How I Became A Space Archaeologist (so you see there is a bit more of the story to tell yet).

In my early wanderings through the vasty halls of space history, I became interested in amateur and public space, particularly the AMSAT programme, and even more particularly the Australis Oscar V satellite. But strange to say, in all of this it never occurred to me to put my radio days together with my current research interests and wonder how the community broadcasting satellite ComRadSat fitted into all of this.

The - what is the word I want here? - zenith of community broadcasting was to have your show sent out to all the community stations across Australia via satellite - in other words being syndicated on a voluntary basis. I aspired to it, and I like to think I was maybe not as far from that goal when I left Radio NAG as I had been previously. I'll never know now. And broadcasting has changed so much. No need to cue vinyl, or edit on reel-to-reel (and it wasn't THAT long ago, just so we're clear about that).

Changed so much, that in this google age I do a quick search and find in some small print somewhere that ComRadSat is not a stand-alone satellite launched by a bunch of hippies from Bellingen, as it might have been in the true history of community broadcasting in Australia, but actually Optus B1. And I have written about the Optus and Aussat satellites, particularly about the impact of satellite television on Aboriginal communities in northern Australia (Gorman 2009), and I didn't think to explore this avenue.

In this FoxNewsedUp world, community broadcasting is more important than ever. So many passionate people are out there sharing their visions with the world, and I want them to continue. They are, as I once was myself, part of the story of space that I want to tell.

References

Gorman, A.C. 2009 Beyond the Space Race: the significance of space sites in a new global context. In Angela Piccini and Cornelius Holthorf (eds) Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now. Bern: Peter Lang

For more information, go to the website of the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia

Re-entry frenzy: Australian Skylab documentary

2011-10-25T11:40:00.000+10:30

An interview with Stan Thornton, who claimed the $10 000 reward for the first piece of Skylab to make it back to the states, and much more ......

Theory, atheory or anti-theory? The state of play in Australian archaeology

2011-10-17T16:49:00.000+10:30

I wasn't planning to go to the annual Australian Archaeological Association conference this year (it's in Toowoomba from 1-3 December), but pressure from my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis (president of the Association) who wants company in the presidential penthouse, plus an enticing suggestion from my new partner-in-crime Tom Sapienza to run a session on theory, has put an end to that.

Here is our session abstract. It's actually nearly too late to submit a paper if you were feeling so inclined, but we will consider anything, however briefly.

Theory, atheory or anti-theory? Issues in Australian archaeology

From students to professionals, many archaeologists in Australia today deny that they are operating in a theoretical framework, or question the usefulness of theoretical approaches to their practice. With ever greater numbers of archaeologists in academia and cultural heritage management, what are the implications of this retreat from archaeological theory for the discipline? Since all data are theory-laden, what does Australian archaeology's particular interaction with theoretical matters say about our data?

Because of Australia’s history, location and unique archaeological record, archaeologists here have the potential to offer new theoretical insights into such questions as the origins of behavioural modernity, the relationship between lithics and social behaviour, cultural responses to climate change and the role of communities in creating heritage, to name a few. Despite the existence of outstanding scholarship in many of these areas, we suggest that an a- or anti-theoretical culture, perhaps related to a broader Australian anti-intellectual tradition and the “cultural cringe”, has limited the realisation of this potential. Moreover, disciplines such as history and geography are currently engaging with a “material turn” (eg Bennett and Joyce 2010), acknowledging that material culture is a legitimate and indeed necessary component of their enquiries. As they look to archaeology to understand how this works, we find ourselves in an awkward position. The question of whether archaeology has developed its own theories, as opposed to borrowing in bower-bird fashion from other disciplines, remains contentious. In this session, we want to examine the nature of theory in Australian archaeology today, both in the academic and private sectors. We invite contributions which address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Teaching archaeological theory

• Theory and communities; theory and students

• Contemporary theoretical developments in Australia

• Case studies in the application of theory

• Historical analyses

• The use of theory in cultural heritage management

References: Bennett, Tony and Patrick Joyce (eds) 2010 Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn. London and New York: Routledge

Alice Gorman Alice.Gorman@flinders.edu.au

Tom Sapienza sapienza@berkeley.edu

Orroral Valley Tracking Station as it is today

2011-10-13T00:11:00.000+10:30

A video shot by mddawson1, which gives you a feel for the abandoned and demolished site.

Orroral Valley NASA Tracking Station in action

2011-10-12T23:26:00.000+10:30

Orroral Valley was a NASA tracking station in the STADAN network, designed for telemetry, tracking and command, from 1965-1985. Orroral veteran Philip Clark has put together this short film of original footage. You can see the fabulous SATAN antenna, the operations room, and the whole tracking station under snow (it's in the Australian Alps). There's also the Wresat 1 satellite, which was sent to Orroral prior to launch at Woomera to check that all the systems would work. And - guess what - there's a rocket cake! Well, a space shuttle cake to be precise.

The Australian Space Science Conference 2011: are we really all "nerds, carpetbaggers, enthusiasts and nutters"?

2011-10-09T22:16:00.000+10:30

The week before last I was at the Australian Space Science Conference in Canberra, the annual gathering for space scientists of all kinds: astrophysics, astronomy, planetary science, astrobiology, robotics, satellite development, propulsion systems, education, policy, history, heritage and a whole heap more. (I gave a paper about why Skylab is remembered while Wresat 1 is forgotten, and what this means for the kinds of stories we want to tell about Australian space). A highlight of the conference was the opening address by Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, which you can read here. Among many other things, he said that:

Combined, the Australian space industry involves around 630 organisations employing 8,400 people and generating revenues of up to $1.6 billion. I cannot overstate the importance of the products and services these businesses provide. Today in Australia, there are some 30 separate federal government programs that depend on space industry infrastructure ....

We need to secure our future in space, to ensure our prosperity in Australia. We have made significant progress towards that goal over the past four years. I have every faith in the exceptional talent represented here today.

Thanks, Kim! After this vote of confidence, it might seem a little surprising that Brett Biddington (Chair of the Space Industry Association of Australia and member of the Space Industry Innovation Council) should give a presentation where he said politicians viewed us as

... a very odd mix of people: nerds, carpetbaggers, enthusiasts and nutters .... typically long on assertion and exceptionally thin on evidence ....

An account of his talk was was written up by SBS World News Australia. Now, Brett is one of us, of course; and I interpreted his conference presentation as a bit of a pep talk, delivered with a measure of affection to his community, but aimed, perhaps, at jolting us out of our silos and thinking a bit more about the importance of good communication with both the public and politicians. (I have to confess that I don't know what a carpetbagger is, apart from the title of a trashy novel by Harold Robbins, which I hasten to add I have never read). When I saw the special coverage on the SBS website, I was actually a little shocked at how harsh the printed words seemed in comparison to his delivery. With so many things happening in Australian space, it's not a good time to feel undermined by one of our own!

To me, it was clear that his talk was not intended as a public statement, although there is of course no reason why it should not be reported. And he's right too: clear communication is a key factor, especially at this critical time when political attitudes towards space are on the upturn. However, reflecting about this characterisation of the space community (and wondering which one of the four I might be - I can see I'm going to have to google carpetbagger before I finish writing this; if it involves snakes, which I feel it might, I'll take it), it occurs to me that it probably required a level of nuttiness and enthusiasm to keep dreams, and more importantly, specialist knowledge, alive through lean times when there was no support, funding or recognition of how space underpins late industrial states and all the things that we now take for granted, like global navigation and telecommunications. So while politicians may see these as bad things, we don't have to feel ashamed of our own nerdiness. It can be a good thing, too (leading, possibly, even to Nobel prizes!)

Brett's point is simply that times have changed, and we need to learn some new skills, to be more politically savvy. I like to think I do my bit for science communication in the space realm.

OK: now for the denouement.

(Wait while I look up carpetbagger)

Lordy! It turns out to be a very complex term with lots of history, generally meaning a bit dodgy, and no snake involvement at all. I'll stick with nerdiness for the time being.

Skylab: fear and loathing on Saturday Night Live

2011-10-05T09:33:00.000+10:30

A couple of weekends ago I was glued to the computer, waiting to hear when and where the UARS re-entered. The blogosphere and the twitterverse were in a frenzy. One of the gems that emerged, via @cosmos4u and @spacearcheology, was this video of John Belushi in a sketch from Saturday Night Live in 1979. I'd not come across it in my search for the cultural footprint of Skylab. (Actually that's quite a good concept, I think!).

There's a creepy World Trade Centre reference, and talk of probabilities - just the very stuff that psychologist Talma Kushnir identified as an issue feeding public fears. In general the sketch betrays a lack of faith in official information: of course they're going to tell us there's nothing to worry about! Skylab ends up not as passive technology, but a vicious world-destroying monster, paid for by John Belushi's hard-earned taxes.

Shades of Skylab: the re-entry of the UARS satellite, and the psychological effects of orbital debris

2011-09-22T07:45:00.002+09:30

This Friday, debris from NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is predicted to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. Twenty six components are expected to survive, with a 1-in-3200 chance of hitting someone or something. Where it will re-enter is not precisely known.

Artist's impression of UARS. Image courtesy of NASA

When Skylab was about to re-enter, there was a great deal of speculation and fear across the world. In the early days, NASA did not give much thought to managing public expectations, only establishing an information centre towards the end. Some thought that it was best not to give the public the impression that NASA was in control (only partially true) as it would reduce the blame if anything went wrong! People thought the world might blow up, or that the spacecraft would descend upon them in vengeance for their misdemeanours (see also my previous post here). Psychologist Talma Kushnir investigated how people in Israel perceived the risk. This is how she summed up the situation:

The anticipation of the fall of Skylab was a worldwide event. Several features of that situation might have caused confusion and emotional arousal in at least part of the population. For example, catastrophes usually occur without prior notice, but in this case the whole world was alerted for weeks beforehand. While the fall was inevitable, its exact timing, location and consequences were unpredictable. For many people it represented a risk of unknown magnitude. The public was constantly bombarded by the mass media with bulletins of confusing information. Moreover, the information provided at the time was mainly probabilistic and varied from moment to moment, within and between available sources. On the whole, many individuals might have perceived the situation as stressful (Kushnir 1982:85).

Among her conclusions were that

1. The media played a role in exaggerating the risks; and presented statistics about the risk that were not very accessible;

2. Stress was higher among women, youth and uneducated people - the less education the person had, the more unrealistic their expectations;

3. Fear of science and technology may have contributed to higher levels of stress.

The gendered dimension is interesting here. Kushnir noted that "in almost any sample, females are more likely to have less years of formal education and less knowledge of scientific and technological matters. These reasons may contribute to their stronger feelings of helplessness" (Kushnir 1982: 92). Moreover, they may also be more likely to express their anxiety than men (Kushnir 1981:112), thus skewing the results.

What was the ultimate result of Skylab's fall on public attitudes? Back in the 1980s, Kushnir felt that Glass's gloomy prediction of 1970 had only been reinforced by Skylab. Glass argued that there would be:

more and more massive resistance to technological change. I predict in equal measure a growing hostility to science .... Hence the fifth .... limiting factor in the growth of science - the psychological resistance of and the restricted support by a population inadequately educated in the understanding of science and militantly opposed to it because of its identification with the technological annihilation of the human environment (Glass 1970:75).

Sure, it's very Cold War, but one could argue that at least part of this prediction has been played out in subsequent decades. How will re-entries like the UARS, which are highly publicised across forms of media that didn't exist back in the 1980s, in an environment where the public are increasingly aware of the problems created by orbital debris, affect attitudes towards space industry, exploration and science?

You can watch the UARS tumbling in its decaying orbit in the video below, shot by Thierry Legault with a 14 inch telescope in France on September 15th.

References
Glass, B. 1970 The timely and the timelessness. New York: Basic Books
Gorman, A.C. in press The sky is falling: how Skylab became an Australian icon. Journal of Australian Studies 35(4): 529-546
Kushnir, Talma 1981 Anticipating Skylab: subjective probability of injury in relation to birth order, anxiety and affiliation. European Journal of Social Psychology 11:109-113
Kushnir, Talma 1982 Skylab effects: psychological reactions to a human-made environmental hazard. Environment and Behaviour 14:84-93

Space junk floating around the Moon

2011-09-17T13:29:00.002+09:30

The picture below is a computer image made by Zoe Star Wardlaw, aged 7. She is the daughter of my friend Alice Wardlaw. She explains it in her own words:

My picture is of a moon, a star and some space junk floating in space. The space junk is floating around the moon. Around the moon there is stars and space junk. The moon is a different colour to the others. I did the stars and the space junk because I wanted to and I felt like it and I just wanted to because I felt like it.

The moon is VERY BIG in my picture BECAUSE I want it that way and I like it that way.

There are many things I like about this picture. The space junk is clearly in orbit around the Moon, and varies in size. For some pieces, it appears as if we are viewing them on an angle, so there is a nice three-dimensionality to the picture.

I also like the fact that, for Zoe, space automatically contains junk. She chose the Moon, not the Earth: she assumes that because the Earth is surrounded by space junk, so are all other celestial bodies in the solar system. This resonates with the way I conceive the space environment, not as a vacuum into which human material is interposed, but rather as a holistic entity.

It also seems a little odd to call orbital debris around the Moon "junk", something I hadn't thought about until Zoe's picture. There's vastly less of it, of course, and it doesn't pose a threat to terrestrial commercial or military enterprises at present. I'd have to look up what is in lunar orbit, but I think of this space hardware, unconsciously, more as artefacts than junk, precious evidence of a past phase of lunar exploration. This makes me think about how attitudes to space junk and space hardware change according to circumstances. When exactly did we come to think of stuff in Earth orbit as junk? In my forthcoming Skylab paper, I talk about how Skylab's descent over Western Australia was co-opted into the application of the new Litter Act, introduced that very year as a result of a decade of the "Keep Australia Beautiful" campaign. While concerns about orbital debris were certainly raised very early on, it would be very interesting to track how attitudes changed as the environmental movement gained momentum: a change from a colonialist, instrumental view of the world to one on which we have certain responsibilities.

So thank you, Zoe, for giving me food for thought! When Zoe is a famous artist (I won't insist that she stick to space themes), remember that you saw her work first on Space Age Archaeology.

The heritage uncertainty principle: excavating air raid shelters from the Second World War

2011-09-13T21:04:00.001+09:30

Hot off the press! Heather and I wrote this a couple of years ago, and finally it is out. Not particularly spacey, but there is some thematic overlap in the idea of bombardment and bunkers, which continue into the Cold War.

Dr Space Junk throws down the gauntlet to the Australian space community on orbital debris

2011-09-04T16:54:00.001+09:30

Well, I exaggerate a little.

Last week the National Council of Research in the US released a report calling on NASA to get serious about orbital debris.

Ashley Hall, a journalist from ABC's PM current affairs programme, called me for comment. You can listen to the interview here. He also talks to orbital debris guru Donald Kessler.

At the end of the interview, I make a case that Australia should become more than a passive observer to the efforts of the space agencies and the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee.

There are a number of reasons why this makes perfect sense:

1. Australia has a number of non-operational and functioning assets in space: FedSat, Australis Oscar V, and the Aussat/Optus telecommunications satellites. We rely very heavily on satellite services. Orbital debris is a problem for us as much as anyone.

2. Orbital debris often re-enters over Australia - a function of our large landmass and location.

3. Because of both the above factors, not to mention plenty of radio-quiet space and political stability, Australia is ideally suited to host tracking and surveillance facilities (which we have done, and still do, a lot of).

4. We have a great track record in tracking expertise, and have local industries developing innovative capabilities in this field (eg EOS).

5. Recently we have signed a couple of agreements with the USA to increase collaboration on Space Situational Awareness.

6. We are located in a global navigation satellite systems "hotspot" - in a decade we will have access to over 40 such systems (apparently).

7. In the past (ie before the Howard era), Australia had a good reputation in middle power diplomacy.

8. Now that we are starting to take space seriously, with the Space Policy Unit and a new space policy on the way, and funding for space research, it is important to build our credibility.

9. Australia has a (rarely used) place on the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

You see my drift? If I hadn't managed to fill up my sabbatical with other writing obligations, I would write a paper about this for the Monthly or something like that. Perhaps I still will. Anyone want to collaborate on it with me?

What does the Moon mean to you? International Observe the Moon Night - 8th October 2011

2011-09-02T12:41:00.000+09:30

International Observe the Moon Night (InOMN) will take place on October 8, 2011! Last year's InOMN included over 500 events in over 50 countries. The theme for InOMN 2011 is "What does the Moon mean to you?" We hope to celebrate cultural and artistic connections to the Moon in addition to current lunar science research.

The InOMN Website has all you need to get started, including tips on hosting an event, tips for getting connected with astronomy clubs in your local area, free downloads, and more. Please consider joining us on October 8, 2011 as people all over the world stop to look up and ponder our closest neighbor!
The International Observe the Moon Night Team consists of scientists, educators, and Moon enthusiasts from government, non-profit organizations, and businesses throughout the United States and across the globe. We believe in the inspirational power of the Moon — a celestial body that has influenced human lives since the dawn of time. International Observe the Moon Night has created the opportunity to for people to take notice of the Moon’s beauty and share that experience with one another. Through International Observe the Moon Night, we hope instill in the public a sense of wonderment and curiosity about our Moon. Our partnerships enable us to stay up to date with the latest and greatest scientific discoveries about Earth’s nearest neighbor, and we strive to bring those discoveries to the public.

Feel free to contact Lora Bleacher, Education and Public Outreach Lead for the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, with any questions. Lora.V.Bleacher@nasa.gov

Uganda in space

2011-08-29T17:23:00.000+09:30

My erudite archaeoastronomical colleague Alun Salt sent me this article on a bunch of space enthusiasts in Uganda who are building a space shuttle in their backyard: African space research: Dreaming of a manned shuttle

There's lots to love about this: the general craziness of Uganda (some young thing on the television the other day had never heard of Idi Amin), the sheer guts and determination of the volunteers and their leader Chris Nsamba, the openly nationalist agenda, the jackfruit tree in the backyard, and the almost-tenderness of the journalist, Anne Cavell, towards these dreamers.

I've long been interested in Africa's role in space. Nigeria, for example, had one of the very earliest generations of USA tracking station (a Microloc system, I think); in Mozambique, a crazy Portuguese dude built his own tracking station back in the 1950s. A few years ago I had one of my students do a project on Nigeria's space heritage, to explore the kinds of values that might be appropriate for space places outside of the Cold War western industrial complexes. I love the ambition of Uganda's attempts to participate in space, and why shouldn't they be ambitious? The big spacefaring states have had it all their way for too long.

And of course this fits very nicely into one of the often-overlooked themes of space travel, the role of amateurs and enthusiasts. The historical importance of rocket societies in the earlier part of the 20th century, and their contribution to space exploration as we know it today, has been well-researched; but people tend to forget that amateurs and the public continue to be involved in making their own kinds of space. My favourite example of this is Australis Oscar V, the satellite designed and built by Melbourne University students in the 1960s, and still in orbit.

