From Earthrise to Artemis II: new ways of seeing the Moon

The Apollo 8 mission in 1968, the first time humans had orbited the Moon, is most famous for producing the Earthrise photo credited with kick-starting environmental activism.

Earthrise was taken by Bill Anders as the spacecraft flew over the far side of the Moon, the first time it had been seen with human eyes. People are entranced by the rising blue Earth, half in shadow, and the image has been analysed and written about countless times. Of course we have to remember that the photograph does not necessarily show the colours that human eyes saw. Nevertheless, the image painted Earth as beautiful, while the Moon was ugly.

The eye is drawn to the blue and white Earth. It seems a fragile sphere of light and life, contrasted with the hard, rocky monochrome surface of the Moon. But what about this surface underneath? This is what I want to explore in this post.

Under Old Earth

If we draw our gaze away from Earth and down to the Moon, what do we see? 

The surface is sort of a mild beige colour with white highlights. It's not smooth, but gently undulating. This is because the photo was taken at sub-solar point, so there's no shadows, like midday on Earth. When the sun is high, the Moon tends to take on browner hues. The craters visible at other times of day aren't so prominent: we depend on the shadows to see depth and elevation. 

The main geological formation is Pasteur crater, which is 233 km in diameter. Crater Pasteur T, 40 km in diameter, is a 'satellite crater' located on the west side of Pasteur. The satellite craters were created by later impacts. There's at least 14 which have a letter designation. Apollo 8 passed over many of them.

Pasteur T was renamed 'Anders' Earthrise' on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission in 2018. Ganskiy M crater, 12.5 km in diameter. was renamed 'Homeward 8'. It was at this point that the spacecraft fired its engines to begin the return journey to Earth.

The Earthrise landscape with the renamed craters. Credit: NASA/IAU

The Earthrise landscape, flat. Credit: NASA/IAU

On Apollo 8's first orbit, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Bormann made their first observations of the Moon close-up with human eyes. 

These days we see a lunar landscape and just assume that the round features we're looking at are impact craters, but this wasn't always the case. Before NASA's lunar exploration programme began in the 1960s, there was debate about whether the circular topography observed was created by volcanic events - inside the Moon - or impact events - from outside the Moon. By the time of Apollo 8, the meteorite theory was gaining ascendance. Bill Anders referred to this when he said 'Whew! Well, we answered it. They're meteorites, aren't they?' (069:15:17).

The astronauts' impressions of the lunar landscape are recorded in the transcript of their conversations with each other and mission control. I've accessed these through the incredible resource which is the Apollo Lunar Flight Journal.

Dirty beach sand

As the astronauts responded to the view on their first lunar encounter, Anders said, 'It looks like a big - looks like a big beach down there' (069:15:24). They were looking at the far side. A commentator on the Apollo 8 transcript said that the far side had a distinct appearance, compared to the near side:

Instead, this landscape is a beat-up mish-mash of overlapping large craters whose ancient forms have been smoothed by aeons of relentless sandblasting from space. Its rounded, undulating topography reminds Bill of a sandy beach which has seen the passage of many feet.

Lovell commented on how grey it was (069:18:08), and later he emphasised this again: "Okay, Houston. The Moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand" (069:51:16). This became the dominant metaphor, and both Lovell and Anders mentioned it again on their second orbit as they were passing over the Pasteur region: 

Lovell: "Say, Bill. How would you describe the color of the Moon from here?" (071:44:10). Anders: The color of the Moon looks, ah, a very whitish gray, like dirty beach sand, and with lots of footprints in it" (071:44:14). 

Of course there were no footprints on the surface of the Moon yet, and if there were they wouldn't have been distinguishable at 70 km anyway. The Apollo 8 astronauts would've had no idea just how significant footprints in the regolith would become in lunar iconographies. 

And this was a beach with no water. It had the appearance of a beach with none of the geological processes which created one.

I wondered if there was any particular dirty beach that Anders had in mind. In an interview done with Ron Judd when he was 79, Anders recalled 'a California beach where he used to sneak off with Valerie', his wife, as his inspiration. This might refer to his period at Hamilton Air Force Base in 1956, when he and Valerie were either not yet married, or newly married, which might account for the sneaking off. The base was located on San Pablo Bay, which is a tidal estuary; so the beaches were not on the open ocean - they were where the rivers gave out to the sea. By 'dirty beach sand', Anders may have meant the tidal beaches along the edges of the bay, grey river silt.

Satellite picture of San Pablo Bay, Carquinez Strait, and Suisun Bay 
©2004 Matthew Trump, adapted from public domain NASA satellite photo.

