Dr Space Junk's Pan-Galactic Birthday Party

This is an exercise I created to allow my friends to join me online (through Twitter) to celebrate my recent birthday, as the Covid-19 virus has stopped all physical parties across the world. It was such fun I thought it was worth preserving!  Here it is in nine tweets.

You might need a pen and paper for this. We are going to create a pan-galactic party. I'm going to stay here on Earth for the moment, but you, my Twitter friends, are going to join me from elsewhere in the cosmos. 

And where might this elsewhere be? I will show you how to find out. Please take a moment to get a beverage of your choice (I'm going for some more sparkles) and instructions will follow. 

Step 1. Using this random planet generator, find out which planet you are currently tweeting from. It might not be your home planet, just where you are right now. Save it or write it down! 

Does everyone have their planet now? Step 2. Because you are a super-galactic traveller, you also need your own starship. It will have a witty and satirical name. Of course, it's a Culture ship! Here's how to find your starship's name.  

Step 3. An intrepid astronaut like you doesn't have a regular name, you have a special name befitting your status. This is how you get your astronaut name. Choose from the list. 

Step 4. Everywhere you travel in this crazy cosmos of ours, you are accompanied by your favourite pet. What species? You decide! But choose it's name from here.  

OK so now you have a planet, a ship, a special astronaut name, and your faithful pet. Step 5. Go to the kitchen and pick a random object. Just whatever speaks to you.  

Step 6. Pretend your random kitchen object is something from your ship, or the planet, or from your last stop. Describe what it does and what it's for. It could be anything. 

Final step! Take a picture of your space (kitchen) object. Tell me your planet, ship, astronaut and pet names, and what your object is for. I can't wait to hear the results!

To give you an idea of how it works, here is one I made earlier. I'm at the planet Rada (see below), not a very hospitable place, so probably I am just orbiting it. My ship is the Rapid Offensive Unit (ROU) Trade Surplus, and I am Commander Jaylen Elmes. I travel the galaxies with my faithful pet Pipsy, a snorgle from the planet Bepo. (I looked up the Random Planet Generator again to find this planet).

Planet Rada. Perhaps I'll go home now.

I always take one of these when I travel. It's a matter re-organiser. You can choose from four different fields, which will recreate the material you feed into it as crystal, antimatter, dark matter or cheese.  

Matter re-organiser, a very handy machine.

So there you have it, a way to create your own galactic adventure. If you were sufficiently energetic you could write a story to go with it. I just sat back and enjoyed what my friends came up with. Many added their own witty touches to the basic structure, and I was vastly entertained! I might have been in isolation, but it was one of the best birthdays!

Is Earth's core a global commons and what does this mean for outer space?

On April 6, 2020, US President Trump issued an Executive Order rejecting the 1979 Moon Agreement and the idea that outer space is a global commons. 

What is space if it is not a global commons? Other such commons include Antarctica, the deep sea, the atmosphere, and cyberspace. We plebs cannot be denied use and access to these places - no-one is going to be selling us oxygen to breathe, on Earth at least, and for the foreseeable future. But as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, I don't think anything can be ruled out. (Note that the atmosphere on Mars might also be a global commons, but as it's not suited to human use, manufactured breathable air may be a commodity there). 

I think Trump's rejection of space as a global commons is really insidious, and the precursor to carving up space between commercial interests. It got me to thinking about a place that mirrors outer space, only you couldn't get any more inner, or deeper into the gravity well. I'm talking about Earth's core.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Image by Roen Kelly

The core has two layers. The outer core is a fluid iron-nickel layer about 2400 km thick wrapped around the inner core, a solid iron-nickel sphere, about 1220 km in diameter.  They're both rotating, but in different directions. The temperature of the outer core ranges from 4000 to 6000 degrees celsius. One of the key effects of the core is to generate Earth's magnetic field, which protects us from the solar wind. Without it life on Earth would be very different.

Sure, it's a big ball of molten metal that we can't get to, but I don't see why this prevents us from thinking about it's status. Space was once inaccessible too, and Jules Verne imagined journeys to both. In 1864, he published Journey to the Centre of the Earth, where his heroes attempt to descend to the core through lava tubes. They don't achieve their goal and there is, sadly, no hidden path straight to the centre. At this stage the nature of the core was unknown but one theory was that it was molten. It was also thought that there were large cavities inside Earth which might sustain ecosystems of different kinds (some containing prehistoric fauna). About 200 km down, Verne's intrepid explorers find a vast underground lake and caverns with their own weather systems.

Source: Wikimedia

The existence of the core was proven by Richard Oldham in 1906, and by the early 1930s, the analysis of seismic waves passing through Earth showed that it was indeed liquid. The solid inner core was discovered by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936 from analysis of a New Zealand earthquake. 

These days we think of Earth as solid, like a boring Easter egg. There are some very deep caves both on land and under the sea, but they're only about 2 km. 

Technology may help where we can't find natural routes to the underworld. The problem is the increasing temperature and pressure as you go down through the mantle, which crushes and melts the equipment. The deepest humans have ever drilled is 12 km. That's just 0.4% of the 2900 km you'd need to go to get to the core.

All the same, the mysteries of the interior of Earth continue to influence our desires and imagination. Only in recent years have scientists started to explore the dark biosphere, microbial and wormy life which thrives in the dark fissures and seams of the deep rock. Perhaps there aren't plesiosaurs in subterranean lakes, but it seems the deep Earth is not sterile, either. And perhaps we need Planetary Protection policies for the deep layers of this, and other planets.

A global uncommons?

The next question is whether there are any resources in Earth's core that could be used by humans.  We may run out of easily accessible iron ore near the surface, for example. This is one of the reasons asteroid mining is being pursued. We might not quite be equipped to deal with extracting it in liquid form, though. 

Heat from the core is already used in geothermal energy, but the extraction happens close to the surface. Geothermal energy is a renewable energy source, and is regulated at a national level. 

How much can be owned below the surface of Earth is also a matter for national regulation. In Australia before 1891, land titles extended to the core in the common law principle of usque adcoelom et usque ad inferos.  The complete sentence is 'whoever's is the soil, it is theirs all the way to Heaven and all the way to Hell'. After 1891, states placed limits on the depths below the surface. In Victoria, for example, the Crown owns the land below 15 m to the centre of Earth. 

And what about treaties or conventions setting out the ground rules for interacting with the core, like there are for outer space? If they exist, I couldn't find them. There seems to be nothing to prevent me claiming ownership of the core, apart from the tiny annoyances of being unable to access it or enforce my ownership. (In 2010, a woman claimed legal ownership of the Sun).

Perhaps we could call Earth's core - and by analogy all planetary cores, and unbreathable atmospheres, a global uncommons or perhaps even dyscommons. Everyone has rights to them and the benefits that derive from them (for example, the protection of magnetic fields), but they have limited or zero commercial use for the people who think of Earth in that way (which I'd prefer not to). The uncommons may underlie the commons that are the subject of competing claims and conflicts.  The commons then only comes into being when it has something of value to offer. For example, geostationary orbit is very valuable real estate, but only became so when it was possible to elevate satellites to this region. We may see something similar with cislunar space in the future.