Maybe Uganda won't have their own space shuttle or astronauts in the next decade, but I don't think that's the point. It's what they'll learn and accomplish along the way that makes this a significant project to watch.

Space junk and its affinity for water: Columbia's fuel tank

2011-08-09T14:21:00.000+09:30

Drought reveals Columbia shuttle debris
Analysis by Irene Klotz
Thu Aug 4, 2011

One of 18 fuel tanks that flew aboard the U.S. space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart as it re-entered the atmosphere for landing on Feb. 1, 2003, has been found in a lake in drought-stricken Texas. "This is one of the bigger pieces," says NASA's Lisa Malone, head of public affairs at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the Columbia debris is stored.

The space center got a call late last week from police officers in Texas who were asking for help identifying a large spherical tank newly exposed in the receding water of Lake Nacogdoches. It was a match to gas tanks on a pallet in Columbia, enabling its seven member crew, which included Israel's Ilan Ramon, to stay in space conducting research for 16 days. As Columbia flew through the atmosphere for landing, its left wing, which had been damaged by a debris strike during launch, broke off, triggering the ship's destruction over East Texas and Louisiana and killing the crew.

Malone said NASA will retrieve the tank and add it to the rest of the recovered wreckage, which is stored inside the shuttle's Vehicle Assembly Building. Unlike the Challenger debris, which was buried in an abandoned missile silo at the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, NASA wanted to make pieces recovered from Columbia available to researchers, in the hopes that more can be learned to benefit future space travelers.

Story from:
http://news.discovery.com/space/drought-reveals-shuttle-columbia-debris-110804.html

The bizarre world of philately and space exploration

2011-08-04T14:26:00.002+09:30

You don't have to hang around the space world for long to realise that there is a strange space-stamp connection going on. Stamps, first day covers, rocket mail, stamp-funded space research programmes, it's all there. My erudite Highland friend Fraser MacDonald is into it too, specialising in space stamps from 1933 to 1937 or something equally obscure. Often when I'm looking for pictures of particular spacecraft, the only ones I can find are those on stamps.

And OK, I'm not entirely immune from this obsession myself - one of my most prized possessions is a large framed montage of space stamps in the shape of a rocket, made for me by one of my former students.

Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden this week released his autobiography, Falling to Earth. He and his fellow astronauts in this mission were given the boot by NASA because they made a secret deal with a German stamp collector to sell 100 of the 400 hundred first day covers they smuggled aboard (they were going to use the proceeds to set up trust funds for their children). It was not the first time that astronauts had taken such things into space, but for some reason NASA decided not to let them get away with it on this occasion.

The other interesting aspect of this is the special status accorded to objects that have been flown in space, whether they are human bodies, spacecraft debris, or souvenirs. Something that has been in space acquires a value that its unflown counterparts can never partake of. I'm quite interested in why this should be - I mean it's perfectly comprehensible at an instinctual level, but I think it takes the idea of the souvenir much further into the realms of fetish and talisman. First day covers are of course very light; and verifiable too, as they are linked to date, so perhaps this one reason why they (and coins) seem to feature frequently in this sort of collecting endeavour.

Just to illustrate, here's a lovely Europa first day cover, commemorating one of the the launches of the British-French-German rocket from Woomera in South Australia in 1966:

Fraser has written a fascinating piece about rocket mail in Brisbane in the 1930s, which you can read here.

Space research in Australia - the successes and challenges

2011-07-27T13:00:00.002+09:30

Space Industry Forum

Tuesday 16 August 2011 from 5.30-7.00pm

followed by refreshments

Council Room,

Level 4, Hawke Building

City West Campus

University of South Australia

North Terrace

Adelaide

Space Research in Australia -

the Successes and the Challenges

Chaired by Brett Biddington, Chair of the Space Industry Association of Australia

Panelists:

Bob Buxton (Flinders University) - Place and Space: Perspective in Earth Observations

Andrew Clark (Vipac) - Greenhouse Gas Monitor Project

Michael Davis (Adelta Legal) - Southern Hemisphere Summer Space Program

Jeff Kasparian (ITR, UniSA) - Space-based National Wireless Sensor Network

*RSVP by 12 August 2011

On-line: http://www.spaceindustry.com.au/register.htm

By email: forums@spaceindustry.com.au

* Entry is free but places are limited so booking is essential

What should Dr Space Junk do on the Day of Archaeology?

2011-07-19T15:21:00.001+09:30

Help, everyone. Next Friday, I will be writing about my day as a space archaeologist for the Day of Archaeology.

Here's what it's about:
Have you ever wondered what archaeologists really get up to? Is it all just digging or is there a lot more to it? The Day of Archaeology 2011 aims to give a window into the daily lives of archaeologists. Written by them, it will chronicle what they do on one day, July 29th 2011, from those in the field through to specialists working in laboratories and behind computers. This date coincides with the Festival of British Archaeology, which runs from 16th – 31st July 2011.

http://www.dayofarchaeology.com/about-the-project/

So what shall I do on that day? In the way these things work, I actually have many interesting things to do in the week before, and even the day before (of that more later); but unless I want to sit at my computer and write, I haven't got anything particularly rivetting apart from farewell drinks for our former Dean of Humanities later in the afternoon on Friday 29th July. OK, so maybe they want an ordinary day, but believe me, no-one wants to read about me visiting the finance officer to see about our budget for the field school or going through the class lists to chase down outstanding assessment, or reading my way through PhD students' chapters. That might characterise an academic's life, but not necessarily an archaeologist's.

Here's my preliminary ideas: I could:

1. visit the Aviation Museum in Port Adelaide to have a serious look at their collections
2. go out to the University of South Australia at Mawson Lakes and have a look at their FedSat materials (actually I'm liking this option!)
3. do one of my favourite activities, op-shopping in the hope of locating rare Woomera or other space souvenirs, and vintage items from the 1950s-1970s related to space (I'm liking this one even more!)
4. make a second version of DrSpaceJunkSat (my cardboard satellite) as a sort of experiment in performance art. (This might be especially appropriate as the day before I am giving a joint seminar on Theatre/Archaeology with a drama person).
5. write something. Well they do say "behind a computer" is acceptable. Perhaps documenting my thought processes would be interesting enough.

So these are the options I've thought of so far, but perhaps I am completely forgetting some marvellous space thing in Adelaide that I should really pursue, or perhaps there is some lead that I should follow up.

Please, if you have any outstanding ideas for my day, do share them.

The psychological effects of Skylab: divine retribution

2011-07-17T11:47:00.000+09:30

It is 1979 in Punjab, India. The U.S. space station - SKYLAB - hurtles toward the Indian sub-continent. A young Punjabi boy, six-year-old Puneet, just stomped on a frog during play. Now, as he listens to a radio broadcast about the imminent crash, he fills with dread that SKYLAB will strike his home and kill him and his family. This charming story, inspired by true events, draws us into Puneet's exotic world and with his struggle as a boy growing up.
Written & Co-Directed by - Arshdeep S Jawandha
Directed by - Pat Pecorella

This short film was made in 2006. I find it interesting for the way it depicts a particular response to Skylab - the idea that an event in the heavens is caused by an action on Earth (The pre-enlightenment view that heaven and earth are interconnected - as above, so below......). In the little boy's eyes, the disparity in scale does not seem odd at all: he is convinced that the fall of Skylab is caused by his naughtiness in squashing a live frog. Skylab is used as a way to illuminate the boy's understanding of how the world works.

He's terrified that the small world we see in the film - the house, the kitchen where his mother prepares meals, the garden, his father reading the newspaper in the sitting room - will be destroyed when the space station falls on it. Skylab is a metaphor for his awareness of the instability of all that seems solid around him. He's like the frog, for whom the violence of his stomp comes without warning and from above.

The director, Pat Pecorella, commented that "Scientists attempted to guide it [Skylab] into the Indian Ocean, but its crashing somewhere in India was a possibility. Indian people remember this event and how frightened they were as children". Arshdeep S. Jawandha, who wrote it and also co-directed (I guess he was basing it on his own experiences as a boy), seems to be a psychiatrist who specialises in children, if my internet sleuthing is correct. (On the other hand, they could be two completely different people).

The film starts, as you will see, with the text:
NASA launched the Skylab space station in 1973. It sustained severe damage during liftoff. It was expected to fall somewhere in the Indian subcontinent, where exactly was unknown.

It's true, of course, that the space station was damaged during launch. But this text implies that the damage was the cause of its de-orbit, which is not the case. All the same it's a quick and simple way to explain to a general audience how a spacecraft falls out of the sky. Perhaps Jawandha was conscious of not making people believe that this sort of thing could happen at any old time (which it can, and does) - he has to make a plausible, predictable reason to prevent the same panic shown by little Puneet.

Puneet is concerned about some sorts of scale. He asks his mother, "Can it [Skylab] be bigger than our house?"; "Is space bigger than Earth?" The next morning, he finds the body of the frog and buries it. Then he hears on the radio that Skylab fell into the Indian Ocean, as if his penitence has averted the disaster.

So, in my reading, it's all about causality and scale in the mind of a child.

References
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDb9OdeksM4
http://www.pcschicago.org/skylab/index.htm

Skylab songs

2011-07-08T23:46:00.001+09:30

Procrastination is a wonderful thing. Yes, there are still assignments waiting for my red pen (although actually I don't use red pen any more, studies have shown that it upsets the students), and drafts from my PhD students to be read.

So what do I do? Instead of summoning all my energy and determination to complete these tasks so I can have a relatively stress-free Saturday, I am looking up Skylab stuff online. And I've discovered an amazing thing: the Electric Light Orchestra's 1979 hit Don't bring me down was dedicated to Skylab.

The lyrics are unenlightening - only the "Don't bring me down" refrain really has any relevance. But I'm still pretty intrigued by this. It's the third song with a Skylab connection that I've located during this research.

One is by Steve Dahl, a US radio personality:

Ballad of a Balladonia Night is by the Australian Christian group Family. You can listen to it here on the Honeysuckle Creek website (which is well worth spending time on for many other reasons). I do have the full lyrics, laboriously transcribed, in my office at work, so perhaps will post them next week.

This instrumental, however, is a little more poignant - it's by a group called The Ventures, released in 1973, and the title is Skylab (Passport to the Future).

Skylab in the cinema, and in French too!

2011-07-06T18:22:00.004+09:30

I'm not the only person obsessed with Skylab at the moment ........ French actress and director Julie Delpy is making a loosely autobiographical comedy set in 1979, in which an extended family gathers for a birthday party in Brittany on the weekend of the re-entry.

Julie Delpy herself was 10 in 1979, and the film will be presented from the perspective of the ten-year old Albertine (Delpy plays Albertine's mother). In mid-July that year, the world speculated about where Skylab would re-enter, and what the consequences would be (many thought the impact may make the Earth explode). In the USA, people sold hard hats as "Skylab Survival Kits", and a restaurant invented the Skylab cocktail: "Two of these and you won't know what hit you". In more war-torn parts of the world, people thought of taking refuge in air-raid shelters; and there was a level of anxiety created by the earlier re-entry of a USSR satellite over Canada which released nuclear fuel.

Thanks to the bloggers at Julie Delpy: A tribute to her talent, I can tell you what the plot is:

Scripted by Delpy, the film is structured like a long flashback experienced by Albertine and triggered by a train journey with her husband and two children. During the trip, she remembers another journey she made when she was ten years old.

We are transported from 2018 to 1979. Albertine is with her parents and maternal grandmother on her way to the house of Aunt Suzette, her father’s elder sister, to spend the summer holidays there.

It’s her paternal grandmother’s birthday and the whole family is gathered together, including uncles, aunts and cousins. Endless meals, heated discussions about politics, racism, sexuality and education: the parents pass on their anxiety to the children who hear everything.

Skylab, the US satellite launched by NASA, thus becomes a huge fantasised monster, when it is just an obsession of Anna, Albertine’s mother, a woman who is as charming as she is neurotic, and is convinced it will crash into the west coast of France.

Here's a shot of Albertine with the family at St Malo, courtesy of Karius de Parius:

Fittingly, the film is being shot as we speak, at the same time of year as the re-entry. The film is due for release in September, apparently, and you may guess that I will be at the cinema as fast as I can, since it combines two of my favourite things, space and French language.

And as I'm writing this, I realise that in my marking-and-thesis-draft addled brain, it has escaped my notice that the anniversary of the re-entry is coming up on July 13th! The day before Bastille Day .... perhaps I should combine my traditional Bastille Day brekky with a Skylab celebration!

How I became a space archaeologist

2011-06-30T02:31:00.000+09:30

It's getting on for 2 am and I have no business being awake. At least, if I had any business being awake, it should be finishing my end-of-semester marking, commenting on thesis drafts, and working on my talk for Friday night ....

So all of that is obviously not happening. Instead, I have been reflecting on how I became a space archaeologist. Previously, I had specialised in Aboriginal archaeology, particularly flaked stone tools, contact-era flaked bottle glass, and usewear and residue analysis. (I still do some of those things). I was also a professional cultural heritage manager, working outside the university sector as a consultant.

Space archaeology came about in a particular moment, back in 2002. This was the setting: my lovely old Queenslander house in the central Queensland town of Gladstone, where I was employed as the project archaeologist on the raising of the Awoonga Dam. The house had the characteristic broad verandahs of that architectural style and a back garden with guavas, mangos, poincianas, and other marvellous semi-tropical trees. It also had an excellent bath, fabulous for soaking off the dirt after a hard day in the field.

I was frequently in the field with my team, all of them young women from the three Native Title claim groups in the area. Surveying, monitoring earthworks, excavating, a whole bunch of stuff. In the height of summer it could be very hot and sweaty work indeed. On one such day I came home, exhausted, clumped up the stairs in my steel-capped, acid-resistant boots, flung off my fluoro vest and hard hat as I entered the door, and went straight to the fridge for a delicious cold beer.

Now I have to confess I am slightly on the old-fashioned side in adhering to the principle of changing for dinner, whether one is by oneself at home, or in the field with only a flimsy dress suffering from the effects of being rolled into a ball and squeezed into some corner of the suitcase not occupied by explorer socks. But sometimes it is just all too much of an effort, and this was one of those days. I think I may have paused briefly to pull my heavy boots off, but the next stop after the fridge was the verandah where I collapsed into a chair with my beer and sat, thinking of nothing much, looking up at the stars.

Now Queensland, you recollect, doesn't have daylight saving, so it gets dark far more quickly on summer evenings that the rest of us are used to. So the stars were already out, even though I wasn't long home. I was contemplating them idly, perhaps thinking about my childhood ambition to be an astrophysicist, the little telescope my parents gave me for Christmas one year, the circular constellation charts that were stored in the bottom shelf of the glass-fronted cabinet in the sitting room. I thought to myself: I think I'm looking at the stars, but actually, the sky is full of satellites and space junk too.

It was the second part of the thought that was critical, very much related to my then-task of managing the heritage values of the more than 300 recorded Aboriginal and European sites within the inundation area of the Awoonga Dam. If there is human material culture in space, does it have heritage value? Does the Burra Charter apply to things that aren't even on the Earth?

I thought about this for a while. And then I decided I was going to find out.

References
The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance (1999)

Dr Space Junk talks to Radio SETI

2011-06-22T11:29:00.000+09:30

Earlier in the month I did an interview with the charming Dr Seth Shostak from Radio SETI, on his programme Are We Alone. (I'm going to admit that I have a teeny tiny crush on him now). The theme of this episode was space archaeology, as described below:

Indiana Jones meets Star Trek in the field of space archaeology. Satellites scan ancient ruins so that scientists can map them without disturbing one grain of sand. Discover how some archaeologists forsake their spades and brushes in favor of examining historic sites from hundreds of miles high.

Also, if you were to hunt for alien artifacts – what would you look for? Why ET might choose to send snail mail rather than a radio signal.

Plus, the culture of the hardware we send into space, and roaming the Earth, the moon, and Mars the Google way.

If you'd like to listen, you can find it here:

http://radio.seti.org/episodes/Space_Archaeology

Skylab: the conspiracy theories

2011-06-09T14:02:00.002+09:30

I do love a good conspiracy theory. And I'm working in two fields where they abound, archaeology and space exploration.

Today, having completed the final revisions to my Skylab paper for the Journal of Australian Studies (and can I just add how nice it is that the Australian government have scrapped the stupid journal ranking system they recently introduced), I am thinking about everything I had to leave out, and everything I could explore in the next thing I write on this topic. The following newspaper article, from the Lewiston Evening Journal (on July 12, 1979, p 19) is full of themes that would be great to explore further: authenticity, US-Australian Cold War relations, feelings of neglect and abandonment, and the Aussie larrikin.

Skylab piece just a hoax

Melbourne, Australia (AP)

An Australian golf course groundskeeper told reporters he found what he thought was a pretzeled piece of Skylab, and he packed a bag for America. Then a metalworker came forward and said it was just a hoax.

The motive: practical joking, but also spite against American space officials.

The groundskeeper, John Rowe of the southwestern Australian town of Albany, told his story to a local newspaper, a local radio station, and a Perth television station and was hoping to get to the United States in time to collect $10 000 from a San Francisco newspaper.

Then William Hall, 54, told reporters that he had planted the piece of twisted metal on the golf course earlier this morning.

"I wasn't the only one involved, and we did it partly in retaliation against the American space scientists as we didn't appreciate them deliberately deciding to put Skylab down in Australia, " said Hall. "After talking about Skylab on Wednesday night and finding that no-one had been hurt we decided to plant the metal as a joke".

Many thought that the US decided to save their own citizens and sacrifice Australians; there was a sense of indignation at our supposed allies undervaluing Australia. Feeling deceived, William Hall and his mates decided to deceive in their turn; but it wasn't a member of the NASA recovery team who found the piece, it was the groundskeeper who got all excited thinking about the reward offered. So they came clean.

I wonder how they decided to make the twisted metal look authentic? Did they look at other bits of Skylab? Did they just imagine what would happen to metal under that heat and acceleration? Were they relying on the fact that no-one really knew what space junk looked like?

My esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis comes from Albany ....... perhaps I can send her out to do some oral history interviews for me .......

Space junk poetry: Kinsella's Skylab and the Theory of Forms

2011-06-05T11:23:00.003+09:30

Today, I am making final revisions to my Skylab paper for a special issue of the Journal of Australian Studies, edited by Ursula Frederick and Kylie Message, on the theme of media and materiality. This poem is the star guest. I'd quite like to write an exegesis of it, as there are so many finely nuanced metaphors in it, but that will have to wait for another day .....

Skylab and The Theory of Forms

John Kinsella

For Jeremy Prynne

We didn’t make it but we ended up getting it,

or parts of it at least. I’ve seen chunks

and my wife’s father brought some home

for them as kids. In the tradition

of those splinters of the True Cross

held in reliquaries around the world,

if you added all the chunks

together there’d have been an entire

city in space. There’s a novel simmering

in its iconic resonance, the charred black

remains the talisman that starts

or in the very least attracts a cult.

