Experiencing space: a 1938 account

This week has had its share of cosmic coincidences .... on Friday I decided I needed something to read on the way home and pulled another old favourite, Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis, off the shelf. I've always loved his description of Ransom's response to finding himself in space, but this time I read it in a whole new way.

What's extraordinary about this book (or one of the many things) is that Lewis wrote it in 1938, and back then, when it really wasn't clear if life could survive in space at all (as in another remarkable piece of writing, Cordwainer Smith's Scanners live in vain), he attempted a description of the sensations and emotions that would accompany such an experience. In this account, cosmic rays and other high energy particles aren't the destructive nasties we now know them to be; instead they create a sense of well-being and euphoria.

Lewis imagines what it is like to see the heavens without the murk of the atmosphere to obscure them:

Pulsating with brightness as with some unbearable pain or pleasure, clustered in pathless and countless multitudes, dreamlike in clarity, blazing in perfect blackness, the stars seized all his attention, troubled him, excited him ....

In Lewis's trilogy, the experience of space is hyperreal, more real than we experience life on earth.

He also describes the noise of the spacecraft:

The room was floored and walled with metal, and was in a state of continuous faint vibration - a silent vibration with a strangely lifelike and unmechanical quality about it. But if the vibration was silent, there was plenty of noise going on - a series of musical raps or percussions at quite irregular intervals which seemed to come from the ceiling. It was if the metal chamber in which he found himself was being bombarded with small tinkling missiles.

And of course it was, a rain of meteroids, as he found out later.

Aesthetic significance and the sensorium of space

This is what I thought about when I woke up this morning. Aesthetic significance, as well as aspects of form, scale, fabric, setting etc, also covers the EXPERIENCE of being in a place - visual, acoustic, olfactory, the touch and taste.

In space, you would always be inside a spacecraft or inside a spacesuit. You take your environment with you, so touch, smell, sound, taste are unrelated to the outside. They remain more or less the same wherever you are. The only sense that could be drawn into apprehension of a spacecraft is sight. So the aesthetic significance of material culture in space is all about how things look.

Of course human sight takes in only a narrow portion of the wavelength, and spacecraft, one would imagine, may appear very differently in UV, IR, radio, etc etc, just like everything else in the universe.

Nationalism and identity in orbital material culture

This morning, while waiting for the bus, I started thinking about satellites again. One satellite on my space heritage list is Indonesia's Palapa 1, a telecommunications satellite launched into GEO in 1976. Indonesia was one the earliest south east Asian nations to take up space technology. Palapa 1 was built by Hughes and was virtually identical in design to Anik 1 and some others. Of course this is often the case: nations without a satellite design capability commission the big manufacturers to build their satellites.

So what is the effect of this? There will be an awful lot of satellites up there which look almost identical. Again, if someone was trying to reconstruct the history of space exploration from the material culture alone, there would be nothing to distinguish an Indonesian satellite from any others of the same series built by Hughes. I don't recall ever seeing national emblems on satellites (although I'll have to go back and look), unlike rockets and other types of spacecraft for that matter. What does this mean?

Many satellites which are identical are also components of telecommunications constellations. But how would you tell, when what links them is intangible?

Obviously I'll have to think a lot more about this and do some more legwork (so to speak). But I'm sure there's something in this.

Do rockets really exist? Identity and continuity in material culture.

I've been trying to find out if there are any R7 (Semyorka) rockets still left in orbit, but it's probably a bit late on a school night - my head is going fuzzy from staring at the data. I suspect they were all probably too low and have reentered.

Anyway. After trying to track some down in museums, another one of those blindingly obvious things struck me. For staged rockets, the actual whole spacecraft does not survive launch: bits of it are released along the way. So whole rockets are always unflown, and those remaining in orbit are only parts. If all you had to go on were the orbital remains, would it be possible to reconstruct the technology? And do the unflown ones represent unsuccessful technology? (Or are they like the hundreds of perfectly fine backed blades that were never used that you find lying around?).