But uncommons don't have to be metrically defined regions of Earth or space at all. As Judith Farquhar, Lili Lai and Marshall Kramer say,

The uncommons is not, in other words, an exterior to the one-world world; rather, it is a possible world that can make itself partly known in a mottled and ever-changing light and shade. (2017)

The one-world world (Law 2011, 2015) is a single vision of what Earth or the cosmos is. Pretty much all of our legal and scientific approaches to space are based on a one-world world. Law argues that the dominance of this one-world world by northern hemisphere thinking (ie industrial capitalist nations) makes the raising of multiple, but simultaneous, ways of experiencing the world seem eccentric and self-indulgent. Think about this and tell me it has not sometimes been your reaction when hearing about, for example, Indigenous worldviews about space. It's not easy to train yourself out of this, to see a fractiverse, as Law puts it, rather than a universe. For me, at least, it's an ongoing project.

My final question is both about how this furthers our thinking about outer space as a global commons, and what this means for defining commons or uncommons on regions of other planets. I don't have any answers just now but I feel I'm on a path of thought that might be productive.

References

Farquhar, Judith, Lili Lai and Marshall Kramer 2017 A Place at the End of a Road: A Yin-Yang Geography. Anthropologica 59(2): 216-227

Law, John 2011 What’s Wrong with a One-World World? Paper presented to the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut on 19th September, 2011 http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2011WhatsWrongWithAOneWorldWorl d.pdf

Law, John 2015 What's Wrong with a One-World World? Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 16(1): 126–139

Australian space icon: Mr Squiggle, the Man from the Moon

The impact of the Space Age was not just in science and technology - it was also in popular and everyday culture. If you were a kid growing up in Australia from the 1960s until the the 1990s, you would have been familiar with a children's television icon: Mr Squiggle, the Man from the Moon. Mr Squiggle is a huge part of Australian television history, but I'm more interested in what the programme says about how space travel was perceived in the 1960s and after.

Squiggle basics

This is Mr Squiggle's theme tune:

Here's Mr Squiggle
With lots of fun for everyone
Here's Mr Squiggle, sing a happy tune
You can see we're as happy as can be
Mr Squiggle, the man from the Moon.

Mr Squiggle was the brainchild of political cartoonist and puppeteer Norman Hetherington. The pencil-nosed puppet's television debut was in 1959. At first Mr Squiggle was part of a six week stint on the Children's TV Club on the ABC, but soon gained his own stand-alone programme. Margaret, who married Norman in 1958, wrote the scripts for the show while Norman performed all the character voices. (Note that while Norman has his own Wikipedia page, Margaret doesn't).

Children would send in their 'squiggles', and Mr Squiggle used his pencil nose to make them into pictures, accompanied by a female sidekick. Other characters included Bill Steamshovel, Gus the snail, Merv Wallop and his nephew Wayne, Reg Linchpin, Doormat, the grumpy Rocket and a talking Blackboard.

Mr Squiggle lived at 93 Crater Crescent on the Moon and travelled to Earth every week in his rocket or by going for a 'space-walk'. He could also break out into gravity-defying 'space-walks' spontaneously in the middle of shows. Sometimes, if Rocket was very grumpy, Mr Squiggle would use an umbrella for the descent. 

The action takes place in a very ordinary, regular backyard, with gum trees, in the fictional location of Bandywallop. (The Collins dictionary defines Bandywallop as 'Australian informal: noun. An imaginary town, far from civilization'). There's a rainwater tank where Bill Steamshovel hangs out, and old, weathered yards surrounded by bush. I guess part of the appeal of Mr Squiggle, as we got so much US and UK children's television, was that it was set in Australia with Australian accents and culture. 

Mr Squiggle's female sidekicks were:

Miss Gina (Curtis) (1959-1960),
Miss Pat (Lovell) (1960-1975),
Miss Sue (Lloyd) (1975),
Miss Jane (Fennell) (1975-1986),
Roxanne (Kimmorley) (1986- 1989).
Rebecca (Hetherington) (1989-1999)

Notice a change? Somewhere in Miss Jane's tenure, those pesky feminists [sarcasm font] got in the ABC's ear about the sexism of the female titles, which classify women according to age, marriageability, and ownership by a man.  'A few years ago, the ABC told us to start using Ms instead of Miss,' Norman said in a news interview. 'But Ms Pat doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it? It sounds like it's short for miserable. So since 1986 we've simply had Roxanne and now Rebecca.'

Miss Pat is the one I remember most. She was played by Patricia Lovell, who went on to become an influential movie producer (eg Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli).

Miss Pat helps Mr Squiggle out of his rocket

The science fiction writer Terry Dowling was a resident guest on Mr Squiggle, from 1979 to 1982. He wrote songs and performed them on the programme with his guitar.  Comedian and radio personality Mikey Robins played Reg Linchpin for a year in 1989-1990. The programme ended in 1999. 

Two books were spin-offs from the series. Margaret Hetherington wrote them, and Norman did the illustrations. They were Mr Squiggle and the Great Moon Robbery (1980) and Mr Squiggle and the Preposterous Purple Crocodile (1992). There was also a colouring book in 1989 - Mr Squiggle and His Rocket Activity Book. 

Mr Squiggle won Penguin awards in 1984 and 1989. He was the guest of honour at two science fiction conventions, and been part of two exhibitions at the Performing Arts Museum in Melbourne. The Mosman Art Gallery, in the suburb where Margaret and Norman lived, had an exhibition called Mr Squiggle: Who's Pulling the Strings? in 2005. In February 2019, the Royal Australian Mint, in collaboration with supermarket chain Woolworths, issued a special release of Mr Squiggle $2 coins to commemorate the puppet's 60th anniversary. They also held an exhibition to go with the launch.

I was living in Sydney when Mr Squiggle was on his 30th anniversary tour. I was determined to go. Me and my friends (who were mostly colleagues from the icecream shop where I worked part-time) were the only unaccompanied adults there!

Squiggle space

Space wasn't really the point of Mr Squiggle - after all, most of the action took place on Earth, in the bush setting of Bandywallop. Space was more the backdrop. All the same, it's an indication how deeply entangled space became with everyday life in the 1960s. Mr Squiggle was launched only two years after the first satellite reached orbit, Sputnik 1 in 1957. Many people were talking about lunar exploration being just round the corner, and indeed, in 1959, the USSR has a major success with the Luna 2 probe becoming the first human object to land on the Moon (or crash land, at any rate). In the meantime, the UK and Australia had already launched the first rockets from the Woomera launch range in South Australia.

In the opening sequence of the show, you didn't see Mr Squiggle's home on the Moon, at 93 Crater Crescent - just his rocket descending through the atmosphere. It was a ratty old rocket which had been patched up. Mr Squiggle was sealed inside as if it were a coffin; his tall pointed hat peeked through the nose cone and his pencil nose had a porthole allowing it to poke out too. While it's grey in the animation, the puppet rocket was a lovely shiny silver on set.

