Space Age Suds: women, washing machines and the astronautics of everyday life

'Space Age Suds' is a charming and slightly alarming little vignette which is about the seeping of the Space Age into domestic life, machines and technology and how they structure social relationships, and gender roles in the Space Age. It's meant to be humorous, of course, but there is so much going on here!

The author isn't just anyone - it's beloved South Australian writer and journalist Max Fatchen. I found the article on Trove and now can't relocate it, but it seems likely it was published in the Advertiser, Adelaide's daily broadsheet. The date is a bit uncertain but it's clearly Apollo era.

I like that the Space Age reverses gender roles and that by the analogy of the washing machine with the space capsule, the wife is accorded the power of technology. After some searching I was able to find her first name but not her original surname, so we will have to call her Jean Fatchen here.

Because the image is a little fuzzy, here is the text.

Space Age Suds: the script

So the Russians are developing a low-orbital bomb. Well, it's just one more complicated space-age development, like our washing machine.

Our washing machine has a shape like a capsule and it is computer programmed and uncanny.

I was never much of a one with technology, and as a member of the avant garde laundry set, I'm all washed up.

There's no longer the simple meshing of gears as with our old washing machine. The cheerful days when I got my tie caught in the wrangler are past.

Our washing machine is automated in a cold, impersonal way, and my wife now calls herself a laundry technician.

She subscribes to advanced scientific journals, keeps up with the Apollo space project and runs off at the mouth on everything from transistors to laser beams.

I have been given the title of junior wash and garment line adherer, which means I hang out the clothes. I suppose I should be grateful.

Yet I dread washing mornings. I belong to a generation of boiling coppers and copper sticks, the hot sudsy smell of saturated sheets, and of bars of yellowed soap.

Now there's an air of bristling technology in the laundry, with split-second timing and ruthless efficiency.

"Load", my wife rasps. I stuff the clothes into the washing machine.

She consults her watch. "Four minutes to wash off," she says.

She looks at the console. "Close hatch," she orders. I shut the washing machine. She begins the countdown, "Five.....four.....three..."

"Look, dear," I interrupt, "I've forgotten a couple of my shirts...."

"Clear the complex", she says icily. "Two.....one.....". She throws a switch.

I humbly take up my position.

"Motor running", I report.

Strange, uncanny sounds come from the interior of the machine.

'Hot water entering,' I chant, consulting my check sheet.

"All systems are go," says my wife.

I sit back and light a cigarette with clammy hands.

Time goes by. The washing machine murmurs, thumps, sighs and gurgles. Its programme goes its relentless way.

"Check machine and report," rasps my wife from the kitchen.

"Machine on course, entering spin-dry period," I say.

"Check systems," she says.

"Check, check, check," I cry. "Hoses running. Pump stops ... four...three...two ....one...NOW."

"Clothes touch down, five minutes," says my wife. "Stand by."

"Machine spinning," I cry.

"Fire retro-rockets," she says absentmindedly.

At last the machine is silent.

My wife climbs to her feet.

"Open hatch!" she orders. "Alert clothes waggon".

She begins unloading the washing machine.

She lets out a shriek. "These clothes still look dirty".

"You didn't," she says, "put in the washing powder, did you?".

"Well," I bluster, insubordinate and defiant to the last, "this machine is supposed to think of everything. If it hasn't enough brains to use washing powder....."

"That's all," she snaps. "We'll have to do another orbit. Get the powder".

No, I haven't been on the moon but there are times when it sounds attractive!

Exegesis

So much to say about this little piece! I'm only going to scratch the surface here.

There's the idea that the Space Age changes how we do small domestic things on Earth: more like machines than messy humans. Both the wife and the washing machine are now operating as Space Age robots (it's a little bit Stepford Wives-ish tbh). It shows how the public interpreted the machine-human interfaces of space technology, down to checklists just like those that the Apollo astronauts used. It's also very cybernetic, getting status updates and adjusting the conditions.

The washing machine drum is a little gravity machine in itself, spinning like a space station or a centrifuge such those astronauts train in. Front loading washing machines with a glass porthole resemble spaceships too. 

The countdown has permeated into the domestic level: precision timing is the key to Space Age efficiency. As a domestic astronaut in her small domain, Jean has assumed power: she commands and Max obeys. She is a robot herself, icy and distant, intolerant of human foibles like forgetting a few shirts - and also the washing powder. (Thanks a bunch, Max. I would have been far more annoyed were I Jean).