Like the Aum Supreme Truth Cult,

that had a place out there, somewhere

where the land is less fertile and not so

closely scrutinised. Members may

not have known about Skylab

but the prospect of the world

crashing down on their neighbours

would have spurred them on.

But Skylab’s not like them,

nor like the couple from the Subcontinent

who names their newborn in its honour,

being American it’s as good as having

Elvis or Marilyn paraphernalia dropped

in your backyard. People pay

good money for stuff like this.

Kids of my generation remember

the diagrams in magazines

and newspapers. The neat bodies

of astronauts suspended in the neat

compartments. Small had great potential.

And it looked much more modern

than anything the Ruskies

put up there. But maybe now

we can see that such assumptions

were merely a matter of taste.

Soviet Space Trash is also

worth a fortune, and promises

the exotic in the subtext

of THE modern novel. A kind of

accidental empire building,

an occupation of the vacant spaces.

Like Woomera. A roar that fills

the void of Terra Nullius.

From Kinsella, John 2003 Peripheral Light. Selected and New Poems. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press pp 73-74

More early microgravity: Dr Dolittle on the Moon

2011-05-29T22:16:00.002+09:30

I've always loved the Dr Dolittle books, so charmingly illustrated by their author Hugh Lofting. (Of course, the ghastly Eddie Murphy films of later years bear little resemblance to the originals). Last week I pulled Dr Dolittle in the Moon, published in 1929, off the shelf for some light bed time reading. Here is how Lofting imagines the experience of lunar gravity, as told by the Doctor's assistant Tommy Stubbins:

The gravity too was very confusing. It required hardly any effort to rise from a sitting position to a standing one. Walking was no effort at all - for the muscles - but for the lungs it was another question. The most extraordinary sensation was jumping. The least little spring from the ankles sent you flying into the air in the most fantastic fashion. If it had not been for this problem of breathing properly (which the Doctor seemed to think we should approach with great caution on account of its possible effect on the heart), we would all have given ourselves up to this most light-hearted feeling which took possession of us. I remember, myself, singing songs - the melody was most indistinct on account of a large mouthful of chocolate - and I was most anxious to get down off the moth's back and go bounding away across the hills and valleys to explore this new world (Lofting 1968[1929]:10-11).

Tommy and the Doctor are still sitting on the back of Jamaro Bumblelily, the giant moth who brought them over from Earth with the assistance of oxygen-exhaling flowers. On the moon, insects can grow to monumental sizes and fly in the weak gravity .....

Here's a picture of Tommy finally getting his wish and bounding up a steep slope on the Moon's surface.

Doctor Dolittle shows himself as wise as Wernher von Braun, who did a pretty good job of thought experiments to figure out what the effects of microgravity on the human body might be. As a qualified medical practitioner, the Doctor's thinking ahead about what this exertion might mean for the heart.

Tommy has to re-adjust to Earth normal gravity on his return too.

The heavier air and gravity of the Earth took a good deal of getting used to after the very different conditions on the Moon. Feeling like nothing so much as a ton-weight of misery, I clambered down from the moth's back and took stock of my surrounding. .... I lunged heavily forward (the trial of the disturbing journey and the unfamiliar balance of Earth gravity together made me reel like a drunken man) ...... (Lofting 1968[1920]:161-162).

There's a clear mood association here. The feeling of lightness on the Moon translates into a light-hearted mood; and Tommy is miserable to be weighed down back on Earth, so fraught with troubles after the utopian world he found in space.

References

Lofting, Hugh 1968 [1929] Dr Dolittle in the Moon. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd

You know you're a complete space nerd when .....

2011-05-29T11:19:00.002+09:30

Someone starts talking about the ATM and you assume they mean the Apollo Telescope Mount rather than Automatic Teller Machine.

Second edition of Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now

2011-05-21T16:29:00.002+09:30

Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now (edited by Cornelius Holtorf and Angela Piccini) has just been reprinted by Peter Lang. With contributions by Julian Thomas, Cornelius Holtorf, Sarah May, Mike Pearson, Colleen M. Beck/ John Schofield / Harold Drollinger, Louise K. Wilson, Mats Burstrom, Jonna Ulin, Alice Gorman, Angela Piccini and Paul Graves-Brown, this volume contributes to the growing field of contemporary archaeology and responds to the important work of international colleagues in this area over the past 20 years.

Available from

<http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?event=cmp.ccc.seitenstruktur.detailseiten&seitentyp
=produkt&pk=58766&cid=348> 
or <http://web.comhem.se/cornelius/contemparch.html>.

The all-new Space Age Archaeology

2011-04-19T22:04:00.000+09:30

Well, I've been thinking about changing the format of Space Age Archaeology for some time now .... the blog is eight years old, and the template is so ancient that I can't play around with it - it basically can't be changed. But I'm so used to the font and the colours that anything else looks odd to me. And I'm pretty sure that once I abandon this template I can't go back to it.

So I guess I'm going to just take the plunge and see what emerges. Anyone who feels strongly enough to comment is absolutely welcome to do so. About anything - font, background, gadgets, whatever. I may be brave enough to apply my new design tonight, I may not. Hard to tell.

Inside the mind of Dr Space Junk with Wordle

2011-04-17T13:09:00.006+09:30

This is from a couple of years ago and reflects my obsessions then ...

First Orbit: a review of the Yuri's Night 50th anniversary film by Christopher Riley

2011-04-13T18:22:00.001+09:30

Last night I was a guest panellist at a screening of the new film, First Orbit, created by Christopher Riley to commemorate Yuri Gagarin's historic spaceflight in 1961.

In answering questions afterwards, I came to the defence of Valentina Tereshkova and named normally unmentionable things in a room full of physicists and space geeks. But that's another story, and for the moment I just want to consider my first impressions of the film.

The music was wonderful, and it seems a shame that Yuri didn't have a nice ipod so he could have listened to it on his journey. What sounds would he have heard? I don't know if his attitude was continually being adjusted, so perhaps the sounds of thrusters were audible .... or perhaps it was silent except for his blood and heart, and the small mechanical tinklings of his instrumentation, until the rude voice of Korolev burst in on his solitude .... (It was very interesting to hear Korolev, whose identity was so long a secret).

As usual, despite the conceit of letting the images speak for themselves, the choices made in the film have a subtle effect. I think the intent was to allow every person, every viewer, the sense that this could be them: that this was a universal body, an accessible experience. It could have been us, floating serenely along in the spacecraft. His perspective is ours, as shaped by the camera view.

I didn't have a problem with that, but ohers among my companions last night found this more disconcerting, as if Yuri had been de-Russianised, de-personalised, by being subsumed or subverted into allowing his unique, intimate experience to be cannibalised by us.

And of course it was long. Many people walked out of the theatre, perhaps to other engagements, perhaps just a bit bored. For me that was part of the point, too. Did he tire of the view? After a while did he have a bit of a snooze, just waiting for something to happen? Was he conscious, for every minute, that he was completing a circumnavigation of creation, dreaming this round Earth into being? It was a mental exercise, a sort of discipline, to remain focused, and I felt that to be important: I was not there just to be entertained, it was a sort of reenactment or perhaps just an enactment.

After his reentry, the film ended abruptly. There was no footage of Yuri back on Earth, a terrestrial being like before. He lands, and it's all over, as if he didn't really return. As if the person he had been was obliterated in the blackout of the descent, and the story continues in the body of another person, the one who takes a world tour and is celebrated and feted. Dissatisfying at one level, but I didn't mind that either. It's we who come back to Earth, in the dimness of the lecture theatre, those who stayed the distance.

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight with Dr Space Junk!

2011-04-11T17:27:00.003+09:30

Yuri's Night

Notice of a Free Special Screening

presented by

the Australian Institute of Physics (SA Branch)

http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/aip-sa aip-sa@physics.adelaide.edu.au

Ph: (08) 8201 2093 or (08) 8234 6112 (a.h.) or Mob: 0427 711 815 Fax: (08) 8201 2905

Post: AIP-SA secretary, c/o CaPS, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide SA 5001

and

the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Adelaide Section)

at 7.00 pm on Tuesday 12th April 2011

in the Kerr Grant Lecture Theatre, Physics Building, University of Adelaide

On the 12th April 2011 it will be 50 years to the day since Yuri Gagarin climbed into his spaceship and was launched into space. It took him just 108 minutes to orbit the Earth, and he returned as the World's very first space man. To mark his historic flight, film maker Chris Riley of In the Shadow of the Moon fame has teamed up with the European Space Agency and the Expedition 26/27 crew of the International Space Station, to create a new film of what Gagarin first witnessed fifty years ago. By matching the orbital path of the Space Station, as closely as possible to that of Gagarin's Vostok 1 spaceship, and filming the same vistas of Earth through the new giant cupola window, astronaut Paolo Nespoli, and documentary film maker Christopher Riley, have captured a new digital high definition view of the Earth below, half a century after Gagarin first witnessed it. Weaving these views together with historic recordings of Gagarin from the time (subtitled in English) and an original score by composer Philip Sheppard, they have created a spellbinding film to share with people aroundf the world on this historic anniversary.

The Australian Institute of Physics and the Adelaide Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics invite you to a special screening of this historic movie - celebrating 50 years of manned space flight!

Following the screening Dr Ian Tuohy (Space Systems Manager), Professor Roger Clay (Astrophysicist), Dr Alice Gorman (Lecturer in Space Archaeology) and Dr Olivia Samardzic (Co-director Centre of Australian Space Education) will be present to answer your burning space science questions.

Contact: Scott Foster T: 7389 5979 Email: scott.foster@defence.gov.au

On being a space archaeologist: between science and the postmodern?

2011-03-30T16:31:00.001+10:30

My colleague Mick Morrison has posed an interesting question, as part of his hosting of the long-running blog carnival Four Stone Hearth this week. He asks: "What are the marginal issues or stories in anthropology that you think deserve more attention?"

I suspect my primary answer to this would surprise no-one at all. (But just to be clear about this, it would be the material culture and heritage of space industry and exploration).

Easy enough. But he also made me think about how I understand my position in the world of archaeology (or anthropology, in the North American sense, encompassing socio-cultural, bio-physical and linguistic anthropology as well as archaeology), as a researcher who is already on the margins, working in an area which many, quite frankly, consider to be mad. (Not that anyone has ever said that directly to me, of course!). In fact I am marginal in more than one discipline, as I also lurk in the corners of space science and policy.

This raises a problem about what to call myself. I usually use "space archaeologist", but this can be confusing for those not accustomed to seeing the two words together, or who think it's all about remote sensing. But I'm not strictly a space scientist either, and although "space historian" is more easily understood, and captures part of what I do, I'm not entirely comfortable with this. Recent discussions with Brett Holman of Airminded highlighted for me the distinctions between archaeology and history. As he characterised it, historians tend to work alone, and are very text-focused, rarely interested in the actual places or things which they may discuss. Archaeologists use documents and archives too, but we are more focused on places, landscapes and material culture, and we are used to working collaboratively, often as part of large multidisciplinary teams, or with stakeholders such as Traditional Owners. So "historian" could be misleading too, given that I have an intense interest in the stuff. Another recent suggestion has been "space heritage adviser", which I kind of like, as it has a relationship to policy. None of these seem to fit all that well, however, and each seem to constrain me in some way that I'd rather not be.

So, thinking about this, I am led to the conclusion that some kinds of multi-, trans- or inter- disciplinary studies are more marginal than others.

This is perhaps best illustrated by an experience I had in the early 1990s, when I was involved in convening an interdisciplinary seminar series at the University of Sydney. Naively, I assumed that my own contribution, an exploration of some obscure (at the time) mathematical models and their application to interpreting human behaviour in the archaeological record, counted as interdisciplinary, in the sense that the methods of two separate disciplines were involved. Not so. Interdisciplinarity, as evident in the topics presented in this series, actually meant postmodern, with a heavy emphasis on Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Spivak, etc. I couldn't actually see how this worked. (OK, Lacan does use topology, but as Alain Sokal has pointed out, very very badly indeed! See The gravity of archaeology for my own, no doubt inadequate, application of topology to archaeology). (And please, no-one tell Sokal). The others were clearly flummoxed by me putting equations up on the screen, and I understood that I wasn't playing the game correctly, not having mentioned Bataille or Deleuze even once; and clearly believing that I could find something out about the world .....

In some contexts, one of the most damning things a colleague can say about one's work is "That's not archaeology ......". Flirting with pure mathematics can be seen as taking the interdisciplinary enterprise just a step too far. Fortunately, the field of contemporary archaeology, where we use archaeological theory and method to turn a lens on our own behaviour and interaction with material culture (see Schofield and Harrison 2010), is gaining support, and I find myself quite at home in this area. Schofield and Harrison even like my excursion into topology! (Thanks, guys).

So, if I am in some sense marginal by being inter- or trans-disciplinary, what is the status of the questions I want to ask about the material culture and places associated with space exploration and industry? Actually, they are pretty straight-down-the-line archaeology and heritage. I want to know what we can learn from the places and objects of space; I want to know what is significant to contemporary communities and what are the most practical yet philosophically sound ways of preserving space places and objects for future generations; I want to know how this unique technology interacts with human behaviour and ideology. So, despite my occasional use of literature, poetry, film and mathematics, perhaps I am just a regular common-or-garden archaeologist after all.

I don't have a problem with that.

References

Gorman, A.C. 2009 The gravity of archaeology. Archaeologies: the Journal of the World Archaeological Congress. 5(2):344-359

Schofield, John and Rodney Harrison 2010 After modernity: archaeological approaches to the contemporary past. Oxford University Press

Sokal, Alain and Jean Bricmont 1998 Fashionable nonsense: postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science. Picador: New York

Yuri Gagarin's Australian story lost in space

2011-03-14T13:32:00.001+10:30

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight, Flinders University space archaeologist Dr Alice Gorman (pictured) reflects on the significance of that feat – with an Australian twist.

Photograph by Ashton Claridge

“Australians were fascinated by the idea of the first man in space, if media coverage around the 12 April 1961 mission is any indication, and they remain so,” Dr Gorman said. Her survey of newspaper accounts reveals the official reception of Gagarin’s achievement was tempered by Cold War hostilities.

“Leaders all over the world were congratulating the USSR but Prime Minister Menzies wouldn’t. He made no public statement,” she said. “Journalists turned to scientists for comment, particularly at Woomera which had been the first tracking station to acquire Sputnik 1 in orbit. They didn’t manage to track Gagarin’s flight, however, which led some to speculate whether it really happened.”

Dr Gorman said a comment by prominent Australian physicist and nuclear scientist Professor Harry Messel reflects the mood in some circles. “There was an element of doubt in his comment: ‘If what the Russians claim is true, then it is a triumph over the free world…Scientifically, I’m happy; but from a Cold War perspective, I’m sad’.”

Menzies’ silence may have led to Moscow’s lack of response when an invitation was issued for Yuri Gagarin to visit the 1961 Sydney Trade Fair, which featured life-size models of several Soviet spacecraft. Gagarin bypassed Australia in his world tour that year.

Australian journalist and Communist sympathiser, Wilfred Burchett weighs into this story, too. “Burchett, whose passport was lost or stolen, moved his family to Moscow in 1956. He and Anthony Purdy were the only Western journalists allowed to have a face-to-face interview with Gagarin.
“They subsequently wrote a book together, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: First Man in Space.”

Dr Gorman stumbled across a photograph of Wilfred Burchett’s father, George, presenting Gagarin with a boomerang in Moscow. The caption reads:
Mr George Burchett presenting Yuri Gagarin with a boomerang on behalf of Australian peace workers with the hope that he and his fellow compatriots in their journeying to the stars will, like the boomerang, always return to Earth safely and to a world at peace.

With human spaceflight programs increasingly under threat and technology able to accomplish many tasks remotely, Dr Gorman said it is easy to underestimate Gagarin’s feat. “Until Gagarin came down in one piece, we actually didn’t know if it was possible for a human to survive in space,” she said. “What is commonplace now was a mystery then. It was less than four years after the first satellite had been launched; can you imagine trusting your life to such untried technology! I think Gagarin demonstrated for the first time that we are all citizens of the cosmos; he was the first person to see the Earth from the outside.”

Story by Vince Ciccarello, Flinders University. Published 7th March 2011 at
http://blogs.flinders.edu.au/flinders-news/2011/03/07/yuri%E2%80%99s-australian-story-lost-in-space/

Consuming the Space Age: the cuisine of Sputnik

2011-01-18T00:54:00.007+10:30

Ever since my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis made a special batch of cup cakes decorated with spacecraft to help me celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sputnik 1’s launch in 2007, I’ve had a bit of a thing for rocket cakes. They are a staple of children’s birthday parties and represent youthful dreams of being an astronaut – the feeling that anything is possible, our potential is infinite, and we can reach for the stars.


Dr Lynley Wallis' special Sputnik cakes

The rocket cake is a charming example of the influence space exploration has had on terrestrial food. This influence, it seems to me, falls into roughly three categories:
•   Food decorated or shaped like spacecraft or celestial bodies.
•   Food devised to commemorate a space event
•   Food from terrestrial places associated with space exploration

In this post, I want to consider the first category, in the form of food that evokes the Sputnik 1 and 2 satellites. These recipes and dishes can be regarded as a sort of performance, half way between tangible and intangible heritage, as they exist only in the moment of their manufacture and disappear in the act of consumption.

The USSR’s successful launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 caught the USA by surprise; and the reactions of panic have been well documented. Suddenly, the night sky was transformed from a serene celestial dome to a place of menace, from which unseen attacks could be launched on the capitalist world. At the same time, there was tremendous excitement that the shackles of gravity had been broken at last and human dreams of space were about to be realised.

While the US military and government were grappling with the political implications of Sputnik 1, one of the ways in which ordinary people responded was to translate the body of the spacecraft into something familiar and edible. The humble olive, with the addition of three or four toothpicks to represent antenna, became a symbol of the satellite. This was an excellent garnish for a martini, sandwich or the quintessential American food, the hamburger.

The caption from this newspaper photograph reads: “Not to be outdone – Harriet Phydros samples a Sputnikburger which an Atlanta café rushed onto the menu. It’s garnished with Russian dressing and caviar, topped by satellite olive and cocktail hotdog”. The hot dog is a reference to Laika the dog, who went into orbit in Sputnik 2 later in 1957. Despite Laika’s sad demise, the visual word play is appealing; but the “not to be outdone” requires further unpacking. Does this imply that Harriet’s imminent consumption of the Sputnikburger will somehow restore the balance of power? Or that eating it is a small conquest of space in its own right? In any case, this potential weapon of mass destruction has become a commodity rather than a beacon of communist ideology. According to Lisa Parks, ‘mainstream American culture commodified and domesticated Sputnik, positioning it within the discourse of American nationalism rather then leaving it to circle the earth on its own accord” (Parks 1995:16).

