The all-new Space Age Archaeology

Well, I've been thinking about changing the format of Space Age Archaeology for some time now .... the blog is eight years old, and the template is so ancient that I can't play around with it - it basically can't be changed.  But I'm so used to the font and the colours that anything else looks odd to me.  And I'm pretty sure that once I abandon this template I can't go back to it.

So I guess I'm going to just take the plunge and see what emerges.  Anyone who feels strongly enough to comment is absolutely welcome to do so.  About anything - font, background, gadgets, whatever.  I may be brave enough to apply my new design tonight, I may not.  Hard to tell.

Inside the mind of Dr Space Junk with Wordle

This is from a couple of years ago and reflects my obsessions then ...

First Orbit: a review of the Yuri's Night 50th anniversary film by Christopher Riley

Last night I was a guest panellist at a screening of the new film, First Orbit, created by Christopher Riley to commemorate Yuri Gagarin's historic spaceflight in 1961.

In answering questions afterwards, I came to the defence of Valentina Tereshkova and named normally unmentionable things in a room full of physicists and space geeks. But that's another story, and for the moment I just want to consider my first impressions of the film.

The music was wonderful, and it seems a shame that Yuri didn't have a nice ipod so he could have listened to it on his journey.  What sounds would he have heard?  I don't know if his attitude was continually being adjusted, so perhaps the sounds of thrusters were audible .... or perhaps it was silent except for his blood and heart, and the small mechanical tinklings of his instrumentation, until the rude voice of Korolev burst in on his solitude .... (It was very interesting to hear Korolev, whose identity was so long a secret).

As usual, despite the conceit of letting the images speak for themselves, the choices made in the film have a subtle effect.  I think the intent was to allow every person, every viewer, the sense that this could be them:  that this was a universal body, an accessible experience.  It could have been us, floating serenely along in the spacecraft.  His perspective is ours, as shaped by the camera view.

I didn't have a problem with that, but ohers among my companions last night found this more disconcerting, as if Yuri had been de-Russianised, de-personalised, by being subsumed or subverted into allowing his unique, intimate experience to be cannibalised by us.

And of course it was long.  Many people walked out of the theatre, perhaps to other engagements, perhaps just a bit bored.  For me that was part of the point, too.  Did he tire of the view?  After a while did he have a bit of a snooze, just waiting for something to happen?  Was he conscious, for every minute, that he was completing a circumnavigation of creation, dreaming this round Earth into being?  It was a mental exercise, a sort of discipline, to remain focused, and I felt that to be important:  I was not there just to be entertained, it was a sort of reenactment or perhaps just an enactment.

After his reentry, the film ended abruptly. There was no footage of Yuri back on Earth, a terrestrial being like before.  He lands, and it's all over, as if he didn't really return.  As if the person he had been was obliterated in the blackout of the descent, and the story continues in the body of another person, the one who takes a world tour and is celebrated and feted.  Dissatisfying at one level, but I didn't mind that either.  It's we who come back to Earth, in the dimness of the lecture theatre, those who stayed the distance.

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight with Dr Space Junk!

 Yuri's Night

 Notice of a Free Special Screening

presented by   

the Australian Institute of Physics (SA Branch)

http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/aip-sa       aip-sa@physics.adelaide.edu.au

Ph: (08) 8201 2093 or (08) 8234 6112 (a.h.) or Mob: 0427 711 815  Fax:  (08) 8201 2905

Post:  AIP-SA secretary, c/o CaPS, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide SA 5001

and

the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Adelaide Section)

at 7.00 pm on Tuesday 12th April 2011

in the Kerr Grant Lecture Theatre, Physics Building, University of Adelaide

On the 12th April 2011 it will be 50 years to the day since Yuri Gagarin climbed into his spaceship and was launched into space. It took him just 108 minutes to orbit the Earth, and he returned as the World's very first space man. To mark his historic flight, film maker Chris Riley of In the Shadow of the Moon fame has teamed up with the European Space Agency and the Expedition 26/27 crew of the International Space Station, to create a new film of what Gagarin first witnessed fifty years ago.  By matching the orbital path of the Space Station, as closely as possible to that of Gagarin's Vostok 1 spaceship, and filming the same vistas of Earth through the new giant cupola window, astronaut Paolo Nespoli, and documentary film maker Christopher Riley, have captured a new digital high definition view of the Earth below, half a century after Gagarin first witnessed it.  Weaving these views together with historic recordings of Gagarin from the time (subtitled in English) and an original score by composer Philip Sheppard, they have created a spellbinding film to share with people aroundf the world on this historic anniversary.

The Australian Institute of Physics and the Adelaide Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics invite you to a special screening of this historic movie - celebrating 50 years of manned space flight!

Following the screening Dr Ian Tuohy (Space Systems Manager), Professor Roger Clay (Astrophysicist), Dr Alice Gorman (Lecturer in Space Archaeology) and Dr Olivia Samardzic (Co-director Centre of Australian Space Education) will be present to answer your burning space science questions.

Contact: Scott Foster         T: 7389 5979  Email: scott.foster@defence.gov.au

On being a space archaeologist: between science and the postmodern?

My colleague Mick Morrison has posed an interesting question, as part of his hosting of the long-running blog carnival Four Stone Hearth this week. He asks:  "What are the marginal issues or stories in anthropology that you think deserve more attention?"

I suspect my primary answer to this would surprise no-one at all.  (But just to be clear about this, it would be the material culture and heritage of space industry and exploration).

