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

The death of a spacecraft

Originally published as part of the Day of Archaeology. now archived with the Archaeological Data Service.

July 30, 2016 

drspacejunk Day of Archaeology 2016, Public Archaeology, Science

I began my Day of Archaeology preparing for a talk on space archaeology, for an audience of 70 schoolkids and their families. The talk featured some of my favourite objects and places in the solar system – the Venera landing sites on Venus, Tranquility Base on the Moon, the Telstar 1 satellite in Earth orbit, and of course, Voyager 1 and 2 – the most far-flung outposts of human activity in the universe that we can still communicate with.

I thought I should include the solar system’s most recent archaeological site too. In 2014, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft dropped the little Philae lander on the surface of Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. What was planned as a graceful cometfall turned into an epic bounce when the lander’s harpoon feet failed to deploy, a potential disaster with so little gravity to hold it there.

The Philae lander. Image courtesy of ESA

The lander came to a stop in the deep shadow of a cliff, another disaster as too little sunlight would now reach its solar panels. Nonetheless, Philae worked in fits and starts, conveying data back to the Rosetta spacecraft dancing around the comet, which then relayed it to Earth.

Among the most interesting results gained from Philae was the existence of complex molecules considered to be “prebiotic”, likely from the early phase of solar system formation. It’s hard to say exactly what this means in terms of the origins of life – but it surely means something.

It was amazing that Philae gave us so much, given its rocky start. But nothing had been heard from it since July 2015, and as the comet’s orbit took it further and further from the sun, there wasn’t going to be enough power for renewed contact. On 27 July 2016, the equipment used by Rosetta to communicate with Philae was turned off.

Of course I was following this, and was sorry to see the end of such a thrilling mission – the first time we have landed on the surface of a comet.

As I collected images and information to set the scene for describing the Philae landing site for the schoolkids, my eyes started to fill with tears.

The landing site. Image courtesy of ESA

Half an hour later I decided to go out and get a coffee, and found myself sobbing in the corridor. A passing stranger saw me and asked if I was OK. So kind of her! But what could I say? How could I explain that the silence of a robotic spacecraft, riding a comet somewhere out beyond Jupiter, was breaking my heart?

I was far from alone in mourning Philae. Across the world, space scientists and fans were feeling the same and expressing their admiration and loss in social media.

Some would say that this is a quite ridiculous result of anthropomorphising an inanimate technological object. which was what the European Space Agency’s publicity campaign around the mission invited us to do. But I think it’s something far more interesting than that. I think it speaks to how cultural significance is created.

Archaeologists are frequently also cultural heritage managers. We study places and objects, and use criteria like those in Australia’s famous Burra Charter to assess their cultural significance. The nature and degree of cultural significance helps us to decide whether a piece of cultural heritage should be preserved for future generations.

One of the categories of cultural significance is social significance. This is about community esteem, or how people feel about a place or object. You might have a site that has tremendous historical significance and scientific research potential – but if people don’t care about it, why shouldn’t we let something new take its place?

It’s often assumed that people don’t form feelings of attachment to recent technology. It’s too industrial, not ‘beautiful’ in the same way as a historic building, and it’s just there to perform a task. But in my years of research on space technology, I’ve found that this assumption is very far from true.

Something about Philae’s trials and tribulations made so many people relate to it. This remote robot was not so different to us, struggling through life doing the best we can. Perhaps if the mission had been an unmitigated success, these feelings of sympathy might not have developed in the same way.

We could say that Philae has all sorts of cultural significance. As the first human object to land on a comet, it has historic significance. We could study it as one of a suite of exploratory probes in the solar system, and look at how its technology compares with other spacecraft made for different environments – that’s scientific significance. The factors that culminated in Philae’s particular design and appearance contribute to its ‘aesthetic’ significance.

But perhaps the most important is Philae’s social significance: how it made us feel.