The bizarre world of philately and space exploration

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

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?

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.

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 riveting 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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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 .....

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

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.

The all-new Space Age Archaeology

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

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

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!

 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?

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

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

Consuming the Space Age: the cuisine of Sputnik

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!

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

The sky is falling: How Skylab became an Australian icon

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 Skylab became more than the sum of its whole.

Thoughts, leads, information, all welcome!

Doing orbital archaeology from space

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.