Easy enough. But he also made me think about how I understand my position in the world of archaeology (or anthropology, in the North American sense, encompassing socio-cultural, bio-physical and linguistic anthropology as well as archaeology), as a researcher who is already on the margins, working in an area which many, quite frankly, consider to be mad.  (Not that anyone has ever said that directly to me, of course!). In fact I am marginal in more than one discipline, as I also lurk in the corners of space science and policy.

This raises a problem about what to call myself. I usually use "space archaeologist", but this can be confusing for those not accustomed to seeing the two words together, or who think it's all about remote sensing. But I'm not strictly a space scientist either, and although "space historian" is more easily understood, and captures part of what I do, I'm not entirely comfortable with this. Recent discussions with Brett Holman of Airminded highlighted for me the distinctions between archaeology and history. As he characterised it, historians tend to work alone, and are very text-focused, rarely interested in the actual places or things which they may discuss. Archaeologists use documents and archives too, but we are more focused on places, landscapes and material culture, and we are used to working collaboratively, often as part of large multidisciplinary teams, or with stakeholders such as Traditional Owners. So "historian" could be misleading too, given that I have an intense interest in the stuff. Another recent suggestion has been "space heritage adviser", which I kind of like, as it has a relationship to policy. None of these seem to fit all that well, however, and each seem to constrain me in some way that I'd rather not be.

So, thinking about this, I am led to the conclusion that some kinds of multi-, trans- or inter- disciplinary studies are more marginal than others.

This is perhaps best illustrated by an experience I had in the early 1990s, when I was involved in convening an interdisciplinary seminar series at the University of Sydney.  Naively, I assumed that my own contribution, an exploration of some obscure (at the time) mathematical models and their application to interpreting human behaviour in the archaeological record, counted as interdisciplinary, in the sense that the methods of two separate disciplines were involved. Not so.  Interdisciplinarity, as evident in the topics presented in this series, actually meant postmodern, with a heavy emphasis on Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Spivak, etc. I couldn't actually see how this worked.  (OK, Lacan does use topology, but as Alain Sokal has pointed out, very very badly indeed!  See The gravity of archaeology for my own, no doubt inadequate, application of topology to archaeology).  (And please, no-one tell Sokal). The others were clearly flummoxed by me putting equations up on the screen, and I understood that I wasn't playing the game correctly, not having mentioned Bataille or Deleuze even once; and clearly believing that I could find something out about the world ..... 

In some contexts, one of the most damning things a colleague can say about one's work is "That's not archaeology ......".  Flirting with pure mathematics can be seen as taking the interdisciplinary enterprise just a step too far. Fortunately, the field of contemporary archaeology, where we use archaeological theory and method to turn a lens on our own behaviour and interaction with material culture (see Schofield and Harrison 2010), is gaining support, and I find myself quite at home in this area. Schofield and Harrison even like my excursion into topology! (Thanks, guys).

So, if I am in some sense marginal by being inter- or trans-disciplinary, what is the status of the questions I want to ask about the material culture and places associated with space exploration and industry? Actually, they are pretty straight-down-the-line archaeology and heritage. I want to know what we can learn from the places and objects of space; I want to know what is significant to contemporary communities and what are the most practical yet philosophically sound ways of preserving space places and objects for future generations; I want to know how this unique technology interacts with human behaviour and ideology. So, despite my occasional use of literature, poetry, film and mathematics, perhaps I am just a regular common-or-garden archaeologist after all.

I don't have a problem with that.

References

Gorman, A.C.  2009  The gravity of archaeology.  Archaeologies:  the Journal of the World Archaeological Congress. 5(2):344-359

Schofield, John and Rodney Harrison 2010  After modernity:  archaeological approaches to the contemporary past.  Oxford University Press

Sokal, Alain and Jean Bricmont  1998  Fashionable nonsense: postmodern intellectuals' abuse of science.  Picador:  New York

Yuri Gagarin's Australian story lost in space

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight, Flinders University space archaeologist Dr Alice Gorman (pictured) reflects on the significance of that feat – with an Australian twist.

Photograph by Ashton Claridge

“Australians were fascinated by the idea of the first man in space, if media coverage around the 12 April 1961 mission is any indication, and they remain so,” Dr Gorman said. Her survey of newspaper accounts reveals the official reception of Gagarin’s achievement was tempered by Cold War hostilities.

“Leaders all over the world were congratulating the USSR but Prime Minister Menzies wouldn’t. He made no public statement,” she said. “Journalists turned to scientists for comment, particularly at Woomera which had been the first tracking station to acquire Sputnik 1 in orbit. They didn’t manage to track Gagarin’s flight, however, which led some to speculate whether it really happened.”

Dr Gorman said a comment by prominent Australian physicist and nuclear scientist Professor Harry Messel reflects the mood in some circles. “There was an element of doubt in his comment: ‘If what the Russians claim is true, then it is a triumph over the free world…Scientifically, I’m happy; but from a Cold War perspective, I’m sad’.”

Menzies’ silence may have led to Moscow’s lack of response when an invitation was issued for Yuri Gagarin to visit the 1961 Sydney Trade Fair, which featured life-size models of several Soviet spacecraft. Gagarin bypassed Australia in his world tour that year.

Australian journalist and Communist sympathiser, Wilfred Burchett weighs into this story, too. “Burchett, whose passport was lost or stolen, moved his family to Moscow in 1956. He and Anthony Purdy were the only Western journalists allowed to have a face-to-face interview with Gagarin.

“They subsequently wrote a book together, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: First Man in Space.”

Dr Gorman stumbled across a photograph of Wilfred Burchett’s father, George, presenting Gagarin with a boomerang in Moscow.  The caption reads:

Mr George Burchett presenting Yuri Gagarin with a boomerang on behalf of Australian peace workers with the hope that he and his fellow compatriots in their journeying to the stars will, like the boomerang, always return to Earth safely and to a world at peace.

