How would lunar mining affect the cultural significance of the Moon?

This is an excerpt from my (pre-revision) forthcoming publication Managing cultural heritage values in lunar mining? What are the issues?

Consultation with stakeholders is part of both assessing the social significance of cultural heritage and obtaining a Social Licence to Operate (SLO). Despite the best intentions, however, gaining free, prior and informed consent is frequently overlooked (Bice 2014). How could this be achieved for an entire celestial body, and with meaningful consultation with the ‘local’ community of Earth’s seven billion people? While the UN offers obvious mechanisms through the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOUS), UNESCO and the  advisory organisation the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), private commercial interests may prefer to undertake their own community engagement.

Lunar surface mining. Image courtesy of NASA

How will people feel if they look at the Moon in the night sky, and know that is being mined underneath their eyes? While diverse publics have been tolerant of scientific missions, commercial ventures may be received very differently. Mining and exploration will have impacts on the lunar environment much greater than the low level created by robotic and scientific missions to date.

While it is probably broadly true to say “humanity as a whole has embraced the historic events and objects associated with space research as part of our jointly held heritage” (Walsh 2012:234), this obscures deeply entrenched divisions between colonial/spacefaring nations and colonised/'developing' nations (Gorman 2005a, Gorman 2009b, Redfield 2005). These divisions have been very evident in the politics around the formation of the Outer Space Treaty (OST), the Moon Agreement even more so, and contribute to the impasse that resource utilisation on the Moon is currently facing (Hoffstadt 1994).

The reaction of, say, an Australian to a US-based profit-making mine in which they have no say or share could easily be negative. A First Nations Australian may have another layer of reaction, based on their experience of alienation from country and destruction of cultural heritage arising from terrestrial resource exploitation. Moreover, an assault on the integrity of a celestial body which belongs to what is commonly called the ‘Dreaming’ – a suite of cultural knowledge in which the past is simultaneously entwined with the creation of law, identity and land in the present – may be a matter of some concern. Aboriginal people are by no means the only First Nation to have such a relationship with the Moon.

Moon Dreaming, by Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, 2007
Ronnie Tjampitjinapa is a Pintupi man from the Western Desert  He was a founding member of the Papunya Tula Artists group. .
Image courtesy of Aboriginal Art Directory
http://gallery.aboriginalartdirectory.com/aboriginal-art/ronnie-tjampitjinpa/moon-dreaming.php

What is considered to be for ‘the benefit and in the interests of all countries’ (OST Article 1, see also Moon Agreement Article 4) depends very much on how regulation unfolds in this next critical period. Again a parallel with terrestrial mining industry may be instructive. Management strategies in SLO frameworks include the concept of ‘offsets’: compensating for impacts at one location through activities at another, either directly or indirectly. A direct offset might be setting aside a protected area of land to compensate for the loss of that impacted by mining. Increasing the value of a heritage place could be considered a direct offset – for example, committing resources to conserving Tranquility Base to compensate for ‘sacrificing’ a Lunar Orbiter impact site. Indirect offsets may include funding research or education around the environmental/heritage resource that will lead to benefits for it. Note though, that offsets are determined during the planning phase, not in retrospect ie they do not compensate for damage already caused.

Lunar mining will take place in an environment where social media are a major part of public engagement with space. Space agencies, private companies, astronauts, missions, and rovers have their own Twitter accounts and there is an expectation of public involvement. Crowd-funded space missions such as Lunar Mission One, a probe designed to drill a deep core in polar regions, is possibly the vanguard of more such projects. The investors in off-world mining companies are likely to be the same people who buy shares in terrestrial mining. The moon’s seeming remoteness will not protect industrial operations from the scrutiny of the public.

References

Bice, Sarah 2014 What Gives You a Social Licence? An Exploration of the Social Licence to Operate in the Australian Mining Industry. Resources 3:62-80

Gorman, A.C. 2009b Beyond the Space Race: the significance of space sites in a new global context. In Angela Piccini and Cornelius Holtorf (eds) Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now, pp 161-180 Bern: Peter Lang

Gorman, A.C. 2005a The cultural landscape of interplanetary space. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):85-10

Hoffstadt, Brian 1994 Moving the heavens: lunar mining and the ‘common heritage of mankind’ in the Moon Treaty. UCLA Law Review 42:575-621

Redfield, P. 2005. Space in the Tropics. From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Walsh, Justin 2012 Protection of humanity’s cultural and historic heritage in space. Space Policy 28:234-243

The day Pluto came to breakfast: Venetia Burney and a life in mathematics

The girl who named Pluto became a mathematician.

Pluto comes to breakfast

Report from the Springfield Union, USA, March 14, 1930.
Image courtesy of Timothy Hughes Rare and Early Newspapers

One morning, when Venetia Burney was 11 years old, the news that a ninth planet had been discovered was reported in the Times. In her own words:

I think it was on March the 14th, 1930 and I was having breakfast with my mother and my grandfather. And my grandfather read out at breakfast the great news and said he wondered what it would be called. And for some reason, I, after a short pause, said, "Why not call it Pluto?" I did know, I was fairly familiar with Greek and Roman legends from various children's books that I had read, and of course I did know about the solar system and the names the other planets have. And so I suppose I just thought that this was a name that hadn't been used.