The irony is that the power of astronaut Jean is illusory. While Max is pretending to help, he's actually demonstrating a typical trope of the inept male. He boasts about hanging out the clothes, but in this scenario, he forgets the washing powder and sits about smoking a casual ciggie (as people did in those days) while Jean multitasks, back in the kitchen. He finishes with that golden oldie, the nagging wife. It's a perfect illustration of the separate gender spheres of the 1960s, when women were excluded from being astronauts in the US.

'Fire retro rockets,' Jean says, absentmindedly. Doesn't this seem at odds with the ruthless robot housewife, all hard, streamlined efficiency? It took me a few reads before I realised what the subtle Max was implying with this sentence. She is absent-minded and talking about retro-rockets - which the washing machine does not have - because she is dreaming. Standing in her apron at the kitchen sink washing the breakfast dishes, while Max lounges around in the laundry, she is an astronaut. She is in command of a space mission, brave and true. The washing machine is as close as she can come to realising this dream. It makes me feel a little sad.

Once upon a time in France (well probably about 2005), I saw a washing machine advertisement in which a rather attractive nude man crouched in front of the washing machine's porthole, presumably waiting for the spin cycle to finish. The caption read 'One small step for man, one giant leap for women' or something to that effect in French: the idea was that is was a bloody big leap to get a bloke to do any housework, so nude dude's efforts at laundry were going to emancipate women and allow them to leave the house, even go to space! In effect, the effort involved in getting a man to do the laundry was equivalent to landing on the moon!

Gallery of Space Age Suds

As it turns out, there are quite a few connections between washing machines and the Space Age. Here's a small sample.

A space-age shop front in Sheffield, UK. Used with permission, from
https://shopfrontsofsheffield.com/2013/09/30/apollo-appliances-ltd-12-meadowhead/

Look at those rocket portholes lined up outside this charming shop!

https://www.doorsteps.com/search/carson-city_nv?property_id=1004635807

A rental property in Carson City, NV, USA, was advertised with a Space Age Laundry!

From Freaking News,
http://www.freakingnews.com/Tom-Hanks-in-Washing-Machine-Spaceship-Pictures-110109.asp

This is a reference to the Apollo 13 mission.

Source: unknown

This advertisement from 1900 explicitly references the gravity of spinning.


















I'm sure I could find many more examples if I kept searching. Le me know if you find any!

And I'd like to finish by saluting astronaut Jean Fatchen. Here she is with Max in 2004.

Jean, with Max. Picture: Grant NowellSource:adelaidenow

The Anthropocene, the nonhuman and the solar system are grand challenges for archaeology

What are the grand challenges for archaeology? Last year, a group of mostly US researchers (Kintigh et al 2014) published the results of a survey conducted in order to find out. The result was a series of general research areas and specific questions, most of which are core issues in what we do, but with some inevitable blind spots and holes.

Here's a few that resonate with me in terms of my own research in space archaeology (thanks to Publishing Archaeology for extracting them from the paper in a nice list):

•  Why and how do social inequalities emerge, grow, persist, and diminish, and with what consequences?
• How do humans occupy extreme environments, and what cultural and biological adaptations emerged as a result?
• How have human activities shaped Earth’s biological and physical systems, and when did humans become dominant drivers of these systems?
• How do spatial and material reconfigurations of landscapes and experiential fields affect societal development?

Archaeology blogger Doug Rocks-Macqueen thinks there's quite a bit more to be said on these grand challenges. He's asked his fellow bloggers to respond in what ever way they choose, and that's a challenge I can't refuse (bursts into song a la Gilbert and Sullivan).

Challenges are often something that we let others define for us. Something I've gradually learnt over the last decade of being an academic (I was a heritage consultant before, and actually during, this time as well), is to trust my voice.  Part of this is allowing deeply buried or incoherent thoughts to rise to the surface and be given shape. Another part of it is turning things you think you're stupid for not understanding properly upside down and making them into questions or problems to be investigated. So I've delved into my brain to work out what I really think, and this is what emerged.