With human spaceflight programs increasingly under threat and technology able to accomplish many tasks remotely, Dr Gorman said it is easy to underestimate Gagarin’s feat. “Until Gagarin came down in one piece, we actually didn’t know if it was possible for a human to survive in space,” she said. “What is commonplace now was a mystery then. It was less than four years after the first satellite had been launched; can you imagine trusting your life to such untried technology! I think Gagarin demonstrated for the first time that we are all citizens of the cosmos; he was the first person to see the Earth from the outside.”

Story by Vince Ciccarello, Flinders University.  Published 7th March 2011

Consuming the Space Age: the cuisine of Sputnik

Ever since my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis made a special batch of cup cakes decorated with spacecraft to help me celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sputnik 1’s launch in 2007, I’ve had a bit of a thing for rocket cakes. They are a staple of children’s birthday parties and represent youthful dreams of being an astronaut – the feeling that anything is possible, our potential is infinite, and we can reach for the stars.  

Dr Lynley Wallis' special Sputnik cakes

The rocket cake is a charming example of the influence space exploration has had on terrestrial food.  This influence, it seems to me, falls into roughly three categories:

• Food decorated or shaped like spacecraft or celestial bodies.

•  Food devised to commemorate a space event

• Food from terrestrial places associated with space exploration

In this post, I want to consider the first category, in the form of food that evokes the Sputnik 1 and 2 satellites.  These recipes and dishes can be regarded as a sort of performance, half way between tangible and intangible heritage, as they exist only in the moment of their manufacture and disappear in the act of consumption.

The USSR’s successful launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 caught the USA by surprise; and the reactions of panic have been well documented. Suddenly, the night sky was transformed from a serene celestial dome to a place of menace, from which unseen attacks could be launched on the capitalist world.  At the same time, there was tremendous excitement that the shackles of gravity had been broken at last and human dreams of space were about to be realised.

While the US military and government were grappling with the political implications of Sputnik 1, one of the ways in which ordinary people responded was to translate the body of the spacecraft into something familiar and edible.  The humble olive, with the addition of three or four toothpicks to represent antenna, became a symbol of the satellite.  This was an excellent garnish for a martini, sandwich or the quintessential American food, the hamburger.

The caption from this newspaper photograph reads:  

Not to be outdone – Harriet Phydros samples a Sputnikburger which an Atlanta café rushed onto the menu. It’s garnished with Russian dressing and caviar, topped by satellite olive and cocktail hotdog.  

The hot dog is a reference to Laika the dog, who went into orbit in Sputnik 2 later in 1957.  Despite Laika’s sad demise, the visual word play is appealing; but the “not to be outdone” requires further unpacking.  Does this imply that Harriet’s imminent consumption of the Sputnikburger will somehow restore the balance of power?  Or that eating it is a small conquest of space in its own right?  In any case, this potential weapon of mass destruction has become a commodity rather than a beacon of communist ideology.  According to Lisa Parks, ‘mainstream American culture commodified and domesticated Sputnik, positioning it within the discourse of American nationalism rather then leaving it to circle the earth on its own accord” (Parks 1995:16).

The toothpick antenna appeared in other Sputnik foods.  A photograph on the cover of a 1957 Life magazine showed a young woman about to tuck into a Sputnik sundae, surmounted by a ball of icecream studded with toothpicks.  A popular hors d’oeuvre of the 1960s featured cubes of cheese, fruit and sausage threaded on toothpicks, then stuck into oranges or melons.  Another version of the hamburger combined both concepts.  The top image below, from a book on children’s parties, shows a Sputnik cheeseburger (and other delicious space-themed party food).

Image courtesy of Amy Alessio at Vintage Cookbooks

And of course there were the Sputnik cocktails.  There are several versions of these floating around; this one seems to be the most common:

45 ml vodka

15 ml Fernet Branca (a bitter Italian digestive liqueur)

15 ml fresh lemon juice

1/2 tsp sugar

Shake all together and serve in a cocktail glass.

William E. Burrows, in his classic “This New Ocean:  The Story of the First Space Age”, described the USA’s reaction to the launch of Sputnik 1 as “the Sputnik cocktail: vodka and sour grapes” (Burrows 1998:187). The culinary metaphor continued: at the time, some US politicians, including Eisenhower, blamed the Soviet lead on the hedonist consumer lifestyles of Americans. As Burrows frames it, they effectively called upon US citizens “to push away their banana splits, hot fudge sundaes, malteds, cherry-lime rickeys, barbequed steaks, and hot dogs” (Burrows 1998:191), and make sacrifices in order to regain the upper hand in the space race. Capitalist ideology had been dealt a significant blow.

Sputnik-inspired food, however, meant different things in different places.  The journalist Fred Blumenthal, travelling though Asia following the launch, observed that

Sputnik just turned the East upside-down. As it did everywhere, I suppose it appealed to the imagination.  In the Philippines, the restaurants, movie houses and taxicabs were renamed Sputnik.  One restaurant even came up with a Sputnik sandwich, the feature of which was an olive with four protruding toothpick ‘antennae’.  More important was the diplomatic loss of face suffered.  In Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines, there was a loss of confidence in the United States and, under the surface, a sort of secret glee that [it] had been toppled from the high horse (quoted in Dickson 2001:132). 

So here, the consumption of Sputnik was almost an act of resistance against US imperialist ambitions in that part of the world. We can see in these few examples that there was an ideological dimension to Cold War food, a literal internalisation of the values that Sputnik was felt to represent for its different audiences (not forgetting that Sputnik was also a sound ……). 