This was no ordinary grandfather. Falconer Madan was the retired head librarian of the Bodleian in Oxford, and his brother Henry had named the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. The planets were part of Venetia's early life on Earth. 

The planetary walk

At her primary school, Venetia recalled in 2006,

we used to play games in the university park, putting - I think they were lumps of clay - at the right distance from each other to represent the distances of the planets from the Sun.

The 'games' were in fact a teaching exercise devised by Miss K. Claxton.

Apparently it all began with a school 'Nature Walk,' which one day turned itself into a 'Planet Walk.' In those days Form II still used The Sciences by E.S. Holden, and we had reached the section on the relative sizes and distances of the planets.

Leaving the sun, represented by a circle two feet in diameter on the classroom blackboard, we set out from school carefully carrying our planets! After 41 paces we placed Mercury (the size of a canary seed) on an Oxford pavement. After 77 paces Venus, represented by a small pea, was laid down. The Earth (a pea), Mars (a small bead), Jupiter (an orange), Saturn (a golf ball) were duly placed—the last after zealous counting of 1,019 paces. Then we let our imaginations finish the walk, for it seemed best to turn back while our enthusiasm and our legs still remained fresh!

The follow-up to this came with the reading of The Age of Fable, when the children became more intimate with the characters of the Greek gods and goddesses and the nature of their kingdoms. And then one morning, March 14th, 1930, we read in the daily papers of the discovery of a new planet, a 'dark' one.

The Age of Fable (1855), by Thomas Bulfinch, recounts the story of Pluto's abduction of Proserpine, and her mother Ceres' search to find her in the underworld - not unlike Percival Lowell's search for the mysterious Planet X in the outer darkness of the solar system. However the silence, the lapping waters, the murky atmosphere, the deep pits and the darkness of the realms of the dead are most vividly described in Bulfinch's retelling of Aeneas's descent under the Earth. Clearly this made a great impression on Venetia.

Falconer Madan later acknowledged the role Miss Claxton's teaching had played in Venetia's thought process. He wrote to her in June 1930 to say that Venetia's:

acquaintance with some of the old legends of Greek and Roman deities and heroes, and that 'nature walk' in the University Parks, by which she was taught the relative spaces between the Planets and the Sun, and the gloom of distance, enabled her to grasp at once the special elements of the situation, and to be the first to make a suggestion so reasonable as to be accepted (it appears) by the whole world of Science.

The chain of chance

Falconer Madan pondered his granddaughter's suggestion, and dropped a note to his friend Professor Herbert Hall Turner, a Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. Professor Turner then sent a telegram to the Lowell Observatory (misspelling Venetia's name), requesting consideration of Pluto as the name for such a 'dark, gloomy planet'.



From the Lowell Observatory Archives
http://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/cdm/ref/collection/loaselect/id/15

As it turns out, Venetia wasn't the only person who thought of Pluto. After all, the major planets had all received the names of Greek and Roman gods, and there were only so many to go around.  However, her connections to astronomy through her grandfather's friendship with Professor Turner, and her great-uncle's previous efforts in planetary nomenclature, made her story the right one for the time. On May 1 1930, the name became official.

A life in science

After her stellar intervention in planetary science, Venetia attended a secondary school (most likely as a boarder) which had a heavy focus on mathematics and science. She went on to study mathematics at Newnham College at Cambridge University. Newnham, established in 1871 to give women an opportunity to attend university, had a proud tradition in mathematics. One of its founders was Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who in 1870 topped the entire university in maths (and later became a famous suffragist). However, women could not officially receive degrees until 1948, so Venetia would have received a discreet certificate in the mail, her name, like nearly 1000 other women, not even appearing in the graduation lists.

During the Second World War she put her mathematical skills to a more mundane use by training as a chartered accountant. She married Maxwell Phair, a classics teacher, in 1947; and perhaps influenced by him, and memories of Miss Claxton's creative approach to learning, she became a teacher herself in the 1950s. Naturally, she taught new generations in her own areas of expertise.

The legacy of a legend

When the New Horizons mission to Pluto was launched in 2006, Venetia was invited, but at the age of 88 did not feel up to the transatlantic journey. She had never made a big deal out of her role in Pluto's birth as the newest member of the solar system, but appreciated the recognition:

I have my kind invitation from NASA, and I treasure that too. I shall put it on the mantelpiece, I think, conspicuously, to look at. And I just wish everybody concerned with the launch that the whole thing will be the success that they hope.

Venetia Burney never saw Pluto through a telescope; her only glimpse of it was a dim photograph. But now, an instrument named after her is hurtling through space towards the ninth planet. Fittingly, for someone who devoted their life to science education, it is a student experiment: the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter.

And over the months to come, the topographical and geological features of our least known planetary neighbour will be given names on the theme of the underworld and exploration, as determined by a young girl on a morning in the world long ago.