The toothpick antenna appeared in other Sputnik foods. A photograph on the cover of a 1957 Life magazine showed a young woman about to tuck into a Sputnik sundae, surmounted by a ball of icecream studded with toothpicks. A popular hors d’oeuvre of the 1960s featured cubes of cheese, fruit and sausage threaded on toothpicks, then stuck into oranges or melons. Another version of the hamburger combined both concepts. The top image below, from a book on children’s parties, shows a Sputnik cheeseburger (and other delicious space-themed party food).

Image courtesy of Amy Alessio at Vintage Cookbooks

And of course there were the Sputnik cocktails. There are several versions of these floating around; this one seems to be the most common:

45 ml vodka
15 ml Fernet Branca (a bitter Italian digestive liqueur)
15 ml fresh lemon juice
1/2 tsp sugar

Shake all together and serve in a cocktail glass.

William E. Burrows, in his classic “This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age”, described the USA’s reaction to the launch of Sputnik 1 as “the Sputnik cocktail: vodka and sour grapes” (Burrows 1998:187). The culinary metaphor continued: at the time, some US politicians, including Eisenhower, blamed the Soviet lead on the hedonist consumer lifestyles of Americans. As Burrows frames it, they effectively called upon US citizens “to push away their banana splits, hot fudge sundaes, malteds, cherry-lime rickeys, barbequed steaks, and hot dogs” (Burrows 1998:191), and make sacrifices in order to regain the upper hand in the space race. Capitalist ideology had been dealt a significant blow.

Sputnik-inspired food, however, meant different things in different places. The journalist Fred Blumenthal, travelling though Asia following the launch, observed that

Sputnik just turned the East upside-down. As it did everywhere, I suppose it appealed to the imagination. In the Philippines, the restaurants, movie houses and taxicabs were renamed Sputnik. One restaurant even came up with a Sputnik sandwich, the feature of which was an olive with four protruding toothpick ‘antennae’. More important was the diplomatic loss of face suffered. In Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines, there was a loss of confidence in the United States and, under the surface, a sort of secret glee that [it] had been toppled from the high horse (quoted in Dickson 2001:132).

So here, the consumption of Sputnik was almost an act of resistance against US imperialist ambitions in that part of the world. We can see in these few examples that there was an ideological dimension to Cold War food, a literal internalisation of the values that Sputnik was felt to represent for its different audiences (not forgetting that Sputnik was also a sound ……).

The culinary legacy of the Cold War in space, however, lives on in the 21st century. Any dish which features long spikey things can be called a sputnik; I’ve seen potato sputniks, a scoop of mashed potato with carrot and cucumber sticks for antenna; and the famous exponent of French cooking, Anne Willan, created a baked Pineapple Sputnik with whole vanilla beans for antenna (Willan 2000). The kohlrabi (a type of turnip) is frequently called the sputnik vegetable, particularly as its leaves are angled just like the satellite’s antennas. I’m not a fan of anything turnippy; and I regret that I don’t like olives, as it’s hard not to appreciate the simple elegance of the olive sputnik. But I think my summer will now feature many Sputnik cocktails ……..

References
Burrows, William E. 1999 [1998] This new ocean. The story of the first space age. New York: Modern Library
Dickson, Paul 2001 Sputnik. The shock of the century. New York: Berkly Books
Parks, Lisa 1995 Technology in the twilight: a cultural history of the communications satellite 1955-58. Paper presented at the 1995 Society for the History of Technology Conference, Charlottseville, VA
Vintage Cookbooks http://vintagecookbooks.blogspot.com/2010/08/sputnik-cheeseburgers.html
Willan, Anne 2000 From My Château Kitchen. Clarkson Potter/Publishers

Food for Thinkers is a week-long, distributed, online conversation looking at food-writing from as wide and unusual a variety of perspectives as possible. Between January 18 and January 23, 2011, more than thirty food and non-food writers will respond to a question posed by GOOD's newly-launched Food hub: What does—or could, or even should—it mean to write about food today? You can check out the conversation in full at GOOD.is/food, join in the comments, and follow the Twitter hashtag #foodforthinkers to keep up-to-date as archaeologists, human rights activists, design critics, and even food writers share their perspective on what makes food so interesting.

Happy New Year from Dr Space Junk!

2011-01-02T11:49:00.001+10:30

Here is my annual New Year card, made as before from Facebook status updates.

The sky is falling: How Skylab became an Australian icon

2010-11-17T12:32:00.001+10:30

A couple of months back Ursula Frederick asked me if I'd be interested in contributing to a volume of the Journal of Australian Studies, guest edited by her and Kylie Message (both of ANU), on the theme of Media and Materiality. To cut a long story short, the theme is about how studies of material culture intersect with cultural studies. It's a teensy bit postmodern for me (sorry, Urs!), but Dr Space Junk is nothing if not versatile, or so I like to think.

Ursula thought I might like to write about Skylab, and she was right. I have quietly been filing away bits and pieces about it with the intention of doing something with them, so here is the spur. Despite this, coming up with a coherent abstract to fit the theme of the volume was harder than I thought. Here it is as sent to Ursula; as usual the actual paper will probably evolve a bit as I get into the research and writing of it.

The sky is falling: how Skylab became an Australian icon.
In 1979, the US orbital space station Skylab made a spectacular re-entry that was widely anticipated across the world. As it disintegrated, debris from the spacecraft fell around the town of Esperance in Western Australia and were scattered over the arid inland. Like the de-orbiting of Mir in 2001, Skylab’s re-entry caused a media frenzy.

Skylab is perhaps remembered more for this than for its actual mission, which was far less dramatic than the preceding Apollo program. It was not even the first space station, as the USSR’s first Salyut had been launched two years before Skylab in 1971. Skylab’s main purpose was to investigate physiological, social and practical aspects of how humans could survive in space. For the first time, thought was given to the comforts of astronauts and the spacecraft was designed to be a home.

This faraway house could only be seen by those who made the effort to look up when it was passing; like all orbital material, it was largely invisible, its presence felt only through media reports. In its reentry, however, the disembodied spacecraft became tangible, visible, and collectable, in the form of its scattered, and charred remains, in a way it had never been before. These pieces were collected, curated, displayed and marvelled over in small and large museums and in private collections. Anyone could own a piece of space if they were lucky; the debris was both space junk and precious artefact.

When the Shire of Esperance, tongue-in-cheek, fined the US Government for littering, Australia had made a statement about the relationship between spacefaring and non-spacefaring states, and the nature of space industry: being in space did not remove more terrestrial responsibilities. Through these local and personal interventions after its decay, the social significance of this house in the sky came to outweigh its historic significance. In this paper I consider how the parts of Sklylab became more than the sum of its whole.

Thoughts, leads, information, all welcome!

Doing orbital archaeology from space

2010-11-12T09:06:00.001+10:30

I know I wrote a while ago that I was over remote sensing, but looking at a wonderful picture by CNES this morning of the Tango satellite as seen from the Mango satellite (if I remember the details correctly) I think I may have been too hasty. It would be possible to do an archaeological survey of orbital space remotely from another spacecraft in orbit. Or many spacecraft in orbit. Sampling would be critical to get across, as the distances are just so vast, but that's a minor problem, I think.

Terrestrial tracking could be recast as a kind of archaeological survey - they're just not aware that that is what they're doing yet! Anyway this is more of a note to myself to remind me to come back to this idea. I have ten minutes before I leave for work, and this morning's task of delivering a masterclass to the graduates on conference networking. This afternoon the graduates are doing presentations on their industry work placements, there will be drinks, and if I don't imprison this thought in words now I might forget it in the awful rush of end-of-semester stuff.

Wouldn't some wealthy aerospace company like to give me job researching this kind of thing? It would make me so happy.

OK. Going to catch the bus now, in the rain.

Space food: recreating an authentic space experience on Earth. A review of The Astronaut's Cookbook.

2010-11-09T15:16:00.003+10:30

I've had an ongoing interest in Space Food Sticks, which have quietly vanished from Australian supermarket shelves in the last few years, despite the fact that they seemed to have a healthy export market in the US. So when I learnt of Springer's recently launched The Astronaut's Cookbook: Tales, Recipes, and More, by Charles T. Bourland and Gregory L. Vogt, I was curious to see what it might have to say about them.

The space food stick was created by Pillsbury in a form that could be inserted into a helmet port - but of course that was never going to work with the pressure differential. Despite this, the originally caramel-flavoured sticks were part of the Apollo menu. Bourland and Vogt imply that sales of the Pillsbury space food stick were disappointing and the product never took off, so to speak (Bourland and Vogt 2010:32).

This is interesting as they certainly took off in Australia! They were manufactured by White Wings, a company owned by Uncle Ben's (I think). I remember them as being chocolate, not caramel, although there was a caramel version available. In later years the box featured a picture of a BMX bike rather than a spacecraft. Perhaps there was a subtle safety message in this: "astronauts wear helmets, so it's cool to wear a bike helmet". Assuming that the callow youth thought astronauts were cool, of course.

When I held a symposium about the history and heritage of Woomera a few years ago, I bought many boxes and put an individually wrapped stick in each delegate's bag of symposium stuff. A year or so later, I wanted to buy some to take to the Centre Spatial Guyanais, and was unable to find them anywhere. (Perhaps, in retrospect, the intended recipients in French Guiana may have reason to be grateful for that).


USA peanut butter flavoured space food stick box. Image courtesy of Mojowski 77


Australian chocolate space food sticks. Author's image.

While Bourland and Vogt don't have much more to say about space food sticks, they do offer a recipe for Bacon Bars (2010:35):

Bacon Bars

1 lb cooked bacon

1. Fry the bacon until golden brown
2. Place the warm bacon into a hamburger press
3. Exert 3000 lbs of pressure for 10 seconds
4. Remove the compressed bacon and let cool.
Yield: more than you would want.
After samping the bar - so that you can say that you tried it - give the rest to the family dog. One nibble, and Fido will prance around the house barking [Translation: "It's BACON!").

While I don't own a hamburger press, or have a dog, I confess I am very tempted to try making some version of this. Hell - it's BACON!

I was also amused by this recipe:

Breakfast cereal

1 cup of your favourite cold cereal*
1/3 cup of powdered milk
2 tsp of sugar or 1 packet artificial sweetener
1/2 cup cold water
1 resealable plastic sandwich bag
*Frosted cereals stay crisper longer than unfrosted cereals.

1. Put all the ingredients in the bag.
2. When ready to eat, add water and reseal the bag.
3. Shake the bag to dissolve the milk and sugar.
4. Open the bag and eat immediately with a spoon.
5. Write a note to yourself to never do that again unless you become an astronaut.
Yield: 1 serving.

I think this recipe may reflect the US palate, much sweeter than the Australian, as I can't imagine any adult would actually add sugar to an already frosted cereal, let alone 2 teaspoons. But perhaps things have to be sweeter in space. (Hmmm. This might not be too bad with Froot Loops ......). If you want to try this one, I think the first step should read "Put all the ingredients in the bag EXCEPT the water". There is an art to writing recipes that is often overlooked. Or perhaps I mean a logic.

So you can see this is a very quirky and entertaining book, and may even have some recipes worth trying at home in it, as well as the historical and scientific background to space cuisine. (They include Russian space food as well). I like the idea that we can be space tourists at home by recreating space experiences, in the same way that space food attempts to replicate the tastes and experience of being at home on Earth. The snippets offered here are from the promotional download, available at the Springer website:
http://www.springer.com/astronomy/extraterrestrial+physics,+space+sciences/book/978-1-4419-0623-6

I don't yet have my own copy. And Christmas is not far away ...........

Voyage to Venus: an archaeological survey of the Venusian surface

2010-11-06T22:48:00.003+10:30

Introductory note
This was written as part of a book chapter, but as it developed Venus became increasingly irrelevant, so I took it out. I've been meaning to do something with it ever since. Posting it here might remind me!

Our tropical twin sister
Although Venus is a close neighbour, and had been the subject of speculation and study since ancient times, very little was known about it in the late 1950s due to the impenetrable cloud layers above the surface (Burgess 1985:8-9). Exploring Venus would be a scientific first as it was considered to be critical in understanding the evolution of the Earth (Dorfman and Meredith 1980:773). Our “twin sister” (Marchal 1983:269) had similar mass, gravity and volume. Before the first missions, Venus also held the promise of life ….

Speculations ranged from a warm, swampy world that resembled Palaeozoic Earth, dry dusty mountains, oceans of carbonic acid, a surface covered in hot oil or puddles of molten metals (Burgess 1985:13, 131). C. S. Lewis (1943) created a lyrical sensorium of fragrant floating islands, a new Eden; Isaac Asimov (1954) imagined telepathic frogs swimming Venus’ warm oceans. But when the first missions returned data, the dream of Venusian life was dashed.

Sapphires, diamonds and Daleks
The earliest missions were flybys. Venera 1 (USSR), launched 1961, failed to return data and entered a heliocentric orbit. In 1962, the US Mariner 2 flyby of Venus discovered that the surface temperature was likely around 430° C (Burgess 1985:2). Venera 2, launched in 1965, also failed.

Venera 3 was a landing mission: the spacecraft crashed on the surface but also did not return data (Burgess 1985:22; Figure 1). Venera 4, which reached Venus in 1967, was the largest interplanetary spacecraft yet launched at 1100 kg (Burgess 1985:22). It had a more sophisticated heat shield, developed from experience with re-entry studies on ICBM warheads (Burgess 1985:38). Venera 5 and 6 (1969; Figure 5) were even heavier, and designed to resist up to 27 atmospheres (atm): but it seemed that the Soviet designers were reluctant to accept the estimation of a surface pressure of around 100 atm. Both spacecraft were crushed before they reached the ground (Burgess 1985:40).

Venera 7, in 1970, was the first to land intact and return data from the surface (Basilevsky et al 2007:2097). This time the landing capsule was designed to resist 180 atm, had stronger insulation and a titanium pressure sphere core (Pauken et al 2006:2). Finally, the surface temperature and pressure were confirmed, and Venera 8, launched 1972, was designed to withstand only 105 atm (Burgess 1985:43).

Veneras 9 and 10, in 1975, were redesigned with a circular ring shock absorber. They returned the first pictures of the surface. In these extraordinary images, we see a field of flat rocks, with curve of the shock absorber visible on the lower edge. The perspective, as if a person is looking down on their feet, gives the photographs a personal feeling. The Veneras, in appearance, are not unlike the cyborg Daleks: they almost seem as if they could start moving of their own volition, uttering some staccato imperative (Figure 2). The images give a sense of the spacecraft orphaned on a strange planet.

Figure 1: Venera 3 spacecraft. Image courtesy of NASA

Figure 2: Venera 9 spacecraft. Image courtesy of NASA

In 1978, both the US and USSR sent missions to Venus. Veneras 11 and 12 weighed in at 5000 kg each (Burgess 1985:48).

Figure 3: Landing sites on Venus. Image courtesy of Philip Stooke

Pioneer Venus has been the only US program to place material on the surface of Venus. Arriving at Venus in 1978, a bus delivered one large (called Large), and three small probes to the surface: the engagingly named North, Day and Night for their proposed destinations. The large probe was 1.5 m in diameter; the three small ones were 0.8 m. Each had a payload of scientific instruments.

The spacecraft were designed and developed by the Hughes Aircraft Company. The large probe was a pressure vessel module 73 cm in diameter and a deceleration module weighing 317 kg. The heat shield was carbon phenolic with aluminium and fibreglass fittings. The pressure module containing the instrumentation was a titanium shell with ports and four sapphire and one diamond window for the instruments. Internal shelves were made of beryllium (Dorfman and Meredith 1980). The small probes were also titanium pressure modules with carbon phenolic heat shields, internal beryllium shelves and two diamond windows each. The Large probe jettisoned its heat shield on the way down to the surface; the small probes retained theirs (Burgess 1985:82).

The last human artefacts to land on Venus were the Vega 1 and Vega 2 probes, released by rockets on their way to a rendezvous with Halley’s Comet. They were essentially developments on the basic Venera lander type. Launched in 1984, both Vegas successfully landed on Venus in 1985 and returned data. All subsequent missions have been flybys or orbiters. Table 1 shows the all the Venus missions which have left material on the surface of Venus.

Date    Nationality    Mission    Components on surface
1965    USSR    Venera 3    Hard lander
1967    USSR    Venera 4    Hard lander
1969    USSR    Venera 5    Hard lander
1969    USSR    Venera 6    Hard lander
1970    USSR    Venera 7    Soft lander
1972    USSR    Venera 8    Soft lander
1975    USSR    Venera 9    Soft lander
1975    USSR    Venera 10    Soft lander
1978    USA    Pioneer Venus    4 probes
1978    USSR    Venera 11    Soft lander
1978    USSR    Venera 12    Soft lander
1981    USSR    Venera 13    Soft lander
1981    USSR    Venera 14    Soft lander
1984    USSR    Vega 1    Soft lander
1984    USSR    Vega 2    Soft lander

Table 1: Missions with surface components on Venus

Archaeological sites of the future
The data returned by the Venera, Pioneer Venus and other missions revealed a fierce environment with the most corrosive upper atmosphere in the solar system: Venus’ yellow clouds are concentrated sulphuric acid (Reddy and Walz-Chojnacki 2002:36-37). On the surface, pressure from the predominantly CO2 atmosphere is 90 times that on Earth; Veneras 3-6 were crushed as they descended through the atmosphere. The surface temperature is 430° C (740 K), above the melting points of lead, tin and zinc. In such conditions, is it possible that the landers and probes have survived?

There is no evidence of plate tectonics and only “modest” evidence of geological activity on Venus (Jones 2007:169). Erosion processes are slow, as there is no water, and surface winds move at human walking pace (Saunders 1999:100, 108, Jones 2007:343). While the winds can move sand and dust, “the slow speed makes the particles ineffective as cutting tools and agents of erosion (Saunders 1999:108), so much so that craters a few million years in age appear fresh (Jones 2007: 275, Saunders 1999:100). There is also little danger from the upper atmosphere. The cloud layers start at around 45 km from the surface. Droplets of sulphuric acid do leak downwards, but evaporate as the temperature rises towards the surface – they do not survive below about 25 km (Jones 2007:342). Being on the surface would be like immersion in a hot dry ocean with slow currents of air (Burgess 1985:132). There is no reason why archaeologists of the future should not find the Veneras, the Vegas, and the Large, North, Day and Night probes exactly where they landed, the diamond and sapphire eyes gazing sightlessly at the dull brown terrain (Figure 3).

The Venera and Vega spacecraft can be seen as representing the Cold War battle to imprint space with ideology (Gorman and O’Leary 2007). Burgess even conceptualised the Veneras as “Red flags on Venus”, and each Venera mission carried Soviet emblems to commemorate the landing (Burgess 1985:35-36). But they are much more than that.

