Things seen from space: the Great Wall of China

It's quite a claim to make: that such-and-such a 'man-made' thing can be seen from space. The one people are probably most familiar with is the Great Wall of China. There's a rumour that Yuri Gagarin saw it during his epic first orbit of the Earth in 1961. There's also a popular culture myth that it's visible from the Moon.

The Moon story, is, interestingly, pre-Space Age. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Portuguese travellers brought accounts of the Great Wall back to Europe, so people there became aware that this impressive structure existed. 

In 1754, the Reverend William Stukeley, who was one of the first people to study Stonehenge and hence somewhat of an expert on large structures, mentioned the "Chinese wall, which makes a considerable figure upon the terrestrial globe, and may be discerned at the moon" in a letter. (Stonehenge really wasn't of much interest to the English public before Stukeley). 

In 1895, English journalist and MP Henry Norman made the same claim: "Besides its age it enjoys the reputation of being the only work of human hands on the globe visible from the moon." He had at least traveled in China and seen the Great Wall first hand. But he doesn't give any evidence to back this claim up. The debate around canals on Mars in the late 19th century may have made it seem logical that long linear artificial structures would be visible from other planets.

In the 20th century, human eyes went to space for the first time. They were in Yuri Gagarin's head.  But he did not mention the Great Wall at all. 

Of course, it's all relative. Whether it's visible or not depends on where your orbit is, whether it's day or night, and what you are looking with. In general I think people mean visible with the unaided human eye, or with satellites in Low Earth Orbit. Higher up in the orbital column, satellites aren't looking. In certain limited conditions, the Great Wall can be seen by astronauts on the ISS or by Earth observation satellites.

The Great Wall seen by ESA's Proba satellite in 2004. Credit: ESA

There are, however, other human structures which are visible from space, including:

• Dubai's palm islands - these are artificial islands built as residential complexes off the coast of Dubai, in the shape of palm leaves
• Major cities at night - when illuminated, the largest cities are easy to pick out as distinct entities. 
• The Pyramids at Giza - located in Egypt, the Great Pyramid of Giza was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It's astonishing to think that it's retained this significance with a new space age spin. The three pyramids at Giza are not visible to the naked eye, but can be seen through a space-based camera.
• The greenhouses of Almeria - 64, 000 acres of greenhouses in Spain. These are visible through cameras because the reflective material of the greenhouses catches the light in daytime. 
• The Bingham Canyon Mine - this open-cut copper mine is the largest human excavation in the world. It extends over 4 km and is over 1 km deep. 

I don't think anything has been designed with the specific aim of being seen from space - yet.

This is Earth taken from lunar orbit - the famous Earthrise photo of 1968.
No human-made features visible. Credit: NASA

From another perspective, it's not just the human artefacts that are visible. It's the impacts of human activities, such as forest loss, desertification and the creep of agriculture. These are also human things seen from space.

Why am I interested in this? 

Firstly, things seen from space may tell us something about what to look for as signs of intelligent life on exoplanets. This is one of the goals of SETI research. 

On the other hand, there are a bunch of people who look for alien structures on the Moon and Mars using remote sensing imagery from orbiting spacecraft, just like archaeologists do to locate and map artificial structures on Earth - and, apparently, they find them!. It comes down to what looks natural and what looks cultural, and this is often because something resembles an Earthly structure. This is called pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing patterns where none exist.

But here's the real reason. Although you won't find it mentioned in the World Heritage listing, the myth of being visible from space contributes to the heritage value of the Great Wall of China. It is about aesthetic and social value, at least to people in the 'west'. 

The aesthetic value of the Great Wall is about scale - something so long, that required huge amounts of labour over centuries in its different forms (I'm not going to go into it's complex history). It's a stable landscape feature, 20, 000 km long. In 1644, when it's construction finished, it was the world's largest military structure. It follows the top of a ridgeline, so it is visible from a distance. To say that it can be seen from space is a testament to its sheer size and ambition. 