Put actual people back into the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a challenge, because despite the brilliant Matt Edgeworth being on the Anthropocene Working Group, there doesn't seem to be a great deal of awareness among that community that there is already a discipline devoted to human-environment interactions in the past. Kintigh et al (2014:15-16) say:

Despite producing key data, archaeologists have largely been left out of this discussion. This is a major limitation, since archaeology, drawing on cross-disciplinary tools capable of tracking the increasingly dominant role of humans in Earth systems, brings a deep-time perspective that stands to make significant contributions to understanding how humans have shaped the Earth.

I even read one paper in which the author coined the term 'technofossil' for objects made of contemporary materials. Dude, they're just artefacts, and not always the most durable ones in human history at that. And in my observation there's little understanding of taphonomy in terms of how archaeological data is derived ....

We can't leave this one to the geologists and earth systems scientists. We need to make ourselves visible and relevant to this debate. What I think this means is synthesising archaeological data at a planetary scale in a way we've rarely done before. Imagine if we calculated the total weight of stone removed from original contexts and moved into others after being knapped, quarried, sculpted, built, used, discarded, from the Pleistocene to the present! In effect, we need to act as planetary archaeologists visiting from elsewhere.

And in this, the fine-grained detail you only get from intensive analysis of a site or an artefact type is still absolutely critical. It is the cumulative effect of living people carrying out individual actions in accordance with their worldview which creates the Anthropocene. As archaeologists, this is at the core of what we do everyday: meshing individual agency with broad scale patterns through time and space.

In some ways I kind of resent being drawn in to the debate on the Anthropocene. Part of me wants to resist trends and buzzwords, as hard as that is to do sometimes. But there is no doubt that this is shaping up to be the big theme of the next decade across all the sciences and humanities, and we need to be leading it, not following.

Last year Matt Edgeworth edited a forum section in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology on The Archaeology of the Anthropocene. I recommend it to you.

Make humans the environment for other objects and things

Another big challenge is almost the polar opposite of the Anthropocene, which makes human actions central. As archaeologists, we're pretty focused on humans, because that is what differentiates us from geologists and palaeontologists, after all. But everyone else, it seems, is leaving humans behind. Animals, plants, microbes, and the inanimate are all being drawn out of the background into the foreground. The very definition of what it is to be human is being reshaped by looking at the human body as a microbial biome and considering its continuity with what we previously considered external to it. Then there are cyborgs, robots, AIs, artilects, hyperobjects, superobjects, posthumanism and transhumanism. It's just not fashionable to look at the human body as a coherent entity or unit of analysis any more.

So where does that leave archaeology? We've done more than our fair share of theorising about the interaction between humans and material stuff, with perspectives ranging from environmental determinism to phenomenology and taking in actor-network theory, social theory and a myriad more along the way. (Some argue that archaeologists have always been bower birds and have never formulated truly original theories about the world of objects. In some ways, I tend to agree). We've questioned the meanings of the human body and the boundaries between the 'cultural' and the 'natural'. But will we be stranded in an intellectual backwater as the human is completely bypassed?

Maybe not. I think our contribution to these frameworks lies in inverting our lens and looking at the experience of a mountain, a microbe, a mammoth, a melaleuca as human bodies, actions and technologies interact with it. Let's swap subject and object, or situate both in a flat or object-oriented ontology. How did the life of a flea change when hominins lost most of their body hair? How does the daily or annual life of a flowering plant change when Neanderthal people move into Shanidar Cave?  I'm not talking about use, or impact, or adaptation.  Perhaps the human body is still the unit of analysis, just from the perspective of something else.

Matrioshka Brain, by Steve Bowers
Orion's Arm Universe Project

My own engagement with this challenge at present is looking at materials and structures like degenerate matter and Matrioshka Brains, both far beyond the human scale of existence. I'm interested in what the future holds if we start from the premise that we have always been adapted to large scale networks mediated by material culture - in the words of Andy Clark, 'natural born cyborgs'. Despite dire warnings about AIs who are going to destroy humanity, I don't see why we have to be gloomy all the time. This is just a deficit in imagination. Sometimes it's nice to focus on creativity and transformation. Perhaps that's one reason why we're archaeologists.

Take the solar system perspective

There's no mention of space in Kintigh et al's survey, which is a little disappointing. I'd like to think we'd made a bigger impact than that. But how can space not be a grand challenge?

This is not about going to the Moon or Mars in order to do space archaeology. But archaeologists know all about colonisation, contact, impacts on the environment, adaptation, social life and things. We've seen how population growth and technology change have played out on Earth. Whether your vision of space is dystopian or utopian, we can't go blindly onto other planets without considering the deep history of sentient life on our own. This is archaeology's greatest strength in my view: different futures can't be imagined without understanding the diversity of the past.

