Technological rites of passage in the liminal space of Earth orbit.

In February 2016, a  cosmonaut on the International Space Station lobbed a USB stick out of the hatch to become an orbital object for perhaps a few weeks, before a fiery death in the Earth's atmosphere. To give it enough mass to leave, it was attached to an empty film cannister stuffed with paper towels. Presumably these objects were due for disposal as waste in any case.

Cosmonaut Sergey Volkov about to release the package.
Image credit: NASA TV

The USB stick contained messages and videos from the 2015 celebration of Victory Day, May 9, which commemorates German surrender to the USSR at the end of World War II. It was the 70th anniversary of this day.

It's not entirely clear from the media accounts whether the flash drive was material from the cosmonauts themselves, or of Russian people and celebrations back on Earth. I think it is most likely the latter, as otherwise, surely, cosmonauts could have thrown their own USB out for the actual 70th anniversary in 2015, rather than a year later in 2016.  (Although I suppose they may have had to wait for an EVA).

It's worth musing a little further on this hybrid orbital object, though. It was composed partly of junk, and yet it was not itself junk. The usual definition of space junk is something in orbit that does not serve a useful purpose now or in the foreseeable future. Mostly, we think of space junk as all the many thousands of defunct satellites, rocket bodies and fragments of spacecraft.

The purpose of this object was (1) to BE in orbit and (2) to vanish from orbit. Its brief passage of time in space between launch and de-orbit was all it was about. Clearly, though, the materiality and physicality of both the object and the sequence of events is important - the fact that it happened even though no evidence survives and no-one can access those messages and images.

It's hybrid nature is also evident in the combination of tangible objects and intangible data. The videos and messages were not actually playing as they left the ISS. They were passive and silent. You'd have to plug the USB stick into a computer to see what they were. In this ceremonial act, seeing the videos and listening to the messages was not important.

You could argue that the data was not intangible as it was physically stored in the device as 0s and 1s. What's intangible, though, is the interpretation and meaning given to a certain de-coding of those numbers, as perceived by a body with a certain range of senses.

The old archaeology joke is that if you can't tell what the hell an artefact was used for, then it was ceremonial or ritual. Sometimes this is actually true! Rituals can be classified in a number of ways. The celebration of Victory Day is a commemorative rite, marking the end of a war. On Earth there are probably millions of war memorials from grand triumphal monuments to plaques and honour boards. They have a static component and an active component when people gather on significant days to carry out ritual actions and speak ritual words. The USB release is also commemorative as it marks the 70th anniversary of a ritual.

But it's also a sort of technological rite of passage. Van Gennep's classic Les Rites de Passage uses the metaphor of passing from one room of the house to the next. The nature of the commemoration was to allow the USB to pass from one state, space, to another, the Earth. In van Gennep's terms, the stages of the ritual are separation, liminality and incorporation. Orbit becomes the liminal space, neither one state nor the other, suspended, falling, as ambiguous as the junk-notjunk. Incorporation comes when the object disintegrates in the atmosphere, returning to Earth with the new identity of spaceflown object. For this ritual, to have lived and died in space is more important than never having existed in the first place.

Note: I wrote about this because I found some notes scribbled on a piece of paper from a talk preparation, so this is to help me remember the ideas - I've recycled the paper already!

Do objects and people cast shadows inside the International Space Station?

Do astronauts cast shadows in space?

Astronaut Mike Hopkins casts a spoon shadow. Image courtesy of NASA.

I've been thinking about shadows a lot, and also space stations. This has involved reading about habitability studies, an area I started to investigate when I was writing about Skylab a few years ago. The point of this line of enquiry is whether shadows are considered when the interiors of space stations are designed. Perhaps they contribute to creating a feeling of homeliness. Perhaps a lack of shadows is something characterising a laboratory environment, or a solitary confinement cell, or a padded cell, and hence to be avoided. Astronauts are, after all, under constant surveillance. You can hide things in shadows. Things can hide themselves in shadows.

It's worth observing that a shadowless environment can occur when you have no light, or when you have too much light.

Part of the answer to this is how, when, where and with what the ISS is illuminated. It appears that the lighting at present is a combination of fluorescent and LED.  

A perusal of images of the interior shows that there are certainly shaded areas, and more highly illuminated areas. The restricted interior space, and the curvature will also have an impact on the appearance of shadows. Have a look at this one:

Image courtesy of NASA

Of course, when we see images of the inside, they are generally illuminated. But the space station is also darkened at 'night'.  Recently astronaut Alexander Gerst took a series of rather spooky pictures with the lights turned off. Clock this and tell me it doesn't send chills down your spine:

Image courtesy of NASA

Do you see that the helmets are hooded? Is this from fear of what you might see if you looked through the visor?

Perhaps illumination inside the ISS is designed to avoid the ever-present uncanny, always just out of sight, in another module, or outside the window....

Sensing heritage - "fragre" in the writing of Iain M. Banks

I do find that science fiction writers are often finely attuned to heritage concepts.  Here is an interesting discussion from Iain M. Banks' Transition about how heritage feels - a form of aesthetic significance, I suppose.

It is in a sense the sense of history, of connection, of how long a place has been lived in, a feeling for the heritage of human events attached to a particular piece of landscape or set of streets and stones.  We call it fragre.  

Part of it is akin to having a sharp nose for the scent of ancient blood.  Places of great antiquity, where much has happened over not just centuries but millennia, are often steeped in it.  Almost any site of massacre or battle will have a whiff, even thousands of years later.  I find it at its most pungent when I stand within the Colosseum, in Rome.  However, much of it is simply the layered result of multifarious generations of people having lived there; lived and died, certainly, but then as most people live for decades and die just the once, it is the living part that has the greatest influence over the aroma, the feel of a place. 

Certainly the entirety of the Americas has a significantly different fragre compared to Europe and Asia; less fusty, or less rich, according to your prejudices. 

I'm told that New Zealand and Patagonia appraise as terribly fresh compared with almost everywhere else.

This leads me back to earlier musings about the senses impacted by space.  Would any space places acquire fragre in Bank's terms?  Or would it just be the scent of burnt metal?  The International Space Station is longest occupied space place; lunar landing sites are really ephemeral camps.

What about the fragre of Maralinga? (which I'm thinking about also, as I have to write a conference paper on it in the next few weeks).

Space junk hurtles towards Space Station

NASA is preparing contingency plans in case a large piece of orbital debris is deemed a threat to the International Space Station. The chunk of space junk measures about 19 square meters, large enough to do significant harm to the ISS in the event of a collision. As a precaution, NASA mission controllers are preparing a plan that would see the ISS fire its booster rockets in order to escape the path of the debris, which is circling the earth in an elliptical orbit.

NASA currently estimates that the space junk will come within 3 kilometers of the ISS on Friday morning. The agency did not state the origin of the debris, but the Earth is encircled by countless particles of refuse from spent satellites, industrial waste, dust, and other sources. The ISS is equipped with shielding that offers some protection from space junk.

Information Week USA