Being seen from space is really a statement about human perceptions of things so large that our eyes can't take them all in at once, that their true form is not comprehensible from the ground. The Nazca lines are like this too. It's about things so enormous from a human scale that they seem almost inhuman. Unlike the Great Pyramid at Giza, though I don't think anyone has claimed that the Great Wall was made by aliens. 

Hold my beer, it seems that they have.

The social phenomenon is about people's beliefs about space. It's like space-flown objects, which are held in museum collections and fetch high prices in the collector's market: the special relationship with space adds value. They could be the most boring, mundane object or material, but when they've come back from space they take on almost magical qualities. They're a talisman, a touchstone, something that brings you spatially closer to that unattainable place (for most of us).

In the 1980s. Frank White put forward the idea of the Overview Effect. The Overview Effect is a semi-mystical experience that involves seeing Earth as a whole planet, a natural object on which human traces are insignificant. The planet is fragile and beautiful, and its delicate ecological balance could be destroyed by human actions. The people of Earth should be united, not torn apart by wars and conflicts: national boundaries are not visible from space. (Although having said that, South Korean astronaut Soyeon Yi reports her sadness at seeing the very obvious differences between North and South Korea when lit up at night - that was a national border visible from space).

This is a different form of the Overview Effect, which involves seeing instead the stability and resilience of human culture, its ability to take raw telluric materials and build them into a human signature on the planet: mark the planet as cultural rather than natural, when seen from space. And potentially when seen by outsiders approaching from space, seeking the evidence of sentient actions. (There might be a few clues before then. I talk about this in 'The Abandoned Solar System')

This brings us to the concept of Outstanding Universal Value, which is the basic criterion for achieving World Heritage status. A natural or cultural place has to have heritage value potentially for the entire human species. It's a big call. But if any cultural feature could be said to have it, it would be something so monumental it could be seen from space - by us, or by another species.

And: at some point in the future, we may have to consider what it means if human-made structures or environmental impacts are visible on the Moon, from Earth.

References
The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley (1887) Vol. 3, p. 142. (1754)

Norman, Henry 1895 The Peoples and Politics of the Far East, p. 215.

The Declaration of the Rights of the Moon

 

We the people of Earth -

Acknowledging the unique, intact, interconnected lunar environments and landscapes which exist on the Moon;

Acknowledging the ancient, primordial relationship between Earth and the Moon;

Mindful of how much is still unknown about the co-origins of Earth and the Moon;

Aware that the Moon is critically important to the healthy functioning of the Earth System, and is a vital sustaining component of all life on Earth;

Aware that the Moon holds deep cultural and spiritual meaning for human beings;

Acknowledging that the cycles of the Moon have enabled life itself to evolve on Earth;

Mindful of the immeasurable value the Moon holds as a repository of deep time and connection among all beings who have ever lived on Earth, since its features have remained almost unchanged since time immemorial;

Conscious that wealthy nations and corporations are developing technologies that may make it possible to return to, live on, mine and otherwise alter the Moon;

Aware of humanity’s impact on the Earth - causing ecosystem collapse, a new era of mass species extinction and global climate change - and seeking to avoid destruction and change to the natural systems and ecosystems of the Moon,

Declare that -

1. The Moon – which consists of but is not limited to: its surface and subsurface landscapes including mountains and craters, rocks and boulders, regolith, dust, mantle, core, minerals, gases, water, ice, boundary exosphere, surrounding lunar orbits, cislunar space – is a sovereign natural entity in its own right and, in accordance with established international space law, no nation, entity, or individual of Earth may assert ownership or territorial sovereignty of the Moon.
2. The Moon possesses fundamental rights, which arise from its existence in the universe, including:
• (a) the right to exist, persist and continue its vital cycles unaltered, unharmed and unpolluted by human beings;
• (b) the right to maintain ecological integrity;
• (c) the right to be defined as a self-sustaining, intelligent, cohesive, intact lunar ecosystem, beyond current human comprehension;
• (d) the right to independently maintain its own life-sustaining relationship with the Earth’s environments and living creatures; and
• (e) the right to remain a forever peaceful celestial entity, unmarred by human conflict or warfare.