The spacecraft also represent an evolution and adaptation to increasingly more accurate information about the nature of the “errant twin”: each set of returned data enabled the design of spacecraft more suited to surviving Venusian conditions. Like the early Cold War launch sites, and the cloud of orbital debris surrounding the Earth, they have made Venus a cultural landscape where the interaction of the environment and human material culture have formed a new entity.

References
Asimov, Isaac 1954 Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus. Doubleday and Company
Basilevsky, A.T., M.A. Ivanov, J.W. Head, M. Aittola and J. Raitala 2007 Landing on Venus: past and future. Planetary and Space Sciences 55:2097-2112
Burgess, Eric 1985 Venus: an errant twin. Columbia University Press, New York
Dorfman, Steven D. and Clarence M. Meredith 1980 The Pioneer Venus Spacecraft Program. Acta Astronautica 7:773-795
Gorman, A.C. and Beth Laura O’Leary 2007 An ideological vacuum: the Cold War in space. In John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft (eds) A fearsome heritage: diverse legacies of the Cold War. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California
Jones, Barrie W. 2007 Discovering the solar system. Second Edition, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, Chichester UK
Lewis, C.S. 1943 Perelandra. John Lane, London
Marchal, C. 1983 The Venus-New-World Project. Acta Astronautica 10(5-6):269-275
Pauken, Michael, Kolawa, Elizabeth, Manvi, Ram, Sokolowski, Witold and Joseph Lewis 2006 Pressure vessel technology developments. 4th International Planetary Probe Workshop, 27 June – 30 June 2006, Pasadena, California. Available at ppw.jpl.nasa.gov/20070607_doc/6_2PAUKE.pdf. Viewed 15 September 2008
Reddy, Francis and Greg Walz-Chojnacki 2002 Celestial delights: the best astronomical events through 2010. Celestial Arts
Saunders, R. Stephen 1999 Venus. In J. Kelly Beatty, Carolyn Collins Peterson and Andrew Chaikin (eds). The New Solar System. Fourth Editions, Sky Publishing Corporation and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge pp 97-110

Mormon space sites - fundamentalism and high technology

2010-10-31T14:37:00.006+10:30

I've long been fascinated by Mormons. It's not that they're necessarily weirder than any other Christian sects or denominations, but they are relatively recent, and New World, and their origins have been played out in the full glare of media such as newspapers and telegraphs (not something your other major prophets have had to deal with). There is also a rich tradition of Mormon archaeology (by serious archaeologists like Mark Leone [for example, 1973, 1977, 1979], not just people trying to prove the Book of Mormon, although they exist too).

But the fundamental polygamist sects are freaky (for a whole range of reasons that are not relevant here). The reason I am contemplating this at all is because on a recent train journey I took Jon Krakauer's fine book Under the Banner of Heaven, an analysis of fundamental polygamist Mormon sects and the nature of belief, to read on the way. Would you be surprised to learn that there was a space connection? And as I read those pages with excitement, little pieces of paper fell out of the book, indicating that I had bookmarked them on an earlier reading. This is why:

At the moment, DeLoy is driving his thirdhand Chevy van on a dirt road on the outskirts of town. One of his two wives and eight of his seventeen children are riding in the back. Suddenly he hits the brakes, and the van lurches to a stop on the shoulder. "Now there's an interesting sight", DeLoy declares, sizing up the wreckage of a television satellite dish behind some sagebrush off the side of the road. "Looks like someone had to get rid of their television. Hauled it out of town and dumped it".

Members of the religion, he explains, are forbidden to watch television or read magazines or newspapers. The temptations of the outside world loom large, however, and some members of the faith inevitably succumb. "As soon as you ban something", DeLoy observes, "you make it incredibly attractive. People will sneak into St George or Cedar City and buy themselves the dish, put it up where it can't easily be seen, and secretly watch TV during every free moment. Then one Sunday Uncle Rulon will give one of his sermons about the evils of television. He'll announce he knows exactly who has one, and warn that everyone who does is putting their eternal souls in serious jeopardy.

Every time he does that, a bunch of satellite dishes immediately get dumped in the desert, like this one here. For two or three years afterward there won't be any televisions in town, but then, gradually, the dishes start secretly going up again, until the next crackdown. People try to do the right thing, but they're only human". (Krakauer 2003:11)

What interests me about this is firstly the satellite dishes, which I have argued (Gorman 2009) are as much space archaeology as anything else, and second of all the domination/resistance theme. So we have accumulations of satellite dishes out in the desert, deposited periodically, representing the impact of telecommunications technology. They are archaeological sites of the space age on Earth. With a turnover of three years or so, this landscape would make a nice study in change in satellite design .....

Domination and resistance have been studied extensively by historical archaeologists, in terms of the ways that people find to assert their identities using material culture and space in controlled situations such as plantations, prisons, asylums, utopias etc. In this case, the discarded satellite dish observed by DeLoy Bateman and Jon Krakauer is visible from the road out of town - on the outskirts - so despite the secrecy involved in accessing satellite television in Colorado City, its disposal is barely concealed. That in itself speaks volumes about the efficacy of, and responses to, strict control of behaviour in the fundamental communities of the city.

And all this makes me think of similar social pressures in places like Woomera - of a very different kind, such as keeping out the contagion of communism, and of course a completely different relationship to technology - but both are desert enclaves where information must be tightly controlled. Apparently the desert outside the township of Woomera bears the evidence of social activities unacceptable in the family atmosphere of the town.

This isn't quite where I thought I was going when I started writing this, but now I'm here, I don't mind it. Perhaps I shall have to explore this similarity a little further. Permeable boundaries of technology and the role of space material culture in mediating identity? Something like that.

References
Gorman, A.C. 2009 Beyond the Space Race: the significance of space sites in a new global context. In Angela Piccini and Cornelius Holthorf (eds) Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now. pp 161 - 180 Bern: Peter Lang
Krakauer, Jon 2003 Under the banner of heaven. A story of violent faith. London: Doubleday
Leone, Mark P. 1977 The New Mormon Temple in Washington, D. C. In Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things. Historical Archaeology. Special Publication Series 2:43-61.
Leone, Mark P. 1973 Archaeology as the Science of Technology: Mormon Town Plans and Fences. In Charles L. Redman (ed) Research and Theory in Current Archaeology, pp 125–150. John Wiley and Sons.

Leone, Mark P. 1979 Roots of Modern Mormonism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press

A space debris-tracking satellite

2010-10-27T08:47:00.001+10:30

WASHINGTON — NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is gathering information for the possible development of a demonstration satellite to track pieces of orbital debris that are too small to be seen by current systems but still pose a threat to operating spacecraft. Spurred by the new U.S. National Space Policy that emphasizes tracking and mitigating orbital debris, Huntsville, Ala.-based Marshall may partner with industry and academia to field a low Earth orbiting satellite as soon as 2014, said Bruce Wiegmann, an engineer in Marshall’s Advanced Concepts Office (full story at http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101022-marshall-ponders-debris-tracking-demo.html)

This is an interesting concept, as, in my opinion, there isn't enough of this going on at the moment. Debris in GEO is not as well modeled as lower orbits because of the difficulties of tracking stuff that far away; but there are only a few satellites being used to obtain data on GEO (at least as I understand the situation).

This demo satellite is aimed at tracking debris from 1-10 cm in diameter, what's known as the medium-sized class. The stuff above 10 cm is well tracked from Earth. The problem with the medium debris size class is that collision with a piece can cause a lot of damage to a functioning spacecraft, and even mission failure. And there's far more of it than the big stuff, so collision is far more likely.

I will have to keep an eye on this development to see if there are implications for space heritage.

Vostok space beer: from prehistory to space tourism. An interview with Dr Jason Held.

2010-10-18T21:34:00.004+10:30

You might wonder why Dr Space Junk is interested in space beer? (A. She's an archaeologist. Beer comes with the territory). But seriously, what has beer got to do with space archaeology?

My interest in this was piqued for a number of reasons. Firstly, nationalist symbols, and the achievement and claiming of "firsts" has been a major feature of space exploration from the start. Australia did quite well in this sphere once, being the fourth nation to launch a satellite (WRESAT 1). Since then our space industry has languished, although we may be heading for a renaissance, fingers crossed! Producing the first space beer reflects the national obsession with this beverage, and so has some symbolic overtones, I believe. Secondly, as you will see, Held contextualises the beer in a trajectory of social culture that I think is quite interesting as I am thinking along the same lines myself.

I think it also raises questions about the future complexion of existence in space. What kinds of artefacts will distinguish the era of space tourism from the era of exploration? I am reminded of a site I saw at Maralinga in outback South Australia, where legendary surveyor Len Beadell and his team left behind a scatter of beer cans (as they were in those days) with tins of spam and tobacco as evidence of their survey in the desert. I don't think we are going to see beer bottles littering orbital space, as they won't be in glass, which is too heavy for a start. (Damn! I forgot to ask Jason how it would be packaged). But I wonder how the material culture will differ, and how the terrestrial acoutrements of tourism will be transformed in the space context.

Anyway, here is Jason to tell the story.

DrSJ: Where did the inspiration for the project to develop a space beer come from?

JH: Several of us are avid homebrewers at Saber Astronautics, both in the US and in Australia, so this is also a chance for us to combine two arenas we love very much. But the original idea for space beer came out of an internal discussion on space logistics needs for tourism. Tourism by its nature is geared towards commerce and entertainment, rather than exploration, so the demands emerge from the people who go up, rather than decided top-down by a government body.

For the beer itself, the usual approach was to study brewing in space, with the goal of bringing beer down to Earth, but logistically this isn't cost effective. At least, not if you wish to be mass market. It makes more sense to brew on Earth, and send the beer up, as the largest market is here. Since there are physical issues with drinking beer in space (carbonation, flavor, etc), we realized that there was an opportunity not just to support the space tourism industry, but fellow beer lovers as well. Consider the history of the India Pale Ale, the thought of making the world's first space beer is really exciting for us-- it's a real contribution to making people happy for a long long time.

DrSJ: Cosmonauts are already known to have consumed vodka in space. Why do you think future space tourists will demand beer? Is this worth pursuing, given the difficulties in dealing with carbonation and taste?

JH: Vodka certainly makes sense as a space alcohol-- with a few tweaks it's usable as a rocket fuel, so there's some fun thought experiments there. But at the end of the day, people on Earth love beer, therefore people in space will also want beer. Also we felt that beer is a bit safer, less flammable, less toxic to the astronauts/cosmonauts/tourists who simply may wish for a bit of taste of home.

DrSJ: You were quoted as saying "Wherever humanity goes, beer is sure to follow". Did you do much research into the history of beer as part of this project, and if so, what was the most relevant fact you discovered? Are there past methods of beer manufacture that can inform this project?

JH: We did run into academic debates over the effects that alcohol has had on human society. Some argue that beer is one of the key causes of human society, but I feel it's more of a correlation. There's some evidence that we've evolved with beer as well, especially considering the genetic differences between people in metabolizing alcohol.

Initially we took inspiration from the history of the India Pale Ale, but the quote comes from a personal desire to try beer recipes from ancient Egyptian and Sumerian cultures. Unfortunately, my homebrewing skills aren't quite up to snuff there, but I'm hoping to convince our friends at the 4-Pines to give it a go.

The 4-Pines Brewing Company follows German purity laws, and that's as far back in history as we're willing to go with the actual manufacturing. Old brewers had very different problems to solve than we do-- astronauts can take vitamin supplements instead of drinking beer to help stave off scurvy. Beer might be good to help morale in long duration trips (i.e., Mars). But for the recipe we're really looking at a unique class of problems which have no historical baseline.

DrSJ: The new beer is called Vostok. Why choose a Russian name for an Australian beer? Were there other names that you considered?

JH: This was in honor of Yuri Gagarin as the first person in space onboard the Vostok 1. It's a name everyone in humanity should know.

DrSJ: What are the possible physiological risks of consuming beer in space, as opposed to other alcoholic drinks?

JH: Aside from issues of carbonation, I doubt there's much difference. Formal studies in alcohol absorption in microgravity and other possible effects have not been done. There are known issues of cabin pressure effects on alcohol absorption which we account for in the study. There also may be interaction effects between medications and alcohol. Part of the point of this study is to learn as much as we can before people start flying to space in larger numbers in 2012.

One difference might be in long duration storage. Since beer contains live organisms ("yeast samples in solution"), there may be changes in shelf life in microgravity.

DrSJ: You've already done some tests on the beer in the Queensland University of Technology drop tower, which creates microgravity for a few seconds. What were the results? Would you have been able to initiate the project without the drop tower, which was only completed recently?

JH: I'll be able to answer more about the QUT Drop Tower in a week or two.

DrSJ: In the recent media coverage, was there anything omitted that you would like to talk about now?

JH: We often think of astronauts/cosmonauts as being examples of human perfection, and are quick to judge at the suggestion of them having a tipple. After all - think of what these fine people had to do just to get in to a space program in the first place... They are subjected to harsh conditions and workloads and still must meet the expectations we place on them. What we have to realize is that they are at a base level very human, and having a beer is very much a part of that.

And here's the point - NASA is right to be conservative, since alcohol can be abused, and the body's limits in space are not known. So this research is not just to make a beer to enjoy, but also to learn how people's drinking limits change in microgravity. Knowing these limits is the only responsible way to allow explorers to drink under any condition. Because if anyone deserves a good beer, it's them.

DrSJ: When you have mastered the principles of gaseous drinks in space, is there any chance you will move on to champagne?
JH: Champagne is a tough one because everybody wants those big, distinctive bubbles. Beer has a bit more "wiggle-room" on the recipe.

You don't have to be a space tourist; Vostok beer (it's a stout) is already available on Earth (see http://vostokspacebeer.com/). Many thanks to Jason for his insightful answers!

Links:
http://www.saberastro.com/home/index.html
http://www.4pinesbeer.com.au/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_Pale_Ale

Dr Space Junk's Heritage Tour of the Solar System

2010-10-18T13:02:00.001+10:30

A lovely poster for my recent seminar, created by the talented Lisa Bennett (Flinders University).

Australia contributes beer to international space culture

2010-10-02T16:09:00.003+09:30

Australia doesn't even have a space program but a partnership between space engineers and a Sydney brewery aims to make damn sure we won't be beaten to the first space-certified beer (Moses 2010).

Now it's not quite true that we don't have a space programme - we had a ripper one some time ago, and with the new Space Policy Unit, and funding for space research in Australia, we might be able to do something in this line again. Still, point taken. Now for the beer.

I have heard, and I believe there are some studies which show this, that altitude affects the sense of taste. This is why airline food is always so uniformly awful. A problem, you might imagine, exacerbated a thousandfold in space. Fine for astronauts who are trained for space conditions, but not so much for your affluent space tourist expecting a bit of luxury. Or even something a bit normal.

So Saber Astronautics Australia and the Manly-based 4 Pines Brewing Company have formed a joint venture, Vostok, to develop a microgravity beer.

"Humanity has had beer longer than we've had writing so, wherever humanity goes, beer is going to follow," Saber director Jason Held said. "So if we're to go into space we need to understand how the human body responds to alcohol. It's very difficult to drink beer in zero gravity because you have a reduced sense of flavour and anything carbonated is going to have a hard time because gases respond differently in space than they do on Earth." (Quoted in Moses 2010)

He's right about the antiquity of beer. It's not really my area, but I do know that beer was consumed like water by the ancient Egyptians, and also by the Tudors. This was extremely weak beer, and there are some arguments that it prevented people from catching diseases from contaminated water. However, apart from the ostensible goal of producing a microgravity beer which tastes nice, there may be many other spinoffs in terms of understanding physiology and food in space that could be quite interesting. If only they weren't starting with a stout - not my favourite at the best of times.

References
Moses, Asher 2010 Beam me up Shhhcotty ..... the Aussie space beer with zero gravity. Sydney Morning Herald October 1 http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/beam-me-up-shhhcotty--the-aussie-space-beer-with-zero-gravity-20101001-15zzh.html. Viewed October 1 2010

Interpreting space technology: Honeysuckle Creek

2010-09-26T12:30:00.001+09:30

Going through some of my photographs to help a friend who is putting together a book about field archaeology. He is very interested in sunny Australian pics as opposed to grey rainy European ones! Came across this one, taken at the former Honeysuckle Creek NASA Tracking Station in the ACT. This stela is located where one of the footings of the 26m antenna would once have been.

People are critical of the design and the way the interpretation has been done, but I rather like the contrast of the rusting iron, remniniscent of the decaying site and perhaps the decay of Australia as a space player, and the bright blue. I like the retro font too.

Extra-terrestrial mining: issues in environmental and heritage management

2010-09-25T10:38:00.001+09:30

Today I am trawling through data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, to get a handle on the state of the mining industry in Australia. This is for a couple of reasons: firstly, many of our graduates from the Department of Archaeology at Flinders University will end up working in heritage management for the resource extraction industry; and I have been having some interesting conversations recently with Dr John Kinahan, an archaeologist and heritage consultant from Namibia, about common experiences working with mining companies in our respective countries. We are thinking of writing something about it.

I was thinking to myself, as I looked at the trends in OPBT (Operating Profit Before Tax, as I now know) that there is not much space relevance in my task for this morning.

But wait! Not so, I have realised. One of the big space industries on the horizon, predicted for many many decades, is mining. The Moon, asteroids, probably other celestial bodies too. One supposes that extra-terrestrial mining will work in much the same way as it does on Earth: exploration, pre-feasibility studies, feasilibity studies, planning, construction, operation, decommissioning and rehabilitation.

There will of course be environmental issues, particularly with rehabilitation. How exactly do you rehabilitate a lifeless site? There is no vegetation to grow back, or animal communities to reestablish. Will extra-terrestrial mining companies pay for rehabilitation at all? How will environmental groups and those concerned with the ethics of our exploitation of space approach this issue? Do we even want to erase the evidence of our activities? Perhaps it is better to make it obvious that a mining site is not natural. All this depends on what we think the values of space environments are, and as I have often opined in various writings, space industry barely conceives of space as an environment to begin with, so it's a bit of a leap to get them to think about its values.

Heritage issues may come in if mining operations of whatever kind take place on or near historic landing sites. There may also be things to think about in the heritage values of the mining infrastructure - heritage as it happens, in the now. We have to consider the human values of the use of space too.

Now that I think of these things I am intrigued by the possibilities. How would one write an EMP or a CHMP for an extraterrestrial mining site? How would they be similar or different to terrestrial mining sites? Will the Outer Space Treaty be of any relevance? (Actually there is some interesting literature on how the OST might work in the context of national resource extraction industries).

Well, I'd better focus on terrestrial mining for the moment, it would be too easy to get distracted at this point when I have other things to do! I'll make another coffee, I think, before I get back to the stats.