(Oh. I like that metaphor).

So rockets are mythical creatures that can only be discerned through disjointed parts. The candles in the Platonic cave. Bloody hell. I'd better go to bed before this gets out of hand.

But no - because the rocket with all the parts together really only exists for a short time, from assembly before the launch window, until the first stage separates. I'm remembering here my wonderful tour of Kourou where I saw the components in various stages of assembly (and I touched the jupe arriere, so my cells went into space!).

A rocket therefore has a very different mode of existence to that of a satellite.

Yes. Going to bed now. I really am learning so much from the intellectual exercise of creating my space heritage list.

Reflections on Dr Space Junk's Space Heritage List

I am still adding entries to this (Facebook only as yet) heritage list. Many of the obvious ones are already there, so I am having to think carefully about new additions. It is a largely intuitive process, also informed of course by my previous research. The latest entry is the Great Wall of China, which I might have to write about separately.

So, to make explicit some of the principles I am following:

1. First of all, all places/objects on the list have to exist at present. This means that there are no Sputniks on the list: all satellites with that name have re-entered the atmosphere.

2. By necessity, the list contains both movable and immovable places and objects. No point having criteria which exclude satellites! This also means that objects like space suits and parts of things are relevant, and some of these may be in private hands, or "collectables".

3. Social significance figures highly, as with the inclusion of the Night Sky. The Great Wall of China, obviously, was not constructed with a space purpose, but is part of the folklore of space.

The good thing about the Facebook application is that I can track which ones people send to each other as gifts, so over time I think this will provide some interesting stats to play with.

International Year of the Quiet Sun, 1964-1965

I do love a good International Scientific Year, and I was born in this one, so it seems a bit special.

The IGY was aimed at taking advantage of a solar maximum; the IQSY (International Quiet Sun Year) was all about the solar minimum. There were some satellite missions launched specifically for it, but I'll need to do a bit more research to find out which ones.

An interesting article about planning the IQSY can be found here:

Martin A. Pomerantz 1963 International Years of the Quiet Sun, 1964-65 Science 142(3596):1136-1143

The International Quiet Sun Year is a lovely notion as it implies that the Sun is usually noisy - like it was singing to us. (I'm sure someone must have translated solar activity into music before).

My publications on space archaeology

Thought I'd better update my publications list. Some new things coming out this year (see previous post).

Articles (refereed)

Gorman, A.C. 2007 La terre et l’espace: rockets, prisons, protests and heritage in Australia and French Guiana. Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 3(2):153-168

Gorman, A.C. 2005a The cultural landscape of interplanetary space. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):85-107

Gorman, A.C. 2005b The archaeology of orbital space. In Australian Space Science Conference 2005, RMIT University, Melbourne, pp 338-357

Book chapters

Gorman, A.C. 2009 Beyond the Space Race: the significance of space sites in a new global context. In Angela Piccini and Cornelius Holthorf (eds) Contemporary archaeologies: excavating now. Peter Lang, Bern

Gorman, A.C. and Beth Laura O’Leary 2007 An ideological vacuum: the Cold War in space. In John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft (eds) A fearsome heritage: diverse legacies of the Cold War. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California pp 73-92

Gorman, A.C. In press The heritage of orbit. In Ann Darrin and Beth Laura O’Leary (eds) The handbook of space engineering, archaeology and heritage. Taylor and Francis

Gorman, A.C. In press The cultural landscape of space. In Ann Darrin and Beth Laura O’Leary (eds) The handbook of space engineering, archaeology and heritage. Taylor and Francis

Gorman, A.C. In press The archaeology of space exploration. In Martin Parker and David Bell (eds) Space Travel and Culture. Sociological Review Monograph, Blackwell Publishing

Short publications and notes

Gorman, A.C. 2007 Saving Woomera. Australasian Science, June pp 38-40

Gorman, A.C. 2005 Space cowboys: the Wild West and the myth of the American hero. The New England Review, February, pp 10-12

Space Travel and Culture

I'm just waiting for the proofs for my chapter in this book, due to be released in June this year.