Background

The Moon has been a constant feature of human existence since the time of our earliest ancestors, illuminating the night, regulating cultural activities, and inspiring science, knowledge and belief.

Since the development of the technology to travel into space over 80 years ago, the Moon has also come to be regarded as a resource for use by humans. International space treaties such as the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 proclaim that the Moon is part of the common province of humanity and not subject to territorial claims. Nevertheless, space agencies and private corporations are proposing to extract lunar resources for profit.

There are many legal and ethical complexities around lunar mining but underlying them is the common space community belief that the Moon is a dead world toward which we have no moral obligation. This view is at odds with public beliefs about the cultural and natural significance of the Moon. It also contrasts with a growing movement on Earth recognising the rights of nature, which has seen entities such as the Whanganui River in New Zealand granted legal personhood. There is mounting scientific evidence that the Moon has dynamic ongoing geological and cosmic processes. Given the acceleration of planned missions to the lunar surface, it is timely to question the instrumental approach which subordinates this ancient celestial body to human interests.

A few years ago, landscape architect Thomas Gooch, Director of the Office of Other Spaces, started running public forums to discuss how we should understand our relationship with the Moon, as part of his work with the Moon Village Association (MVA), an international NGO based in Vienna. The MVA is committed to ethical and sustainable engagement with the Moon. The last of these forums, in August 2020, considered whether the Moon could be granted legal personality as a way to acknowledge that the Moon had an existence of its own separate from human perceptions. Watch the recording of the forum below.

The forums led to a discussion between Dr Michelle Maloney (National Convenor, Australian Earth Law Alliance), Ceridwen Dovey (space researcher and writer), Alice Gorman (space archaeologist), Mari Margil (Executive Director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, US) and Thomas Gooch, about creating a Declaration of the Rights of the Moon. One issue was clear: as the Moon held such importance for the people and non-humans of Earth, it was imperative to consult widely and gain as much input as possible. However, there had to be some starting point to open the discussion. Slowly the idea that the group would draft such a declaration was born.

Over the course of a year, the group met regularly to define and refine the necessary concepts. The Draft we have created here is the end result. But it’s really just a beginning – a way to start the discussion at a global level. We don’t know how this declaration will evolve, but your participation is a key part of the process.

In the 1870s, Flaubert predicts space travel by balloon

'BALLOONS: With balloons, we'll end up going to the moon. We're not about to control them.'

Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas (1870s)

Illustration, "Blanchard's Balloon" from Wonderful Ballon Ascents, took off on March 2, 1784 near the Ecole Militaire at Champ-de-Mars, Paris, France. Date: 1870. Source: Wikimedia Commons

An archaeological survey of Earth orbit.

Sometimes people say that a problem with space archaeology is that we can't just pop into orbit or to the Moon for a season of fieldwork, and collect data in the usual way. How can you do archaeology without the quintessential archaeological activities of excavation and survey? Aren't we just the much-maligned 'armchair archaeologists'?

In answer to which I give you:

Cartoon by Robert Mankoff. Image courtesy of the New Yorker

There's nothing wrong with a comfy armchair, if you ask me. They're good places for thinking. And cups of tea, with maybe cake too, or a fluffy lamington, or a delicious Iced VoVo, every space archaeologist's biscuit of choice.

The first archaeological surveys in orbit

However, surveys using remote sensing are now standard in archaeology. This involves both geophysical surveys - sending different signals into the ground to detect metal objects, cuts and cavities - and aerial or satellite surveys to locate and map sites, using optical or multispectral data collected from UAVs, aeroplanes or satellites in Earth orbit.