I haven't been able to find any good images of the area in the 1950s to illustrate this, so it is a theory at the moment, but it's worth thinking about the metaphor of a grey silty river beach rather than polluted ocean sand. The comparison Anders is making is not that the Moon is a dirty beach compared to pristine yellow or white ocean beaches on Earth. The comparison is between a tidal riverine beach and an open ocean beach; so I think this is quite a different sort of metaphor. We might imagine the footprints, as Anders imagined the small craters overlying Pasteur T, as those of the young lovers as they walked along hand-in-hand.

And the orbits rolled by

When you see the Earthrise photo, the Moon is static and the unseen spacecraft is hanging frozen above it. The camera shutter has barely closed. Time has stopped. It's easy to forget how dynamic the moment was. The Apollo 8 astronauts saw the lunar surface in motion, at all points of the day and night, as shadows lengthened and shortened. 

The Apollo 8 mission showed us Earthrise on the Moon, but perhaps equally significant is that it showed us sunrise and sunset on the Moon through human eyes. They took images of the terminator as it passed over crater Mechnikov, light and shadows turning to pure black as they whirled into lunar night. Nightfall on another planet! Such a mundane, daily experience on Earth, but here, strange and otherworldly.

They saw a rich and dynamic shadow landscape created by the depths and heights of craters and seas and mountains and rilles. Many of the craters had names, and they could correlate them with the maps that they had studied on Earth. They made a roll-call of craters as they flew over them. The static Earthrise photo contributes to the impression of a dead Moon because none of this movement is captured in it. 

The colours and textures changed as they spun past, but the astronauts persisted in their interpretation of lifelessness and nothingness, which have come to dominate how people understand the Moon. Lovell said 'We don't know whether you can see it from the TV screen, but the Moon is nothing but a milky white. Completely void' (085:44:28). 

During a live broadcast to Earth, Borman said 'What we'll do now is follow the trail that we've been following all day and take you on through to a lunar sunset. The Moon is a different thing to each one of us. I think that each one of - each one carries his own impression of what he's seen today. I know my own impression is that it's a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence, or expanse of nothing, that looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone...' (085:44:58).

Who else has seen this landscape?

Of course, Apollo 8 has not been our only view of this landscape. It existed before and it will exist after Earthrise .... it's dynamic, with the Earth in motion continuously. There are Earthrises and Earthsets every day.

The Soviet orbiter Luna 3 sent back the first images of the far side in 1959. In 1961, the International Astronomical Union named a crater photographed by Luna 3 'Pasteur', but it was not well defined.

The first US lunar orbiters, Lunar Orbiter 1 and Lunar Orbiter 2, launched in 1966, got coverage of nearly the whole Moon. LO1 took the first robotic photograph of an Earthrise, but it was in black and white.  LO2  photographed Pasteur crater from 1, 790 km.

Pasteur crater taken by Lunar Orbiter 2. Credit: James Stuby based on NASA image

The Soviet Zond 5 and 6 spacecraft flew round the Moon in September and November 1968, and seem to have taken photographs. But the region was still vaguely defined by the time Apollo 8 went past. The crew's unofficial name for Pasteur was Borman. After the mission, Apollo 8 data was used by the IAU to firm up names for landscape features and Pasteur became official.

Apollo 15 snapped the Earthrise landscape (I'm going to call it this from now on) from orbit in 1971. Apollo 17 photographed it in 1972, from an oblique angle. You can see the little craters that looked like footprints to Anders.

Oblique view of Anders' Earthrise crater, facing west. Taken by Apollo 17 panoramic camera. Credit: James Stuby based on NASA image

There have been other lunar orbiters too, like Clementine, which orbited briefly in 1994, and the Japanese Kaguya, launched to the Moon in 2007. Kaguya took many photos of Earthrise and Earthset but I'm not sure if any of them were over Pasteur. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched by NASA in 2009. It has mapped the Earthrise landscape during multiple passes, using the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument. 

If we went trawling through the archives we would no doubt find the Earthrise landscape in many different lights and moods, taken by different spacecraft at different distances from the lunar surface. 

A Site of Special Scientific Interest?

In 2025, Working Group 1 of the Global Expert Group for Sustainable Lunar Activity (GEGSLA) proposed that Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) should be identified on the Moon. One of the categories was radio-quiet areas, which need to be protected so that radio astronomy can be carried out. The far side is ideal for this as it is shielded from the radio pollution coming from Earth. It's vital that areas of the far side are sequestered from radio interference created by future lunar satellites, industries and permanent bases - before it's too late.

The Earthrise landscape is potentially one of these areas. In 2024, ESA's JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) spacecraft flew past the Earthrise landscape and used it to test the Radar for Icy Moon Exploration (RIME) instrument. This instrument uses radar to measure the topology of rocky bodies. To get good results, RIME needs to measure precisely the differences in how radio waves bounce back from the surface - for example, from the rocks underlying Europa's oceans. It needed radio quiet, and the far side of the Moon was ideal to test this. All the other instruments were turned off for eight minutes so there was complete radio silence. The RIME instrument's results were assessed against LOLA's measurements to make sure it was working properly. It was so radio quiet that all they could hear was noise from one of the other instruments - which ESA then had to fix before the spacecraft continued its journey to the moons of Jupiter!

