Historic images of the Earth from space - how the view from the Tesla Roadster compares.

On February 6th 2018, Elon Musk launched his own personal midnight cherry Tesla Roadster into space on a test Falcon Heavy rocket. The car went sailing away from Earth with a mannequin in a spacesuit, a copy of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series on a disc, a Hitchhiker's Guide the the Galaxy Don't Panic sign, and a plaque engraved with 6000 names of SpaceX employees. There may have been some other things, but finding a reliable source is harder than you'd think.

Now that the dust is starting to settle, I want to think about something else - some of the iconic, world-changing images of the Earth from outside, and the addition of this new one seen from the front seat of a car.

Here they are:

Apollo 8, 1968

Image credit: NASA

Apollo 17, 1972

Image credit: NASA

International Space Station, 2011

The Cupola on the ISS, 2014

Image credit: NASA

Tesla Roadster, 2018

Image credit: SpaceX

This is something that I'll have to think a lot more about, but here are a few initial impressions. 

Early conceptualisations of what the Earth looked like from outside tended to be greyscale: it was assumed that the blue sky would only appear so from the surface of the Earth (due to Rayleigh scattering). The blueness of the Earth was a surprise that came with the first human spaceflight missions. It was translated into the blue marble, and the pale blue dot, in a colour scheme including white, black, and muted tones. 

Another factor is the presence or absence of the photographer. In the Apollo 8 and 17 images, there's no hint of them. Their absence accentuates a separation of the natural and cultural, setting the human observers apart from the world they're capturing on film. In the case of the whole ISS, the image is taken by a service vessel approaching or departing. We still don't see the photographer.

So many images of the ISS show the space station in relation to the partially curved Earth. Space is closer to us, with people living just a few hundred kilometres above our heads. Then we get the astronaut's eye view, as if we are telepresencing from inside their bodies. These shots are often taken from the Cupola, and often there are people in them. It's a more intimate relationship to the Earth, but it's always looking down. We have a more integrated view of the interconnectedness of Earth and space.

So what about the Tesla Roadster? The addition of the red colour against the blue and white is striking. The effect is almost cartoon-like. 

The other big contrast is how dominant the human presence is - and it's not even human! The Earth is only a backdrop: we're meant to focus on the car in the foreground. I don't know where the camera filming was (this is a still from the video), but we have both a hidden observer and a portrait of the Starman. (We can't see the rocket body which is apparently still attached).

While the other images are related to sensibilities of the Earth's fragility, environmental awareness, the erasure of national borders and the insignificance of Earthly conflicts and struggles (aspects of the Overview Effect), I don't think this is what is going on here.

The faceless driver is not even looking at the Earth. They're focused on leaving. 

I think this is a radical paradigm shift. I don't fully understand what it means yet, but I'm pretty sure others are going to start analysing this as we get further away from the event. 

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....

The sky is falling: How Skylab became an Australian icon

A couple of months back Ursula Frederick asked me if I'd be interested in contributing to a volume of the Journal of Australian Studies, guest edited by her and Kylie Message (both of ANU), on the theme of Media and Materiality.  To cut a long story short, the theme is about how studies of material culture intersect with cultural studies.  It's a teensy bit postmodern for me (sorry, Urs!), but Dr Space Junk is nothing if not versatile, or so I like to think.

Ursula thought I might like to write about Skylab, and she was right.  I have quietly been filing away bits and pieces about it with the intention of doing something with them, so here is the spur.  Despite this, coming up with a coherent abstract to fit the theme of the volume was harder than I thought.  Here it is as sent to Ursula; as usual the actual paper will probably evolve a bit as I get into the research and writing of it.

The sky is falling:  how Skylab became an Australian icon.

In 1979, the US orbital space station Skylab made a spectacular re-entry that was widely anticipated across the world.  As it disintegrated, debris from the spacecraft fell around the town of Esperance in Western Australia and were scattered over the arid inland.  Like the de-orbiting of Mir in 2001, Skylab’s re-entry caused a media frenzy.

Skylab is perhaps remembered more for this than for its actual mission, which was far less dramatic than the preceding Apollo program.  It was not even the first space station, as the USSR’s first Salyut had been launched two years before Skylab in 1971. Skylab’s main purpose was to investigate physiological, social and practical aspects of how humans could survive in space.  For the first time, thought was given to the comforts of astronauts and the spacecraft was designed to be a home.  

This faraway house could only be seen by those who made the effort to look up when it was passing; like all orbital material, it was largely invisible, its presence felt only through media reports.  In its reentry, however, the disembodied spacecraft became tangible, visible, and collectable, in the form of its scattered, and charred remains, in a way it had never been before.  These pieces were collected, curated, displayed and marvelled over in small and large museums and in private collections.  Anyone could own a piece of space if they were lucky; the debris was both space junk and precious artefact.  

When the Shire of Esperance, tongue-in-cheek, fined the US Government for littering, Australia had made a statement about the relationship between spacefaring and non-spacefaring states, and the nature of space industry:  being in space did not remove more terrestrial responsibilities. Through these local and personal interventions after its decay, the social significance of this house in the sky came to outweigh its historic significance.  In this paper I consider how the parts of Skylab became more than the sum of its whole.

Thoughts, leads, information, all welcome!

The scientific value of astronaut waste

Thinking about this again after a conversation with Professor Maciej Henneberg from the University of Adelaide. At present, people only stay in space for relatively short periods of time. (The longest occupation was a USSR cosmonaut who spent over a year on Mir in 1994-1995). There are many health issues related to living in space; one of the major risks is prolonged exposure to cosmic rays and other high energy nasties.

So in terms of assessing the long term effects of this exposure on human tissues, we're lacking serious longitudinal data.

But wait! Perhaps we're not .... you see where I'm going with this. Studying human biomolecules from liquid/solid waste ejected during crewed missions could supply us with that data, without having to risk the health of actual people! The very fact that DNA and other complex molecules would have been degraded by high energy particles is not an impediment to scientific research: it is in fact the very information that we seek.

Of course there are many other factors to consider ... location and retrieval, dating the length of exposure, the source mission, the likelihood of survival in LEO, etc etc. We know that Mir was surrounded by a halo of frozen urine particles, and returned aerogel surfaces have preserved yellowed traces of impacts with it ... so perhaps this is the best way to obtain the samples.

Someone will be persuaded of the value of this argument eventually .....

Fiji in space and boy scout rockets

I'm procrastinating again .... but thought I would do some preliminary investigations on Polynesian space activities. I started with Fiji, a random choice, and found little available. A couple of interesting leads to follow though: Mir debris collected from the beaches, satellite television developments and rocket mail. In the early 1900s, rockets were used to deliver mail from the ship to the shore on one of the Fijian islands. The main reference for this seems to be:

Kronstein, Max 1986 Rocket Mail Flights of the World to 1986 The American Air Mail Society

I'm not especially interested in rocket mail, but it was a theme that continued after WW II, with a popular children's author writing a book on rocket postal services from Woomera.

Also in my investigations this morning I came across a reference to boy scout rocket launches. This is in direct line with my interest in amateur/public space programmes, so must definitely follow it up.