When considered from this perspective, it turns out that archaeological surveys of human material in Earth orbit have been conducted since the beginning of the space age, using antennas and optical telescopes of multitudinous configurations to locate and track spacecraft and space junk. (In orbital archaeology, tracking is the equivalent of mapping a site). Rather than turning a sensor towards the Earth, these eyes and ears look towards the heavens.

The first such survey had two artefacts as its target - Explorer 1 and Sputnik 1 in the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58. You could say that this was the turning point, when space ceased to be a purely 'natural' environment and became a cultural landscape. First it was just the one satellite, a small blip for three months. Sputnik 1 orbited from 4 October 1957 to 4 January 1958. Between 4 October and 3 November when Sputnik 2 was launched, Sputnik 1 was the only artefact of its kind in all the solar system - just think of that! 

The survey team, if we can call it that, consisted of human and mechanical observers. The human observers were the volunteer brigades of Project Moonwatch. The brainchild of Professor Fred Whipple of the the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the Moonwatchers were teams established in 27 countries to look for and visually track the first satellites. Patrick McCray has written a wonderful book about them.

The mechanical observers were the antennas and cameras set up just to look for satellites. There were the Minitrack interferometers, of which there were 14 across the US, South America, South Africa and Australia. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory set up a network of 12 Baker-Nunn cameras, not just for satellites but also natural objects in Earth orbit. The cameras were located in Argentina, Curacao, India, Iran, Japan, Peru, South Africa, Spain, US and Australia - where Woomera was one of the few locations to have both a Minitrack and a Baker-Nunn.

The USSR KIK network was developed from the ground tracking stations of the R-7 rocket, an intercontinental ballistic missile that was the launcher for Sputnik 1. There were 13 ground stations, all within the USSR. Now this is an interesting point, because the Vanguard satellite project was designed explicitly to disguise its military origins; hence their tracking network was not simply an adaptation of a defence one. The USSR was not so concerned about 'military taint'.

On 31st January 1958, Explorer 1 poked its head above the ionosphere and joined Sputnik 2. Just the two of them. Vanguard 1 was launched on St Patrick's Day on the 17 March, and then there were three. A bit less than a month later, Sputnik 2 re-entered on 14 April, and it was down to two satellites again. All that infrastructure for two little blips in the sky.

Sieving the sky

Since that time, the number of instruments surveying the sky for human artefacts has increased exponentially, as have their targets. It's not just whole satellites any more; it's also the fragments, of which there are millions. In fact, you could say that the tracking instruments are like the nested sieves archaeologists are accustomed to use in excavations. Usually, you screen the dirt through a top mesh which is 5 or 7 mm. This catches the larger artefacts. Beneath it is a smaller mesh, usually 2 mm. This catches the smaller pieces. Everything else falls through and becomes part of the spoil heap. If you use even smaller sieves, or flotation tanks, you can recover pollen and other microscopic objects.

This is very like how observation of space junk from Earth happens. Most of the optical or radar tracking instruments can only 'see' pieces 10 cm or above. This is the top sieve. Others can 'see' smaller pieces - these tend to be lasers, or beam park instruments. This is the 2 mm sieve.

The analogy is even more apt when you consider that artefacts larger than 5 mm can slip through the top mesh, depending on their angle. Angle and cross-sectional area are also factors in how visible a bit of space junk is from the ground.

In archaeology the artefacts are often fragments, or by-products of manufacture. Sometimes we piece the bits back together to form a whole stone tool, or a ceramic vessel. Sometimes we use them to calculate the weight of a particular material in that excavation unit. For your edification, I can tell you that the weight of human material in Earth orbit is the equivalent of 10 million cane toads.

You could divide space objects into active and passive. The artefacts we excavate from the ground don't usually tell us where they are. If you're using a magnetometer, though, metal artefacts will reflect a signal back to your instrument above the ground. This is a passive signal. Functioning satellites are not your usual artefacts, in that they're often actively emitting signals that you can tune into.