The combination of scientific utility and cultural associations gives the Earthrise landscape exceptional natural and cultural value. I'm not going to do a formal significance assessment in this post, but will note that multiple strands of significance converge on this place. Perhaps this makes the Earthrise landscape a good candidate for a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

The eyes of Artemis II 

Bill Anders famously said 'We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.'

The economist Barbara Ward, author of Spaceship Earth and one of the founders of sustainable development, was filled with optimism:

Above all, we are the generation to see through the eyes of the astronauts the astonishing ‘earthrise’ of our small and beautiful planet above the barren horizons of the moon. Indeed, we in this generation would be some kind of psychological monstrosity if this were not an age of intense, passionate, committed debate and search.

She saw Earthrise playing a role in the foundation of a 'moral community' that would enable a more equitable distribution of the planet’s wealth. 

We've seen Earthrise now. We've seen many views of Earth from outside and many views of the lunar surface. Earthrise still has the power to astonish, but it has not led to the radical change in attitudes towards Earth's fragile environment that it heralded. 

Apollo 8 orbited at about 100 km, while Artemis II, planned to launch from the US on April 1, 2026, will see the Moon from around 7, 600 km. It won't be a similar perspective. But, for the first time, it won't be a white American male gaze either. The 4-person crew includes a woman (Christina Koch), a Canadian (Jeremy Hansen), and a person of colour (Victor Glover). All of the crew, except Jeremy Hansen, have been in space before. They've seen Earth. Now, they'll see the Moon, with all the hindsight of the nearly 60 years of space activities since 1968, knowing that there are plans to mine its resources and build infrastructure to sustain more permanent human residence. They'll be taking photos - more details about the spacecraft's cameras are here - and talking about what they see. I don't know if or when we'll get that transcript. But I want to know what the crew say, what their emotional response will be.

What I'm looking for from Artemis II is a not a new Earth. It's a new revelation of the Moon - or at least the start of one. 

I don't want to expect too much of the crew. They shouldn't have to have the burden of being profound as well as doing their jobs, but I am hopeful that they won't simply replicate the Apollo 8 mantra of the desolate, barren Moon. I'd like to see a vision of the Moon as part of the Earth system, not the almost adversarial relationship that Earthrise set up. 

To my mind, there's another significant image taken by Apollo 8 that hasn't received much attention. During an attitude change, the spacecraft was pointing away from the Moon and looking beyond Earth, which appears in the lower left corner. Earth is not the focus of the image. It's decentred from its place at our core. Instead, we're looking into the blackness of space and out to the solar system beyond. It' a Copernican rather than a Ptolemaic vision.

Earth, photographed from Apollo 8 during attitude change at 075:58:38. Credit: NASA

It reminds me of something that James Clerk Maxwell said in Matter and Motion, published in 1876.

There are no landmarks in space; one portion of space is exactly like every other portion, so that we cannot tell where we are. We are, as it were, on an unruffied sea, without stars, compass, sounding, wind or tide, and we cannot tell in what direction we are going. 

 

Planetarity and the technosphere: a ‘planetary turn’ for archaeology

I propose that a ‘planetary turn’ in archaeology is imminent and timely. At the same time as space archaeology was emerging as a discipline in the early 2000s, the influential theorist Gayatri Spivak put forward the concept of planetarity as a counter to globalisation, describing it as ‘the intuition that the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system’ (2003). Anthropocene and SETI scholars have since reconfigured the planetary system as a technosphere which erodes the boundaries between nature and culture. On Earth, the technosphere is three trillion tons of human-manufactured material which acts as a dynamic ecosystem at the planetary scale. 

A planetary turn both centres and decentres the planet as a unit of analysis. It rejects the philosophy of the ‘Overview Effect’, ‘Spaceship Earth’ and the ‘Pale Blue Dot’, which emphasise a united humanity on a planet which is our only home, to highlight instead the uncanniness of the familiar made unfamiliar. It invites archaeological geocentrism to become Copernican, to see terrestrial conditions as only one instance in a plurality of worlds.

Note: this is my panel abstract for the AusTAG conference, Adelaide University, May 22-23, 2026. Panelists are Associate Professor Alice Gorman, Professor Tracy Ireland and Dr Sean Williams.

References

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003 Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press

Space heritage: towards an international agreement

This is a talk I gave in 2010 - 15 years ago - at the Asia-Pacific Regional Space Agency Forum in Melbourne. At this time, there was no hint that the Moon would become the renewed target of exploration. Some people, across the both space and archaeology sectors, thought what I was doing was stupid. Some made this very clear to me! Indeed, one of the Japanese delegates at the forum attacked me viciously in the question time after my presentation. (It was so vicious that one of his colleagues apologised to me afterwards). Anyway, as how to manage heritage values in space is a hot topic in the space community now, it seems my ideas have merit after all. So here are my slides from all those years ago.