Dr Space Junk is now on Twitter

2010-09-20T09:12:00.001+09:30

Certain friends in the blogosphere have been urging this for some time, but it was the revelation from aeronaut Dr Brett Holman that drspacejunk was not yet taken that precipitated the establishment of a Twitter account late last night after my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis had plied me with Moscato.

I don't really know what I'm doing though ..... I'm following a number of space agencies, wondering where I draw the line between personal/professional (I love Lady Gaga, but does Dr Space Junk?). I'm guessing that the smart thing is to link blog/facebook/twitter/academia.edu/linkedin (lordy! How many of these things can one person do?), but maybe it's not the smart thing. So advice is appreciated.

Dismantling space infrastructure: thoughts on the shuttle launch pad.

2010-09-03T11:49:00.002+09:30

It's the fate of industrial heritage: when no longer useful, it is dismantled, demolished, sold off for scrap. This is what happened at Woomera after the end of ELDO and Apollo, and it's about to take place at the US Space Shuttle launch pad, 39B, at the Kennedy Space Centre. The launch pad is quite historic. It was first used by the Saturn V for the Apollo 10 mission, which was essentially a test run for Apollo 11. Crews for Skylab were launched from it, as well as for Apollo-Soyuz.

Service towers will shortly be demolished, as they are custom made to fit the shuttle, and can't be reused for a newer vehicle. Rather than a controlled implosion, which has been the method used in the past, the towers will be dismantled section by section and the metal recycled. This approach protects the concrete foundations which can then be reused.

Jose Perez-Morales is the launch pad project manager. He feels quite odd about what is about to take place:
"I'm an engineer and my job is to build things. You feel a little bit funny when you're demolishing things because that's not your nature. As an engineer, you're trained to build and make sure things last forever. It's kind of mixed feelings that you're tearing down something that took so much effort to put together." (Spaceflight Now, http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1009/01pad39b/)

As well as the service towers, electronics and cables have to be removed and upgraded if the launch pad is to be refurbished and reused. Approximately 246 miles (sorry, can't be bothered to convert this at the moment!) will have to be taken out. As you know, I have been taking a much greater interest in cables since working at the Orroral Valley Tracking Station, so I would like to find out more about this. In equipment rooms beneath the launch pad surface, Apollo and Shuttle-era electronics are also being removed.

Are they documenting all of this from a heritage perspective, I wonder? Will they keep samples of these materials?

At the Department of Archaeology seminar yesterday, we had three excavation reports, one on the excavation of an old water works in Adelaide. The plans had been located, but the actual structures and their arrangement differed significantly from the plans, as the archaeological survey and excavation revealed. This reminded me once again that the historical documentary record is insufficient to capture everything we might want to know about places, technology, and society in the past, and even the recent past.

Launcher 39B (image courtesy of NASA/Troy Cryder)

Remote sensing and space age archaeology

2010-08-29T22:25:00.002+09:30

"Space age archaeology" is a term you often see applied to the technique of using satellite imagery to detect landscape patterns, and built environments, that are not apparent from aerial images or on the ground. All fine stuff.

But it's not what I do. Space people, and indeed many other people, leap to the assumption that space archaeology means the use of remote sensing in terrestrial archaeology, or the study of re-entered material (ie bits of spacecraft that survive reentry to fall to the surface of the earth). The idea that the material culture of space, both in space and on Earth, is worthy of research, often takes some time to make sense to those who have not come across it before.

And that's OK. It's just that I am totally over remote sensing.

A manifesto for space archaeology and its Dada precedents

2010-08-21T09:26:00.003+09:30

I have been planning to write a manifesto for a while, but manifestos require more sustained thought that can be mustered in the overworked brain of a university lecturer. Perhaps on my sabbatical next year.

In the meantime, I have been contemplating the appropriate pithy quote with which to open such a work. (These things are important). I feel it ought to come from another manifesto. Manifestos are often not a ripping read, by their very nature, but there are exceptions. My all-time favourite would have to be Tristan Tzara's Dada manifestos. As far as I'm concerned, Dada was over far too soon.

So, reading through Tzara's Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, I came across many that might do. I offer a few here to see what you think.

To launch a manifesto you have to want: A.B. & C., and fulminate against 1, 2, & 3,

work yourself up and sharpen your wings to conquer and circulate lower and upper case As, Bs & Cs, sign, shout, swear, organise prose into a form that is absolutely and irrefutably obvious, prove its ne plus ultra .......

(I like that about manifestos too, that they have to be launched - just like a rocket, ha! - and then you wait for action and reaction, because manifestos are meant to upset people ..... )

I always speak about myself because I don't want to convince, and I have no right to drag others in my wake, I'm not compelling anyone to follow me, because everyone makes his art in his own way, if he knows anything about the joy that rises like an arrow up to the astral strata, or that which descends into the mines strewn with the flowers of corpses and fertile spasms.

or this:

Every object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the precise shock of parallel lines, are means for the battle of: DADA; the abolition of memory: DADA; the abolition of archaeology: DADA; the abolition of prophets: DADA; the abolition of the future: DADA.....

Admittedly, these do not lend themselves obviously to my purpose, but sometimes trying to see the relevance in something you like leads to new connections. This is certainly what I found when writing a talk (which I really must write into a paper) about archaeology, space and Edwin Abbott's Flatland. In the last quote, I like the sequence of memory, archaeology, prophecy, future.

References

Tzara, Tristan 1984 [1963] Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. London: John Calder and New York: Riverrun Press. Translated by Barbara Wright.

New measures for active orbital debris mitigation

2010-08-12T11:37:00.003+09:30

ATK Proposes Satellite That Could Break Up Space Debris.

Space News (8/9, Werner, subscription required) reported, "Alliant Techsystems (ATK) is proposing plans for a small satellite designed to address one of the most vexing problems facing spacecraft operators in low Earth orbit: debris too small to be tracked by ground-based telescopes but large enough to penetrate satellite shielding." The plans are expected to be "discussed publically" at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics small satellite conference on Wednesday. "The spacecraft would operate in low Earth orbit as a sweeper or shield, breaking up debris particles and reducing their velocity, according to Jose Guerrero, chief technologist for ATK Spacecraft Division's Systems and Advanced Technology Group." The concept has been discussed with NASA, DARPA, and the US Air Force, "Guerrero said. Further development of the concept, including testing, will require government funding, he added."

Quoted from AIAA Daily Launch

The top ten orbital debris-producing missions of all time

2010-08-08T16:20:00.001+09:30

This is recent data released by NASA's Orbital Debris Office. As a result of over 4 700 launches since 1957, there are currently around 19 000 pieces of trackable debris. Most of this derives from missions launched by the USA, the former USSR and China.

The missions which produced the greatest quantity of debris are:

Name Year Debris Cause of Breakup

Fengyun-1C 2007 2,841 Intentional Collision

Cosmos 2251 2009 1,267 Accidental Collision

STEP 2 Rocket Body 1996 713 Accidental Explosion

Iridium 33 2009 521 Accidental Collision

Cosmos 2421 2008 509 Unknown

SPOT 1 Rocket Body 1986 492 Accidental Explosion

OV2-1/LCS 2 Rocket 1965 473 Accidental Explosion

Nimbus 4 Rocket Body 1970 374 Accidental Explosion

TES Rocket Body 2001 370 Accidental Explosion

CBERS 1 Rocket Body 2000 343 Accidental Explosion

What's interesting to note about this is that the most frequent source of debris in the top ten is rocket bodies, and I presume this is largely due to residual fuel (there is a large amount of literature on the problem of passivation at the end of mission life). And six are also within the last ten years, suggesting that, despite guidelines for limiting the creation of orbital debris being around for a decade or more, they may not be very effective ...... Note also that there are only two accidental collisions in this list, which supports my argument that the risks posed by large objects that may have heritage value, if they are left in orbit, are not as great as we might think.

Of course this is only the top ten, and a more thorough investigation of the figures may be illuminating.

Source: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/64242

Space Age Archaeology archived by the National Library

2010-08-01T18:18:00.001+09:30

Terrified that some technical glitch will cause all of Space Age Archaeology to disappear as if it had never been? (I know I am). Wondering how future generations will learn about space archaeology when blogs are as antiquated as cuneiform? Well worry no more!

Space Age Archaeology has been placed on the PANDORA archive at the National Library of Australia. This is what PANDORA is about:

PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive, is a growing collection of Australian online publications, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and now built in collaboration with nine other Australian libraries and cultural collecting organisations. The name, PANDORA, is an acronym that encapsulates our mission: Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia.

This is, I like to feel, something of an accolade.

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/

Random thoughts: Matrioshka brains and analogies for outer space

2010-07-09T14:02:00.001+09:30

Well, I've spent the last week in an intense frenzy of activity - finishing my paper for the Australian Space Development Conference, attending the conference and socialising perhaps just a little too much for the good health of my liver, and then falling back to Earth to prepare an Australian Archaeological Association submission about proposed mining in the Burra State Heritage Precinct .... but let's not go there or I shall just get angry at the utter ineffectualness of those in South Australia who are supposed to be looking after our heritage.

So today, I'm catching up on four lost days of work and, and looking over the copious notes I wrote during the conference, about all sorts of things.

While researching for my paper, I was reflecting on the analogies we use to understand space (also inspired by Peterson 1997, see below), such as sea and sky, and how these might translate into heritage principles. A talk by Mark Dankberg, CEO of ViaSat, on the first day of the conference, led me to ponder this further. In my notes I have written "return to the idea of noosphere + the Matrioshka brain = new ways of conceiving space".

The noosphere was proposed by the intriguing and enigmatic Teilhard de Chardin, archaeologist and theologian, and as I recall it from a meagre high school study, it was about evolutionary development from the lithosphere to the biosphere to the noosphere, as the conscious thought characterising humanity grew with the population. The noosphere extends into space, where our thought also now extends with cultural and technological developments.

The Matrioshka brain is a set of nested Dyson spheres, which form a nano-engineered computer around a star, only attainable by a level of technological development far beyond ours. So I see it as kind of similar in some ways - it is a sort of hardware equivalent of the noosphere. (I suspect how I visualise this owes something to the writings of Charles Stross). Of course this is simplifying the idea radically, but I think the conjunction of the two in my own brain is worth further contemplation in terms of how I want to re-conceptualise space.

References:
Peterson, M.J. 1997 The use of analogies in developing outer space law. International Organization 51(2):245-274

Orbital cemeteries, state jurisdictions and debris

2010-07-03T11:24:00.002+09:30

I'm hard at work on a beautiful sunny Saturday morning, trying to complete my paper for the 11th Australian Space Development Conference in Adelaide, which starts on Monday. Oh the luxury of reading! (And the pressures of time - aaarrrgh).

I came across this story (unfortunately unreferenced), which has little to do with my current topic but which I like a lot:

There is the anecdote of the proposal to launch an orbiting cemetery with ten thousand vials containing the ashes of deceased people with a guaranteed lifetime of a million years. As the story goes, it met with refusal because Florida law requires that every cemetery has an access road and there are, evidently, no access roads to orbits. (Perek 1994:196)

This is in the context of not creating space missions which could equally be accomplished on Earth, thus diminishing the potential contribution to the orbital debris problem.

Perek, Lubos 1994 Management of Outer Space. Space Policy 10(3):189-198

Walking in microgravity: a fairytale version

2010-06-23T19:52:00.001+09:30

I have been addicted to fairytales since a child, and still read them .... but normally don't expect to find anything relevant to space in them. Hence I was very struck by this account of movement without gravity in George MacDonald's story The Light Princess, first published in 1864. In the usual fashion, a magnificent christening is held for infant princess. The king, however, neglects to invite his spiteful and magical sister, who deprives the little princess of her gravity. This deprivation operates not only in the physical realm, for she can take nothing seriously and laughs at everything - although she never smiles.

Here is how MacDonald describes her "moonwalk":

I may here remark that it was very amusing to see her running, if her mode of progression could properly be called running. For first she would make a bound; then, having alighted, she would run a few steps, and make another bound. Sometimes she would fancy she had reached the ground before she actually had, and her feet would go backwards and forwards, running upon nothing at all, like those of a chicken on its back.

I'm struck by this, I guess, because it is an attempt to describe the lack of gravity using only the imagination. Not bad for 1864.

In fact the princess only feels her weight when immersed in water, and the lake where she loves to swim is instrumental in allowing a prince to release her from her affliction.

In Alison Lurie (ed) 1994 The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales. Oxford University Press, Oxford

A stellar event: celebrating the AIAA registration of the ACT tracking stations

2010-05-30T22:14:00.002+09:30

Last week I attended the ceremony at Tidbinbilla to celebrate the inscription of the three ACT tracking stations, Tidbinbilla, Orroral Valley and Honeysuckle Creek, on the AIAA Historic Aerospace Sites register. Caught up with the darling Gordon Pike (SingTel Optus), with whom I discussed the relative advantages of spin stabilisation and three-axis stabilisation. He also told me about Optus' tracking station at Frenchs Forest in Sydney (aha!). I had some fascinating chats with former tracking station staff - of that more soon. Orbital debris guru Duncan Steel (QinetiQ) was there, as well as Ian Tuohy of BAE Systems, taking a brief respite from gearing up for Hayabusa's return. Michael West, chair of the AIAA Sydney Section, gave me a lift there and back (Tidbinbilla is about half an hour out of Canberra). A truly wonderful occasion.

Zombiesat joins the ranks of space junk

2010-05-10T13:56:00.001+09:30

Zombiesat! What's Next for the Out-of-Control Galaxy 15 Satellite

By Clara Moskowitz
SPACE.com Senior Writer
posted: 04 May 2010

The Galaxy 15 commercial satellite that recently lost contact with the ground has joined the ranks of a boatload of other debris adrift in space. It's now termed a "zombiesat" by engineers who have a better sense of humor than you might have imagined. So what's next for this 4,171-pound (1,892-kg) zombiesat?

This defunct satellite will probably drift to one of two "gravity wells" that catch most out-of-control spacecraft, experts say. Galaxy 15 could threaten nearby satellites because its communications package is stuck on and it may start interfering with its neighbors by siphoning off their signals. It's the first time such an event has ever occurred, and it sent Orbital Sciences, the satellite's builder, on a dash to figure out how to stop the satellite-run-amok.

Galaxy 15, like many communications satellites, was circling Earth about 22,369 miles (36,000 km) high in what's called geosynchronous orbit, meaning that it orbited at the same speed the Earth rotates, so that it sat perched above the same part of Earth all the time. "There are two points in geosynchronous orbit called geopotential wells," explained Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist for Orbital Debris at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "These are perturbations in Earth's gravity field. Typically when satellites lose control they will drift toward the nearest geopotential well and just oscillate around it." The two spots, also called libration points, are located at longitudes of 105 degrees west and 75 degrees east. There are already between 150 and 200 objects oscillating around these points, Johnson said.

Still a large place

In that sense, the new zombiesat doesn't significantly increase the space debris problem or pose a serious risk of colliding with an operational satellite.

"Space is still a very large place," Johnson told SPACE.com. "There are a lot of objects that are drifting back and forth. Galaxy 15 really just kind of joins a relatively large number of objects – it's not a significant new hazard from a global standpoint. But if your satellite happens to be near where Galaxy 15 is drifting then it's of more concern." Eventually, everything in low-Earth orbit will eventually fall back down toward Earth because of atmospheric drag. The small amount of atmospheric particles in space create friction with spacecraft, causing their orbits to decay. The time it takes for an object's orbit to decay depends on its altitude.

For example, the International Space Station orbits at about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, while the Hubble Space Telescope circles much higher, at 353 miles (569 km). "When things fall off the International Space Station, they typically fall back within a couple months, but where Hubble is, it typically takes several years to fall back to Earth," Johnson said. "At 800 km you're talking many decades or even hundreds of years."

To prevent the buildup of dead spacecraft in heavily trafficked areas of geosynchronous orbit, guidelines recommend that when a satellite reaches the end of its life it is boosted to a higher orbit out of the way. This "graveyard orbit" is about 186 miles (300 km) above where most satellites orbit. "The whole idea is to get to an altitude so they don't drift back into the operational region for a very, very long time – over 100 years," Johnson said.

It's actually easier to boost a spacecraft up just this much higher than to maneuver a craft down to where it would immediately fall back to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere, he said.

Getting rid of space junk

To actually go and collect defunct spacecraft to remove the collision risk altogether is currently beyond our ability. "Unfortunately we haven't found a concept which appears to be both technically feasible and affordable," Johnson said. The best way to remove spent rocket stages and other large objects from orbit is to simply send up another spacecraft to rendezvous and dock with it and drag it back down to earth. This method would be extremely expensive and time-consuming, and isn't viable for the vast number of objects already in space. Some more exotic measures involving tethers and other props have been proposed, Johnson said, but aren't yet feasible.

For getting rid of very small pieces of space junk, there are two favorite ideas, he said. One involves shooting lasers at the objects to push them into lower-altitude orbits so they fall back down to Earth more quickly. "That has technical, economic, as well as policy issues," Johnson said. Another concept is to fly up a structure with a large area but low mass so that when particles strike the surface they will penetrate and lose some of their orbital energy, causing them to fall back to Earth more quickly. This option would also need many technical issues ironed out. "If it was easy we'd already be doing it," Johnson said of tackling the debris problem. "But it's prudent to be working the issue now before it becomes a serious impediment to space operations."

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/zombiesat-out-of-control-satellite-100504.html

Orroral Valley designated a global AIAA Historic Aerospace Site

2010-05-07T10:30:00.001+09:30

The Sydney Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is proud to announce that the Tidbinbilla, Honeysuckle Creek and Orroral Valley Space Tracking Stations have been designated as global AIAA Historic Aerospace Sites. This is a prestigious award which recognises the significant role these three Australian tracking stations have played throughout the space-faring era, particularly in support of NASA's manned space missions. It is a fitting tribute that these sites should be recognised in this way in 2010, the 50th anniversary of treaty-level cooperation between the Australian Government and NASA.

The AIAA established the Historic Aerospace Sites Program in 2000 to promote the preservation of, and the dissemination of information about, significant accomplishments made in the aerospace profession. Other sites recognised by the AIAA History Technical Committee include NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA; the Boeing Red Barn, Seattle, Wash.; Kitty Hawk, N.C.; the site of the first balloon launch in Annonay, France; the Royal Aircraft Research Establishment at Farnborough, England; and Tranquility Base on the moon. Currently Woomera is the only other AIAA Historic Aerospace Site in Australia.

Laser 'tractor beams' to tidy up space junk

2010-05-03T09:57:00.002+09:30

New Scientist
29 April 2010 by Paul Marks

WITH Earth's orbit cluttered with dead satellites, discarded rocket boosters and other space junk, ways to prevent the accumulation of such debris are desperately needed.

How about using a tractor beam to simply steer future junk aside, says space-flight engineer John Sinko of Nagoya University, Japan.

Sinko's idea is based on an experimental type of spacecraft engine called a laser thruster. Inside these motors, laser pulses fired into a mass of solid propellant cause a jet of material to be released, pushing the craft in the opposite direction.