Still from the animated opening sequence

Rocket didn't speak, but conveyed his feelings through his whistle (which you can see on the side) and a blower of the kind you have at children's parties. Rocket's whistle calls resembled birds you might hear in the bush.

Children really believed that Mr Squiggle lived on the Moon - and, apparently, that Australia Post delivered there. The Mosman Art Gallery's exhibition, Mr Squiggle: who's pulling the strings?, showed an envelope addressed in a child's hand to 'Mr Squiggle, The Moon'.

Children have always had a special relationship with the Moon. A turn-of-the-century study looked at the feelings and beliefs of North American white children. Many felt the Moon to be very close, and they looked on it as a confidante who would keep their secrets. Many of them talked to the Moon or to the man/woman in the Moon. It was part of their universe in an intimate way. (You can find out more in my recent book).

It's interesting that we never see the Moon in the programme. Mr Squiggle is not the only inhabitant; after all, he has a suburban street address. Occasionally he would mention different activities such as cultural festivals (eg Settler's Week!) taking place there. There may have been a reason behind this. With so much lunar science going on, perhaps it was safer to avoid being locked into one vision of it. Perhaps it was preferable to leave the Moon in the children's imagination, as fluid and creative as their squiggles.

We might also ask what kind of being lives on the Moon. In Margaret and Norman Hetherington's vision, Mr Squiggle had particular characteristics. As Richard Bradshaw (2010) described it, he was imbued with 'the qualities of a blessed child: kindness, vulnerability and resourcefulness'. He was happy to ask Miss Pat or Miss Jane to hold his hand while he drew. The gentle Mr Squiggle was a contrast to the sinister space of Cold War politics and the shadowy aliens with their elusive UFOs.

Mr Squiggle was never presented as an alien. To the contrary: as Norman's friend, the cartoonist Steve Panozzo, remarked, Margaret and Norman 'even went to a science fiction convention as special guests because Mr Squiggle is considered Australia's first astronaut.' If Squiggle was the first astronaut, then the Bandywallop back yard was Australia's second rocket launch site, as Woomera had been operating for a decade already when Squiggle made his television debut.

Squiggle space vs real space

Rocket was very different to the sleek rockets colonising playgrounds in this period (Gorman 2017). The trend in the US to build metal rockets as climbing apparatus for children was brought to Australia in the 1960s and 'took off', so to speak. One of my favourite playground rockets is in Ulverstone, Tasmania (home of Tastrofest). This geocaching location has reconfigured the Ulverstone rocket as Mr Squiggle's back-up. I don't know how common this connection was, but at least one person made it.

Mr Squiggle's ramshackle rocket was also a contrast to the hi-tech missiles, sounding rockets and satellite launchers that made Woomera one of the busiest launch sites in the world throughout the 1960s. There was much overlap and category confusion between weapons and space rockets; my colleague Fraser MacDonald has argued that children's toy rockets do something similar in confusing the categories, a way of dulling the sinister aspects of this technology, inculcating them into a set of values.

Unlike the Cold War missiles of the time, Rocket was quirky and mostly harmless. 

While it doesn't emerge in the show, Norman and Margaret were certainly aware of the Space Age events unfolding around them. Norman drew a map showing Rocket travelling from the Moon to Earth and back again. In a 1989 interview by Melissa Jones in the Australian Women's Weekly, Norman said 'Did you know he has clocked up more interplanetary travel, with his backwards and forwards, than the American and the Russians together?'

The Apollo astronauts did not encounter Mr Squiggle's lunar suburb, but Mr Squiggle certainly noticed what they were doing to his habitat. According to Jones (1989), he was extremely concerned by the litter the astronauts left behind. Squiggle was an early space environmentalist. In an interview with journalist Clive Robertson on television that year, he alluded to the problem of space junk:

Mr Squiggle: 'Do you know, the traffic problems up there are something terrible.'
Robertson: 'What, the satellites, you mean?'.
Mr Squiggle: 'That's it! You never know who you're going to bump into. And they have parking meteors everywhere, and then there's the Milky Way - there's so much traffic it's turning sour!'

This was quite prescient - now there is a field called Space Traffic Management which is devoted to figuring out how to safely co-ordinate satellite launches and operations among the growing population of junk created from defunct and exploded spacecraft. This small exchange indicates that awareness about environmental issues in space were starting to seep into popular consciousness.

More than one character had a space connection. Talking and having attitude weren't the only characteristics which made Gus the Snail unusual: he also didn't have a shell. In the early shows, he had a television on his back in a nice meta sort of way. This was replaced with a flowerpot in later years.  But the idea that Gus had the capacity to pick up radio signals remained. He had a satellite dish and his own satellite, which could be used to communicate with Mr Squiggle on the Moon. The satellite dish looked like a colander painted silver with some knobs on it: more improvised, domestic-scale space technology.

The Australian space conundrum

Mr Squiggle is very typical of a theme I've noted in how Australians conceive space - as a backyard activity (Gorman 2011). It's low key, low scale. Although Australia was the third nation in the world to launch a satellite from within its own national borders, this achievement has never really been celebrated. In general Australians have been content to boast about collaboration with the US, particularly in the Apollo missions. Honeysuckle Creek tracking station and the Parkes radiotelescope were key facilities in all the Apollo landings from 1969 to 1972.  Their roles are conflated in the very popular film The Dish (2000). The dramatic re-entry of Skylab in 1979 is fondly remembered by Aussies, and celebrated in Western Australia - but few people know about the amateur Australis Oscar 5 satellite launched in 1970 (celebrating its 50th anniversary this year), or the second Australian scientific satellite, FedSat 1, launched in 2002. Until 2018, Australia didn't even have a space agency. The way I see it, there's something that makes us uneasy about high technology.

I guess what I find interesting about Mr Squiggle is that this theme of backyard space is already in place in 1959, and it never develops further. Squiggle doesn't get a bigger and better rocket. Miss Pat doesn't make a trip to the Moon. Events in Australian space aren't incorporated into the show, in the way that they were for US Sitcom I Dream of Jeannie (also very popular on Australian television). I don't want to speculate too much about cause and effect; but Mr Squiggle is an exemplar of this uneasy relationship: a reluctance to leave the bush behind. High technology is translated into something gentle and safe. Perhaps this is a form of risk aversion.

I'm not saying Australians were not interested in space - far from it. In the 1950s, there were speculations about commercial spaceports at Woomera and post delivered by rockets. People flocked to see full-scale models of Russian spacecraft at the Sydney Trade Fair of 1961. Children dreamed of being astronauts, and so did the grown-ups. Newspapers reported on scientific advances and space events all round the world. And every night, from the 1959 to 1999, Mr Squiggle brought a little bit of the Moon to Australian living rooms. Space was associated with humour, not a political existential crisis such as the US faced. Maybe Aussies were too complacent. I don't know. I've been tugging at this thread for a while now, trying to understand how Australia understood itself as a space identity.