The birth of the cable tie and augmented reality: a synergy

I love it when random things turn out to have a deeper connection. One of the joys of research is falling into those rabbit holes where only you can see the significance of the jars on the shelves, because of the chain of events that led you to be in possession of certain facts. Or perhaps a strong desire for vegemite on toast. OK, perhaps I can only stretch this metaphor so far.

(Incidentally, one of my recurring dreams evokes the Sheep's Shop in Through the Looking Glass. Needless to say, I identify strongly with Alice).

Readers may be aware of how one such serendipitous chain of connections led me to understand the significance of the humble cable tie, following a survey of the Orroral Valley NASA Tracking Station in the Australian Capital Territory. My research on the cable tie's history led me to inventor Maurus C. Logan, who worked for electrical outfitter Thomas and Betts. In the late 1950s, he visited a Boeing aircraft factory and watched the workers fitting a wiring harness. One of their tasks was to secure bundles of wires (cables) together with waxed string. The string turned their hands into a bloody mess, a condition known as 'hamburger hands' because their resemblance to hamburger meat.

'There has to be a better way', thought the kind-hearted Maurus, and so away he went and invented the cable tie. (More of the story will be told in my forthcoming publication on cable ties in Frederick and Clarke (eds) That was then, this is now: contemporary archaeology in Australia).

At the moment, I'm trying to piece together another story about two unusual material things, congohelium and computronium. My methodology is anamnesis and metaphor. I'm reading widely to try and 'remember the future' and ferret out of the deep recesses of my mind and viscera exactly what I meant when I put these two unconnected things together. What I'm really trying to say here is that I concocted a paper title because it sounded good, then wrote an abstract, and now have to find out what it's really all about. I'm choosing to make a virtue of what is really lack of planning. The anamnetic technique is based on the assumption that my unconscious knew something about why I connected these two things, and by using literature as a catalyst, I'm trying to draw it into the shallows of my conscious mind so that I can give a coherent paper at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in New York in two days.

My research has not been systematic, but I have managed to read a couple of things that have achieved that crystallisation for me. Good for the progress of the paper. But in the process, a cyborg rabbit, using its watch as an external storage device, has led me to a small piece of information that probably has resonated only with me in this precise way.

In the early 1990s, some engineers and scientists came up with the idea of Augmented Reality. Not virtual reality - this was not an attempt to digitally recreate the experience of reality. Augmented reality is rather the overlaying of new information on what we perceive in the everyday world. It's the sort of thing that proponents of wearable tech are exploring.

Have three guesses where this concept emerged.

Please try a little harder!

Oh OK, I give in.

At Boeing. In the context of aircraft wiring harnesses.

I nearly fell off my chair when I read this.

Now, as well as the issue of the waxed string and its terrible impact on human hands, one of the problems created by the evolution of aircraft was how to get cables into inaccessible parts of the aerodynamic structure. I believe that ferrets were at one period trained to carry the cables to remote parts of the aircraft structure where neither human nor hands could get. The point of the augmented reality was to enhance the invisible and future parts of the system with the idealised plan for the location of the cables in the harness. I'm guessing they didn't need the ferrets after that.

In writing this I'm struck by the disjunction between the - probable - constraints of aircraft structure and the need to get certain components into it in certain ways. Basically, they don't go well together. It's a more-than-awkward fit. Something always gives, whether it's flesh or aircraft or poor little ferrets. The system is mashed together so that it works, but there's always something sticking out, not smooth. Push it back in and it pops out somewhere else. Technology is not a smooth ball of functionality: it's a bag of snakes writhing and twisting within their boundary conditions.

So with these thoughts, I'll get back to my reading!

The frozen Martian dreams of new worlds

This image was taken at the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex at Tidbinbilla, a wonderful place where the Voyagers' thin whisper is captured by metal paraboloidal ears listening with all their might, the limbs of dead and frozen antennas startle you as you turn a corner, and kangaroos lollop lazily about as if space communication was just one more passing fad and they were ready for a spot of afternoon tea grass, actually.

Author's image.

I couldn't help but think of Martian tripod locomotion when I saw this. It's quite a beautiful structure. It feels like it might just lift it's feet, creaking, out of the cement footings, and continue stalking across the landscape.

When geostationary orbit became real: the cultural significance of Syncom 3

Syncom 3 was the first true geostationary (GEO) communications satellite, launched in 1963, nearly two decades after Arthur C. Clarke predicted the potential of GEO for telecommunications. Prior to the Syncom series, communication satellites were located in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) where they required massive terrestrial infrastructure. Syncom 3 was aimed at providing live television coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, as well as carrying telephone transmissions. But its uses were not confined to the civil sphere. Syncom 3 and its geosynchronous sister Syncom 2 were the primary communications link between South East Asia and the western Pacific in the Vietnam War.

Syncom 3
Image courtesy of NASA

Only six years after the first satellite, Syncom already shows how satellite design has moved past the early templates of the baby moon (Sputnik and Vanguard) and the rocket (Explorer 1). The Syncom series were the first spin-stabilised satellites. The basic design is still in use, for example, in the Aussat and Optus B series.

Syncom 3 is the ancestor of the satellites that provide telecommunication services today. Technologically, Syncom 3’s design and mission helped shape the world of the second millennium where nearly everyone is within reach of almost every point on the globe, and transnational entities flicker and spark into existence between hardware on Earth and in orbit.