Sinko realised that the laser did not necessarily have to be on the same craft. "These on-board motors could also be targeted remotely by lasers for tractor beaming," he says.

A spacecraft could fire a low-power laser beam at another craft to steer it from a distance

He has designed a series of laser thrusters that can be activated in this way. A spacecraft fitted with a laser would fire a low-power beam at a thruster fitted on another craft to attract, repel or steer it in another direction. Pushing a spacecraft away is a relatively simple matter, but more complex designs using mirrors are needed to use a beam to tug one towards the laser (see diagram).

Combining those designs could allow full control in any direction, says Sinko. He imagines spacecraft being fitted with remotely operated thrusters before launch, so that once they reach the end of their lives it is simple to alter their orbit or even shove them into the atmosphere to burn up - even if they have lost all power (Journal of Propulsion and Power, DOI: 10.2514/1.46037).

Tractor beams could be fired from up to 100 kilometres away, says Sinko, either from a spacecraft in orbit or a mirror in space redirecting a beam from Earth.

"It's an interesting idea that could work in principle," says Richard Holdaway, director of space science technology at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, UK. Keeping a laser beam accurately trained on a distant motor would be a challenge, he adds, "but perhaps not an insurmountable one".

Sinko hopes to test one of his tractor beams on a 10-kilogram satellite within a few years. He is not alone in trying to develop such technology: a team at the Research Institute for Complex Testing of Optoelectronic Devices and Systems in Sosnovy Bor, Russia, is working on similar ideas.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627585.900-laser-tractor-beams-to-tidy-up-space-junk.html

"Handbook of Space Engineering, Archaeology and Heritage" nominated for award

2010-04-24T19:56:00.001+09:30

The Handbook of Space Engineering, Archaeology and Heritage, edited by Ann Garrison Darrin and Beth Laura O'Leary, has been nominated for an Emme award.

The annual Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award, named for NASA’s first Historian, recognizes an outstanding book that advances public understanding of astronautics. It rewards originality, scholarship and readability.

Congratulations to our wonderful editors!

Orroral Valley Tracking Station and its significance

2010-04-22T16:20:00.001+09:30

Last night I gave a talk for the Canberra Archaeological Society about the Orroral Valley Tracking Station in the ACT. I reported, with the assistance of my elegant geophysical friend Ian Moffat, on the results of the magnetometer survey we did in February. There were several subsurface anomalies that were not correlated with any visible surface features. An old Orroral staff member present at the talk was able to tell me that one of them was where the remains of the Baker-Nunn camera infrastructure were buried.

I talked a lot about horn antennas, which I am finding increasingly fascinating. Up until now, I have created a few boundaries to define my research interests - a necessity, so that one doesn't get distracted from the main game. Pretty much, I have decided that I start at 1936 (Peenemunde) and only do space - so not sites associated with pure astronomy. Of course it's not as simple as that, I'm well aware that there is much overlap between space sciences and astronomy, but it's worked pretty well until now.

But with tracking stations, I'm now looking at things which are antenna, telescopes, and aerials all at the same time. Many paraboloid antennas were recycled/reused in radio astronomy (so really it's a nature/culture divide, isn't it - it's an antenna when listening to human signals, a telescope when listening to non-human signals). The design is starting to interest me more, and the co-development of radio astronomy and spacecraft tracking.

So I may have to rethink my research parameters.

CubeSail - active orbital debris removal moves closer to reality

2010-04-09T09:46:00.002+09:30

UK researchers have developed a device to drag space junk out of orbit.
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News
26th March 2010

They plan to launch a demonstration of their "CubeSail" next year. It is a small satellite cube that deploys a thin, 25-sq-m plastic sheet. Residual air molecules still present in the spacecraft's low-Earth orbit will catch the sheet and pull the object out of the sky much faster than is normal.

The Surrey Space Centre team says the concept could be fitted to larger satellites and even rocket stages. The group also envisages that a mature system would even be sent to rendezvous and dock with redundant spacecraft to clean them from orbit. "Our system is simple and very low cost; but we need to demonstrate that it can be done," said Dr Vaios Lappas, lead researcher on the project and senior lecturer in space vehicle control. "It would help make space a sustainable business. We want to be able to keep on launching satellites to provide new services; but unless we do something, the amount of junk up there is going to grow exponentially."

Simplicity of approach

It is thought more than 5,500 tonnes of junk now clutters the region of space just a few hundred km above our heads. Last year, two satellites even collided, showering their orbit with tiny fragments that now pose additional risk to operational spacecraft.

International agencies have agreed that retired hardware - old satellites or spent rocket stages - should be removed from space within 25 years of the end of service. Using large deployable surfaces to increase the drag on these objects so they fall to Earth rapidly is one possible solution to the space litter problem. CubeSail, unveiled on Friday, is a 3kg (6.6lb), 10cm x 10cm x 30cm (4in x 4in x 12in) nanosatellite. It incorporates within its tiny frame a polymer sheet that is folded for launch to be unfurled once in space. The simple deployment mechanism features four metal strips that are wound under tension and will snap into a straight line when let go, pulling the sheet flat in the process.

The team hopes to launch its demonstrator at the end of next year, riding piggy-back on another mission or as part of a cluster of small research satellites that are sometimes lofted en mass atop a single rocket.

Force of sunlight

The nanosat will then circle the Earth, going from pole to pole at an altitude of about 700km (435 miles), testing its systems and assessing the drag principle. If successful, CubeSail could become a regular add-on system to satellites and rocket stages, opening up a new space business akin to the daily refuse services here on Earth.

"We would be looking to put it on our own satellites and to put it on other people's spacecraft as well," said Sir Martin Sweeting, the chairman of SSTL, the world-leading small-satellite manufacturer, which is supporting the research. "We want this to be a standard, essential bolt-on item for a spacecraft; and that's why it's very important to make it small, because if it's too big it will interfere with the rest of the spacecraft," he told BBC News.

The researchers hope to develop the project as a propulsion system as well. The pressure of sunlight falling on such a large structure would also move it. The force is tiny but continuous. This "solar sailing" technique has long been touted as a means of moving spacecraft around the Solar System, or even just helping conventional satellites to maintain their orbits more efficiently. Indeed, some of the large geostationary satellites, for example, already use solar-sail flaps to maintain their attitude without firing their thrusters. This saves valuable chemical propellant and extends mission lifetime.

Delicate control

CubeSail will endeavour to demonstrate this "propellantless propulsion" by trying to shift the path it takes across the surface of the Earth by just a few degrees over the course of a year. To do this though, the nanosatellite will have to carefully control the angle of the sail with respect to the Sun, just as an ocean vessel has to play with its sails to catch the wind.

"We're going to control our sail with a very novel geometric technique; we're not going to use any thrusters," explained Dr Lappas. "We have developed a tilting mechanism that uses very tiny motors. It's able to move in two directions. This enables you to change the centre of mass of the sail. We're also going to be using small magnets to control the sail because they will interact with the Earth's magnetic field." Once its mission is complete, CubeSail will be instructed to take itself out of orbit.

The project is a private venture within the Surrey Space Centre, which is based at the University of Surrey, Guildford. CubeSail has been funded by Europe's largest space company, EADS Astrium, which is one of the world's biggest manufacturers of satellites. It also produces Europe's heavy-lift rocket, the Ariane 5, which launches about half of the world's commercial satellite platforms. The entire cost of the project is expected to be no more than £1m ($1.5m).

Other groups around the world are expected to launch solar sail demonstrators soon. The US space agency has been working on a project with The Planetary Society, a long-time proponent of the technology. The Japanese, too, have work in progress. And even Astrium is sponsoring other space junk mitigation strategies within its own division.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8590103.stm

Orroral Valley Tracking Station, and Australia's new space initiatives.

2010-04-03T15:32:00.002+10:30

Watch this empty space

Cheryl Jones, The Australian Higher Education Supplement, March 31 2010

NASA's Honeysuckle Creek tracking station near Canberra received the world's first images of the Apollo 11 moonwalk in 1969, but staff at nearby Orroral Valley tracking station enjoyed a private viewing of the event. They swung their 26m dish antenna on to the moon and got their own pictures, according to a former staff member.

"We weren't actually tracking anything, so we had a look at it," Philip Clark tells the HES. He was an electronics and radio communications technician at Orroral, 50km south of Canberra in Namadgi national park, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps outside the lunar module.
"It was for our interest only," says Clark, who was later promoted to senior operations supervisor of the facility, established by NASA in 1965 to track near-Earth-orbit scientific satellites. Clark was one of a small group of Australians in the space race at the height of the Cold War. Australia was a space power in the 1960s, at the forefront of satellite and rocket technology, and the site of ground stations to track and communicate with spacecraft exploring our solar system. But Australia's foray into the final frontier is now so long ago that it is the stuff of archeology. A research team led by Flinders University archeologist Alice Gorman will soon start digging the Orroral site.

Australia remains a world leader in astronomy. But that discipline is not normally classified within the fields of space science and engineering, which encompass satellite technology and space exploration. Experts warn that Australia's decline in these areas is costing us dearly and putting our national security at risk. Now the space industry is being relaunched by the federal government. The big question is whether it will stay in orbit.

When Australia launched WRESAT-1 from the Woomera rocket range in South Australia in 1967, it was only the fourth nation to launch a satellite and the third to launch one from its own soil. But a British satellite launched just four years later aboard a Black Arrow R3 rocket was the last satellite to blast off from the desert site.

Australia owns no satellites. Optus has several communications satellites but they are owned by Singapore Telecommunications. The global market for commercial satellite-based products and services is estimated at more than $100 billion a year, according to the report of a Senate inquiry into Australian space science and industry. Released in 2008, the report, titled Lost in Space, says the use of satellites for Earth observation is "the most important commercial aspect of space for Australia". Australia is a heavy user of satellites but has "very limited national capabilities" in the technology, Australian National University earth and planetary scientist Marc Norman tells the HES. "We use data from European, Japanese, American and Chinese satellites to do everything from predicting the weather through navigation, to carbon accounting, minerals exploration, stopping terrorists and preventing the spread of quarantine pests," Norman says.

He is a member of the steering committee of the Australian Academy of Sciences Decadal Plan for Australian Space Science. "We depend on our international partners to provide the data which, in some cases, is essential to our national security. That's not a very strong position in an uncertain world." Meanwhile, although Woomera is still used for rocket testing, it has fizzled out since the days when it was central to British and US programs.

Australia still plays a key role in the support of space exploration, however. NASA recently announced plans to install two new dish antennas at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla. The facility is part of NASA's Deep Space Network, which communicates with space probes. But Australia once hosted several NASA satellite tracking stations, including Orroral, Clark says. Now only two facilities remain, in Alice Springs and Dongara, Western Australia.

Much of Australia's early involvement in space was driven by its geography, with foreign powers needing to site facilities here. Australia's sparse population also made it an attractive site for ground segment operations, Gorman tells the HES. Strategic factors also played a part, she adds, with Australia expecting access to defence technology through joint operations with Britain and, later, the US, she adds.

When those countries wound back some activities, successive governments did not fill the gap with a strong, independent space program. The Rudd government has introduced programs to build national space capability. Last month it announced about $12 million in grants in the first of four funding rounds of its four-year, $40m Australian Space Research Program. Among projects funded was research led by the University of Queensland that could deliver an air-breathing, hypersonic combustion scramjet engine for use in a satellite launching system.

The Australian Academy of Science estimates it would take an investment in research of $100m for 10 years to rebuild capacity in the civil space sector. The government is on track to meet that target as long as it maintains its present level of funding. Innovation,Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr tells the HES the government will consider future funding levels after evaluating the latest initiatives. He points out the government has also invested $8.6m across four years in a new space policy unit within his department to co-ordinate space activities. "It [space] is not an abstract sideline for people interested in weird and wonderful things," he says. "It's about making sure that this country stays at the cutting edge of technological development."

After drifting without a space program under the Howard government, the scientific community has welcomed the initiatives. But Norman says the investment is low by international standards and the government will have to keep up the momentum. Much rides on private-sector participation, he says.
Australia tried to get back into space in 2002 with the launch of FedSat, a 50kg research satellite designed by the Co-operative Research Centre for Satellite Systems. The $25m project delivered good scientific results and briefly built capacity in space technology. But the CRC closed in 2005. It failed to meet expectations, perhaps unrealistic, that it would propel Australia into satellite design.

FedSat's signal failed in 2007. The microsatellite was carrying a CD with a recording of the Paul Kelly song From Little Things Big Things Grow, the battle cry of the champions of lost causes.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/watch-this-empty-space/story-e6frgcjx-1225847659700

Heritage listing Australia's historic satellites

2010-03-22T22:39:00.001+10:30

With the State of California recently listing the objects at Tranquility Base as a historic site (for a recent story on this see http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,684221,00.html), I have been thinking again about the intersection of national and world heritage, and the legal issues around interpreting the extension of national jurisdictions into space as equivalent to making territorial claims.

Australia has the potential for an interesting twist here. Only heritage places on national territory of some kind can be registered on the Commonwealth Heritage List, but there is the capacity to recognise sites of significance to Australia in foreign territories on the List of Overseas Places of Historic Significance to Australia.

The List of Overseas Places of Historic Significance to Australia recognises symbolically sites of outstanding historic significance to Australia located outside of the Australian jurisdiction.
It was established by the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) on 1 January 2007. With this new list, Australia can recognise and celebrate those overseas places of greatest importance to the development of our nation in a way that is respectful of the rights and sovereignty of other nations. The list helps tell the story of the most significant parts of Australia's history that occurred outside our borders. (http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/overseas/index.html, viewed 22 March 2010)

OK, so the overseas bit isn't perhaps helpful here, but you could certainly argue that space was "over the sea" in terms of being above the sea, if one wanted to get all semantic. The respectful of the rights and sovereignty of other nations bit is more helpful in terms of the Outer Space Treaty.

Currently there are three places on the Overseas List: Anzac Cove (Turkey), the Kokoda Trail (Papua New Guinea), and Howard Florey's Laboratory (UK).

What if we wanted to list Australia's historic satellites in orbit? There's really only two, Australis Oscar V and FedSat (still in orbit as far as I know). The Overseas List is symbolic, so it does not imply a territorial claim. You could argue that California's listing of Tranquility Base is just as symbolic, given that enforcing it may prove more than slightly tricky. But there is a legal difference here that may be worth exploring

Lunakhod 2 located on the moon - a new heritage site.

2010-03-18T13:36:00.002+10:30

Canadian finds long-lost moon rover in new NASA images
By Margaret Munro, Canwest News ServiceMarch 16, 2010

The tracks were clearly visible on the moon's surface, leading lunar sleuth Phil Stooke straight to the long-lost Russian rover — and effectively solving a 37-year old mystery over the craft's location. "There is a black dot where the track stops and that's the rover itself," he said.

When NASA released on Monday images and data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), revealing the moon's surface in unprecedented detail, Stooke wasted no time finding the Lunokhod 2, one of the first remote-controlled rovers to beam back pictures of craters and moon rocks. "The tracks were visible at once," said Stooke, who set up a searchable database to sort through the new NASA images. "We can see where (the rover) measured the magnetic field, driving back and forth over the same route to improve the data. "And we can also see where it drove into a small crater, and accidentally covered its heat radiator with soil as it struggled to get out again," he added. "That ultimately caused it to overheat and stop working. And the rover itself shows up as a dark spot right where it stopped."

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is on a one-year exploration mission from a perch about 50 kilometres above the moon. The plan is to produce a comprehensive map, search for resources and potential safe landing sites. Stooke — a professor at the University of Western Ontario who has written extensively about lunar exploration — hopes it will also enable him to find other lunar relics.

Having bagged the Lunokhod 2, he's already moved on to searching the images for the Surveyor 5, which made a lunar landing in 1967, before NASA astronauts walked on the moon. But locating the Russian Lunokhod 2 is quite a find, Stooke said, as the craft still holds the record for distance travelled on another celestial body. (It conked out after a 35-kilometre trek.)

The travels of Lunokhod 2 and its companion rover also marked "the first time anyone ever drove something by remote control on another world," said Stooke, author of The International Atlas of Lunar Exploration. He plans to update the book, published in 2007, with the new images of the rovers that he speculates may one day need protection as "historic sites." If space travel ever becomes routine, he chuckled that someone might need to draw a line around the early rovers and say: "You can't come any closer than this."

http://www.canada.com/technology/Canadian+finds+long+lost+moon+rover+NASA+images/2690499/story.html

Deep space antenna in California that relayed moon landing declaration to undergo major repair

2010-03-15T10:48:00.001+10:30

ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer 12:02 p.m. CST, March 8, 2010
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The deep space antenna that relayed Neil Armstrong's famous "one giant leap for mankind" declaration from the moon to a rapt American audience will be offline for eight months for repair. Work begins this week to replace a steel donut-shaped bearing on the aging 230-foot-wide dish at the NASA Deep Space Network site at Goldstone Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert about 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
The labor-intensive process, which will involve jacking up 9 million pounds, will keep the antenna out of service until at least November. "It's not trivial," said Pete Hames of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is in charge of maintaining the antennas at the Goldstone complex.

Besides California, tracking stations in Australia and Spain make up the Deep Space Network. Together, they point nonstop to the sky, sending commands to robotic spacecraft millions of miles away and listening for their often faint replies — communication streams filled with images, scientific findings and operational data.

During the repair, interplanetary communications will not be disrupted, said deputy project manager Wayne Sible. Missions that normally depend on Goldstone, such as the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Saturn explorer Cassini, various Mars spacecraft and even the Voyager 1 probe — which sailed to the edge of the solar system — will instead communicate through other giant, bowl-shaped antennas near Madrid, Spain, and Canberra, Australia.

Engineers chose to do the repair this year — at an estimated cost of $1.25 million — so that the Goldstone antenna would be ready next year to support the launchings of the Juno spacecraft to Jupiter and the long-delayed Mars Science Laboratory to the red planet. It's the first major work done on the antenna since the 1980s when it was enlarged to its current size. Engineers said the bearing, which helps it turn sideways, has worn out after more than four decades.

The Goldstone antenna is steeped in history. During the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, it captured Armstrong's words and sent them on to American televisions while the image came through another antenna. Its other accomplishments include receiving the first close-up views of the outer planets and their moons.

NASA last month broke ground in Australia on a new generation of smaller but advanced antennas that would eventually replace the workhorse fleet of 230-foot-diameter dishes around the world.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-us-sci-deep-space-antenna,0,1618143.story

The need to "sweep space clean"

2010-03-12T11:54:00.001+10:30

Need to eliminate space debris highlighted

First Published : 10 Mar 2010 07:04:33 AM IST

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Space debris can threaten long-term sustainability of space programmes, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) director Dr B.N.Suresh said on Tuesday, stressing the need to sweep space clean.