The culinary legacy of the Cold War in space, however, lives on in the 21st century.  Any dish which features long spikey things can be called a sputnik; I’ve seen potato sputniks, a scoop of mashed potato with carrot and cucumber sticks for antenna; and the famous exponent of French cooking, Anne Willan, created a baked Pineapple Sputnik with whole vanilla beans for antenna (Willan 2000).  The kohlrabi (a type of turnip) is frequently called the sputnik vegetable, particularly as its leaves are angled just like the satellite’s antennas.  I’m not a fan of anything turnippy; and I regret that I don’t like olives, as it’s hard not to appreciate the simple elegance of the olive sputnik.  But I think my summer will now feature many Sputnik cocktails ……..

References
Burrows, William E.  1999 [1998]  This new ocean.  The story of the first space age.  New York:  Modern Library
Dickson, Paul  2001  Sputnik.  The shock of the century.  New York: Berkly Books
Parks, Lisa 1995 Technology in the twilight:  a cultural history of the communications satellite 1955-58.  Paper presented at the 1995 Society for the History of Technology Conference, Charlottseville, VA
Vintage Cookbooks http://vintagecookbooks.blogspot.com/2010/08/sputnik-cheeseburgers.html
Willan, Anne 2000 From My Château Kitchen. Clarkson Potter/Publishers

Food for Thinkers is a week-long, distributed, online conversation looking at food-writing from as wide and unusual a variety of perspectives as possible. Between January 18 and January 23, 2011, more than thirty food and non-food writers will respond to a question posed by GOOD's newly-launched Food hub: What does—or could, or even should—it mean to write about food today? You can check out the conversation in full at GOOD.is/food, join in the comments, and follow the Twitter hashtag #foodforthinkers to keep up-to-date as archaeologists, human rights activists, design critics, and even food writers share their perspective on what makes food so interesting. 

Happy New Year from Dr Space Junk!

Here is my annual New Year card, made as before from Facebook status updates.

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!

Doing orbital archaeology from space

I know I wrote a while ago that I was over remote sensing, but looking at a wonderful picture by CNES this morning of the Tango satellite as seen from the Mango satellite (if I remember the details correctly) I think I may have been too hasty.  It would be possible to do an archaeological survey of orbital space remotely from another spacecraft in orbit. Or many spacecraft in orbit.  Sampling would be critical to get across, as the distances are just so vast, but that's a minor problem, I think.

Terrestrial tracking could be recast as a kind of archaeological survey - they're just not aware that that is what they're doing yet!  Anyway this is more of a note to myself to remind me to come back to this idea. I have ten minutes before I leave for work, and this morning's task of delivering a masterclass to the graduates on conference networking. This afternoon the graduates are doing presentations on their industry work placements, there will be drinks, and if I don't imprison this thought in words now I might forget it in the awful rush of end-of-semester stuff.

Wouldn't some wealthy aerospace company like to give me job researching this kind of thing? It would make me so happy.

OK. Going to catch the bus now, in the rain.

Space food: recreating an authentic space experience on Earth. A review of The Astronaut's Cookbook.

I've had an ongoing interest in Space Food Sticks, which have quietly vanished from Australian supermarket shelves in the last few years, despite the fact that they seemed to have a healthy export market in the US. So when I learnt of Springer's recently launched The Astronaut's Cookbook:  Tales, Recipes, and More, by Charles T. Bourland and Gregory L. Vogt, I was curious to see what it might have to say about them.

The space food stick was created by Pillsbury in a form that could be inserted into a helmet port - but of course that was never going to work with the pressure differential.  Despite this, the originally caramel-flavoured sticks were part of the Apollo menu. Bourland and Vogt imply that sales of the Pillsbury space food stick were disappointing and the product never took off, so to speak (Bourland and Vogt 2010:32).

This is interesting as they certainly took off in Australia!  They were manufactured by White Wings, a company owned by Uncle Ben's (I think). I remember them as being chocolate, not caramel, although there was a caramel version available.  In later years the box featured a picture of a BMX bike rather than a spacecraft.  Perhaps there was a subtle safety message in this:  "astronauts wear helmets, so it's cool to wear a bike helmet".  Assuming that the callow youth thought astronauts were cool, of course.

When I held a symposium about the history and heritage of Woomera a few years ago, I bought many boxes and put an individually wrapped stick in each delegate's bag of symposium stuff.  A year or so later, I wanted to buy some to take to the Centre Spatial Guyanais, and was unable to find them anywhere.  (Perhaps, in retrospect, the intended recipients in French Guiana may have reason to be grateful for that).

USA peanut butter flavoured space food stick box.
Image courtesy of Mojowski 77

Australian chocolate space food sticks.  Author's image.

While Bourland and Vogt don't have much more to say about space food sticks, they do offer a recipe for Bacon Bars (2010:35):

Bacon Bars

1 lb cooked bacon

1. Fry the bacon until golden brown

2.  Place the warm bacon into a hamburger press

3.  Exert 3000 lbs of pressure for 10 seconds

4.  Remove the compressed bacon and let cool.

Yield:  more than you would want.

After samping the bar - so that you can say that you tried it - give the rest to the family dog. One nibble, and Fido will prance around the house barking [Translation:  "It's BACON!").

While I don't own a hamburger press, or have a dog, I confess I am very tempted to try making some version of this. Hell - it's BACON!

I was also amused by this recipe:

Breakfast cereal

1 cup of your favourite cold cereal*

1/3 cup of powdered milk

2 tsp of sugar or 1 packet artificial sweetener

1/2 cup cold water

1 resealable plastic sandwich bag

*Frosted cereals stay crisper longer than unfrosted cereals.