But it's always possible that Squiggle would have rejoiced in recent developments, such as the establishment of the Australian Space Agency in 2018. He might have upped sticks from the safe old Moon and moved further afield too. 'If he [Norman] was doing it [Mr Squiggle] now, he’d go to Pluto or Mars,' Rebecca Hetherington told a reporter in 2016.

If Mr Squiggle made the bush backyard into a space scenario, he also followed Australian bush traditions in his residence at 93 Crater Crescent. I think his statement to Roxanne (1987) captures something very charming about life in our little neck of the solar system:

'That's one of the nice things about the Moon. It's always afternoon tea time'.

Fun Squiggle stories

In 1993, the musician Prince changed his name to a symbol. Some called him Mr Squiggle. Richard Wilkins relates an interview he did with Prince in 2003:

'What about when you changed your name? That was all a bit weird. What was that all about?' 'I was both having fun and at war with the record label. They said to me, "Prince is contracted to us. You can't change your name and just be somebody else". They owned me. That's when I came up with the symbol thing'. 'We used to call you Mr Squiggle', I told him. 'That's funny', he said generously and half-heartedly. He probably didn't get the connection, since Mr Squiggle was only on TV in Australia'.

In 2009, opposition politician Christopher Pyne used 'Mr Squiggle' to insult Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. The Prime Minister wasn't phased and commented: 'Many of us on this side of the House would always stand up for the integrity of Miss Pat and the entire crew out there on Mr Squiggle'.

PS: sorry about the weird font changes, I couldn't fix it!

References

Bradshaw, Richard 2010 Eulogy for Norman Hetherington 1921 - 2010. OPEN: Oz Puppetry Email Newsletter Issue 11

Gorman, A.C. 2018 Gravity's playground: dreams of spaceflight and the rocket park in Australian culture. In Darran Jordan and Rocco Bosco, ed. Defining the Fringe of Contemporary Australian Archaeology. Pyramidiots, Paranoia and the Paranormal. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 92-107.

Gorman, A.C. 2011 The sky is falling: how Skylab became an Australian icon. Journal of Australian Studies 35(4):529-546

Jones, Melissa 1989 Mr Squiggle chalks up 30 years. The Australian Women's Weekly p 65 (reproduced at http://members.optusnet.com.au/kringunny/squiggle.htm)

Solman, Peter 2010 Norman Hetherington Remembered. A personal recollection by Peter Soloman. OPEN: Oz Puppetry Email Newsletter Issue 11

Wilkins, Richard 2011 Black Ties, Red Carpets, Green Rooms. Chatswood: New Holland

Wilson, Peter J. and Geoffrey Milne 2004 The Space Between: The Art of Puppetry and Visual Theatre in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press

Stone Age to Space Age in 1960s and 70s American sitcoms

One weekend I was idling at home watching cheesy American sitcoms from the 1960s and 1970s, and I chanced across a very interesting episode of The Brady Bunch. I was arrested by a theme that I've written about often before: the trope which places the 'Stone Age' and the 'Space Age' in opposition. The Brady Bunch was a pretty unlikely place to stumble across a critique of this, but stranger things have happened.

This led me to recall a double episode of my favourite Space Age sitcom, I Dream of Jeannie, set in Hawai'i. I watched this again just as I was beginning to feel my way around my space research over a decade ago, and it's been in the back of my mind ever since. Its themes are similar to the Brady Bunch episodes, and it's interesting to see how they appear to the contemporary eye.

From buffalo to blast-off

In the Brady Bunch episode Grand Canyon or Bust (1971), Cindy and Bobby wander off during a family holiday and get lost. They meet Jimmy, a Hopi boy who has run away from his grandfather.

This is in the midst of the Apollo human spaceflight program: Apollo 14 had been launched in January 1971, and Apollo 15 in July.

Cindy and Bobby meet Jimmy

In the third episode of this story arc, The Brady Braves, Mr Brady rescues the three children. Jimmy says he loves his grandfather, but ran away because his grandfather talked about the past all the time. He says, 'Mr Brady, I'm tired of being an injun [sic]. I want to be an astronaut'. In his mind, the two are mutually exclusive. The 'Stone Age' cannot meet the 'Space Age'. 

When he is reunited with his grandfather, the grandfather says to Mr Brady, "He thinks because I speak of buffalo, I don't understand blast-offs". There are generational dilemmas in this phrase. The implication is that knowledge is lost in simply three generations between the grandparents and grandchildren. The youngsters don't want to know their heritage; the connection between the past and the future is not obvious to them. The grandfather thinks differently, however: for him the buffalo (a term commonly used for North American bison), a species which had been decimated by European invasion, is still the present, not the past. The buffalo symbolises the impacts of colonialism which young Jimmy wants to forget, but the grandfather sees the connections between the 'Space Age' and 'Stone Age'.

Later there's a ceremony in which the Brady Bunch are inducted as members of the tribe and given new names. There is an exchange of values flowing between past and present, invader and vanquished. Of course none of this is as fluffy and light in reality as in Brady Bunch world, but the episodes attempt to break down the idea that there should be a division between buffalo and blast-off - the Hopi boy can have his American Dream without giving up his heritage. It's a hopeful message about the reconciliation between Stone and Space Ages.

'Pity the Indians of Outer Space'

There's quite a few stories of American Indian reactions to the Apollo missions. They centre around the themes of Indigenous knowledge vs 'scientific' knowledge.

In series of stories (I heard one account first-hand from a US anthropologist), American Indian people tell anthropologists who ask their opinion of the Apollo lunar landings that they already knew the Moon was just a grey dusty rock. There was no need to spend billions on a mission to find out what was already known!

Another set of stories has a tribe sending a message to the lunar inhabitants, or the lunar spirits, to watch out for the visitors. They will only steal their land, or ruin the environment as Europeans have on Earth (eg Young 1983: 273).

These stories place Indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in opposition, and are told with the intention of mocking Western science - but the 'superstitious' knowledge of the First Nations people is also satirised. The 'Stone Age' and 'Space Age' still define the encounter. Like all good urban legends, the stories stop short of telling you what happened next. The conflict is not resolved but left hanging in the air.

As Young (1983:274) argues, however, these are different registers of knowledge. Although they are juxtaposed in the metaphor, they are not commensurate. Each requires a different class of action. And First Nations people are not, by these stories, positioned as the first astronauts. They are still excluded. The Space Age is seen as unnecessary for them.

I dream of a terra nullius

There's an interesting parallel in the on-location Hawai'ian episodes of I Dream of Jeannie, which are basically US propaganda to justify the illegal annexation of the islands. Hawai'i was an independent sovereign kingdom until the monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, was overthrown by an American conspiracy in 1893. In the 1960s, an independence movement was emerging in Hawaii just at the time when tourism was becoming a big industry. The IDOJ episodes represented space as soft diplomacy.