 

References

Australia ICOMOS Charter for the Conservation of Places of Cultural Significance (the Burra Charter) https://australia.icomos.org/publications/burra-charter-practice-notes/

Baslar K. 1997 The Concept of the Common Heritage of Mankind in International Law. Kluwer Law International

Grego, Laura and David Wright 2010 Securing the Skies. Ten Steps the United States Should Take to Improve the Security and Sustainability of Space. Union of Concerned Scientists 

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

10 talks by space archaeologists

These are 10 videos by space archaeologists that you might find interesting to watch if you want to know more about the field.

There's all sorts of AI slop out there now about space archaeology, which I kind of take as a good sign, because it means we're worth talking about! I analyse a few of these AI videos in this post and this one. The weirdest thing is hearing your work discussed as if you're not a real person, just some disembodied nameless presence. So here's what the real space archaeologists have to say!

1. What is space archaeology all about? In this TEDxSydney talk, I share my journey from regular archaeologist to space archaeologist, what I think some of the big issues are, and a few favourites places and artefacts (2013).

2.  I used to be a heritage consultant working in mining industry. Here I apply terrestrial principles of environmental impact assessment to managing heritage values in lunar and asteroid mining (2013).

3. Lunar sites as archaeology and heritage: the pioneer of space archaeology, Beth Laura O'Leary, talks about the cultural significance of the Apollo 11 human landing site and how it can be protected at the international level (2014).

4. Beth Laura O'Leary talks about archaeology on the Moon and her groundbreaking Lunar Legacy Project, which was published in 2000 – over 25 years ago (2015).

5. Why do people want to mine the Moon, and what impact will industrial activity have on lunar heritage sites? Sticky, abrasive dust is a big issue – and we need an environmental impact assessment process that includes cultural and natural heritage (2019).

6. Imagine if our solar system was abandoned, and a team of alien archaeologists approached it from the outside to learn about human culture. What would they find? (2019).

7. How do you do space archaeology if you can’t dig? Director of the International Space Station Archaeological Project, Justin Walsh, talks about how machine learning is used to study the material culture of living in space (2021).

8. "To Boldly Go Where No Archaeologist Has Gone Before" – Justin Walsh talks about what space archaeology is and how archaeological methods and theories have been used to get novel results about how humans adapt to space, particularly on the International Space Station (2022).

9. Archaeologist Shawn Graham from Carleton University talks about Canada’s space archaeology record, and how he built an innovative database for the International Space Station Archaeological Project (2023).

10. Justin Walsh talks about the first archaeological fieldwork ever done in space, the SQuARE project on the International Space Station (2024).

I hope you enjoy these insights into space archaeology. Stay tuned for more!

Space cowboys. The Wild West and the myth of the American hero.

This article, requested by Susan McMichael who was the editor of the literary magazine The New England Review, was almost the first thing I wrote about space, back in 2005! Reading it now, I find that many of the themes that I'm still writing about today are already present. The New England Review doesn't seem to exist any more and its archives are not digitised. (A poor-quality pdf is on my Academia site but I thunk you have to be signed up to see it). So I thought I would put the text here for those interested. I've added lots of pics and links too.

At the time I made a concerted effort to find the appropriate terminology around Indigenous people in the US, but much has changed in 20 years, so apologies for what I've got wrong. (This is the original text, I haven't edited it). I would never use the term 'nomadic' now; it is too loaded. Nor would I apply the concept of terra nullius to space. The anecdote at the end has been recounted in many forms; it's almost an 'urban legend' and is meant to satirise the anthropologists, but I'm aware it may come across differently now. I included it here because it shows how the Moon is not an empty land.

The article was inspired by my visit to Las Cruces in 2003, where I stayed with my friend and colleague Beth Laura O"Leary. I'm grateful to her for the inspiration and support.

Original citation: Gorman, A.C. 2005 Space cowboys: the Wild West and the myth of the American hero. The New England Review February, pp 10-12 

Aussie kids, American culture 

The game of Cowboys and Indians was played in countless Australian backyards in my childhood. My brothers had sheriffs’ badges, little fringed leather chaps and vests, cowboy hats, and toy pistols. A few chook or galah feathers, and you could pretend that you were an Indian chief. Three long sticks and an old tablecloth in the garden made a presentable tepee. Of course it was a very problematic game to play, because the Indians always had to lose. 

We also loved the television series The Cisco Kid. Every show began with the words “Here’s adventure! Here’s romance! Here’s O. Henry’s famous Robin Hood of the Old West – The Cisco Kid!” (TV Acres nd). Cisco wore the costume of a Spanish caballero: elaborate embroidered black and silver clothes, and a sombrero. He had a sidekick, just like Don Quixote and the Lone Ranger. Together Cisco and Pancho roamed the Old West, redressing injustice while on the trail of adventure. 