Syncom 3 was a major step in the process of globalisation that has been developing since the 1400s when navigation connected previously separate old and new worlds. For some, globalisation has meant new possibilities and opportunities; for others, it has meant the erosion of identity in contexts where colonial exploitation has already exacted a high cost.

Note: This is an excerpt from Gorman, A.C. 2005 The Archaeology of Orbital Space.
In Australian Space Science Conference 2005; pages: [338-357]. Melbourne: RMIT University.

References

Clarke, A. C., 1945 Extraterrestrial relays: can rocket stations give worldwide radio coverage? Wireless World, October, 1945, pp 305-308

From Stone Age to Space Age: the impact of Woomera on Aboriginal people

In 1946–7, as a joint project between the UK and Australia, the Long Range Weapons Establishment was set up [at Woomera] approximately 450 km north of Adelaide. The area was considered remote and unproductive, a treeless gibber plain with few water sources. Everything had to be constructed from scratch: roads, airstrips, workshops, housing, leisure facilities. Water was piped at great expense to supply the new range (Morton 1989:123–126).

However, not everyone in Australia supported the establishment of a rocket range aimed at developing nuclear missiles. There was widespread consternation at the decision, in the wake of World War II, to enter into a nuclear arms race, and concern about the impact of the rocket range on Aboriginal people (Watt 1947; Duguid 1947). Under the leadership of Dr Charles Duguid, the Presbyterian Church spearheaded a nation-wide protest movement that involved over 50 community groups, trade unions and Aboriginal rights organisations.

Image courtesy of
National Museum of Australia

The protest gathered high profile supporters: Duguid himself, the anthropologist Donald Thomson, Member of Parliament Doris Blackburn, the Aboriginal activist Pastor Doug Nicholls, and many others. Debate raged about the place that Aboriginal people held in white Australian society, with views ranging from the familiar expectation that Aboriginal people were on the verge of extinction (e.g. Bates 1938), to calls for greater assimilation - or protection. In response, the Australian government branded the protest leaders as communist dupes and placed them under surveillance.

Advised by Sydney University anthropologist A.P. Elkin, the government took the line that Woomera would, at most, accelerate processes both unavoidable and already evident among the Aboriginal groups of central and southern Australia: 'coming in' from the desert to missions, increasing reliance on European food and medicines, and exposure to alcohol, disease and other vices of civilisation. A supposedly independent committee set up to examine the impact of the range on Aboriginal people dismissed the representations of Duguid and Thomson. Disillusioned, Duguid withdrew from spotlight and the first phase of protests at Woomera was effectively over.

The survey and construction of the rocket range infrastructure progressed throughout the late 1940s, and the first missile test took place in 1949. Now movement was restricted within the prohibited area of the range, and Aboriginal people could no longer access many ceremonial sites and resources: they were competing for precious water with the needs of the rocket range. Roads were pushed through, bringing people, equipment, and encounters for which neither group had much preparation. A policy of non-intervention led to fraught interactions where Woomera and other government employees were forbidden to assist Aboriginal groups even when they were in obvious need of food, water, transport or medicine (Morton 1989:83, 87). This situation held until 1967, when Aboriginal people finally became recognised as citizens of Australia. Meanwhile, in Woomera Village, people collected stone artefacts from the desert, and pondered on the contrast between the Stone Age and the Space Age (Gorman 2005a).

These events are not, I have argued, peripheral to the understanding of the Woomera rocket range as a space site. They are an integral aspect of its significance that relates to the colonial processes at work in the growth of space industry (Gorman 2005b, Gorman 2007). Nor was the conjunction of space/protest an isolated one in the history of space exploration.

This is an excerpt from Gorman, A.C. 2007 La Terre et l'espace: rockets, prison, protests and heritage in Australia and French Guiana. Archaeologies: the Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 3(2):153-167

Further reading and resources can be found at Collaborating for Indigenous Rights.

References

Bates, D. 1938. The Passing of the Aborigines. A lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia. London: John Murray.

Duguid, C. 1947 The Rocket Range, Aborigines and War. Melbourne: Rocket Range Protest Committee

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. From the Stone Age to the Space Age: Interpreting the Significance of Space Exploration at Woomera. Unpublished Paper Presented at the Symposium Home on the Range: The Cold War, Space Exploration and Heritage at Woomera, South Australia, Flinders University, November 2005

Gorman, A.C. 2005b. The Cultural Landscape of Interplanetary Space. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):85–107.

Morton, P. 1989. Fire Across the Desert. Woomera and the Anglo-Australian Joint Programme, 1946–80. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service

Watt, A. 1947 Rocket Range Threatens Australia. Adelaide: South Australian State Committee, Communist Party of Australia

Cold War, colonialism, and the meaning of space hardware.