Inaugurating the 28th conference of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Co-ordination Committee (IADC) at the Technopark here, Dr Suresh said that there has been a 13 per cent increase in debris in 2009. ``Satellites have become an integral part of human society. But unfortunately orbital debris pose a serious threat,’’ he said. Space agencies of Italy, UK, US, Japan, Ukraine, Russia, France, Germany and the European Space Agency have sent representatives to the four-day conference which will deliberate on future courses of action. Around 100 delegates are participating.

Dr V.Adimurthy, IADC acting chairman and ISRO representative, said that ISRO was committed to reducing the threat of space debris. ``It’s a continuous process. We had recently released a manual on protecting man-made assets in space.,’’ he said. ISRO was also looking at developing radar and optical systems for tracking space debris, he said.

Figures furnished by the European Space Agency (ESA) on Tuesday show that traceable man-made objects in space numbered 36,131 in 2009, but they could go up to 1,27,884 by 2040, projections showed. The IADC is a platform for space agencies to share information and devise strategies to mitigate the threat posed by space debris. Today, all major space agencies are actively involved in its activities. VSSC director P.S.Veeraraghavan was also present. A 12-member Chinese delegation was to have attended the conference, but they were not present on the inaugural day.

http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=Need+to+eliminate+space+debris+highlighted&artid=P89KH|8LMIo=&SectionID=lMx/b5mt1kU=&MainSectionID=lMx/b5mt1kU=&SEO=&SectionName=tm2kh5uDhixGlQvAG42A/07OVZOOEmts

Minitrack at Orroral Valley, ACT

2010-03-06T17:47:00.002+10:30

Here are some of the pylons at the Minitrack site, Orroral Valley Tracking Station in the ACT. My recent field survey here was funded by an ACT Heritage Grant (thanks, guys!).

A review of "Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now"

2010-03-05T15:07:00.002+10:30

Holtorf, Cornelius & Angela Piccini (eds.) 2009 Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.

Reviewed 01 Dec 2009 by Lawrence Moore

Contemporary Archaeologies is an interesting edited collection from mostly European contributors. The focus is on the ties between today’s changing conceptions of what archaeology is and the study and preservation of recent material culture and heritage. In the introduction editors Cornelius Holtorf and Angela Piccini argue that they are not trying to promote a new period of specialization but state instead that all archaeologies are contemporary because the past and present are conceptually combined (cf. Holtorf 2008). Archaeology is also viewed as an event within and a result of our contemporary world; hence the statement the book "marries archaeology in the modern world with the archaeology of the modern world" (p. 16). Holtorf and Piccini also present their introduction in the form of a dialog such that their individualism is apparent.

The book is divided into four parts. Part one discusses the character of archaeology. Julian Thomas starts off by highlighting some of the main ideas developed in his Archaeology and Modernity (2004). To him archaeology "embodies and condenses the modern condition" and that it is unlikely that archaeology would have developed under other historical circumstances (p. 33). Thomas then describes the depth metaphor of archaeology--that time is stratified in layered containers--and parallels this with Sigmund Freud’s idea that the mind is stratified with the deeper layers tied to the past of the individual and the human species.

Cornelius Holtorf follows with a discussion of archaeology within the Experience Society, his description of contemporary society’s emphasis on feel good experiences. He reviews how archaeology is often portrayed at theme parks and other themed contexts (cf. Holtorf 2005, 2007) and argues that archaeology is mostly in the storytelling business. Sarah May discusses the material culture that goes along with people’s interests in and dealings with tigers, and, this material culture is patterned depending on if the tigers are wild, performers in a show or zoo, or are pets. From this analysis she makes an important analogy between the conservation and rescue of tigers and archaeological sites. For archaeologists, the twentieth century has yet to be rescued; it is "wild and dangerous but powerful" (p.78).

Part two discusses the need for and means of recording and preserving twentieth century heritage. Mike Pearson describes the contexts, assemblages, and formational processes of early expeditionary material culture found within Antarctica. After discussing the history of and artifacts associated with several expeditionary huts he concludes that this material culture could be displayed as a performance such that meanings are "successively presented, challenged, confounded, inverted, and reinvented" (p. 93).

Next, Colleen M. Beck, John Schofield and Harold Drollinger describe their social and political experiences while investigating the Peace Camp adjacent to a federal nuclear testing and experimentation area in Nevada, United States. The Peace Camp has been regularly used since 1957 for numerous protests and confrontations. The Camp was surveyed and has hundreds of features and artifacts that can be mapped and analyzed, just as archaeologists study other encampments. As the land is administered by a federal agency federal laws about historic preservation and archaeology apply. Interestingly, these researchers were told by the agency archaeologist that their work was not archaeology and that the "protest site had no legal historical significance" (p. 104).

Louise K. Wilson concludes part two with a discussion of recording Cold War era sites in England; she reminds us that sounds are artifacts. Her mission was to find new ways to attract visitors to these heritage sites and engage them in new ways. This leads to recording the sights and sounds of rocket testing and launch sites, especially of wind, weather, and sea. She also describes how some buildings are used by choirs for rehearsals as the acoustics are similar to churches and theaters. One sound she was interested in documenting was the throb of machinery; she was able to record a working centrifuge and then use the sound track within a dilapidated centrifuge building. A number of visitors were emotionally impressed with this experience.

Part three discusses new dimensions of materiality. Mats Burström describes an old car dump and junkyard in Sweden, in use from the 1930s to the 1970s. The dump is referred to as a car cemetery and the property was the home of a thrifty old loner. Today, visitors are struck by the site’s austerity and quality of gradual disintegration; its decay is what makes it interesting. This quality stumps local heritage planners who are inclined to view the site as garbage, or, if it is to be called heritage, then they want to stabilize it, stopping the decay. After some conflict over this, the public has won out and the cars rust in peace.

Jonna Ulin offers a family archaeology; she describes her excavation and memory-work of her grandmother’s home in Sweden. Her data consists of excavated material and her recollections from her childhood, as well as family secrets, stories and photographs. She is not interested in linear time but in the "space of the past" (p. 145). Alice Gorman completes part three while discussing the material culture of space exploration and the significance of the post World War II Space Race. Space industries both represent nationalist ideologies and agendas, and are the very instruments that reduce the economic relevance of nation states (p. 176). She concludes with a call for an inclusive view that takes into account all participants in the development of space technologies.

And finally, Part Four offers thoughts for the future. Angela Piccini explores the potentialities and limitation of archaeological practice and camera based technologies. She offers an open-ended essay about a walk down a gutter, her video of it, describing what she saw, her thoughts and memories, with a little commentary in between. For her, documenting the material culture of gutters and the recording of it is a performance. Cameras are used not to transmit knowledge but to be a creative treatment of actuality. Although certainly scripted, the essay appears as unscripted fragments of ideas stimulated from walking along a gutter.

Paul Graves-Brown concludes the book with a discussion of privacy and individualism. He briefly reviews the literature about privacy and argues that the privatization of experience is important to archaeology because the organization of space changes along with the evolution of privacy. A key concept within modernity is this individualism/collectivism pairing. As the editors began with their individualism displayed it’s appropriate to conclude with this topic.

While this is not the first book to discuss the archaeology of the twentieth century I think it does push the discussion along quite well. I applaud these efforts because the century forces the profession to rethink its theories, methods, and overall intellectual perspectives. For archaeologists, it really is untamed territory. I laughed when Beck, Schofield, and Drollinger described their problems with a federal agency. They were told that what they were doing was not archaeology. New ideas are needed to tackle twentieth century material culture and if that means reinventing archaeology, that’s okay with me.

To say that "archaeology-is-contemporary" and the "past-is-now" is certainly reasonable from this perspective. However, such statements are limited by the same constraints that the earlier conception (i.e. past, present, and future are conceptualized separately) had. Eventually, all concepts become stagnant and less useful. For now, the utility of these fresh ideas is bright but complicated.

Those anthropologists and archaeologists who prefer rationalism and linear time will likely find the book uninteresting because it is fully spatial, non-linear, cyclical, and intuitive, consistent with the general trend of our feel good romantic society. Many progressive academics will likely be inspired by the book, and we can expect them to continue pushing the conceptual envelope well into the twenty-first century. Archaeologists in the compliance driven heritage industry will see the difficulty in applying the new ideas within a bureaucratic environment.

For many the future of archaeology is blurry because we don’t know what it will look like. If we adopt the idea that the future-is-now then we likely do know something: archaeology could become very much like what is presented in this book. This begs the question why the subtitle "Excavating Now"? Only one essay mentions this traditional archaeological activity. Is it possible that archaeologists will come to rely less on excavation and more on above ground material culture and landscape analyses? This is quite possible. More than most, Holtorf (2005, 2007) is well aware that excavation is a key element in defining "what is archaeology". Perhaps he and Piccini are telling us that the metaphor of excavation is more important than its actuality.

     Level/Use: Suitable for graduate students, special study courses on theory, method, & intellectual trends.

     References:
     Holtorf, C. 2005 From Stonehenge to Las Vegas: Archaeology as Popular Culture. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.
     Holtorf, C. 2007 Archaeology is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture. Oxford: Archaeopress, and, Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
     Holtorf, C. 2008 The Past Is Now-an Interview with Anders Högberg. European Journal of Archaeology 11(1):7-22
     Thomas, J. 2004 Archaeology and Modernity. London and New York: Routledge.

http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3412
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:

Moore, Lawrence
2009 Review of Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now. Anthropology Review Database. December 01. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3412, accessed March 4, 2010.

Fresh eyes on the universe as Canberra gets new dishes

2010-02-25T11:46:00.001+10:30

NICKY PHILLIPS

February 24, 2010

Just staring into space ... one of the existing dishes at Tidbinbilla. Photo: CDSCC/NASA

It takes more than 9½ years for a spacecraft to travel the 5.7 billion kilometres to Pluto. But when the New Horizons mission finally passes the dwarf planet in 2015, Australia will play a pivotal role. An official from the US space agency NASA has confirmed plans to build two new dish antennae at Tidbinbilla, just outside Canberra, as part of the support network that tracks all of NASA's deep space missions.

When man landed on the moon 41 years ago, it was Australian antennae that broadcast the astronaut's first few steps to the world. And while no men will walk on Pluto just yet, Australian dishes will be the first to capture the most detailed images of the icy blue mass so far.

Badri Younes, the head of Space Communications and Navigation, said NASA hoped the two new antennas, both 34 metres in diameter, would be operational in time for the Pluto flyby in 2015. Mr Younes said there was also a plan to build an extra two antennas of the same size by 2025. ''From down under you can have a better view of the world above,'' he said. ''Australia has been our eyes and ears into our universe.''

The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science & Research, Senator Kim Carr, said NASA's commitment to expanding its presence at Tidbinbilla was an endorsement of Australia's capabilities. ''Our long-standing science and technology relationship with the United States is of enormous value to Australia,'' he said.

Australia already has four antennas at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla. The new, more efficient dishes will replace two of the old ones. The dishes are part of NASA's deep space network, the only site in the southern hemisphere. Two other sites are in Madrid, Spain and Goldstone in the US. Each site is 120 degrees of longitude apart from the others, providing continuous coverage of NASA's activities in space.

A group of NASA officials arrived in Australia this week for the announcement of the new antennas, which will cost the space agency an estimated $US45 million ($50 million) each to build. The Herald understands a ground-breaking ceremony for the first new antenna will be held at Tidbinbilla on Thursday. The NASA party, which includes William Gerstenmaier, the head of space operations at NASA and Charles Elachi, the head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is in Australia to also celebrate the 50th anniversary of Australian and US space relations.

Earlier this month it was announced that the agreement between the two nations over the use of Australian space monitoring sites at Tidbinbilla, Alice Springs and Dongara in Western Australia, would be extended for another two years. Mr Younes said the relationship between the two countries was very reliable. It was something to preserve and grow. ''We could have ground sites elsewhere, but what's so special about the Canberra site is the relationship we have with the government of Australia,'' he said.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

Space Junk Mess Getting Messier in Orbit

2010-02-25T11:39:00.002+10:30

By Leonard David
SPACE.com’s Space Insider Columnist posted: 23 February 2010
09:20 am ET

BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. — The already untidy mass of orbital debris that litters low Earth orbit nearly got nastier last month. A head-on collision was averted between a spent upper stage from a Chinese rocket and the European Space Agency's (ESA) huge Envisat Earth remote-sensing spacecraft. Space junk tracking information supplied by the U.S. military, as well as confirming German radar data, showed that the two space objects would speed by each other at a nail-biting distance of roughly 160 feet (50 meters).

ESA's Envisat tips the scales at 8 tons, with China's discarded rocket body weighing some 3.8 tons. A couple of tweaks of maneuvering propellant were used to nudge the large ESA spacecraft to a more comfortable miss distance. But what if the two objects had tangled?

Such a space collision would have caused mayhem in the heavens, adding clutter to an orbit altitude where there are big problems already, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency's Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, Germany. It turns out, Klinkrad told SPACE.com, that 50 percent of all the close conjunctions that Envisat faces are due to the lethal leftovers from China's January 2007 anti-satellite test, as well as chunks of junk resulting from last year's smashup between an active U.S. Iridium satellite and a defunct Russian Cosmos spacecraft.

Klinkrad joined several orbital debris experts that took part in the 33rd Annual Guidance and Control Conference organized by the Rocky Mountain Section of the American Astronautical Society. The five-day meeting began Feb. 5.

Avoidance maneuvers
Significant progress has been made by the U.S. and the international aerospace communities in recognizing the hazards of orbital debris, reported Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist for orbital debris at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Johnson added that steps are being taken to reduce or eliminate the potential for the creation of new debris. However, "the future environment is expected to worsen without additional corrective measures," he noted.

During 2009, Johnson reported, five different NASA robotic spacecraft carried out collision avoidance maneuvers: a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-3), Cloudsat, Earth Observing Mission 1, Aqua, and Landsat 7. Also, the space shuttle and the International Space Station took collision avoidance actions, he said.

The worst thing that could happen, according to ESA's Klinkrad, is the International Space Station (ISS) receiving a fatal hit. The space station is currently home to five astronauts representing the U.S., Russia and Japan.
"A penetrating object hitting the ISS, and possibly causing a casualty onboard . . . I think that would be the most dramatic case we could have," Klinkrad suggested. Such an incident might turn public opinion against human spaceflight, he said.

Collaboration on the increase
One bit of good news in all this orbital riff-raff. Due to last year's satellite crash between the Iridium and Cosmos spacecraft, Johnson explained that the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) of the U.S. Strategic Command now conducts conjunction assessments for all operational spacecraft in Earth orbit, regardless of ownership nationality. "To be honest, a year ago, we couldn't even have hoped to have done this," Johnson told SPACE.com.
"It's really a consequence of the collision last year. People have been talking about this for years. But now we've made the commitment . . . that this is something that needs to be done and can be done relatively easily," Johnson said. Klinkrad concurred. "The collaboration is getting even closer now," he said.

Duck or pluck?
Playing dodge ball with high-speed space debris is one tactic. But there is also a growing interest in removing the most troublesome objects — perhaps an annual quota of some sort. Targeted would be specific inclination bands and altitude regimes, Klinkrad said. But prior to implementing debris remediation measures on a global scale, technical, operational, legal and economic problems must be overcome.

Klinkrad and NASA's Johnson provided a wearisome appraisal of the future. Even with an immediate halt of launch activities, spacefaring nations will be dealing with an unstable low-Earth orbit environment in some altitude and inclination bands. This would be a consequence of about 20 catastrophic collisions within the next 200 years, the two orbital debris experts explained. Some orbit altitudes already have critical mass concentrations that will trigger "collisional cascading" within a few decades, unless debris environment remediation measures are introduced.

The Kessler Syndrome
The idea of debris creating debris was put in motion by Donald Kessler, along with fellow NASA researcher, Burton Cour-Palais, back in 1978. Their research suggested that, as the number of artificial satellites in Earth orbit increases, the probability of collisions between satellites also increases. Satellite collisions would produce orbiting fragments, each of which would increase the probability of further collisions, leading to the growth of a belt of debris around the Earth. Now, decades later, that prophecy has been dubbed the Kessler Syndrome.

Kessler told SPACE.com that the disorder fits into much more complex natural laws that include the evolution of the solar system, as well as meteoroids, meteorites, and climate-changing asteroids. Kessler is now an orbital debris and meteoroid consultant in Asheville, North Carolina. "There is nothing complex about what is called the 'Kessler Syndrome' . . . it is just the way nature may have converted a disorderly group of orbiting rocks into an orderly solar system . . . although nature reminds us with a large asteroid or comet collision every few million years that it isn't quite finished yet.

"In the case of orbital debris, this collision process is just starting," Kessler explained. Consequently, nobody should be surprised that as orbital debris models became more complex — and as more data is obtained — the same conclusion holds, Kessler said. "The future debris environment will be dominated by fragments resulting from random collisions between objects in orbit, and that environment will continue to increase, even if we do not launch any new objects into orbit," Kessler concluded.

Some of the Worst Space Debris Moments in History

India Developing Anti-Satellite Spacecraft

Video — The Expanding Danger of Space Junk

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

Space archaeologists search for hidden heritage

2010-02-20T12:14:00.001+10:30

12/02/2010

A group of space archaeologists are investigating the material culture (remains) of space exploration at the Orroral Valley NASA Tracking Station in the Namadgi National Park thanks to an ACT Government Heritage grant. Dr Alice Gorman, archaeologist from Flinders University, and her research team will map the site from Saturday 13 February to Monday 15 February 2010, using electromagnetic induction techniques and differential GPS to find out exactly what remains below the ground.

"Australia has had a long involvement in international space exploration, and while not widely recognised, Orroral Valley was involved in many major NASA projects and played a critical role in Australia's early ventures into space," Dr Gorman said. "Our project aims to not only map and document material culture of space exploration from the site, but to raise awareness of the site's heritage significance. We will be using electromagnetic induction to identify the location of cables, tanks, and construction trenches and rubbish dumps at the site. The remains of the tracking station cover approximately 40 hectares.

"Electromagnetic induction measures the electrical properties of objects below the surface. These instruments are not invasive and do not require direct contact with the ground. They are also easily integrated with a GPS unit allowing us to survey large areas. During the survey, former employees of the tracking station are invited to visit the site to contribute to an accurate interpretation of the data.
Following mapping of the site there may also be opportunity to excavate materials which would further assist in the interpretation of how people lived and worked at the tracking station."

Chief Minister and Minister for the Arts and Heritage, Jon Stanhope, said the Orroral Valley Tracking Station is currently nominated on the ACT Heritage Register. "I am pleased the ACT Government has been able to contribute to the understanding of this site's heritage through a $9000 grant to support the investigation," he said.

The research team consists of Dr Alice Gorman (lecturer in archaeology, Flinders University), Ian Moffat (geophysicist), Rob Koch (surveyor), and graduate student Julia Garnaut from Flinders University.

http://www.chiefminister.act.gov.au/media.php?v=9229