I think archaeologists have an important role to play in shaping the discourses around space exploration. The usual rationales trotted out are riddled with 19th century ideas about progress and curiosity and exploration and growth, some drawing very explicitly on assumed human imperatives to colonise and explore. In other words, there's a particular (masculine) version of behavioural modernity that is co-opted to justify the current models of space occupation. Needless to say, I hate that stuff almost as much as I hate evolutionary psychology, which is quite a bit actually.

At this point, however, the two challenges outlined above come to be part of the same question. Really, we should be taking the perspective that Earth is just one of the planets colonised by life at this point in time, and contextualise ourselves within a whole solar system. If there is anything living on other planets, then perhaps they will have their own 'cene'. We can't judge the scale of the Anthropocene in isolation after all. So we need to develop concepts to frame humans a part of a much bigger system than just one planet. Continuities and discontinuities are important here, and we need to be wary of drawing the lines in all the wrong places.

Elsewhere I've argued that a constant gravity is assumed for terrestrial archaeology, and for space archaeology we have to stop considering it as "normal" and recognise that it's just one gravitational regime to which culture is adapted. This is not an entirely new idea: the seeds of it were present in the 19th century (think Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Otis Mason Tufton). I think one of the challenges of space archaeology is how it makes us look back on Earth, and I don't mean as a pale blue dot, a blue marble, a spaceship, Gaia or the so-called 'overview effect'. Call me unromantic but I want a more robust and nuanced philosophy of existence in the cosmos.

Finally

When I started writing, I didn't know this would be where I'd end up. To be honest, parts of it come as a surprise to me, but in a good way. So it seems I've set some challenges for myself here; I hope this discussion may provide some inspiration for others too.

See you in orbit.

The archaeology of not-quite-there: Pluto and the human gaze

why did you glance back?

why did you hesitate for that moment?

why did you bend your face

caught with the flame of the upper earth

above my face?

HD, Eurydice

In 2006, a spacecraft the size of an industrial fridge was launched on a remarkable mission: to zoom past the ninth planet in our solar system and show us its face for the first time. The New Horizons mission to Pluto caught the imagination of the world for a couple of epic weeks in July 2015. But as the spacecraft continues its journey beyond the formerly elusive and controversial planet and on to the Kuiper Belt, I’ve been thinking about what this means from an archaeological perspective.

This mission has turned Pluto from a fuzzy disc of reflected light into a place that we can see and read with our own signs and meanings. Already, there’s such a wide range of interpretations. Some are geological – craters, valleys, mountains. Others are geometric: rectangles, lines, circles, shapes, smoothness, spikiness. Then we have the zoomorphs: a whale’s tail, the head of a cartoon dog. Perhaps the most charming is that which sees the large icefields, now unofficially called Tombaugh Regio, as a heart.

Image from http://www.universetoday.com/121436/youthful-frozen-plains-cover-plutos-big-heart-spectacular-new-images-from-new-horizons/

We could also look at Pluto from a heritage/landscape perspective. Using the World Heritage Convention’s definitions of cultural landscapes, you could argue that that it is an associative landscape – with no actual physical human traces, it is still the repository of beliefs, dreams, visions and ideas. Some of these relate to its location so far from the light of the Sun. It’s said that midday on Pluto is as bright as Earth after sunset. It is a cold, dim planet, like a deep sea fish that lives and swims in darkness all its life. Since it was given the name of the ancient Roman god of the underworld, the International Astronomical Union has decreed that all place names on it will relate to this theme (which includes exploration). So already we have a set of metaphors and associations that shape the planet in our minds.

what was it that crossed my face

with the light from yours
and your glance?
what was it you saw in my face?
the light of your own face,
the fire of your own presence

HD, Eurydice

Our gaze creates Pluto as a place. I’ve written before about how the process of identifying distinct features and naming them creates a map of values. Assigning names to features on Pluto is a colonial process of mastery that draws the dwarf planet into a web of geopolitics. Despite the efforts of the International Astronomical Union to diversify the cultures represented in named things across the solar system, there is still a long way to go.