Spacecraft are more than utilitarian objects that further industrial, environmental or military objectives. They can also be regarded as artefacts, the material record of a particular phase in human social and technological development. On Earth, the preservation of material culture is considered important at a number of different levels: because it tells a story that is different to that presented in written documents, because it supplements written history, because material culture is the repository of people’s memories, ideas, and attachments. Material culture both shapes the world and is shaped by it:

....the things which constitute our world, which direct its functions, in turn influence our most basic cultural assumptions. A society which has access to jet engines, fast cars, and an international mass media based on television, fax machines and the information super-highway views the world entirely differently from a society dependent on the bullock dray and sea mail. (Anderson 1997).

That people see the material culture of space exploration as important is demonstrated by the popularity of museums such as the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. More people visit NASM than any other Smithsonian Institution. They don't go to see photographs of space, or to read interpretations of space history on storyboards. Words are not unique, and they are cheap. So why are visitors drawn in such staggering numbers to this museum?

Because the NASM has on display a Gemini capsule, a section of Skylab, and an astronaut's complete moon-walking suit....it's the artifacts, stupid. (Smith 2004)

Skylab module in NASM.
Image courtesy of http://whizzospace.com/

At the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communication Complex near Canberra, around 70 000 people each year come to the Visitor Centre to see a piece of the Moon and items of flown space hardware. The material culture of space exploration captures something that no written word can convey, and an object that has flown in space is perceived as more charged with meaning than a model, prototype or unflown spacecraft.

The material culture of space exploration is clearly seen as significant. However, its significance is often assumed to be self-evident. A well-used aphorism in the space community maintains that space exploration is the outcome of an innate human urge to explore. Thus, space objects are perceived to have a globally understood meaning that appeals to our common human nature (Gorman 2005). Just as the great navigators and explorers ventured out into unknown seas to discover the New World, so we have now left the cradle of Earth to satisfy a fundamental curiosity about our universe. This curiosity is one of the most commonly cited rationales for pursuing space exploration, far more palatable than the realpolitik of military and commercial dominance.

Another implicit and popular model for understanding the significance of space material culture is what I have called the Space Race model (Gorman 2005). In this formulation, objects and places have significance for their contribution to the Cold War confrontation between the USA and the USSR. This model focuses on these two states, ignoring the achievements of other countries like France, Britain, China, Japan and Australia in the development of space technology. It emphasises competitiveness rather than cooperation in space, and overlooks the contributions of and impacts on non-spacefaring countries, such as the colonial territories where potentially dangerous space installations were located. The relationship of space exploration to inequalities between the developed and developing world is unexplored, and indeed unproblematic, in the Space Race scenario, where US hegemony in space is assumed to benefit all.

The significance space artefacts might hold, therefore, is far from obvious.

Note: This is an excerpt from Gorman, A.C. 2005 The Archaeology of Orbital Space.

In Australian Space Science Conference 2005; pages: [338-357]. Melbourne: RMIT University

References

Anderson, M. 1997 Material culture and the cultural environment: Objects and places. Australia: State of the Environment Technical Paper Series (Natural and Cultural Heritage), Department of the Environment, Sport and Territories, Canberra

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

Smith, Bill 2004 It’s the artifacts, stupid! Guest Editorial. The Mineralogical Record 35(2):106-107

 

Dr Space Junk's Guide to Voting For Names of Surface Features on Pluto

When the New Horizons mission reaches Pluto and its moons in July 2015, there'll be hundreds of surface features that have never been seen before and which will need new names. The theme for these names is exploration and the underworld.



New Horizons. Image courtesy of NASA

The International Astronomical Union is in charge of allocating names in the solar system. But the New Horizons mission team have got together with the SETI Institute to get the public to contribute to a shortlist for their consideration.

'Pluto belongs to everyone', says New Horizon science team member Mark Showalter, also a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute.  'So we want everyone to be involved in making the map of this distant world'.

You're my kind of guy, Mark Showalter.

But of course, one of the questions that immediately arises, to me anyway, is how many women-type of people will get a look-in in this process. So I went to the list to see what the representation was like. Let's just say, no surprises.

So with this in mind, I've done the hard work so you don't have to! Here is a list of women or female beings who are part of the longlist so far. And yes, you can vote for more than one. I'm also going to include some honourable mentions at the end that are just so cool you couldn't not want them to be the name of something on Pluto or Charon (the largest moon).

Happy voting! And remember to do it before April 24th. Full instructions are here.

History of exploration

Jeanne Baré (or Baret; botanist; first woman to circumnavigate the globe)

Alexandrine Tinné (Dutch explorer of Egypt)

Sacagawea (US Native American - Lewis and Clarke guide)

Fictional Explorers and Travelers

Eleanor Arroway (from Contact - Carl Sagan)

Alice (from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll) VOTE FOR ALICE. As someone who has identified with Alice from earliest childhood, I most certainly will be.

Arthur Dent/Trillian/Zaphod Beeblebrox (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). She was smarter than the rest of them put together.

Candide/Cunegonde/Pangloss (from Voltaire's Candide)

Dorothy Gale & Toto (from Oz books - L. Frank Baum)

Kaguya-hime (Japanese folktale) You get double value with this one, as it's also the nickname of a Japanese lunar orbiter (separately listed).

