In 2003 I began work on a research project that has taken me to places that I never imagined: the cultural heritage of space exploration. Now I am determined to bring to light the secrets at the heart of the Space Age. | This site does not use AI/LLM tools to create articles or art. I do not support the use of AI.
In September, I was researching Australian space history at the National Archives office in Adelaide. This was in the days when you sat there for hours furiously scribbling notes in pencil until your fingers bled. One of the files I looked at was the (formerly) secret UFO file from Woomera. What I discovered in this file gave me pause for thought....
Racehorses and space. You wouldn't think there was a connection, would you? However....this is what happened when my father tried to name a racehorse after Laika the dog during the Cold War.
Once upon a time in the dim past of internet history there was a lovely man called Nicey who ran a website devoted to tea, biscuits, and sit downs. It was called, appropriately, Nice Cup of Tea and A Sit Down. It was charming and funny and full of biscuits (proper Commonwealth biscuits, not the American version of the scone), and they loved space archaeology! I wonder what happened to him?
This was the abstract for a session on space archaeology at the World Archaeological Congress in Dublin, which I was convening with Beth Laura O'Leary. The title incorporated the name of a spaceship that will be familiar to anyone who has read the works of Alistair Reynolds.
No-one doesn't love a rocket cake, and for some reason anything I post about space-related food and drink goes down a treat. Kudos to my friend Kaylene Manderson, who made this masterpiece!
Michael Allen wrote a review of this book, in which I had a chapter, and more-or-less called my contribution "quirky, yet methodologically sound". I was enchanted.
I wasn't joking about the food-and-drink bit. Another book review, but this time by me, and I have a little digression into the history of Australia's monopoly on the manufacture of Space Food Sticks. Snap them up if you find them gathering dust on a supermarket shelf, because they went out of production last year. But whatever you do, do not attempt to actually eat one. They're not very nice.
Nicola Twilley of Good Magazine ran a week-long distributed online conversation about food-writing. I decided to write something about space food, and this was the result. A little bit of history, a little bit of politics, a cocktail recipe, and the Sputnik Burger!
They don't love me for my unique insights into space history or brain-splintering forays into theory. What the readers of my blog really want is recipes and spacey things for kids. I'm cool with that, though. Here's some excellent things you can make, collected together from all over the internet, and yes, there is another cake.
I didn't post much in 2013. I had left the university for a break to return to my first profession, heritage consulting. In April, I went to the Society for American Archaeology conference in Hawai'i, and managed to injure myself rather badly, necessitating a long 18 month rehabilitation. In May, I gave a TEDxSydney talk, and shortly afterwards, life took an even more unexpected turn which I'll tell you about one day over a beer. BUT there were other good things. The lovely brain-the-size-of-planet Matt Edgeworth invited me to give a paper at the Chicago Theoretical Archaeology Group conference on the Anthropocene (so sometimes someone does actually want me for my theories), and this was later published in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. You can read the abstract in this blog post, and the article here.
They asked for it, and I delivered. Not cakes this time, but what I hope is a practical guide to eliminating locutions like "manned mission" that reinforce the idea that women like/are like fluffy kittens and aren't really suited to the man's business of space. Which, incidentally, was exactly what a Russian cosmonaut trainer said in a public talk in Adelaide last year, so don't even try to tell me it's not an issue.
Terrestrial mining is something I know a fair bit about. In my former career as a heritage consultant, I spent a LOT of time on mining sites, and in remote areas where mining exploration was taking place. My job was the make mining companies comply with legislation that was supposed to protect Aboriginal heritage places. In this excerpt from a forthcoming paper, I consider how these principles might play out in space.
I raise a glass of dry Australian sherry to you, dear readers! I feel that 2016 is going to be an exciting year in space.....
This is an excerpt from my (pre-revision) forthcoming publication Managing cultural heritage values in lunar mining? What are the issues?
Consultation with stakeholders is
part of both assessing the social significance of cultural heritage and
obtaining a Social Licence to Operate (SLO). Despite the best intentions, however, gaining free, prior and informed consent is frequently overlooked (Bice 2014). How could this be
achieved for an entire celestial body, and with meaningful consultation with
the ‘local’ community of Earth’s seven billion people? While the UN offers
obvious mechanisms through the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOUS), UNESCO and the advisory organisation the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), private commercial
interests may prefer to undertake their own community engagement.