When telemetry showed that New Horizons had successfully completed its flyby, many in the mission control room waved American flags. Nationalism and national prestige are still among the main drivers of today’s space industry, despite the growth of private and crowd-funded space enterprises. As I watched the flag-waving, I thought that, for some people at least, the passage of a piece of space hardware has been the equivalent of planting a flag – as it was on the Moon – to stamp the outer solar system  as part of an American colonial landscape. And indeed, one of the ‘cultural artefacts’ on board the spacecraft was also a US flag, in stark contrast to the universal symbols on the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft.

Against this is the discourse of space exploration as a global human endeavour which everyone shares, the undeniable excitement generated in social and traditional media across nations and age groups, and NASA’s always brilliant open access, with all materials available to anyone with an internet connection. Possibly more people than ever before have waited with bated breath for the unique experience of gazing on the face of another planet for the first time, like a distant relative they’d longed to meet.

what had my face to offer

but reflex of the earth,
hyacinth colour
caught from the raw fissure in the rock
where the light struck

HD, Eurydice

Pluto is a ‘natural’ object that existed for billennia (is that a word?) before there were sentient beings to observe it. But since its existence was first hypothesised in the 19^th century, it has become a cultural artefact too. Like an archaeological excavation, the cameras of New Horizons excavated it from obscurity in the darkness of the night sky and brought it into the light. Space scientists and the public speculated about this strange new artefact: what was it made of? How had its surface markings been created? Its composition, history and appearance were compared to other planets and moons to gauge its character and hence the genesis of the landscapes captured by the LORRI camera. Deep time was being decoded from a surface of mountains, ice plains and craters: four dimensions being raised up from two.

The images, received as radio signals, converted and processed into pictures that we can view and understand, are a type of heritage or archaeological object in themselves. In one sense they are ephemeral, composed of numbers inside computers. In another sense, their endless duplication and proliferation gives them a digital resilience. Pluto, in our homes and at work, is a place we see and visit through a flat screen, almost as if we are inside our own spacecraft.

When we turn off the device, does Pluto still exist?

Pluto map by Snowfall-the-Cat
http://snowfall-the-cat.deviantart.com/art/Pluto-Map-Sept-10-2015-546286799

If you had let me wait

I had grown from listlessness
into peace
if you had let me rest with the dead
I had forgot you and the past

HD, Eurydice

New Horizons only came within 12 000 km of the planet’s surface. No human trace has been left there as a footprint of the Anthropocene. For a fleeting moment, New Horizons was part of the Pluto-Charon system. Perhaps a few molecules of material are left behind in a tenuous wake within the orbit. Now that the spacecraft has passed, there is nothing to indicate that it was ever there, save for the images, words and memories of people closer to the Sun.

I’m thinking about this ‘nearly there-ness’ of human interaction. Many planets in the solar system have only ever been ‘flown past’:  Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and until the Messenger spacecraft crashed into the surface in April 2015, Mercury too. Similarly, there are places on Earth, like the deep sea, that we know only from remote sensing, probes, and flyovers. There are also places we could visit, but haven’t yet, like World Heritage sites. We feel it’s important that they exist, even if we haven’t had any personal encounter with them, and many people feel strongly about protecting such places.

This is what characterises space archaeology too, at least at the present time. It’s all an archaeology of ‘not-quite-there’, where we use historical and proxy data in order to make hypotheses about what lies beyond our reach in space.

Can there be an archaeology of the ‘not-quite-there’? How do you analyse something you can’t touch? It doesn’t bother planetary scientists: few of them will ever have anything other than data acquired from remote sensing. But as Matt Edgeworth has pointed out, archaeology is made of human dimensions. We dig using our bodies: the artefacts we scrutinise are made to fit in our hands, accommodate similar-sized human and animal bodies. This is partially why the pyramids, and other such wonders of the ancient world, seem so extraordinary and even, to some, alien. Their scale seems to defy the human capacity. In the modern industrial world, there are many such structures: bridges, buildings, mines, rockets, giant offshore gas rigs. Of these objects, Edgeworth (2010:140) notes that 'The sheer scale...is such that it is impossible to fully grasp either in a visual or tactile sense - to see all of it at once or to touch more than a tiny part of it'.

John Schofield, an archaeologist, and David Jenkins, a physicist, have written about the vast differences in scale between sub-atomic particles and the deep galaxy maps that almost show the beginnings of time, all coalesced around the CERN research facility on the border of France and Switzerland. This massive complex of buildings and installations, where the highest of high science takes place (such as the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs Boson in 2012) also contains dilapidated chairs and shabby rooms, forgotten corners where an archaeologist finds the empty space redolent of human presence.

