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

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.

How to manage the heritage values of space junk

'My career as a heritage consultant working with engineers on mining, urban development and construction projects was a huge influence on how I started to think about the heritage values of space junk. It was no good being too theoretical and rarified: my approach had to be practical.

Doing the research to work out if space junk might be culturally significant was almost the easy part. There’s no doubt that many, many satellites, like Vanguard 1, Australis Oscar 5 and Syncom 3, are bursting with significance, and this is without considering the fragments and broken bits.

Artist's impression of the Vanguard 1 satellite, in orbit, with Earth below it.
Credit: unknown 

In the field on Earth, there were many situations where I had to persuade an engineer (who was just trying to do their job) that the route of a power line or some other infrastructure might have to change to avoid a place of significance to the Aboriginal or European community. I had heritage legislation to back me up. There’s no similar system for space.

It was very common for developers to leave the heritage survey until the last minute, because they assumed it was less important than project design. But by the time a road alignment, for example, had been chosen, there was often very little room to manoeuvre if it turned out that significant heritage was lying in its path. Changing the road would be very expensive at late stages in the design. I’ve had countless conversations in my career with developers grumbling at the expense of heritage assessments, as if it were the fault of the heritage. ‘If you’d started this process early,’ I’d say, ‘it wouldn’t be the big cost it is now.’ Planning was the key to spending as little money as possible – which was very persuasive to developers and engineers.

The other key factor was persuading people that culturally significant space junk should not be removed from its natural setting in orbit – which would be very expensive, if necessary at all. I considered the risk of collision to see just how dangerous some of these significant old satellites might be to functioning spacecraft. Spacecraft with fuel and power can move out of the way of a piece of rogue space junk.

There are also hit lists of the most dangerous junk, usually old rocket bodies abandoned in orbit which are likely to explode. It would be very useful to have a heritage list of significant satellites in orbit. If a heritage satellite appears in a conjunction analysis or space junk hit list, then we can think about how to manage it. For the moment, there’s nothing we can do'.

Excerpt from Dr Space Junk vs the Universe: Archaeology and the Future  (UNSW Press, 2019, pp 123-124)

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.