Space Travel and Culture

Edited by David Bell and Martin Parker

Wiley-Blackwell

1. Introduction: Making Space: Martin Parker and David Bell

2. Checklist: The Secret Life of Apollo’s "Fourth Crewmember": Matthew H. Hersch

3. A Political History of NASA’s Space Shuttle: The Development Years, 1972-1982: Brian Woods

4. The Geostationary Orbit: A Critical Legal Geography of Space’s Most Valuable Real Estate: Christy Collis

5. The Cosmos as Capitalism’s Outside: Peter Dickens

6. Capitalists in Space: Martin Parker

7. Space is the (non)Place: Martians, Marxists, and the Outer Space of the Radical Imagination: Stevphen Shukaitis

8. The Space Race and Soviet Utopian Thinking: Iina Kohonen

9. The archaeology of space exploration: Alice Gorman

10. Giant Leaps and Forgotten Steps: NASA and the Performance of Gender: Daniel Sage

11. Idealised Heroes of ‘Retrotopia’: History, Identity and the Postmodern in Apollo 13: Dario Llinares

12. Middle America, the Moon, the Sublime and the Uncanny: Darren Jorgensen

13. Re-thinking Apollo: Envisioning Environmentalism in Space: Holly Henry and Amanda Taylor

14. Conclusion: To Infinity and Beyond?: Warren Smith

How does one create a space heritage list?

I've been adding new objects and places to Dr Space Junk's Space Heritage List on Facebook. It's a fairly random, intuitive process (this despite having put together some criteria based on the Australian Commonwealth ones).

A number of things struck me, reflecting on this process. Firstly, most heritage criteria are designed to assess the significance of one place or thing at a time. What I'm doing, I've realised, is a little different. I am thinking about the shape of the whole list, and what it represents as collection. I'm trying to make it representative, both chronologically and geographically (or spatially). So (in a very gradual and ad hoc way), after having added some of the major ones like Tranquility Base, Peenemunde, Woomera (obviously!), Vanguard 1, Syncom 3 - all things you will recognise as my favourites, I'm filling in gaps. Something for every year since 1936, something from every country that has launched a satellite, or hosted a space installation.

This is more similar to a museum collection policy than how a standard heritage register works, where properties are nominated by professionals or interested parties without any coordination. And more like the World Heritage List, which tries to redress imbalances in its properties, and publishes documents identifying gaps.

There are two criteria that stand out as I think each day what I can add to satisfy demand. Firstly, I want to get something in there from every nation-state that has a space involvement. Nationalism and national prestige are significant motivating factors in spacefaring, and the role of nationalism in heritage, particularly world heritage, is a contentious issue and something that has been endlessly written about and debated.

Secondly, because this is a developing technology, and in a sense the ultimate colonising technology, many of the things that are intuitively significant are those that were the first to do something or go somewhere: the first spacecraft to flyby Mars, the first to land of Venus, the first active telecommunications satellite.

I'm still working out what this all means, but wanted to get my thoughts down before I forgot them!

The world's first Space Heritage List

Sometimes very simple ideas are extremely productive. This was how I got into space archaeology a few years ago: by wondering if terrestrial cultural heritage management principles applied off-world.

As you know I've been thinking about the World Heritage List and the legal aspects extending it to space (in collaboration with my sidekick Nigel). A couple of weeks ago I took the criteria for registration on the Australian Commonwealth Heritage List and rewrote them for space. Not much involved, really! Yet reading through it afterwards I realised it was actually quite a powerful document in its own right. Each criterion, when applied to space heritage, raised new issues. In particular, I'm now thinking of natural/cultural values in space and how these ideas intersect in a non-biological environment. More on that later perhaps.