Now, over 30 years later, I realised with a shock of recognition that I was in the landscape of these American romances. Out in the New Mexico desert among the mesquite bushes and the arroyos, the events on which Cowboys and Indians and The Cisco Kid were based really happened: this was the actual Wild West. I was here to visit White Sands, location of the world’s first atomic bomb detonation and the USA’s earliest missile tests, where Wernher von Braun and a clutch of German rocket scientists came as the spoils of war in 1947. As I was to discover, the complex history of New Mexico and the technology of the space age were deeply entangled. 

Cowboys and Indians 

In New Mexico, the ancient adobe architecture of the Pueblo Indians survives among the haciendas of the Spanish colonists, and is surrounded by a sea of modern America: drive-through banks, trailer parks and Wal-Mart. Despite this, many Americans don’t realise that New Mexico is a state of the USA. Hispanic language and culture are dominant, and people from interstate can find it confronting. 

Originally, New Mexico belonged to the Anasazi Indians and their descendants, the Puebloans. But in 1598, the Pueblo Indians suddenly found themselves deprived of sovereignty in their own land, when Don Juan de Oñate claimed it for the Spanish crown. Oñate’s troops were the first caballeros in New Mexico. By the 17th century, the Pueblo Indians were forced to work and pay taxes to Spanish masters, and persecuted by Catholic missionaries for their religious beliefs. The Spanish conquest had another effect: the horses, cattle and sheep introduced by the Spanish were rich pickings for nomadic hunting and gathering Apache, who began raiding the Puebloans. In 1675, the Pueblons revolted and drove out the Spanish. They enjoyed a decade of freedom before the Spanish came back up the Camino Real road from Mexico City to re-conquer them. 

Over a century later, in 1846, the Americans waged war against Mexico to win the vast area that became the states of New Mexico and Arizona. Having evicted the Mexicans, they turned their attention to another thorn in the side of US colonial expansion. In 1863 and 1864, Kit Carson rounded up over 8000 Navajo and Apache Indians by means of threats, murder and destruction of property, and forcibly marched them to the newly-established reservation of Bosque Redondo. Thousands died on the Long Walk, and from the terrible conditions in the reservation. Outside, the legendary Geronimo led the Apache resistance until his surrender in 1886. By the 1870s, starvation and oppression had forced most of the Apache into reservations. 

Navajo Indian captives under guard, Fort Sumner, New Mexico, ca. 1864–1868. Photograph by the United States Army Signal Corps, courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), 028534

After the Civil War in the 1860s, Texan ranchers returned to find that their longhorn cattle had multiplied to more than 5 million head, roaming unattended on the grasslands. They could fetch a high price in the eastern states, but first they had to be herded to the northern railheads for transportation. Thousands of cattle were taken on the long trail from Texas, through New Mexico, to Wyoming territory. And so began the legends of the cowboys and rustlers, the sheriffs and the outlaws, the saloons and the gunfights, and a whole new genre of literature and film. 

Fire across the desert

In the next century, a new industry burgeoned in New Mexico, drawn by the seemingly remote and empty desert. In the 1920s, the “father of modern rocketry,” physics professor Robert Goddard, began experimenting with liquid fuel rockets near Roswell. Some of his innovations were adopted by Wernher von Braun for the German V2 rocket which began development in 1936. In 1943, the research facility of Los Alamos was founded near Santa Fe to develop the atomic bomb. On July 16 1945 the first nuclear device in the world was tested at White Sands in the desert near Las Cruces. A place of great natural beauty, White Sands was named for it’s pure white gypsum sands and is now a National Monument. On August 6 and 9, 1945 the new weapons were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

The mushroom cloud from the Trinity test, 1945. Credt: Los Alamos Laboratory

As I drove through the stark stony hillsides covered in flowering yuccas, I had another revelation. In the 1950s, the mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer had worked at Los Alamos. He wrote a song contrasting the romantic life of the cowboy and the new presence in the desert (Lehrer and Searle 1981). The landscape he invoked was White Sands: 

We-ell on the trail you’ll find me lopin’ 

Where the spaces are wide open 

In the land of the old AEC 

Where the scenery’s attractive 

And the air is radioactive 

Oh the Wild West is where I wanna be 

‘Mid the sage brush and the cactus 

I’ll watch the fellas practice dropping bombs 

Through the clean desert breeze – Yeee haaa! 

I’ll have on my sombrero 

And of course I’ll wear a pair o’ Levis 

Over my lead BVDs. 

I will leave the city’s rush 

Leave the fancy and the plush 

Leave the snow and leave the slush 

And the crowds 

I will seek the desert’s hush 

Where the scenery is lush 

How I long to see the mushroom clouds 

‘Mid the yuccas and the thistles 

I’ll watch the guided missiles 

While the old FBI watches me - yeee haaa! 