Hawaii was quite an important place in the US space program. NASA built a tracking station on the island of Kauai, in Koke'e State Park, in 1961 to support their first human spaceflight program, Project Mercury. The station went on to support Gemini and Apollo. Neil Armstrong himself was posted to the Kauai tracking station in 1965 when he was the CAPCOM (capsule commander) for Gemini 3. It's now called the Koke'e Park Geophysical Observatory.

The tracking station on Kauai in 1965. Image credit: NASA

The returning Apollo astronauts dropped into the sea; and the Pearl Harbour naval base, near Honolulu, was where the recovery fleet was stationed. (You might remember that astronaut Tony Nelson finds Jeannie's bottle on a tropical beach with palm trees when he steps out of his capsule). The Apollo 11-14 crew were quarantined in Honolulu.

NASA also used the stark volcanic landscapes of Hawaii to familiarise the Apollo 11 astronauts with lunar geology. In January 1965, the crew traipsed over terrain shaped by lava in training exercises, including a hike to the summit of the Mauna Loa volcano.


But of course, these uniquely Hawai'ian landscapes were not a terra nullius, the legal fiction of a land belonging to no-one. They were only a lunar analogue if you stripped away all history and culture; reduced them to a narrow geology where people had never set foot before.

'Oh, you don't think he's serious about this invasion business, do you?'

Oh, you don't think he's serious about that That invasion business, do you?

Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=i-dream-of-jeannie-1965&episode=s03e15

Oh, you don't think he's serious about that That invasion business, do you?

Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=i-dream-of-jeannie-1965&episode=s03e15

In Jeannie Goes to Honolulu (December 19, 1967), Tony and his comedic sidekick Major Roger Healey are on a 'working holiday' in Hawai'i when Jeannie joins them. The second part is The Battle of Waikiki (January 2, 1968). Tony expresses the desire to meet King Kamehameha, who founded the Kingdom of Hawai'i in 1810, and of course Jeannie summons him up.

Tony and Roger chat to King Kamehameha in downtown Honolulu.
Image courtesy of Sitcomsonline

The script is so entangled with colonial metaphors it would take a whole essay to pull them apart.  I'm not going to do it now! But there are some key points. Famously, Kamehameha was in power when Captain Cook came through and 'discovered' the islands in 1778.  There's a whole narrative of space exploration which co-opts the colonisation of the Pacific by intrepid seafarers, followed by the European colonial voyages, into a supposed universal human 'urge to explore' which leads to space. Thus Hawai'i's subjugation by the US is subsumed into an arc of inevitability. The connections in this narrative are so strongly embedded in space culture that the Apollo Lunar Surface Journals were created in emulation of Cook's journals during his Pacific voyages.

Part of the humour resides in King Kamehameha's reactions to modern technology. 'He has a chance to see what civilization has done for his country' says Roger. The king surveys the office buildings, hotels, sidewalks and motorcycles, but he's not impressed. He insists that they are removed. The astronauts are confused. Isn't it obvious that this is better? 'He's got to be made to see that civilization has helped, and the progress that's been made here', Tony says.

Once again, Indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge are brought face to face. Kamehameha performs a dance and causes it to rain (with intervention from Jeannie). Dr Bellows sees an opportunity:

Dr Bellows: Don't you realize if he went to Washington with us, have you any idea what it would mean? 

Tony:  It would certainly shake up the boys in meteorology.

Dr Bellows: Well I think so! Predicting the weather is one thing, but making the weather? Why, we're just beginning to experiment!

Interestingly, Dr Bellows prefigures the current trend to incorporate Indigenous knowledge in land management. Of course, the joke's on him: as Tony points out, no-one would believe him about the rainmaking.

The King is in no mood to be trifled with, and proposes to raise an army to take back the islands. But the only canoes he can find are rented at $2.00 an hour to tourists, and the only spears are souvenirs for purchase in the hotel gift shop. His soldiers are the staff at the 'Living Hawai'i' museum.

While King Kamehameha plans his moves, the NASA staff all head off for a grand luau with roasted pigs and tropical fruits. Kamehameha's attack is interpreted as a performance and his army desert to participate in the luau. The King gives up in disgust.

By the end of the program, he has been brought to heel. 'I do not understand your way of life but my people seem happy. Perhaps this progress is good for them', he says. 'You make sure your civilization take care of my people.' An interesting statement in light of the social divisions unremarked upon in the episode: the local Hawai'ians are employed to serve food, sell souvenirs, hire out war canoes to white American military personnel and tourists looking for authentic tiki culture.

And so by the end of the episode, all conflict is resolved neatly, delivering political stability in advance of the Apollo 11 mission.

Conclusions

The episodes are both blunt instruments and nuanced in ways you don't expect. The Brady Bunch episode has so many cliches and stereotypes, and yet it is basically promoting the idea that the Stone Age and Space Age are not opposed: the young Hopi boy CAN become an astronaut. The buffalo and blast-off can co-exist, neither erasing the other.

The Battle of Waikiki is a reverie on the continuity of colonial manliness, a theme analysed by Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather. King Kamehameha conquered and united the Hawai'ian islands, just like the astronauts are going to conquer space. And like the cannibal mythos, the astronauts have absorbed some of King Kamehameha's heroic qualities. They become his symbolic heirs in conquest. In doing so, they retrospectively bestow value on Indigenous cultures, which are not excluded but incorporated into the narrative while staying firmly fixed in the past.

Hawai'i is still a battleground of Stone Age/Space Age values. It's the location of the Hi-SEAS (Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) habitat, meant to simulate the experience of isolation on a long-duration space mission to Mars. The colonial refiguring of the landscape has morphed with changing USA space aspirations.

More recently, there has been controversy about the construction of a new telescope on the mountain of Mauna Kea.  The easy resort of placing 'Stone Age' in the past while 'Space Age' represents the future is being challenged by protectors resisting a manifestation of colonialism masked in science. It's complex and I don't pretend to understand enough about the issues to explain them here. One commentator, however, has called the protests 'one of the largest uprisings of Native Hawaiians in modern history'.

There are no Indigenous people in space, I have heard stated many times. Space is up for grabs with clean hands as no humans will be displaced, alienated, subjected to genocide. Space is the colonialist's wet dream.

But I would argue that it's a false framing to say that the lack of space Indigenes creates a carte blanche, a tabula rasa, a terra nullius. It's just that we don't recognise how deeply space is now inscribed with white, male, capitalist and colonialist values, as these are the default, invisible to the scientific and military cadres of which the space community is mainly composed. But because these things are defined by what they exclude, the exclusions are already present. You need a different perspective to perceive their power.



References
McClintock, Anne 1995 Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge

Young, Jane 1983 'Pity the Indians of outer space': Native American views of the space program. Western Folklore 46(4):269-279

Words and poems by women in Dr Space Junk vs the Universe.

In my book Dr Space Junk vs the Universe: Archaeology and the Future, I start every chapter with a poem or a quote by a woman. This was something I decided to do very early on in the writing process.