Robot archaeologists

Terrestrial space object tracking could be recast as a kind of archaeological survey. But imagine an archaeological survey of orbital space done remotely using cameras mounted on other spacecraft. There are a few companies, such as HEO, who are imaging spacecraft on-orbit. 

The International Space Station, taken from orbit. Image courtesy of HEO

Does thus change our perception of what orbital debris is? Of course you would need a robust optical sample, and there are still many limitations of these camera surveys. 

All of this is just to say the inability to do fieldwork in space does not invalidate us as archaeologists, and indeed gives the discipline a deeper lineage. Using remote sensing to collect archaeological data has a long history. So does using remote sensing from Earth-based instruments to survey the sky - including human artefacts.

References

Bonnal, Christophe 2025 The proliferation of space debris in Earth's orbit. Polytechnique Insights 12 February

Centre for Invasive Species Solutions (2012) Overview of the cane toad. Factsheet. PestSmart website. https://pestsmart.org.au/toolkit-resource/overview-of-the-cane-toad accessed 06-09-2025

Lavatime: day, night and dreams in a lunar lava tube (excerpt)

This is the opening four paragraphs of a short story, which was shortlisted in the 2024 Minds Shine Bright Light and Shadow international literary competition. The story is about how the protagonist lets go of Earth and commits herself to the Moon, with some nefarious activity along the way.    

Lavatime

    Waking up on the Moon was a process of adjustment. Sleep was such a terrestrial phenomenon, she had decided. In the transition before her eyes opened, she always felt herself to be still ‘at home’, in the Earth bedroom, the Earth bed with the pale green satin quilt that no longer existed. It was a moment of disorientation before she became fully conscious of where she was. 

    The residues of bright trees fled from her dreams. She could set her room’s ‘window’ to show any view she liked from Earth — such earthly connections were held to be beneficial for the mental health of the lunarians — but somehow these digital forests seemed less real than the trees formed solely inside her sleeping brain. Hers were usually eucalypts with long glossy leaves and piebald cream-and-brown trunks. Sometimes the hum of insects hung in the leaves, barely leaving an imprint in her mind as the regular morning sounds of the lunar habitat started to overwrite them. 

    So she did not usually turn the window on to Earth. She preferred the live feed to the surface. Not many of her colleagues did, she knew; but somehow this made the Moon real for her, stabilising her here. The unchanging, silent, grey surface was an anchor to a reality that grew further and further away from Earth the longer she stayed. 

    The surface was never as still or boring as the others believed, though. Over 15 Earth days, the angle of the sunlight slowly changed, and she saw the plain, strewn with rough boulders, reveal different contours and textures to her gaze. It was quite dynamic really, if snail-slow in its progress sometimes. Time was such a moveable feast on the Moon. Inside the lava tube, they worked to a local clock which matched circadian rhythms, aided by artificial light and dark; they communicated with Earth using UTC; and they pitted themselves against the implacable force of the long lunar day, which would have frozen them in its dawn and boiled them at its noon. Of the lunar night they did not speak.

Lava tube entrance. Image credit: NASA / Goddard / Arizona State University

Reference 

Gorman, A.C. 2025 Lavatime. In Amanda Scotney (ed) Light and Shadow. Minds Shine Bright International Creative Writing Anthology Seasons 2, pp 109-114. Windsor, Vic: Minds Shine Bright

Purchase a copy here.

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank Amanda Scotney for tracking me down when I was ill, and including me in the public events around the anthology, and my esteemed colleague Lynley Wallis for providing valuable feedback and encouragement!

What is space archaeology?

I made a little, very amateurish, animation explaining what space archaeology is.

 

Pale blue dot: everyday material culture on the International Space Station

The most ordinary objects sometimes end up in extraordinary contexts. Who would have thought that the humble resealable (or snap lock/ziplock/ziploc) plastic bag was a space traveler?