I’ll soon make my appearance 

Soon as I can get my clearance 

‘Cos the wild west is where I wanna be. 

The cowboys and the cattle are long gone; now the FBI stalk the desert and Lehrer’s cowboy, who, Cisco-like, is wearing a sombrero. The song also makes a connection between nuclear testing and missile development. While the USA was developing atomic weaponry, the Germans, under Wernher von Braun, had been producing rockets capable of reaching another continent. The implication of combining nuclear weapons with rocket technology was lost on no-one by the end of the Second World War. One of the earliest battles of the Cold War was the race between the USA and the USSR to obtain both German rocket scientists and rocket technology. The USA carried off the prize, Wernher von Braun, and sent him and his team out to White Sands to set up a rocket range. 

Why did the USA decide to locate its first nuclear tests and its guided missile programme out in the desert? The answer was simple: deserts are dry, with predictable weather conditions and little atmospheric disturbance to interfere with visual observation or radio signals. And deserts are empty. No one lives there, or hardly anyone worth bothering about. 

The Empty Land 

Even before I arrived at White Sands, I knew this was unlikely to be the whole story. When, after the war, Britain proposed to the Australian government that a joint rocket range be established in the desert of South Australia, they used the same argument. They even proposed to call the facility Red Sands in echo of White Sands. An estimated 1800 Aboriginal people were living in the proposed range, an area the size of England, but in the late 1940s, it was still expected that mainland Aboriginal people would fade politely into extinction. 

The country around Woomera had been classed as barren and infertile, scarcely capable of supporting human life. The Kokatha and Pitjantjatjara people who lived in the Woomera rocket range did not find the land inhospitable. They knew where the water-retaining clay lines ran through the gibber desert, how to judge the readiness of seasonal resources by the stars and how to read the landscape. 

The Europa rocket launch pad at Lake Hart, Woomera. Credit: Max Ryan

Today the Australian Defence Force at Woomera has an Aboriginal Liaison Officer and takes its responsibilities towards Aboriginal culture seriously. When I enquired at White Sands if there was any interaction with Native American people, I was told that there weren’t any people native to the area to consult with. The archaeological remains within the missile range are mostly from the Mogollon culture which seem to “disappear” around 1500 AD  – the Hopi and Zuñi Indians are thought to be their descendants rather than the local Puebloans. The Apache and Navajo were considered newcomers to New Mexico, moving down from North Canada around 850 AD. Did this really mean the land was empty when the US government wanted to test missiles and bombs in the clean desert breeze? On the range, I felt the Native Americans as a presence rather than an absence, always just beyond the edges of my vision. 

The events of the 1860s had certainly not destroyed the Apache communities. Beyond the perimeter of the missile range there was a reservation where the nomadic Mescalero Apache were now settled. There was some level of consultation with the Mescalero, which was represented as a great courtesy and a favour to them. After all, this wasn’t really their country, as I was told. And yet the Apache had been living in the southwestern USA since the 9th century. It has always been hard for nomadic people to prove their land tenure to European colonists, as Australian Aboriginal people know so well. 

As we drove around, we stopped at the edge of a playa, a temporary freshwater lake. All around the edge of the now dry lake bed were ceramic fragments from an earlier occupation. When these lakes were filled, the Mogollon people gathered to take advantage of the game and vegetation that sprang to life in the desert. But the Pueblo Indians had not “vanished” like the Mogollon. Driving from Las Cruces to Albuquerque, many pueblos and pueblo-run casinos were visible from the road. 

In 1988, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act allowed Indian communities to run casinos and this has been turned into a big business, bringing money and employment into impoverished communities. But, according to some, this activity had caused the Pueblo Indians to forfeit their rights to Traditional Ownership. Casinos were hardly traditional, and neither was making a profit! (This attitude is also seen in Australia where Aboriginal people who live in metropolitan areas are somehow considered less authentic). My questions about consultation were deftly side-stepped. I couldn’t understand my failure to engage anyone in discussion on this topic, until a colleague (who held different views) explained the deep resentment in some sectors of the community towards these Indians who had failed to keep their place in the colonial hierarchy. It was easier, it seemed, to acknowledge a culture long dead and gone than a living people. 

It is doubtful if the fate of the Indians troubled Werhner von Braun. He said, famously, “Once rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department”. His signature was visible on the missile range, in the design of the early V2 rocket hangars, gantries and launch pads. I walked in his footsteps in the underground observation tunnels outside the static firing test stand he designed, hearing the roar of the rocket engines as if from a great distance in the stale air. (Perhaps the presence of rockets and top-secret technology contributed to the other great legend of the New Mexican desert, the UFO crash at Roswell in 1947). 

White Sands Missile Range, V-2 Rocket Facilities, Near Headquarters Area, White Sands vicinity
(Dona Ana County, New Mexico). Credit: Thomas More.