Kathryn Janeway (from TV's Star Trek: Voyager)

Skywalker/Solo/Leia/Kenobi (from Star Wars films)

Exploration Authors and Artists

Octavia E. Butler (US - author of Xenogenesis trilogy) I've never read Octavia Butler, but I really, really should.

Madeleine L'Engle (US author - A Wrinkle in Time) Now I'm sorry, but I will brook no opposition on this. Vote for Madeleine. If you were not moved to fear, horror, compassion and love by A Wrinkle in Time, you are barely human. If you have not read it, get thee to a library forthwith.

Anne McCaffrey (US-Irish author - Pern and Talents series) Rollicking good science fiction-fantasy yarns that entranced millions. 

Alice Sheldon (US author - A Momentary Taste of Being) AKA James Tiptree Jnr, a wonderful science fiction author. Her family background is also discussed in Donna Haraway's Primate Visions.

Travelers to the Underworld

Proserpina (kidnapped by Hades) I prefer the Greek Persephone but whatever.

Inanna & Dumuzi (from Sumerian mythology)

Orfeo & Euridice (from Greek mythology) Please read this poem about Eurydice by H.D (Hilda Dolittle), but be warned it will break your heart.

Virgil & Beatrice (from Dante's Inferno)

Underworld Beings

Tuoni & Tuonetar (Finnish mythology)

Ereshkigal (Sumerian mythology)

Alecto/Megaera/Tisiphone (Furies or Erinyes - Greek mythology)

Ammit (Devourer of Souls - Egyptian mythology)

Melinoë (Bringer of nightmares - Greek mythology)

Honourable Mentions

Phileas Fogg (from Around the World in 80 days). However, it should really be Passepartout, who did all the hard work anyway.

Tintin (from graphic novels by Hergé)

Gallifrey (Planet of the Time Lords - Dr Who)

Heart of Gold (Infinite Improbability spaceship, from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Dawn Treader (by C. S. Lewis)

Chesley Bonestell (US space artist)

Hieronymus Bosch (Dutch painter of Hellish scenes) This is so obvious I don't know why it's even a matter of voting.

Stanislaw Lem (Polish science fiction author) Because I love that man's writing so much.

Maurice Sendak (US author - Where the Wild Things Are) Nuff said.

Baralku (Yolngu culture, Australia) Baralku is the Island of the Dead. You must vote for this because it is from the same region of Australia as the Aboriginal music on the Voyager Golden Records.

Sun Wukong (Monkey King - Chinese mythology) MONKEY. Do you hear me? This is Monkey.

Cthulhu (from H. P. Lovecraft)

Notes: on the official website, they mostly link to Wikipedia, but I've linked to other sites where I think there is more interesting or nuanced information. Sometimes, Wikipedia does have the best information online so I've stuck with that.

The longlist is quite long, and it's possible I've missed a few - if so, let me know and I'll add them.

If you think there are women/entities who ought to be on the official longlist but aren't, it's worth checking the Gazetteer to see if they haven't already been used elsewhere in the solar system.

My list here, and the commentary on it, are of course my personal views, and you are free to disagree or ignore them as you wish.

Congohelium and computronium: the thinking materials of the far future

This is my abstract for the Theoretical Archaeology Group New York University conference in May 2015.

In this paper, I want to explore two materials of the far future and use them to imagine the material worlds they inhabit. In Cordwainer Smith’s classic short story Under Old Earth, congohelium is an unstable material composed of “matter and antimatter laminated apart by a dual magnetic grid” (Smith 1966). The Douglas-Ouyang planets, an artificial cluster of planets with a dull malevolent sentience, communicate with Earth through the music of the congohelium.

Sunboy makes music with the congohelium.
Illustration by Virgil Finlay.

Computronium is the material of a hypothetical giant super-computing Matrioshka Brain, structured as nested Dyson shells of processing elements which employ the entire energy output of the sun. In Robert Bradbury’s conception, an element of computronium consists of a cooling system, a solar power array, a nanoprocessor and vernier thrusters for station-keeping – very like contemporary satellites. In the far future, today’s satellites could be considered equivalent to eoliths, with some resemblance of form, yet barely recognisable as cultural artefacts.

In both cases we have materials which act as the intermediary between an unimaginable entity and the humans who desire to communicate with it. They are the new elements in a periodic table of thinking materials. How would we classify these materials as archaeologists, or use them to infer the behaviour of mega-engineered structures? This is the most extreme anthropocene, where the balance of materials between ‘natural’ and ‘manufactured’ is altered at the nano- and solar-system scale; where prosaic science meets a new poetics of space.

You say potato, I say citizen of Mars. Space travel in the vegetable kingdom.

One of the things I love about my particular niche in the space world is that it brings me into contact with artists working in science and technology. This kind of interaction is also a feature of the archaeology of the contemporary past. I like to think that both are about the transformative potential of material culture.

In 2010, artist Jonathon Keats created the Local Air and Space Administration (LASA) and launched the research careers of vegetable astronauts. This project has always appealed to my interest in amateur, popular, citizen engagement with space and I've been meaning to write about it ever since.

Ostensibly, Keats was frustrated by NASA's abandonment of interplanetary exploration back then and decided to take matters into his own hands. Without launch capability, he had to take a novel approach: don't go to the stars, explore the star stuff that has come to us.