1.  Put all the ingredients in the bag.

2. When ready to eat, add water and reseal the bag.

3.  Shake the bag to dissolve the milk and sugar.

4. Open the bag and eat immediately with a spoon.

5.  Write a note to yourself to never do that again unless you become an astronaut.

Yield:  1 serving.

I think this recipe may reflect the US palate, much sweeter than the Australian, as I can't imagine any adult would actually add sugar to an already frosted cereal, let alone 2 teaspoons.  But perhaps things have to be sweeter in space.  (Hmmm.  This might not be too bad with Froot Loops ......).  If you want to try this one, I think the first step should read "Put all the ingredients in the bag EXCEPT the water".  There is an art to writing recipes that is often overlooked.  Or perhaps I mean a logic.

So you can see this is a very quirky and entertaining book, and may even have some recipes worth trying at home in it, as well as the historical and scientific background to space cuisine. (They include Russian space food as well).  I like the idea that we can be space tourists at home by recreating space experiences, in the same way that space food attempts to replicate the tastes and experience of being at home on Earth. The snippets offered here are from the promotional download, available at the Springer website,

I don't yet have my own copy.  And Christmas is not far away ...........

Voyage to Venus: an archaeological survey of the Venusian surface

Introductory note

This was written as part of a book chapter, but as it developed Venus became increasingly irrelevant, so I took it out. I've been meaning to do something with it ever since. Posting it here might remind me!

Our tropical twin sister

Although Venus is a close neighbour, and had been the subject of speculation and study since ancient times, very little was known about it in the late 1950s due to the impenetrable cloud layers above the surface (Burgess 1985:8-9). Exploring Venus would be a scientific first as it was considered to be critical in understanding the evolution of the Earth (Dorfman and Meredith 1980:773). Our “twin sister” (Marchal 1983:269) had similar mass, gravity and volume.  Before the first missions, Venus also held the promise of life ….

Speculations ranged from a warm, swampy world that resembled Palaeozoic Earth, dry dusty mountains, oceans of carbonic acid, a surface covered in hot oil or puddles of molten metals (Burgess 1985:13, 131). C. S. Lewis (1943) created a lyrical sensorium of fragrant floating islands, a new Eden; Isaac Asimov (1954) imagined telepathic frogs swimming Venus’ warm oceans.  But when the first missions returned data, the dream of Venusian life was dashed.

Sapphires, diamonds and Daleks

The earliest missions were flybys. Venera 1 (USSR), launched 1961, failed to return data and entered a heliocentric orbit. In 1962, the US Mariner 2 flyby of Venus discovered that the surface temperature was likely around 430° C (Burgess 1985:2).  Venera 2, launched in 1965, also failed.

Venera 3 was a landing mission: the spacecraft crashed on the surface but also did not return data (Burgess 1985:22; Figure 1).  Venera 4, which reached Venus in 1967, was the largest interplanetary spacecraft yet launched at 1100 kg (Burgess 1985:22).  It had a more sophisticated heat shield, developed from experience with re-entry studies on ICBM warheads (Burgess 1985:38).  Venera 5 and Venera 6 (1969; Figure 5) were even heavier, and designed to resist up to 27 atmospheres (atm): but it seemed that the Soviet designers were reluctant to accept the estimation of a surface pressure of around 100 atm.  Both spacecraft were crushed before they reached the ground (Burgess 1985:40).

Venera 7, in 1970, was the first to land intact and return data from the surface (Basilevsky et al 2007:2097).  This time the landing capsule was designed to resist 180 atm, had stronger insulation and a titanium pressure sphere core (Pauken et al 2006:2).  Finally, the surface temperature and pressure were confirmed, and Venera 8, launched 1972, was designed to withstand only 105 atm (Burgess 1985:43).

Veneras 9 and 10, in 1975, were redesigned with a circular ring shock absorber.  They returned the first pictures of the surface.  In these extraordinary images, we see a field of flat rocks, with curve of the shock absorber visible on the lower edge.  The perspective, as if a person is looking down on their feet, gives the photographs a personal feeling.  The Veneras, in appearance, are not unlike the cyborg Daleks:  they almost seem as if they could start moving of their own volition, uttering some staccato imperative (Figure 2).  The images give a sense of the spacecraft orphaned on a strange planet.

Figure 1:  Venera 3 spacecraft.  Image courtesy of NASA

Figure 2:  Venera 9 spacecraft.  Image courtesy of NASA

In 1978, both the US and USSR sent missions to Venus.  Veneras 11 and 12 weighed in at 5000 kg each (Burgess 1985:48).

Figure 3:  Landing sites on Venus. Image courtesy of Philip Stooke

Pioneer Venus has been the only US program to place material on the surface of Venus.  Arriving at Venus in 1978, a bus delivered one large (called Large), and three small probes to the surface:  the engagingly named North, Day and Night for their proposed destinations.  The large probe was 1.5 m in diameter; the three small ones were 0.8 m.  Each had a payload of scientific instruments.

The spacecraft were designed and developed by the Hughes Aircraft Company.  The large probe was a pressure vessel module 73 cm in diameter and a deceleration module weighing 317 kg.  The heat shield was carbon phenolic with aluminium and fibreglass fittings. The pressure module containing the instrumentation was a titanium shell with ports and four sapphire and one diamond window for the instruments.  Internal shelves were made of beryllium (Dorfman and Meredith 1980).  The small probes were also titanium pressure modules with carbon phenolic heat shields, internal beryllium shelves and two diamond windows each.  The Large probe jettisoned its heat shield on the way down to the surface; the small probes retained theirs (Burgess 1985:82).