Image courtesy of NASA

In a recent conference paper, I mused about the solar-system-scale Matrioshka Brain and how humans might interact with it as ‘natural-born cyborgs’. Something incomprehensibly large and complex, whether ‘natural’ or ‘cultural’, can still be held in our minds when it is what is called transparent technology: we use it intuitively, without thinking, as an extension of ourselves. This is pretty much what smart phones and other devices are for us now. We're not aware of the vast network of infrastructure that supports them, from satellites to the tiny chips inside - we use them as an augmentation of our bodies.

you who have your own light
who are to yourself a presence
who need no presence

HD, Eurydice

So what are we to make of this? At the end of this disquisition, I'm left with the feeling that we're becoming very good at bridging these differences of scale. Spacecraft like New Horizons give us dimensions of both time and space to get our heads around. They present the act of focusing, through the feeble jellies of our eyes, as a temporal act. We draw closer and closer to the planet's surface, like the process of focussing a microscope objective, and when the object precipitates into our field of view, we assess, name, categorise, analyse - and dream. Pluto becomes part of our personal solar system, the full extension of our gaze, and we are one step closer to becoming truly cosmic.

And then we stumble through and past, like Orpheus, and turn our gaze elsewhere.

Note: the full text of HD's extraordinary work Eurydice can be found here.

you who

who are to yo

From the vault: bodies in outer space

Recently I found a old notebook from 2003. It contains various lists of things I need to do, notes for a paper I was writing at the time on the English collector and armchair anthropologist Henry Ling Roth, my photograph catalogue from a visit to the Woomera rocket range, and lots of scribbled ideas and thoughts.

One page was entitled "A paper: bodies in space". This is what I wrote:

• the moral qualities of bodies in space
• gender and race of bodies in space
• how gravity constitutes a body
• suits - diving/space
• the national body
• the ideological body
• presence/absence
• view/perspective
• cameras inside the capsule, outside the capsule
• prison metaphors
• the medical body in space
• male/female bodies
• contested bodies
• a new anthropometry measuring bodies - moral, emotional, physical fitness, stamina
• robots, animal bodies, frontier bodies, spiritual bodies
• Ransom in space
• Unstable boundaries between body/ship = cyborg, body/space = vacuum

X ray image of Alan Bean's space suit from the Skylab 3 mission, from the US National Air and Space Museum's exhibition Suited for Space.

You can probably see the directions I was going in by reading between the lines of these sparse dot points. This wasn't so long after I finished my PhD, which was about body modification, so theories of embodiment were still very present in my mind. All the same, I think there are still some interesting things to be explored in a few of these elements, particularly gravity, anthropometry, and boundaries.

Ransom, by the way, is C.S. Lewis' reluctant astronaut in Out of the Silent Planet and Voyage to Venus (also known as Perelandra. I pretend That Hideous Strength doesn't exist). I often find myself using Lewis' words as windows into space, as his vision was so unique and prescient.

Now to wait for a gap in my writing/research schedule ....

Dead or alive, the Yutu rover says much about how we relate to robots

This weekend, the moon’s fortnightly rotation cycle turns China’s lunar rover Yutu (the Jade Rabbit) and its solar panels toward the sun once again … but whether the rover wakes up or not remains to be seen, as Yutu already announced its impending death to Earth-based watchers with a series of first-person messages on January 25.

The messages were posted on China’s equivalent of Twitter, Sina Weibo, from an unofficial account believed to be run by a group of enthusiasts.

The rover has been on the lunar surface since December 15, when it was deployed from the Chang’e 3 lander.

Since then, it has covered 100 metres with its six-wheel locomotion.

As space scientists struggled to get Yutu to respond to commands to fold in its solar panels and external equipment, the two-week lunar night descended, plunging the exposed equipment into -150C temperatures without protection.

In 1971, Russia’s Lunokhod 1 similarly failed to make it through to the next dawn, even though it had successfully entered mechanical hibernation.

It’s not impossible that Yutu will survive the night. But it certainly doesn’t look good.

What is different about its probable death, though, is the way that it has been conveyed to the public via the Chinese state news agency Xinhua:

I’ll tell everyone a little secret. I’m actually not that sad. I’m just in my own adventure story, and like any protagonist, I encountered a bit of a problem. Goodnight Earth. Goodnight humans.