Lunar surface mining. Image courtesy of NASA
How will people feel if they look at
the Moon in the night sky, and know that is being mined underneath their eyes? While
diverse publics have been tolerant of scientific missions, commercial ventures
may be received very differently. Mining and exploration will have impacts on
the lunar environment much greater than the low level created by robotic and
scientific missions to date.
While it is probably broadly true to
say “humanity as a whole has
embraced the historic events and objects associated with space research as part
of our jointly held heritage” (Walsh 2012:234), this obscures deeply entrenched
divisions between colonial/spacefaring nations and colonised/'developing' nations
(Gorman 2005a, Gorman 2009b, Redfield 2005). These divisions have been very evident
in the politics around the formation of the Outer Space Treaty (OST), the Moon Agreement even more
so, and contribute to the impasse that resource utilisation on the Moon is
currently facing (Hoffstadt 1994).
The reaction of, say, an Australian to
a US-based profit-making mine in which they have no say or share could easily
be negative. A First Nations Australian may have another layer of reaction,
based on their experience of alienation from country and destruction of
cultural heritage arising from terrestrial resource exploitation. Moreover, an
assault on the integrity of a celestial body which belongs to what is commonly
called the ‘Dreaming’ – a suite of cultural knowledge in which the past is
simultaneously entwined with the creation of law, identity and land in the present
– may be a matter of some concern. Aboriginal people are by no means the only First
Nation to have such a relationship with the Moon.
What is considered to be for ‘the
benefit and in the interests of all countries’ (OST Article 1, see also Moon Agreement
Article 4) depends very much on how regulation unfolds in this next critical
period. Again a parallel with terrestrial mining industry may be instructive.
Management strategies in SLO frameworks include the concept of ‘offsets’: compensating
for impacts at one location through activities at another, either directly or
indirectly. A direct offset might be setting aside a protected area of land to
compensate for the loss of that impacted by mining. Increasing the value of a
heritage place could be considered a direct offset – for example, committing
resources to conserving Tranquility Base to compensate for ‘sacrificing’ a
Lunar Orbiter impact site. Indirect offsets may include funding research or
education around the environmental/heritage resource that will lead to benefits
for it. Note though, that offsets are determined during the planning phase, not
in retrospect ie they do not compensate for damage already caused.
Lunar mining will take place in
an environment where social media are a major part of public engagement with space. Space agencies, private companies, astronauts, missions, and rovers have
their own Twitter accounts and there is an expectation of public involvement.
Crowd-funded space missions such as Lunar Mission One, a probe designed to
drill a deep core in polar regions, is possibly the vanguard of more such
projects. The investors in off-world mining companies are likely to be the same
people who buy shares in terrestrial mining. The moon’s seeming remoteness will
not protect industrial operations from the scrutiny of the public.
References
Bice, Sarah
2014 What Gives You a Social Licence? An Exploration of
the Social Licence to Operate in the Australian Mining Industry.Resources 3:62-80
Gorman, A.C. 2009b Beyond the Space Race: the
significance of space sites in a new global context. In Angela Piccini and
Cornelius Holtorf (eds) Contemporary Archaeologies:
Excavating Now, pp 161-180 Bern: Peter Lang
Gorman, A.C. 2005a The cultural landscape of
interplanetary space. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):85-10
Hoffstadt, Brian 1994 Moving the heavens: lunar
mining and the ‘common heritage of mankind’ in the Moon Treaty. UCLA Law Review
42:575-621
Redfield, P. 2005. Space in the Tropics. From Convicts to
Rockets in French Guiana.
Berkeley:
University
of California Press.
Walsh,
Justin 2012 Protection of humanity’s
cultural and historic heritage in space. Space
Policy 28:234-243
By Alice Gorman, Flinders University (Orginally published 29 November 2013)
With India and China planning lunar surface missions, privately-funded space entrepreneurs competing for the US$40 million Google Lunar X Prize and discussions around lunar mining intensifying, working out what to do with our moon’s cultural heritage is becoming urgent.
In an article in the journal Science today, space lawyers Henry Hertzfeld and Scott Pace propose a multilateral agreement at the highest international level, initially between the US and Russia, but open to other moon-faring entities such as China, India and the European Space Agency (ESA).
And while there is much to recommend this, I propose we should consider extending the agreement idea further.
The moon has a rich archaeological record created by nearly 40 missions, from 1959 until the present. Most are robotic, but those that really grabbed the public’s imagination had human crews.