The last human artefacts to land on Venus were the Vega 1 and Vega 2 probes, released by rockets on their way to a rendezvous with Halley’s Comet.  They were essentially developments on the basic Venera lander type. Launched in 1984, both Vegas successfully landed on Venus in 1985 and returned data.  All subsequent missions have been flybys or orbiters.  Table 1 shows the all the Venus missions which have left material on the surface of Venus.

Date    Nationality    Mission    Components on surface

1965    USSR    Venera 3    Hard lander

1967    USSR    Venera 4    Hard lander

1969    USSR    Venera 5    Hard lander

1969    USSR    Venera 6    Hard lander

1970    USSR    Venera 7    Soft lander

1972    USSR    Venera 8    Soft lander

1975    USSR    Venera 9    Soft lander

1975    USSR    Venera 10    Soft lander

1978    USA    Pioneer Venus    4 probes

1978    USSR    Venera 11    Soft lander

1978    USSR    Venera 12    Soft lander

1981    USSR    Venera 13    Soft lander

1981    USSR    Venera 14    Soft lander

1984    USSR    Vega 1    Soft lander

1984    USSR    Vega 2    Soft lander

Table 1:  Missions with surface components on Venus

Archaeological sites of the future

The data returned by the Venera, Pioneer Venus and other missions revealed a fierce environment with the most corrosive upper atmosphere in the solar system: Venus’ yellow clouds are concentrated sulphuric acid (Reddy and Walz-Chojnacki 2002:36-37). On the surface, pressure from the predominantly CO2 atmosphere is 90 times that on Earth; Veneras 3-6 were crushed as they descended through the atmosphere.  The surface temperature is 430° C (740 K), above the melting points of lead, tin and zinc.  In such conditions, is it possible that the landers and probes have survived?

There is no evidence of plate tectonics and only “modest” evidence of geological activity on Venus (Jones 2007:169).  Erosion processes are slow, as there is no water, and surface winds move at human walking pace (Saunders 1999:100, 108, Jones 2007:343).  While the winds can move sand and dust, “the slow speed makes the particles ineffective as cutting tools and agents of erosion (Saunders 1999:108), so much so that craters a few million years in age appear fresh (Jones 2007: 275, Saunders 1999:100).  There is also little danger from the upper atmosphere.  The cloud layers start at around 45 km from the surface.  Droplets of sulphuric acid do leak downwards, but evaporate as the temperature rises towards the surface – they do not survive below about 25 km (Jones 2007:342).  Being on the surface would be like immersion in a hot dry ocean with slow currents of air (Burgess 1985:132).  There is no reason why archaeologists of the future should not find the Veneras, the Vegas, and the Large, North, Day and Night probes exactly where they landed, the diamond and sapphire eyes gazing sightlessly at the dull brown terrain (Figure 3).

The Venera and Vega spacecraft can be seen as representing the Cold War battle to imprint space with ideology (Gorman and O’Leary 2007).  Burgess even conceptualised the Veneras as “Red flags on Venus”, and each Venera mission carried Soviet emblems to commemorate the landing (Burgess 1985:35-36).  But they are much more than that.

The spacecraft also represent an evolution and adaptation to increasingly more accurate information about the nature of the “errant twin”:  each set of returned data enabled the design of spacecraft more suited to surviving Venusian conditions.  Like the early Cold War launch sites, and the cloud of orbital debris surrounding the Earth, they have made Venus a cultural landscape where the interaction of the environment and human material culture have formed a new entity.

References

Asimov, Isaac  1954  Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus.  Doubleday and Company

Basilevsky, A.T., M.A. Ivanov, J.W. Head, M. Aittola and J. Raitala  2007  Landing on Venus:  past and future.  Planetary and Space Sciences 55:2097-2112

Burgess, Eric  1985  Venus:  an errant twin.  Columbia University Press, New York

Dorfman, Steven D. and Clarence M. Meredith  1980  The Pioneer Venus Spacecraft Program.  Acta Astronautica 7:773-795

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

Jones, Barrie W.  2007  Discovering the solar system.  Second Edition, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, Chichester UK

Lewis, C.S.  1943  Perelandra.  John Lane, London

Marchal, C.  1983  The Venus-New-World Project.  Acta Astronautica 10(5-6):269-275

Pauken, Michael, Kolawa, Elizabeth, Manvi, Ram, Sokolowski, Witold and Joseph Lewis  2006  Pressure vessel technology developments.  4th International Planetary Probe Workshop, 27 June – 30 June 2006, Pasadena, California.  Available at ppw.jpl.nasa.gov/20070607_doc/6_2PAUKE.pdf.  Viewed 15 September 2008

Reddy, Francis and Greg Walz-Chojnacki  2002  Celestial delights:  the best astronomical events through 2010.  Celestial Arts

Saunders, R. Stephen  1999  Venus. In J. Kelly Beatty, Carolyn Collins Peterson and Andrew Chaikin (eds).  The New Solar System.  Fourth Editions, Sky Publishing Corporation and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge pp 97-110

Mormon space sites - fundamentalism and high technology

I've long been fascinated by Mormons. It's not that they're necessarily weirder than any other Christian sects or denominations, but they are relatively recent, and New World, and their origins have been played out in the full glare of media such as newspapers and telegraphs (not something your other major prophets have had to deal with). There is also a rich tradition of Mormon archaeology (by serious archaeologists like Mark Leone [for example, 1973, 1977, 1979], not just people trying to prove the Book of Mormon, although they exist too).