More than 6,000 people have responded to the posts with messages of hope and appreciation. (Some, though, thought it “creepy”.)

For them, it doesn’t matter that Yutu is not actually sentient, nor directly responsible for the messages.

Space fandom

Yutu is not the only spacecraft to have a public fan base. Social media such as Twitter and its equivalents play a prominent role in this. Other high profile spacecraft which communicate in first person include @MarsCuriosity and @NSFVoyager2.

But is this a trivialisation of serious scientific endeavours? It could be argued that these engagements are cynical attempts to gain public support for funding space exploration; perhaps a means of glossing over the vast amounts of money spent on space while (in the view of critics, more urgent) terrestrial problems remain underfunded.

However, many of these accounts are not official, but run by fans. This is the case for Yutu’s microblog, as well as @NSFVoyager2 and the popular @SarcasticRover. Unconstrained by communications policies, these accounts sometimes use humour to great effect.

     

@SarcasticRover in action. Twitter

The question, then, is whether this approach makes for effective science communication. Does following an anthropomorphised spacecraft lead people to engage with the science behind it?

Vanessa Hill, CSIRO’s Social Media Manager, argued in an article last year that:

By personifying the spacecraft in the form of social media accounts we’re characterising spacecraft in an easily accessible way which allows people to connect with specific missions.

Human-robotic interactions

The issue, however, is much broader than it at first appears. We can take this a step further into the field of social robotics.

While the development of the fully humanoid robot has been a longstanding scientific ambition, any human-like feature can be co-opted into building a relationship with machines. We can see this in the natural tendency to see faces in inanimate things.

On rovers like Yutu, cameras and antennas often look a little like necks with a head emerging from the body. It’s enough for us to attribute emotional states to them.

A scale model of the Yutu rover shows its more anthropomorphic attributes. Joel Raupe

In this engagement, whether or not the robot is capable of feeling these emotional states is irrelevant. It’s more whether the robot appears to have them. This is what is commonly known as the Turing Test.

Of course, humans reading emotions into a space robot and conveying them as if they originated from the robot is very different. But perhaps the time when such robots will be designed to translate their mechanical states into statements that they tweet directly is not too far off.

In all of this, though, we are still thinking of “us” and “them”. Even if it’s not actually the case, we like to treat the robot as a separate being with sentience. It makes the communication exciting.

We can even take this a step further. These first-person communications as if from spacecraft bridge the distance between remote and proximate interaction.

     

Mars: it’s far out (literally). NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Bell (Cornell University), and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute, Boulder)

In remote interaction, humans and robots are separated in space, and even sometimes in time, such as the time lag in communication between Mars and Earth.

In proximate interaction, humans and robots are co-located, for example, in the same room or facility. The physical distance affects how people behave around machines, as well as the robot’s level of autonomy.

What these social media interactions do is make people feel more present in the remote location, collapsing the distinction between near and far. It doesn’t end there, though.

A post-human perspective

If we take a “post-human” perspective, we can look at space robots as extensions of ourselves. We don’t have to anthropomorphise spacecraft: they can actually be our senses. This is how metatechnology researcher Robert Pepperell explained it in a 2004 conference paper:

This state of co-extension requires that we revise our attitude towards human-machine interaction: if technology is now regarded as an extension of human cognition, then the classical model of interaction whereby two distinct entities are interfaced, one sentient and one insentient, is inaccurate. In its place we must posit an exchange of cognitive activity between the sentient user and the cognition embodied in the device.

Yutu’s live microblogging of its own death from the first-person perspective could be seen, on the one hand, as a measure of the extent to which social media have become pervasive in engaging the public with civil space exploration.

But I think it’s something more. Space robots are not yet fully autonomous, as they rely on human commands. As Yutu shows, however, the exchange is not all one way. Even if the machine itself is not generating the posts, there is still an interaction whereby the actions and “experiences” of the rover are translated into a verbal message which elicits human emotional responses.

The public may not be influencing Yutu’s behaviour, but it sure as heck is affecting ours. These kinds of interactions are charting future territory in social robotics. Yutu’s legacy is part of this new cognitive exchange.

By Alice Gorman, Flinders University.
This article was originally published at The Conversation, 5 February 2014
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