There were poems and poets I already knew I wanted to include, such as the inspiring Christine Rueter (@Tychogirl). For other chapters, I had to do a lot of research to find the right fit. This, as you can imagine, was an incredibly rewarding process as I trawled through the internet poetry archive, discovering wonderful works and poets I had never come across before. There were some interesting Twitter conversations which led me to all kinds of beautiful writing. So much amazing poetry! I would have used them all if I could. (I'm very open to offers from a publisher to edit a book of women's space poetry....)

Then began the process of gaining permission to use the quotes. This came as a shock to me, as it's generally not necessary in academic writing. As my book was a regular bookshop book expected to make money, I had to negotiate copyright clearance. Sadly some did not come through in time and I had to find alternatives. Of that, more later.

Here are the poems/quotes as featured in the book, links to their full version, and a little explanation of what they mean for me.

Introduction: Looking Up, Looking Down

I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

From Ursula K Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969

Ursula K. Le Guin.
Image Credit: Dana Gluckstein / MPTV Images

The Left Hand of Darkness is a justly renowned novel by the great master of science fiction. She explores the impacts of sex and gender on human social systems by imagining a society where neither exists as we understand it. It's what good science fiction should be: something that gives us insight into the other, and in doing so invites reflection on the causes and consequences of our own social being.

The quote implies that facts are not enough to tell a story, and facts themselves are dependent on context. I felt this was a fitting way to open the book, as I did not want to talk just about facts. I wanted it to be about the things that usually get left out of space narratives - feelings and emotions, social context, and the everyday.

Chapter 1: How I became a space archaeologist

And I am as far as an infinite alphabet
made from yellow stars and ice,
and you are as far as the nails of the dead man,
as far as a sailor can see at midnight
when he’s drunk and the moon is an empty cup,
and I am as far as invention and you are as far as memory.

Excerpt from Susan Stewart, Yellow Stars and Ice, 1982.

Susan Stewart.
Image credit: https://poets.org/poet/susan-stewart

I love this poem because it's about the distance between things that can't be measured. It seems to capture a paradox of space for me. Space can't be characterised by just numbers; its vast distances can be both infinite and intimate at the same time.

I love the juxtapostion of invention and memory. This reminds me of the Platonic theory of anamnesis: that all knowledge is just remembering what we already knew before our current embodiment.

It also reminds me of the story of little yellow droplets of frozen urine from the Mir space station, which sometimes became embedded in the windows of the US space shuttle.

It's a magical incantation too, with shades of the tarot in the empty cup, the dead man, the Moon. Perhaps I need to go back and read the rest of the poem in this light.

Chapter 2: Journey into Space

Our trajectory

the nautilus shell curved path

away from our home.

Poem by Christine Rueter, Our Trajectory, 2015

Christine Rueter. Image Credit: @tychogirl

I've been inspired by Christine Rueter's poetry and artworks ever since I met her on Twitter, and she is unfailingly generous in giving me permission to use her work. I first started to think about shell-and-space metaphors when I read Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space (1958). I had kind of hoped that the Poetics of Space would have a lot more of outer space in it than it did, but in fact outer space is folded into and interleaved with inner space if you look for it in this work.

The nautilus shell in Christine's poem is a curve both inwards and outwards. Home is the planet Earth, but also the home where I start this autobiographical chapter. The nautilus shell is the curves of orbit, the journey not to centre of Earth, vide Jules Verne, but into the infinite expanse of outer space.

Chapter 3: Space Archaeology Begins on Earth

This morning this planet is covered by winds and blue.
This morning this planet glows with dustless perfect light,
enough that I can see one million sharp leaves
from where I stand. I walk on this planet, its hard-packed

dirt and prickling grass, and I don’t fall off. I come down
soft if I choose, hard if I choose. I never float away.
Sometimes I want to be weightless on this planet, and so ...

Excerpt from Catherine Pierce, Planet, 2017.

Catherine Pierce. Image Credit: Brooklyn Poets

In the previous chapter I had talked of the moment of getting my first glasses, at age 11, and the sudden revelation that the species of bird could be identified visually while they were in flight. The other revelation was leaves on trees, which suddenly became individual and distinct. I remember so well wearing my new glasses on the drive home from Albury, the town where the nearest optometrist was, with this new vision: marvelling at all that had previously been hidden from me.

In recent years I've become more and more interested in dust (lunar, cosmic, interplanetary), and the 'dustless light' is a contrast to, for example, zodiacal light, which is the sun's rays reflected from the particles of dust between the planets. This dust is left over, they say, from the formation of the solar system.

I interpret the 'come down soft if I choose, hard if I choose' as a statement about how gravity is experienced. It's not just an abstract quality, and equation, a way to characterise different motions and places in space. It's also something all living things interact with. Pierce reminds us that we are not helpless victims of gravity. We can choose - sometimes at least - how to engage with it. Later in the book I pick up the theme of gravity in more detail. 

Chapter 4: Junkyard Earth

Strange flashes of radiation
zip through your ghost eyes
on this frenzied carousel
hurtling round Earth.
You wonder if radar will pick
you up as a spectral shadow
or dark mass. An unexplained
phenomenon cataloged and
monitored in the wasteland flux
where blackness leans into the soul.

Excerpt from Marina Lee Sable, Space Junk, 2010. 

Space junk. Image credit: University of Miami

In the book I'm trying to convey the message that junk is never just junk: how we classify it says something about our values. This excerpt speaks about the general invisibility of space junk and its ghostly qualities. It's a visual picture of what's above our heads - a high speed whirling carousel of dark objects which you can only see when they catch the sunlight. Apart from these moments, they are in darkness and beyond human senses.

Dead satellites have been called zombies. They are not buried, they don't stay put, they move. But they have no direction; there's no-one home inside. Sable evokes a colourless wasteland populated by shadowy beings whizzing frantically without purpose: damned, condemned to orbit, their soullessness threatening our souls. Space is haunted by the ghosts our past.

Chapter 5: Shadows on the Moon

The grey unknown
was acceptable for so long
but then we got close
and color leaked in

Poem by Christine Rueter, Color leaked in, 2015

Goethe's theory of colours. Image credit: unknown.

I chose this poem because it contrasts our vision of the Moon from a distance, where it appears a relentless grey, and the experience of it close up when humans finally walked there on the Apollo missions of the 1960s. There is the scientific observation of light and shadow, and then there is the embodied experience. As a former painter, I've long been intrigued by Goethe's colour theory; and although it has been heavily criticised, I think his exploration of coloured shadows has something to offer the way we understand colour on other worlds, in other atmospheres. Astronaut Alan Bean devoted his post-Apollo life to painting the colours he saw on the Moon: mauves, yellows, greens, hidden in the shadows. You can see his paintings here.

I do hope Christine publishes a book of her poetry and artworks, because it would be truly beautiful and I would buy many copies to give to my friends.

Chapter 6: The edge of known space

Black upon black, the fissure in the ice,
The outer rim where you passed
Once, but not twice.

Excerpt from Alice Gorman, Eurydyssey,  2018.