Tom Marshburn, Roman Romanenko and Evgeny Tarelkin, Expedition 43. Ziplock bags filled with fruit and vegetables float in the air around them. Image credit: NASA

In this image, taken on board the International Space Station in 2012, the astronaut and cosmonauts are looking very excited. That’s because they’ve just received a rare delivery of fresh food – carrots, capsicum, grapes, and blueberries. If the photo had been taken on Earth, you might have thought they were juggling; but juggling isn’t something you can do in a microgravity environment. The food is packaged in perfectly ordinary ziplock bags, each with a blue velcro dot attached. There seems to be three sizes represented. They’re not the kind of bags archaeologists and geologists use, with the white stripes to write labels on.

The ziplock bags mark this food immediately as different, as most astronaut food is in vacuum-sealed metallic pouches. The image raises a number of questions. Are the ziplock bags as ordinary as I presume, or are they special space bags? What happens to the bags once their contents are consumed? Do they become trash, returned to Earth, or are they recycled and used in different contexts in the space station?

If the latter, we might expect that a re-used bag might start to look cloudy over time, just as they do in our own kitchens. (There is something slightly pathetic about a worn ziplock bag). So it should be possible to monitor the condition of bags throughout the space station to work out how often their contents and use have been changed. And of course we’d have to find out how many each expedition has at their disposal. Indications are that they are abundant.

A kitchen in orbit

Below you can see astronaut Sandy Magnus cooking on Expedition 18, in 2008. Ziplock bags were her mixing bowls. The seal on the bags prevented the ingredients from floating away as she combined garlic, olives and sun-dried tomatoes. Her only equipment in this improvised space kitchen – there are galley areas on the ISS but no facilities for cooking as such – was a blunt pocket knife, the bags, and duct tape to

hold the chopped ingredients down. You can also see the duct tape on one of the bags in this image.

Sandy Magnus, Expedition 18. She holds two ziplock bags filled with cooking ingredients. Image credit: NASA

To get the ingredients she needed, Sandy had to plan well in advance before she left Earth, and experiment a bit on fellow crew members to make sure her recipes and her mise-en-place worked. It was like a MasterChef challenge.

The use of the bags, usually for storage, as a mixing bowl, is an adaptation of an artefact intended for one purpose for another. Vicky Kloeris, the manager of ISS food systems during Sandy’s stint, noted that Sandy “found ways to use things beyond their original intentions”.

Perhaps these are bags recycled from the fresh food delivery. When did the practice of using the bags for cooking begin? Is this a practice initiated by the astronauts and cosmonauts themselves to add variety – and a measure of self-determination – to their restricted diet? What other options might there have been for mixing ingredients?

Cooking is an everyday activity in Earth gravity but is not a feature of orbital life. Why go to all this effort to do something that requires so much planning, with perhaps dubious results? It wasn’t about the taste or nutritional value of the food; it was more about a social concept. The feeling of home is important to people, and food is a big part of that – just as it is on Earth. As Sandy Magnus observed, “Special occasions have special food and our world revolves around eating food. Being able to have special dishes on Christmas and New Year’s made it feel more like home.”

Hang on – what was that about pocket knives? Do astronauts really use pocket knives and not some fancy sonic knife? It turns out they do. Here’s a red pocket knife lying on a galley surface, in a picture taken by Scott Kelly on Expedition 43 in 2015.

A table set for three. Galley table showing straps to secure objects, velcro tapes, foil food packets, and miscellaneous objects. Image credit: NASA

Here you also see food pouches, three pairs of scissors and small snap lock bags which look like they might have pills inside them. Note that one of the pill bags is velcroed down using the blue dot. The scissors are essential flatware for space; they are used for cutting open the outer food packaging. This seems to be a table set for three. To terrestrial eyes, it looks perhaps more like a medical clinic than a dining room.