I took an ordinary chondrite meteorite and smashed it with a hammer, and then I planted these two cacti in the rubble since cacti sometimes grow in rocky soil. They lived on the asteroid isolated under a bell jar for twenty-one days, exploring the alien terrain by osmosis. The total cost was around $25, plus $2.99 each for the cacti (Interview, 21 October 2010).

Succulent space travellers. Image courtesy of Jonathon Keats/LASA

The technique of simulating alien environments was then repeated using minute quantities of lunar anorthosite (from meteorite NWA 482) and Martian shergottite (from meteorite NWA 1195). The meteorites (presumably) also contained nanodiamonds composed of dead extra-galactic star material. Keats created mineral water from these materials for potato astronauts suspended by toothpicks to osmotically explore. As he said,

The technology is fairly rudimentary – mostly just a funnel and some coffee filters – but anybody who's watched Apollo 13 knows that complexity can be deadly.

Spuds in space. Image courtesy of Jonathon Keats/LASA

By incorporating the exoplanetary minerals, Keats argued that the potatoes were being transformed into aliens. 'On certain matters, such as the nature of Mars', he said, 'potatoes now know more than we do'.

Image courtesy of Jonathon Keats/LASA

Space travel wasn't just for the succulents and spuds, though. Keats mounted a chair on pieces of meteorite and embedded more pieces into the soles of slippers: in this way, on rising from the chair and putting on the slippers, any walk you undertook was a space walk.

And by imbibing the lunar, stellar and Martian mineral waters, sold for a 'reasonable price' by the LASA Exotourism Bureau in San Francisco, humans could also be transformed into alien hybrids.

There's so much I like about this project. I have to confess that I struggle with the idolisation of astronauts; there's something about the predominant narrative of the white, male colonial frontier hero that I find irritating. (The greater diversity of astronauts these days has dulled but not eclipsed this trope). There's a wonderful subversion in claiming these qualities for something without a brain. Keats says: 'here's the chance for children to look up to potatoes as heroic, just as John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin were once role models'.

Spacewalk slippers. Photo by Carolyne Zinko.

'Bargain basement procurement' is a model of space innovation that I admire because it makes space accessible. One of my all-time favourite spacecraft, the Australis Oscar V amateur satellite, was built using begged, borrowed, and off-the-shelf hardware store components. Similarly, Keats created a space programme with approximately $200 USD. He bought the meteorite fragments on eBay, and the hammer to smash them up with.

It's also about the materiality. The tiny bits of interplanetary, interstellar star stuff, even if you can't see them dissolved in the mineral water, have a talismanic quality. By their authenticity, they can transport you to other worlds. It's you who does the thinking, but the particles from outer space are like scrying crystals that focus your inner gaze until your insides are turned inside out and expanded to fill the universe. You become a TARDIS.



What's the point? you may ask. Keats says:

I think it has the potential to change your perspective on everything, from immigration policy to the environment to what it means to be human.

It does indeed challenge some of the conceptual underpinnings of our current interactions with space. Do the cacti and potatoes acquire rights to space through this process of hybridisation?  Keats argues that they do:

Of course by colonialist standards, potatoes will have territorial claim to Mars since they've beat Homo sapiens, and what's most hospitable to them may be to inhabit it without us around.

I have bad news for Keats, though. He was not the first to train vegetable astronauts. In 1968, Mr Potato Head went to the Moon.

And now cucumbers are in on the action! From Tracy's Toys (And Some Other Stuff)

The first Australian to orbit the Earth

Who was the first Australian in space?

Andy Thomas? Paul Scully-Power? I hear you say.

Well, no. The first Australian in space was a young boy called Neville in the early 20th century.

What? How was that possible before the WWII rockets? Will you tell us the story?

I thought you'd never ask.

Actually, it's not my story. Famous Australian writer C.J. Dennis first set down the events in The boy who rode into the sunset.

Sometime before 1921, Neville lived with his family on the outskirts of an unnamed Australian city. One evening he was standing on top of a hill watching the clouds, when one formed into a horse and approached him. The horse (rather manipulatively) enticed him to mount it, and then took flight, riding straight into the sunset.

The sunset is not what it seems. It's an orchestrated performance that has to continually move around the world with the terminator (the dividing line between night and day). As Neville arrives, the Last Sunbeam is getting ready to move the sunset to the next location. His boss, the head scene-shifter, isn't very pleased to see Neville, but there's a problem: how can they get him home again? The cloud horse can only follow the sunset; it can't go backwards. The only solution is for him to go round the Earth ahead of the sunset. Nev is justifiably a little nervous about this proposal, but the Last Sunbeam has it all sorted. He gives him a blue flower - made out of a 'genuine piece of sky' - which he has to give to the Porter of Dawn on the other side of the world in order to be let through. The Sky Flower will also defy gravity to allow him to jump off the cloud horse when they reach Neville's home again. The cloud horse, from this point on, loses its agency and effectively becomes a satellite.