At the same time, I developed the world's first actual space heritage list. OK, so it's a Facebook gift application, but I don't think that diminishes its importance. If you're not on Facebook, you won't understand what this means and I apologise. (I didn't mean to be on Facebook myself and I completely blame my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis, creator of the Sputnik cakes, for getting me addicted to an online game). If you are on Facebook, you can select objects like satellites and places like Kourou from Dr Space Junk's Space Heritage List to send to your friends. It just seemed like the right kind of platform for the moment.

Again, the mere process of thinking what belongs in this list, and why, raises a whole lot of interesting issues. One is representativeness. I have tended to focus on certain periods and places in my research. The Space Heritage List, however, should represent all periods and geographic regions (or should it? and how? equally? proportionally? this not yet worked out). To construct it, I'm researching things that have been off my radar until this point, like the first post-Sputnik USSR scientific satellites, Elektron 1- 4. So I'm learning a lot from this (ostensibly) frivolous exercise. I dare say I shall report more on it as it develops.

(Image courtesy of Roger Jones)

The eighty-day orbit

Another orbital reference from Around the World in Eighty Days:

Such was the respective situation of these two men, and above them Phileas Fogg was hovering in his majestic indifference. He was accomplishing rationally his orbit around the world, without being troubled by the asteroids gravitating around him.

Wishing on space hardware - it's right.

More satellite poetry (if you regard song lyrics as poetry, which I do). This one from Billy Bragg's New England:

I saw two shooting stars last night

I wished on them but they were only satellites

Is it wrong to wish on space hardware

Literary manifestations of globalisation: Around the World in Eighty Days.

Over Christmas, I raided the bookcase in a cousin's house, and decided to read an old childhood favourite, Around the World in Eighty Days.

Not having read it for some years, different things struck me. (I used to wonder: why did Mrs Aouda fall in love with Phileas Fogg when it was really Passepartout who rescued her?). 

When Fogg is playing whist in the Reform Club at the beginning, the following conversation contributes to the laying of the wager:

"Well", replied Ralph,"there is not a single country where he can take refuge".

"Pshaw!"

"Where do you suppose he might go?"

"I don't know", replied Andrew Stuart, "but after all the world is big enough".

"It was formerly", said Phileas Fogg in a low tone.

.....

""How, formerly? Has the world grown smaller perchance?"

"Without doubt", replied Gauthier Ralph. "I am of the opinion of Mr Fogg. The world has grown smaller, since we can go round it now ten times quicker than one hundred years ago".

The reason the world is smaller is because of railways, steamships, and constructions such as the Suez Canal. But even in 1873, our man Jules presages the time when satellites make the world even smaller. Later in the book, this is how he describes Phileas Fogg:

He was a heavy body, traversing an orbit around the terrestrial globe, according to the laws of rational mechanics.

Phileas Fogg is himself a satellite, just in the lowest orbit possible.

Incidentally, I had to look up the date Around the World was first published, and in doing so came across the book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds by Julio Cortazar. This is how it is described in Wikipedia:

La Vuelta al Día en Ochenta Mundos (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds) is a book by Julio Cortázar released and published in two separate volumes in 1967 (same year Hopscotch's translation wins the 1967 U.S. National Book Award). It pays homage to Julio's biggest literary influences while narrating new developments in the world of music during the 1960s, modern art (Dada and Surrealism) and some of the events in regard to America's expanding involvement in other countries. The book also reveals for the first time one of Julio's most adorable pastimes in Paris: playing the trumpet.

This makes me so want to read it, but what I like most about this description is the notion of playing the trumpet as an adorable pastime.

Launch of International Astronomy Year 2009

15 January 2009

2009 has been declared the International Year of Astronomy by the UN General Assembly in collaboration with the International Astronomical Union.

Launched under the theme, 'The Universe - Yours to discover', IYA2009 involves more than one hundred countries, and will stimulate worldwide interest, especially among young people, in astronomy and science.

The official opening ceremony takes place in Paris, 15-16 January 2009, under the aegis of the United Nations (UN), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Nobel Prize winners, scientists from all over the world and government ministers are attending this prestigious event.