A versatile container

It’s not all about food, thought. Ziplock bags are used for a range of purposes on the ISS, such as:

• Space ‘barf bags’ to deal with the common problem of space sickness
• Rubbish bags
• Sample bags (for human medical samples I believe)
• Growing fresh vegetables
• To stow parts eg lids, cables during repair and maintenance of equipment
• Scientific experiments
• Tool kits

Here’s a gyro repair tool kit in its official, inventoried zip lock bags. Notice the specification of the restraint – velcro – to keep each bag inside the kit from drifting away as it’s put to use. This is the blue dots again. Someone on Earth must have the job of sticking the dots onto everything.

This one is even flame retardant! The white velcro squares are attached in the four corners of the bag, which can then be stuck onto velcro strips on the Space Station’s surfaces. Restraining objects is one of the challenges of living in microgravity. This is how astronaut Garrett Reisman described it in 2008:

One of the things about working in zero gravity is you can’t put anything down. That’s really an issue. Just think about trying to work on your car, because when we’re doing maintenance work on the Space Station it’s kind of like working on a car. Every time you unscrew a bolt, you can’t just put it down; you have to put it into a zip lock bag, or tape it somewhere, or Velcro it to a wall. If you just let go of it, or you turn your back on it, it may be gone when you turn back around again and good luck finding it because it’s hard to find things up there. So that’s a unique challenge up there. It makes it very easy to lose stuff, and it takes a long time in the beginning until you get good at managing all the parts.

The bag is an essential mechanism for recreating a feature of the Earth gravity environment that we are so used to we don’t even remark upon it. It carves up a tiny bit of the directionless space into a sort of gravity surrogate. Who knew that this flimsy piece of polyethylene could replace the relentless pull of the Earth’s mass?

The ziplock bag has a number of ‘affordances’ that enhance its usefulness in microgravity. It’s flexible, lightweight, transparent, resusable and sealable. Now that I reflect upon it, I can see that the white-label-strip bags we archaeologists often use are not the best choice for space. The strips obscure the contents for a start. And once written on, the label is not easy to remove, reducing the bag’s recyclability.

But what does this all mean?

From the pictures, you can see that there is a variety of ziplock bags in circulation aboard the ISS. Their use ranges from very particular and prescribed, to very ad hoc and informal. A question I immediately want to ask is how easily the bags move between these categories and what the behavioural constraints around them are.

Space stations have to achieve a balance between all sorts of contradictory conditions. They have to be a home where people live, but situated inside a giant scientific laboratory with little privacy; they have to use the lack of up and down to make good use of limited space, but also make astronauts comfortable and productive; they have to use technologies designed and tested on Earth to make people function in microgravity.

The ziplock bag opens up questions about how astronauts use material culture to navigate these contradictions. They’re the kind of material culture that people tend not to notice; they’re just background environment, cheap, abundant, disposable. But here we see them playing an important role in the everyday life of the crew.

It’s for this very reason that an archaeological approach to ISS material culture might bring new insights into life in space. This is why Justin Walsh and I are looking at how astronauts create their own cultures in this remote and closed world. One day there might be a space society which cannot exchange material with Earth. Then, every artefact might be the one that makes or breaks a new planetary culture.

For more information on the Archaeology of the International Space Station, you can follow us on Twitter @ISSArchaeology, on Facebook or keep up to date on our blog. Justin St Walsh has contributed to Day of Archaeology here.

Sunflower seedling, sprouting out of a hole in the corner of the bottom edge of a ziplock bag with water in it, floating in microgravity. Grown by Don Petit. Image credit: NASA

Notes 

This essay was originally written for The Day of Archaeology in 2017. All the DoA posts are archived by the Archaeological Data Service, where you can download them as pdfs. However, I wanted to have it online where it could be easily read so I have reproduced it here. The original in-text links no longer exist. I have left them flagged in the text, however, in green, so you can see where they would have been. There are still plenty of articles online about Sandy Magnus and her microgravity cuisine, just not the ones I quoted from!

I have added more detail to the figure captions to serve as alt-text.

To cite the original article:

Gorman, A.C. 2017 Pale blue dot: everyday material culture on the International Space Station. Day of Archaeology, 28 July