But the fundamental polygamist sects are freaky (for a whole range of reasons that are not relevant here). The reason I am contemplating this at all is because on a recent train journey I took Jon Krakauer's fine book Under the Banner of Heaven, an analysis of fundamental polygamist Mormon sects and the nature of belief, to read on the way. Would you be surprised to learn that there was a space connection? And as I read those pages with excitement, little pieces of paper fell out of the book, indicating that I had bookmarked them on an earlier reading.  This is why:

At the moment, DeLoy is driving his thirdhand Chevy van on a dirt road on the outskirts of town.  One of his two wives and eight of his seventeen children are riding in the back.  Suddenly he hits the brakes, and the van lurches to a stop on the shoulder.  "Now there's an interesting sight", DeLoy declares, sizing up the wreckage of a television satellite dish behind some sagebrush off the side of the road.  "Looks like someone had to get rid of their television.  Hauled it out of town and dumped it".

Members of the religion, he explains, are forbidden to watch television or read magazines or newspapers.  The temptations of the outside world loom large, however, and some members of the faith inevitably succumb.  "As soon as you ban something", DeLoy observes, "you make it incredibly attractive.  People will sneak into St George or Cedar City and buy themselves the dish, put it up where it can't easily be seen, and secretly watch TV during every free moment.  Then one Sunday Uncle Rulon will give one of his sermons about the evils of television. He'll announce he knows exactly who has one, and warn that everyone who does is putting their eternal souls in serious jeopardy.

Every time he does that, a bunch of satellite dishes immediately get dumped in the desert, like this one here.  For two or three years afterward there won't be any televisions in town, but then, gradually, the dishes start secretly going up again, until the next crackdown. People try to do the right thing, but they're only human". (Krakauer 2003:11)

What interests me about this is firstly the satellite dishes, which I have argued (Gorman 2009) are as much space archaeology as anything else, and second of all the domination/resistance theme. So we have accumulations of satellite dishes out in the desert, deposited periodically, representing the impact of telecommunications technology. They are archaeological sites of the space age on Earth.  With a turnover of three years or so, this landscape would make a nice study in change in satellite design .....

Domination and resistance have been studied extensively by historical archaeologists, in terms of the ways that people find to assert their identities using material culture and space in controlled situations such as plantations, prisons, asylums, utopias etc.  In this case, the discarded satellite dish observed by DeLoy Bateman and Jon Krakauer is visible from the road out of town - on the outskirts - so despite the secrecy involved in accessing satellite television in Colorado City, its disposal is barely concealed. That in itself speaks volumes about the efficacy of, and responses to, strict control of behaviour in the fundamental communities of the city. 

And all this makes me think of similar social pressures in places like Woomera - of a very different kind, such as keeping out the contagion of communism, and of course a completely different relationship to technology - but both are desert enclaves where information must be tightly controlled. Apparently the desert outside the township of Woomera bears the evidence of social activities unacceptable in the family atmosphere of the town.

This isn't quite where I thought I was going when I started writing this, but now I'm here, I don't mind it.  Perhaps I shall have to explore this similarity a little further.  Permeable boundaries of technology and the role of space material culture in mediating identity?  Something like that.


References
Gorman, A.C.  2009  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
Krakauer, Jon  2003  Under the banner of heaven.  A story of violent faith. London:  Doubleday
Leone, Mark P. 1977 The New Mormon Temple in Washington, D. C. In Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things. Historical Archaeology. Special Publication Series 2:43-61.
Leone, Mark P. 1973 Archaeology as the Science of Technology: Mormon Town Plans and Fences. In Charles L. Redman (ed) Research and Theory in Current Archaeology, pp 125–150. John Wiley and Sons.

Leone, Mark P.  1979  Roots of Modern Mormonism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press

A space debris-tracking satellite

 WASHINGTON — NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is gathering information for the possible development of a demonstration satellite to track pieces of orbital debris that are too small to be seen by current systems but still pose a threat to operating spacecraft. Spurred by the new U.S. National Space Policy that emphasizes tracking and mitigating orbital debris, Huntsville, Ala.-based Marshall may partner with industry and academia to field a low Earth orbiting satellite as soon as 2014, said Bruce Wiegmann, an engineer in Marshall’s Advanced Concepts Office (full story at http://spacenews.com/marshall-ponders-debris-tracking-demo-satellite/)

This is an interesting concept, as, in my opinion, there isn't enough of this going on at the moment.  Debris in GEO is not as well modeled as lower orbits because of the difficulties of tracking stuff that far away; but there are only a few satellites being used to obtain data on GEO (at least as I understand the situation).

This demo satellite is aimed at tracking debris from 1-10 cm in diameter, what's known as the medium-sized class.  The stuff above 10 cm is well tracked from Earth. The problem with the medium debris size class is that collision with a piece can cause a lot of damage to a functioning spacecraft, and even mission failure. And there's far more of it than the big stuff, so collision is far more likely.

I will have to keep an eye on this development to see if there are implications for space heritage.

Vostok space beer: from prehistory to space tourism. An interview with Dr Jason Held.

You might wonder why Dr Space Junk is interested in space beer? (A. She's an archaeologist.  Beer comes with the territory).  But seriously, what has beer got to do with space archaeology?

My interest in this was piqued for a number of reasons.  Firstly, nationalist symbols, and the achievement and claiming of "firsts" has been a major feature of space exploration from the start.  Australia did quite well in this sphere once, being the fourth nation to launch a satellite (WRESAT 1).  Since then our space industry has languished, although we may be heading for a renaissance, fingers crossed!  Producing the first space beer reflects the national obsession with this beverage, and so has some symbolic overtones, I believe. Secondly, as you will see,  Held contextualises the beer in a trajectory of social culture that I think is quite interesting as I am thinking along the same lines myself.