Sputnik racehorses

Further to an earlier posting (Jan 20, 2005) about my father's attempt to get one of our racehorses registered as "Little Lemon" in honour of Laika, it seems that satellites were a popular source of racehorse names in the 1950s:

The Jockey Club of New York, which approves the names of race horses, has recently announced that only one horse can be named Sputnik and that since that name has now been assigned, no more breeders need ask for the name.

'

From Ackerman, Louise M. 1958 Facetious variations of 'Sputnik'. American Speech 33(2):154-156

Around this time many space expressions, including Russian words, became common; and there are many articles tracking these changes in language driven by the popular interest in space exploration.

Rock art or rockets?

Or perhaps it should be rock art AND rockets. This is a title for a paper that we came up with, late one night after too many champagnes in the earlier part of last year. The illustrious Dr Alistair Pike was present and complicit. I was filing some papers and came across a sheet of scrap paper covered in scribbled notes from this long-ago evening, which also included the proposed title of Alistair's autobiography: "Vermin and physics".

But "Rock art or rockets" may become nicely relevant this year, as I am in discussions with Mr Phil Czwerwinski, who knows this area well, about doing something with both out at Woomera.

Happy New Year!

The heritage value of comets

In the short story Of late I dreamt of Venus by James van Pelt (The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21, 2008, edited by Gardner Dozois, pp 84-99), various comets are manoeuvred into orbit around Venus, to provide water for terraforming. However, there is opposition:

There's a lobby defending Halley's Comet for its 'historical and traditional values', as well as several groups who argue that 'comets possess a lasting mythic and aesthetic relation with the people of Earth'.

Tranquility Base under threat

NewSpace Digest

Duncan Law-Green

ASTROBOTIC ANNOUNCES AMBITIOUS COMMERCIAL LUNAR EXPLORATION PROGRAMME: ROBOTIC RETURN TO TRANQUILITY BASE BY 2010

Astrobotic Technology Inc., one of the leading teams in the $20 million Google Lunar X-Prize (GLXP) has unveiled its plans for a series of robotic expeditions to build a commercial library of information on lunar science and engineering.

“Astrobotic will robotically explore the Moon’s high-interest areas on a commercial basis, collecting information required to design future outposts and to answer scientific questions about the Moon and Earth,” said President David Gump. “Our data library also will point the way to utilizing lunar energy and mineral resources to lower the cost of exploration and eventually supply markets on Earth.”

In addition to building a lunar data library, the company will deliver payloads, perform on-the-Moon services and generate interactive, high-definition media content for television, the Web, science centers and theme parks.

Astrobotic’s first lunar expedition is the "Tranquility Trek Mission" in May 2010 to the historic Apollo 11 landing site. The second and third missions are aimed for crater rims at the poles because NASA and other agencies plan to establish permanent outposts there. The lunar poles offer persistent sunlight for electrical power and moderate temperatures, plus potential water ice in permanently shadowed deep craters. The company expects that by 2013 it will send a robot into one of the deep polar craters to confirm if water ice can be mined to support future crews and refuel future spacecraft.

Additional missions will collect seismic data to chart the Moon’s interior, and a prototype Moondozer will test lunar construction technology.

Astrobotic Technology was formed in late 2007 and has secured lunar contracts from NASA and two commercial firms. Prototype rovers are now being field-tested at Carnegie Mellon University by Dr. William “Red” Whittaker, the firm’s Chairman. Prototype landing platforms have been constructed by Raytheon Co., using the company’s proven digital terrain matching technologies to achieve precision landings on the Moon. Mission planning and camera expertise is provided by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at The University of Arizona. More information is available at www.astrobotictechnology.com

First Indian material culture on the Moon

I think this is terribly significant: the first nation-state outside the USA and former USSR has placed material on the moon. From ESA:

The Indian Space Research Organisation's lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1 released a probe that impacted close to the lunar south pole on 14 November. Following this, the instruments on the spacecraft are being switched on to get the science observations started.

More at:

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Chandrayaan-1_starts_observations_of_the_Moon