Glidden Fresh Hyacinth.
Image credit: Encycolorpedia

Originally I had wanted to use a quote from HD's Eurydice, a poem that pierces you to the core. You can find the full text here. However, I didn't get permission to use it in time. This left me with a dilemma. My publisher suggested finding another poem; but in the diminishing time I had left to both find one and obtain permission, it was a tall order. I was stymied, my beautiful scheme of women's words about to become unravelled.

I asked my esteemed colleague Dr Lynley Wallis for advice. Her answer was: why not write one yourself? But I'm not a poet, I replied. So? she said. I thought about it for a little while, and then thought, what have I got to lose?  I can at least have a go. It doesn't matter if it's crap, it need never see the light of day....

So this is my effort above. The conceit is that it's from a longer poem - it's just that I haven't written the rest yet! I called it Eurydyssey to reference the inspiration of HD's Eurydice, and as a play on the Odyssey, as this chapter was about far-voyaging spacecraft. 

While I wanted to make it a homage to Eurydice, I also had to avoid the risk of plagiarism. There had recently been a massive plagiarism scandal in the poetry world, and many people were discussing the issues around writing something 'after', or 'in the style of', a poem or poet. My three meagre lines were inspired by a verse in HD's Eurydice:

What had my face to offer 

but reflex of the earth, 

hyacinth colour 

caught from the raw fissure in the rock 

where the light struck

In my mental vision of this verse, there is a vivid streak of blue contrasted to the dull brown fissure in the rock. I feel this to be a primeval Earth, like the rock is new, but what lies beneath it is far, far older.

The fissure in my version has riven the icy surface of Pluto, and the outer rim is the circumference of a hypothetical sphere around the planet which the New Horizons deep space probe entered briefly, before flying past - visiting only once. The rhyme of ice, twice, was unintended, but when I had written it, I thought why not?

I begged my publishers for honest feedback - would I embarrass myself by using this feeble effort? Is it ACTUALLY a poem or just some words flung together? They assured me they would never let that happen, so I was very brave and put it in the book. Now I just have to think of how to write the rest of it.

Chapter 7: Whose space is it anyway?

08 morning star song, Venus rising                         comet dust string 
to a lorikeet dawn, ironwood fire cracking, reverberation of the verse

stringybark                             sugarbag                           lines of song

Excerpt from Meredi Ortega, ‘Liner Notes, Voyager Golden Record', 2013

Meredi Ortega.
Image credit: Red Room Poetry

Meredi Ortega won the 2013 Australian Poetry Science Poetry competition with this beautiful work about the Voyager Golden Records. While so much has been written about the Golden Records, including Carl Sagan's 1979 Murmurs of Earth, and you can find the full playlist on the JPL website, one thing the records lacked was an actual cardboard sleeve with the customary liner notes.

A few years back I was researching the Aboriginal music on the records, a fascinating trail which led me to the original tapes in the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. In the book, I wanted to write about how Indigenous culture intersected with space industry, a perspective I felt was often lacking in the space world. This seemed like an appropriate place to use the part of Ortega's liner notes which refer to the music, two tiny bits of longer songs by the Yolgnu musicians Djawa, Mudpo and Waliparu. The verse is so evocative of Australian smells and sounds.

Chapter 8: Future Archaeology

The wider our universe becomes due to science, and the furthest we go – we think we go so far when we go to the Moon – the nearer we need to come to the centre of ourselves in order to interpret this world, in order to find values, in order to give our lives meaning. 

Excerpt from speech by Anais Nin, Hampshire College, 1972

As an undergraduate university student, I came across the work of Anais Nin and loved it. I too kept diaries, and her early diaries in particular spoke to me. They were about the life of the mind, emotions, senses, reactions, and navigating the world as a young woman. I felt that she should be in my book somehow.

Nin is a controversial figure in literary history, often overshadowed by her lover and friend Henry Miller. I'm pretty sure, though, that she is more read these days than he is. Recently I returned to her novels, and I'm blown away all over again by how she uses language to capture such fine shades of experience. Through her words you catch a glimpse of a sensory universe like no other.

This quote comes from a speech she gave at Hampshire College in the US in 1972. It captures one of the themes of Chapter 8, about how outer space is entangled with everyday space, and its emotional resonances.

This is the full speech:

In the course of writing the book, I also realised that I needed to read more work by women in general. But that's a story for another time.

An archaeological perspective on orbital stratigraphy

One of the things I've been thinking about for a while is the the structure of the archaeological record of Earth orbit - all the spacecraft that have been launched over the last 60 years, and their decay products, fragments and molecules of Earth-manufactured materials. Something people ask me occasionally is how you can do archaeology when there is no stratigraphy. In terrestrial archaeology, everything eventually falls to the ground and becomes buried as winds, water and human activities erode higher places and move the sediment to lower places. Generally, the deeper you dig, the older the remains that you find.

This isn't how it works in Earth orbit. Everything's falling, for sure - but a large proportion of stuff never reaches the ground. It's all up there, the new mixed up with the old, the functioning with the defunct, the living with the dead. It's not a mirror of stratigraphy on Earth. The lower something is says nothing about how recent it is.

With one exception - everything in geostationary orbit is younger than 1963, when Syncom 3 became the first satellite to successfully reach this critical orbit, the importance of which for telecommunications had been predicted since the early 20th century. This is just seven years after the first satellite though - not very long. And there's only about 40 satellites left in orbit which date from this period.

Multigravity environments

It's more useful not to think of Earth as the standard, but as a special case in a solar system comprising many different levels of gravity and many different ways of experiencing it. For example, when we talk of microgravity in Earth orbit, it's not really that there is no gravity. The Earth is still there, pulling everything towards it as usual. It's the acceleration of falling towards it that creates the sensation of microgravity. You can experience the same thing in a droptower ride at an amusement part or the zero-gravity 'Vomit Comet'. You don't even have to leave Earth to have different gravity experiences!

The nature of the archaeological record varies according to the gravity you're in. In full Earth gravity, a powerful attractor, things fall. In Earth orbit, things float but can get pulled back to Earth by atmospheric drag. On the Moon, things fall, but more slowly, and less energy is needed to throw them up into orbit. At the five Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon-Sun system, things bounce around. (Indeed, just recently, they have been shown to be massive dust traps).

Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon-Sun system. Image credit: NASA

I prefer to conceptualise the way artefacts respond to variable gravity environments as a dynamical system. This is a visual, mathematical way of representing how objects move over time when certain boundary conditions are set. Objects are the recipients of energy through various sources, and gravity determines how much energy the objects need to move. The dynamical system is a map of places where objects end up as they lose energy - the process of entropy. Effectively, such a map is also an archaeological plan of a site or the surface of an excavation unit. (Now I wonder if we should be regarding our plans as frozen moments in a dynamical system, just one that is generally moving a lot more slowly than orbit. So the critical difference between the two regimes is not speed, but time).