I think it also raises questions about the future complexion of existence in space.  What kinds of artefacts will distinguish the era of space tourism from the era of exploration?  I am reminded of a site I saw at Maralinga in outback South Australia, where legendary surveyor Len Beadell and his team left behind a scatter of beer cans (as they were in those days) with tins of spam and tobacco as evidence of their survey in the desert.  I don't think we are going to see beer bottles littering orbital space, as they won't be in glass, which is too heavy for a start.  (Damn!  I forgot to ask Jason how it would be packaged).  But I wonder how the material culture will differ, and how the terrestrial accoutrements of tourism will be transformed in the space context.

Anyway, here is Jason to tell the story.

DrSJ: Where did the inspiration for the project to develop a space beer come from?

JH:  Several of us are avid homebrewers at Saber Astronautics, both in the US and in Australia, so this is also a chance for us to combine two arenas we love very much.  But the original idea for space beer came out of an internal discussion on space logistics needs for tourism.  Tourism by its nature is geared towards commerce and entertainment, rather than exploration, so the demands emerge from the people who go up, rather than decided top-down by a government body.  

For the beer itself, the usual approach was to study brewing in space, with the goal of bringing beer down to Earth, but logistically this isn't cost effective.  At least, not if you wish to be mass market.  It makes more sense to brew on Earth, and send the beer up, as the largest market is here.  Since there are physical issues with drinking beer in space (carbonation, flavor, etc), we realized that there was an opportunity not just to support the space tourism industry, but fellow beer lovers as well.  Consider the history of the India Pale Ale, the thought of making the world's first space beer is really exciting for us-- it's a real contribution to making people happy for a long long time.

DrSJ: Cosmonauts are already known to have consumed vodka in space.  Why do you think future space tourists will demand beer? Is this worth pursuing, given the difficulties in dealing with carbonation and taste?

JH: Vodka certainly makes sense as a space alcohol-- with a few tweaks it's usable as a rocket fuel, so there's some fun thought experiments there.  But at the end of the day, people on Earth love beer, therefore people in space will also want beer.  Also we felt that beer is a bit safer, less flammable, less toxic to the astronauts/cosmonauts/tourists who simply may wish for a bit of taste of home.  

DrSJ: You were quoted as saying "Wherever humanity goes, beer is sure to follow".  Did you do much research into the history of beer as part of this project, and if so, what was the most relevant fact you discovered?  Are there past methods of beer manufacture that can inform this project?

JH: We did run into academic debates over the effects that alcohol has had on human society.  Some argue that beer is one of the key causes of human society, but I feel it's more of a correlation.  There's some evidence that we've evolved with beer as well, especially considering the genetic differences between people in metabolizing alcohol.  

Initially we took inspiration from the history of the India Pale Ale, but the quote comes from a personal desire to try beer recipes from ancient Egyptian and Sumerian cultures.  Unfortunately, my homebrewing skills aren't quite up to snuff there, but I'm hoping to convince our friends at the 4-Pines to give it a go.  

The 4-Pines Brewing Company follows German purity laws, and that's as far back in history as we're willing to go with the actual manufacturing.  Old brewers had very different problems to solve than we do-- astronauts can take vitamin supplements instead of drinking beer to help stave off scurvy. Beer might be good to help morale in long duration trips (i.e., Mars).  But for the recipe we're really looking at a unique class of problems which have no historical baseline. 

DrSJ: The new beer is called Vostok.  Why choose a Russian name for an Australian beer? Were there other names that you considered?

JH: This was in honor of Yuri Gagarin as the first person in space onboard the Vostok 1.  It's a name everyone in humanity should know.

DrSJ: What are the possible physiological risks of consuming beer in space, as opposed to other alcoholic drinks?

JH: Aside from issues of carbonation, I doubt there's much difference.  Formal studies in alcohol absorption in microgravity and other possible effects have not been done.  There are known issues of cabin pressure effects on alcohol absorption which we account for in the study.  There also may be interaction effects between medications and alcohol.  Part of the point of this study is to learn as much as we can before people start flying to space in larger numbers in 2012.

One difference might be in long duration storage.  Since beer contains live organisms ("yeast samples in solution"), there may be changes in shelf life in microgravity. 

DrSJ:  You've already done some tests on the beer in the Queensland University of Technology drop tower, which creates microgravity for a few seconds.  What were the results?  Would you have been able to initiate the project without the drop tower, which was only completed recently? 

JH: I'll be able to answer more about the QUT Drop Tower in a week or two.

DrSJ: In the recent media coverage, was there anything omitted that you would like to talk about now?

JH: We often think of astronauts/cosmonauts as being examples of human perfection, and are quick to judge at the suggestion of them having a tipple.  After all - think of what these fine people had to do just to get in to a space program in the first place...  They are subjected to harsh conditions and workloads and still must meet the expectations we place on them.  What we have to realize is that they are at a base level very human, and having a beer is very much a part of that.  

And here's the point - NASA is right to be conservative, since alcohol can be abused, and the body's limits in space are not known.  So this research is not just to make a beer to enjoy, but also to learn how people's drinking limits change in microgravity.  Knowing these limits is the only responsible way to allow explorers to drink under any condition.  Because if anyone deserves a good beer, it's them.

DrSJ: When you have mastered the principles of gaseous drinks in space, is there any chance you will move on to champagne? 

JH:  Champagne is a tough one because everybody wants those big, distinctive bubbles.  Beer has a bit more "wiggle-room" on the recipe.  

You don't have to be a space tourist;  Vostok beer (it's a stout) is already available on Earth!  Many thanks to Jason for his insightful answers.