From his early days at White Sands, Wernher von Braun moved to the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, to design missiles based on the V2. When the International Geophysical Year committee set the challenge for an Earth satellite in 1952, Von Braun’s Explorer proposal was rejected because closing the “missile gap” was seen as more urgent, and because a satellite based on military technology would send the wrong message to the world. But after the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 these considerations were no longer important. On January 31, 1958, Von Braun’s Explorer 1 satellite became the first American satellite in orbit. Von Braun went on to develop the Saturn V rocket, used to send American men into space on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Space Cowboys 

It was here in the New Mexican desert that the legends of the Spanish caballeros and the All-American gunslingers were caught up in the creation of a new myth of American nationhood: the Space Cowboy. The metaphor had been around as long as 20th century science-fiction: “as far back as 1900… space adventurers have been toting blasters killing rampaging monsters, and making the galaxy safe for the rest of us in much the same way that cowboy with six-shooters cleaned up the wild west” (Flynn nd). 

Space Western comic, 1952
Image courtesy of John Bell 

Space was a new frontier for American colonial expansion. This time there were no treacherous Apache or troublesome Mexicans to get in the way. Nor were there herds of space cows requiring the manly attention of a cowboy. Unlike the desert, space really was empty: a true terra nullius. So why did this matter? Because there was an enemy to be “cleaned up” out there. After Sputnik 1 was launched and Americans, conscious of the new eye in the sky, went into a national panic attack, nuclear weapons supremo Edward Teller was asked what might be found on the moon. He replied, “Russians”. There were battles to be fought on the high frontier of space, just as there were when the USA wrested New Mexico and Arizona from the Kingdom of Mexico and ousted the martial Apache braves. Space was the new Wild West; but this time the battles were ideological and fought with high science. 

As political tensions between the Eastern and Western blocs accelerated after the Second World War, cowboys were recast as Cold Warriors. It was no coincidence that the heyday of Western films was 1946 to 1962 (Corkin 2004:2). Throughout this period, the USA was struggling to maintain its edge as dominant superpower. It had to present this position as just and natural against the threat posed by the USSR, and Western films “helped to mediate such shifts by grafting the historical onto the mythic to help audiences adjust to new concepts of nationalism” (Corkin 2004: 3). Thus the cowboy was the bearer of the American way of life, a symbolic task that was transferred to the astronauts as they rode the rockets out to the new frontier. The space cowboy figure obscured the nuclear and military foundations of the space race, contradictions exposed by Tom Lehrer’s cowboy who now saw mushroom clouds and missiles as natural parts of the desert, just like the sage brush and the cactus. 

The conquest of the Wild West was the metaphor used to confer heroic status on the otherwise helpless astronauts, incarcerated in tiny capsules and rigid spacesuits in the vastness of outer space. In 2000, the archetypal Hollywood cowboy hero, Clint Eastwood, brought the metaphors together when he played an astronaut in “Space Cowboys”. In this film, fictional astronauts from the late 1950s who were denied their moment in space are given the chance to go back in their old age, and perform heroic deeds. 

Houston welcomes the Mercury astronauts, 1962. Credit: NASA

The roots of this myth lay in the desert sand beneath my feet, where I could see the fragments of Mogollon ceramics and the eroded yellow clay where a pueblo wall once stood. The cowboys of the old west arose from the destruction of Apache, Pueblo and Mexican cultures, and carried the dreams of American conquest out into space. But no land is ever really empty. In many Indigenous cultures, elders and shamans travel to other planets without leaving the Earth. An Indian chief once said to an anthropologist, “Why did the government spend so much money to send men to the Moon? If they had asked me, I could have told them it was a dry, grey old rock.” 

References 

Corkin, Stanley 2004 Cowboys as Cold Warriors. The Western and US History. Temple University Press, Philadelphia 

Huff, John nd The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine. An exclusive interview with Philip N. Krasne: the man who saved Pioneertown. [URL no longer exists] 

Flynn John L. nd Pulp science-fiction. https://johnlflynn.com/blog20.pdf 

Lehrer, Tom and Ronald Searle 1981 Too many songs by Tom Lehrer with not enough drawings by Ronald Searle. Eyre Methuen, London. 

TV Acres nd Beginning and end narrations: the Western series. [URL no longer exists]

The spacescape: looking at heritage spacecraft as part of a cultural landscape

This is an excerpt from Gorman, A.C. 2005 The archaeology of orbital space. In Australian Space Science Conference 2005, pp 338-357. RMIT University, Melbourne. (Follow the link to read the full paper)

Vanguard 1, showing all its components. Credit: Naval Research Laboratory

[A] case could be made that the best means of preserving the heritage value of these satellites [Vanguard 1, Syncom 3 and FedSat-1] would be to remove them to Earth, when such an operation becomes feasible. Here, they could form part of a museum collection and be accessible to the public, while also protected from the destructive impacts of other orbital debris themselves. In essence, these satellites and other retrieved objects would become souvenirs of a faraway and inaccessible place, something to remember orbit by.