So the cloud horse takes off with Neville on his back. This is what he sees as they fly over the world:

Almost before he knew what had happened, he had left evening far behind and was riding in broad daylight. The cloud Horse had ridden high in the air, and Neville saw the broad country, with plains and hills and forest lands, stretched far beneath him. An instant later, and the land was no longer below him, but the wide sea, sparkling in brilliant sunlight.

Before he had time to notice very much he had reached mid-day, high over a strange foreign land, and was racing through the morning toward the dawn. So quickly did he go that there was little chance of seeing anything clearly; but he had glimpses of many strange sights. Many ships he saw upon the sea - small ships and stately steamers crawling over the ocean like strange water-beetles. Once, as the Cloud Horse drifted low, Neville saw a beautiful sailing-ship, with all sails set, and strange-looking men upon the deck. They looked very like pirates, and perhaps they were; but Neville had no time to make sure, for the very next minute he was over a wild land where he saw a horde of black men, with spears and clubs, hunting an elephant through a clearing in a great jungle. As he looked, the elephant turned to charge the hunters; but what happened then Neville did not see, for in a moment more he was above a great city with crowds of people in the streets - people dressed in strange, bright-coloured clothes - and there were bells ringing and whistles blowing. Then a great desert spread beneath him, with no living thing in sight but a great tawny lion prowling over the sand. Then came the sea again, and more ships; and the light began to grow dim, for he was nearly half-way round the earth, and was approaching the dawn. 

He arrives at the silver gateway of the dawn. The Dawn Porter sees the Sky Flower and lets him through.

...in an instant Neville had passed through the dawn and plunged into the night. 

It was a dark night, with no moon, for the sky was overcast with dense clouds. Above these the Cloud horse flew, and overhead Neville saw the rushing stars, and below only the blackness of heavy clouds. But more often the Cloud horse flew low, and then there was little to be seen. By the lights of moving ships Neville knew that sometimes he was above the sea. Sometimes twinkling lights in towns or solitary farms, or the sudden blaze of a great city told him that the land was beneath him. Once, through the blackness, he saw a great forest fire upon an island, and the light of it lit up the sea, and showed the natives crowded upon the beach and in the shallows, and some making off in canoes.

Then darkness swallowed the Cloud Horse again, and the blazing island was left far behind.

After that, Neville began to feel a little drowsy. Perhaps he did sleep a little, for the next thing he saw was a faint light in the sky before him, as though the dawn were coming. But he knew it must be the evening, because he was coming back to the place from which he had started, and was catching up with the sun. You see, he had only been gone a few minutes.

The Cloud Horse flew very low now; and rapidly the darkness grew less. Then, long before he expected it, Neville saw the roof of his own home below him. He could see the garden in the twilight and his own dog sniffing about among the trees as though in search of him.

Using the Sky Flower, Neville jumps from the horse and arrives safely home in time for dinner. He gives the Sky Flower to his mother, and as it's a genuine piece of sky, it never fades.

Neville's view as he approaches his house

To get around the world in a few minutes, the cloud horse is clearly very high and very fast (in fact it takes 90 minutes in Low Earth Orbit at about 200 km).  When Yuri Gagarin made his orbit in 1962, there was great interest in what he could see. To be visible from space - or reputed to be - is a measure of cultural significance.

Neville's view is perhaps typical of a certain kind of colonial geography. He sees Indigenous people struggling against nature: the hordes of black men in the wild land, with the elephant their equal, about to fight back; the burning island with the 'natives' fleeing into the sea. In the cities, people dressed in bright colours are strange and their noisiness (bells, whistles) is part of their exoticism. By contrast, colonised Australia is ordered roads, farm houses, and cleared fields:

Neville clung on tightly, for he was so high above the earth that to fall off would mean the end of him. And far beneath him he saw the green fields and the white road, which now seemed like a mere thread.

He was high over a farm-house now: one that he used to see from the bald hill. He knew it by the tall pine-trees that grew round it ....Now he was far beyond that farm house and above an orchard, where he saw the fruit-trees standing in straight rows ....

It's a tame land, not a wild land.

As you know, I'm very interested in how people imagine experiences of being in space. (As in here and here).  I do think this is a rather lovely description of what it might be like to be in orbit. Neville and the cloud horse are not described as being in space, and much of what he sees you wouldn't even be able to discern from an aeroplane, let alone a satellite. Remember in this era very little was known of the upper atmosphere; and we have enough trouble defining where space begins today. Dennis is thinking specifically of aerial views ('Of course, now that aeroplanes have been invented, flying is not thought so wonderful as once it was'), but Neville's speed is in contradiction to this. And he clearly does make a complete orbit!

C.J. Dennis' charming illustration of a biplane. Gosh, those two are having fun!

The Sky Flower is an interesting touch. It's a talisman, as the Last Sunbeam explains to Neville (I found that such a fascinating word as a child. I had to ask my mother what it meant). A little later (1927-1928), Hugh Lofting also used flowers in space - when Dr Dolittle flies to the moon on the giant microgravity moth Jamaro Bumblelily, oxygen-storing flowers are used as breathing devices.

So that's the story of the first Australian in space. Think of it next time you stand gazing into the sunset!