In 1969, at the site of Tranquility Base, humans set foot on another world for the first time. The Apollo 11 astronaut footprints in the thick lunar dust and the controversial flag are among the most iconic images of the 20th century.
More recently, China, India, Japan and the ESA have started crashing spacecraft into the surface of the moon at the end of their mission life.
All up, there are more than 190 tons of artefacts from lunar exploration. Now, these sites may be under threat.
US law to the moon
In 2011, NASA created a set of voluntary guidelines for future missions to avoid damage to Ranger, Surveyor and Apollo sites.
These include measures such as no-go buffer zones, heritage “precincts” and recommendations about how to fly around sites to avoid stirring up destructive dust.
Another proposal, which emerged in July this year, has raised alarm bells. The Apollo Lunar Legacy Act, which is currently before US Congress, aims to declare a National Park on the moon specifically to ensure the protection of US heritage sites.
Space legal experts have pointed out that this is incompatible with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), to which the US is a signatory. The Outer Space Treaty forbids territorial claims in outer space, by any means – and this includes indirectly, such as the extension of national jurisdiction to space places, as we see here.
It’s not the first time this issue has come up. In 1999, archaeologist Beth Laura O’Leary, from the State University of New Mexico, and her team, catalogued all the material at the Apollo 11 site for the Lunar Legacy Project funded by NASA.
The Apollo 11 command module on display at the Air & Space Museum in Washington. Image credit: Gouldy99
They proposed designating the artefacts a National Historic Landmark, as they were legally the property of the US under the Outer Space Treaty. Back then, NASA’s response was unequivocal: such a move risked being interpreted by the international community as making a territorial claim.
As well as the legal issues, the Apollo Lunar Legacy Act plays into aspects of US ideology that sometimes cause unease in the international community:
manifest destiny (it is a moral duty of Americans to expand their territory)
American exceptionalism (America is unique among nation states and not bound by the same rules)
the cult of the American flag (the flag as the actual embodiment of the nation rather than just a symbol).
While this is obviously a simplification of more complex ideas, which are by no means universally accepted, elements of all three can be seen in the discourse around the significance of US lunar heritage sites.
All the same, everyone seems to agree that something needs to be done. Is the US bill the best option for the moment? Probably not.
The authors of today’s Science article, Hertzfeld and Pace, argue that a multilateral agreement would not violate the Outer Space Treaty, and would allow the interests of other nations to be represented.
The very sensitive issues around property and resource rights on the moon are side-stepped, leaving the way clear to effectively protect this precious heritage.
I suggest, though, that this proposal could go further. Hertzfeld and Pace limit the agreement to space-faring nations. But if we are to uphold the principle that space exploration is undertaken for the benefit of all humanity, then we need to broaden our view of who has contributed.
Looking Down Under
A replica of the Redstone rocket in Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson. brentdanley
Let’s look at a couple of Australian examples. In the 1960s, the US used the Woomera rocket range in South Australia to test nose-cones on the Redstone rocket, a precursor of the Saturn V rocket which took astronauts to the moon.
The contribution of the Traditional Owners who were displaced to make way for the range may have been involuntary, but it supported the development of both US and European space industries.
Four of the five successful Apollo missions carried a dust detector experiment, designed by the University of Western Australia’s Professor Brian O’Brien. (The detectors gathered important data which can be used for comparison with new data from NASA’s recently launched LADEE spacecraft.)
No doubt there were many other hardware components designed or manufactured outside the US.
Australia might not be a space-faring nation, but it doesn’t mean we’re not stakeholders in lunar heritage. You can find many similar examples, such as the nations who hosted NASA tracking stations, a critical part of the Apollo programme.
Include more, not less
This kind of approach is consistent with United Nations declarations and principles, which call for space to be more inclusive. It also picks up on the recommendations of the Dublin Principles, created in 2011 by the International Council on Monuments and Sites and the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage. The Dublin Principles emphasise the importance of recognising networks and multiple locations.
A multilateral lunar heritage agreement could also serve as a model to address another issue that is even more urgent – international cooperation on actively removing hazardous orbital debris.
The extraordinary achievements of the US lunar exploration programme are undeniable. But heritage is inherently political. Whoever controls the past will have a huge influence on the shape of things to come.
This is my abstract for an upcoming session on the Anthropocene at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in Chicago. No, alas, I'm not going to be there in person; I will be presenting in Skype mode. None of the conference registration and travel costs, but none of the conference partying either ......