If space objects are considered as isolated artefacts, then their cultural heritage value inheres in their physical characteristics. This value may be considered to be intact if the object is intact, even though removed from its original location, However, the question alters significantly if we include the relationship of the artefact to other artefacts and to its physical location. In this case, its significance is assessed as part of a cultural landscape. This question hinges on the importance of place. Rather than regarding spacecraft and orbital debris as unrelated objects in an empty substrate, they can also be regarded as related by location, history and function. They are not separate from the space they inhabit, but part of it. They form a new kind of cultural landscape.

On Earth, a cultural landscape approach has come to replace older ideas of the division between nature and culture in the field of environmental management. This is most obvious in the reformulation of the notion of “wilderness”.  It is now recognised that most wilderness areas of the world are in fact the homelands of Indigenous people, and the record of human occupation cannot be erased to return the landscape to a mythical state of nature that has not existed for the last 2 million years (eg Denevan, 1992, Jacques, 1995, Taylor, 2000). Rather, the interaction of human and natural processes has resulted in the topography, vegetation and visible features of the landscape. Together, the landscape created by both natural and human processes has been called a cultural landscape [22, 23, 24]. Cultural landscapes are

… illustrative of the evolution of human society and settlement over time, under the influence of the physical constraints and/or opportunities presented by their natural environment and of successive social, economic and cultural forces, both external and internal [25].

The World Heritage Convention recognises three processes that can create a cultural landscape:

• Design or intention, for example, in the case of gardens, parklands and urban landscapes;

• Organic evolution, resulting from human actions within the natural environment, both past and ongoing;

• Association with religious, artistic or cultural meanings rather than evidence of material culture alone.

These landscapes are deemed to be worthy of preservation because they capture the interaction of human and natural processes. I argue that orbital space is just such a cultural landscape. It is an organically evolving formation in which spacecraft and space debris contribute their physical properties to an environment also containing plasmas, cosmic rays, electromagnetic storms, meteoroid swarms, etc. Space debris is now as much part of this environment as is the debris from the creation of the solar system. There’s no going back.

If space objects are seen as part of a cultural landscape, then their location is an important feature of their heritage significance. It’s important that orbital objects are up there: once they come down, their meaning changes. But the spacescape is not simply a distant and (largely) invisible location. Space objects are linked to place, processes and people on the surface of the Earth. The spacescape is a three-tiered vertical landscape, starting from designed space landscapes on Earth (launch facilities, tracking stations, etc), organic landscapes in orbit and on the surface of celestial bodies (satellites, rocket stages, landers, debris), and beyond the solar system, the rich associative landscape of the night sky [15].

A cultural landscape approach offers a framework for studying the relationship between places, associations and material culture:

Cultural significance is embodied in the place itself, its fabric, setting, use, associations, meanings, records, related places and related objects. Places may have a range of values for different individuals or groups [4].

For each of the three satellites I have investigated, place is an integral part of their significance. Vanguard 1 was not the first satellite, or even the first US satellite; but it is the only satellite of the early generation that remains in orbit. No model or unflown satellite is interchangeable. Similarly, Syncom 3 is significant because it is in GEO. From its location, Syncom 3 hooked the world up to watch an international event, foreshadowing events such as the Live8 concert in 2005. FedSat represents Australia in space through its name, the song, and the voices on the CD. Sure, we can hear them on the CD deposited in the National Museum, but what matters is that those now-silent voices have left the Earth on a different journey. In space, their words carry a meaning they could never have on Earth.

References

Denevan, W.M. (1992) ‘The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492’,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82: 369–85.

Jacques, D. (1995) ‘The Rise of Cultural Landscapes’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 2: 91–101.

Taylor, K. (2000) ‘Nature or Culture: Dilemmas of Interpretation’, Tourism, Culture and Communication 2: 69–84.

[4] ICOMOS Australia, Burra Charter http://www.icomos.org/australia/, 1999

[15] Gorman, A.C., “The cultural landscape of interplanetary space” , Journal of Social Archaeology Vol 5, No 1, 2005, pp 85-107

[22] Hirsch, E. and O’Hanlon, M. (eds) The anthropology of landscape: perspectives on place and space, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995

[23] Von Droste, B., Platchter, H. and Rossler, M. Cultural landscapes of universal value. Gustav Fischer Verlag Jena, New York and Stuttgart, 1995

[24] Knapp, Bernard, and Ashmore, Wendy (eds) Archaeologies of landscape: contemporary perspectives. Malden: Blackwell, Malden, 1999

[25] UNESCO Operational Guidelines for the implementation of the World Heritage Convention, http://whc.unesco.org/nwhc/pages/doc/main.htm Sections 35—42, 1998