A characteristic of what many are now calling the
Anthropocene era is the redistribution of elements and minerals in patterns
recognisable as the result of human interventions. Since 1957, the year Sputnik
1 was launched, approximately 6000 tons of human materials have been injected
into Earth orbit, and more is thinly spread in various locations throughout the
solar system. Mineral signatures rarely seen beyond the terrestrial sphere are
now colonising interplanetary space. Their contribution to the estimated 40 000
tons of material from space that falls to Earth every year, including meteoroids
and dust, is increasing. With the predicted acceleration of asteroid and lunar
mining, the human impacts on space are likely to grow. However, the idea of the
Anthropocene as constituted in an Earth/Space system has barely been explored.
In this paper I draw on Nigel Clark’s concept of 'ex-orbitant globality' to situate
the Anthropocene in a multi-gravity environment, moving away from the
geocentrism that has dominated both archaeological and environmental approaches
to understanding what space means.
References
Clark, Nigel
2002 Ex-orbitant globality. Theory,
Culture and Society 22:165-185 Gorman, A.C. 2014 The Anthropocene in the Solar System. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1(1):87-91
Last week I spent a fascinating two days at the University of New South Wales' Off-Earth Mining Forum, organised by the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research. This forum united the twin strands of my professional expertise - cultural heritage management in the mining sector, and space archaeology.
Naturally, I talked about what the heritage issues are for lunar mining, particularly in light of the 2011 NASA guidelines. I argued that terrestrial processes of environmental and cultural heritage management need to be taken seriously in space, but that the lack of a well-developed concept of environment was an obstacle.
The first day, which I wasn't able to attend, was a workshop on lunar soil simulants. For many reasons, lunar regolith doesn't behave like soil or rock on Earth, and of course the use of robotic mining machinery is all dependent on the mechanical and physical properties of the stuff. Excitingly, Associate Professor Leonhard Bernold from UNSW has located an Australian source, and we were all given a vial (I do love a good gimmick).
Some of the jigsaw pieces are already under development: automated mining, water and volatile extraction, construction materials and processes. There are also some big gaps. Who are the investors? Who's buying the products? What about international law and the existing treaties? What about microgravity geology - that's going to be critical in asteroid mining.
One thing most people were clear about: lunar mining wasn't going to look like anything we are used to.
Today I am trawling through data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, to get a handle on the state of the mining industry in Australia. This is for a couple of reasons: firstly, many of our graduates from the Department of Archaeology at Flinders University will end up working in heritage management for the resource extraction industry; and I have been having some interesting conversations recently with Dr John Kinahan, an archaeologist and heritage consultant from Namibia, about common experiences working with mining companies in our respective countries. We are thinking of writing something about it.
I was thinking to myself, as I looked at the trends in OPBT (Operating Profit Before Tax, as I now know) that there is not much space relevance in my task for this morning.
But wait! Not so, I have realised. One of the big space industries on the horizon, predicted for many many decades, is mining. The Moon, asteroids, probably other celestial bodies too. One supposes that extra-terrestrial mining will work in much the same way as it does on Earth: exploration, pre-feasibility studies, feasilibity studies, planning, construction, operation, decommissioning and rehabilitation.
There will of course be environmental issues, particularly with rehabilitation. How exactly do you rehabilitate a lifeless site? There is no vegetation to grow back, or animal communities to reestablish. Will extra-terrestrial mining companies pay for rehabilitation at all? How will environmental groups and those concerned with the ethics of our exploitation of space approach this issue? Do we even want to erase the evidence of our activities? Perhaps it is better to make it obvious that a mining site is not natural. All this depends on what we think the values of space environments are, and as I have often opined in various writings, space industry barely conceives of space as an environment to begin with, so it's a bit of a leap to get them to think about its values.
Heritage issues may come in if mining operations of whatever kind take place on or near historic landing sites. There may also be things to think about in the heritage values of the mining infrastructure - heritage as it happens, in the now. We have to consider the human values of the use of space too.
Now that I think of these things I am intrigued by the possibilities. How would one write an Environmental Management Plan (EMP) or a Cultural Heritage Management Plan (CHMP) for an extraterrestrial mining site? How would they be similar or different to terrestrial mining sites? Will the Outer Space Treaty be of any relevance? (Actually there is some interesting literature on how the OST might work in the context of national resource extraction industries).
Well, I'd better focus on terrestrial mining for the moment, it would be too easy to get distracted at this point when I have other things to do! I'll make another coffee, I think, before I get back to the stats.
This article was originally published at The Conversation.