These places are points of stable or unstable equilibrium. When an object falls to the ground, it's in a stable equilibrium place of low energy. To get off the ground, energy has to be added. The energy might come from someone kicking it, or a stream of water which moves it on. The Lagrange points include both stable (L4 and L5) and unstable equilibria (L1, L2 and L3). Unstable equilibrium is like balancing an egg on its pointy end: you can do it, but it's going to fall over pretty quickly. (Also, it helps if the egg is hard-boiled). Using this as a framework, Earth and Earth orbit are not completely different places with different rules, but places within the same system with different amounts of energy.

It also helps to visualise this as an Einsteinian gravity well. The bottoms of the wells are points of low energy and stable equilibrium.

A 2-D slice of a gravitational force vector field (left) is interchangeable with a 3-D gravity well (right), with the z-axis showing energy (potential). Image courtesy of Invent2HelpAll

How junk disperses, or a taphonomy of orbit

In fact, the stratigraphy of space junk does include a terrestrial component. The lowest point of energy in the orbital dynamical system is the surface of Earth: an orbit of zero apogee and perigee. The atmosphere is a barrier or boundary between different gravity regimes, as space objects can bounce off its upper surface, and those that get pulled into it tend to incinerate. However, some spacecraft parts are made of materials like stainless steel and titanium alloys, which have high melting temperatures. Other parts may have carbon-carbon insulation which provides some protection from temperature extremes. Sometimes these components scream at high speed into the atmosphere, with their flesh burning, and fall with a smoking thud to the surface. The so-called 'space balls', titanium pressure vessels, are one of the most common spacecraft parts to survive re-entry. These spheres are the best gravity travellers; they get to come back.

Of course little of the spacecraft is likely to remain in orbit after the main body has re-entered - perhaps some molecules or broken-off bits. When we find the space balls or other Earthbound space junk, it's most likely that this is all that remains of the spacecraft. They've fallen to the point of lowest energy. This includes the spacecraft graveyard at the bottom of the ocean. Earth orbit is bookended by graveyards, if you take into account the graveyard orbit a few hundred kilometres above the geostationary ring. This is where old GEO satellites go to rest in their undead way, as they can still drift down and across the orbits of living satellites.

In general the the structure of space junk is not vertical layers as we're accustomed to in archaeology. Instead, spacecraft decay fragments have an elliptical or cloud geometry. When a spacecraft is whole, all its components are on the one orbital trajectory. Now imagine a solar panel detaching from the main body. Initially, its speed and orbit will be pretty much the same as the main body. But as time passes, the orbits will diverge. If the panel is tracked by one of the Earth-based telescopes, then we will have all the data about it's orbit into the past and will be able to trace it back to the original spacecraft - as long as we keep tracking it.

If a spacecraft explodes, the debris initially forms a cloud around it. The cloud travels together for a little while and then the individual pieces, all with their own weight, size, shape and velocities, start to disperse. If you look at the orbital tracks of Fengyun 1C, the Chinese satellite which was the target of a test missile shot in 2007, the debris rapidly moves apart and starts to spread out as you see here:

Fengyun 1C debris evolution. Image by Karl Tate @space.com

Position in orbit is described using a set of six equations devised by Johannes Kepler. Usually what people use, however, is Two-Line Elements - a bit like Eastings and Northings. The position is simplified into two strings of numbers. But because of the non-linear unpredictability of orbits, the reliability of the TLEs diminishes pretty fast. After 30 days you can't be sure that the TLE will accurately predict where something is. What this means in practice is that objects have to be continually watched or tracked to know where they are. This is called persistent observation and it's not generally something archaeologists worry about on Earth. However, artefacts on the surface do move around, although very slowly. You can record a concentration of stone artefacts on the surface, but if you revisit the same site a year later, half of them might be missing. Some have worked their way underground; some are covered by vegetation; others have moved under the influence of wind, water, animal movement or land use and industrial activities. Ten years into the future, there may be nothing to see. So perhaps I should apply the principle of persistent observation to terrestrial archaeology after all...

Objects in space are, of course, moving at incredibly high speeds - an average of 7-8 km per second. It's not that objects within archaeological deposits don't move; soils can act as liquids over a long time period, with a gravity-driven convection that gradually makes artefacts rise higher in the profile. Sometimes objects rise to the surface like a fish and get stranded there. Others, like stone tools with narrow sharp edges, slip back in for re-circulation. This is something archaeologists are very interested in as it says something about the integrity of the site and the relationship between objects. We're looking to that relationship to try and work out the human behavioural correlates, so we need to understand how the relationships decay over time due to natural or cultural factors, such as water movement or scavenger activity.

It's the relationship that matters

Both inside Earth and in orbit, the way the relationships between objects within a space evolves over time is critical to working out the human behavioural component. Looking at how the space debris environment evolves, it seems that after a certain amount of time it would be impossible to reconstruct the orbital path and work out what spacecraft a piece of junk came from, if you did not already have tracking records. Let's imagine the scenario of a future human archaeologist after the records have vanished (we can't assume they will survive in their current form) or even an alien archaeologist looking at space debris to get a handle on Earth culture. They will initially use materials and style to identify which space objects belong in the same time frame or to the same culture. They'll also have to work out what differences are due to style, and which to function.

Effectively, orbital archaeologists of the future will be 'recapitulating' a period of terrestrial archaeology before there was absolute dating, when similarities in style were used to posit chronological and social relationships. This period of investigation is known as culture history, and it worked on a number of premises. The first was the definition of culture, which as V. Gordon Childe phrased it, was a consistently occurring suite of artefact types, features and structures that you could attribute to an ethnic group. The second was the assumption that things change over time, coming in and out of fashion. Graphs of the frequency of occurrence of different artefacts types or styles resembled battleship curves, as they were known. Something starts out at a low frequency, then its numbers increase as it becomes popular. Soon the next big thing starts to supersede it and the frequency declines until no-one makes or uses the object any more. This is pretty much what happens in the fashion industry. Using changing frequencies to date an object is called seriation.

Because atmospheric drag pulls objects out of Low Earth Orbit all the time, things that survive there will be those with the greatest numbers, eg rocket bodies. This makes it a matter of sampling. Future archaeologists may not find the rare satellites as easily as the common ones. It's like the famous section in Kent G. Flannery's The Early Mesoamerican Village, a classic of the 1960s-1970s movement known as the New Archeology. A Real Mesoamerican Archaeologist laughs about another's failure to find the city of Teotihuacan using a particular sampling strategy. The Skeptical Graduate Student explains that this is not the purpose of a sampling strategy - and that the sample should produce results in proportion to what exists in the entire population of artefacts.

In another post I'll consider whether we can apply absolute dating techniques to space junk in orbit.

Topological stratigraphy

Terrestrial stratigraphy is locally linear and Euclidean, but orbits are non-linear and non-Euclidean. At larger scales, space is better described as the topological object called a manifold. Stratigraphy might simply be the wrong concept to describe the structure of orbiting objects. What kind of word would we use instead? Perhaps gravigraphy - written in gravity? Or orbitography, which is 'the determination and positioning of satellite orbits by a form of geodesy'?

Visualisations of space junk show Earth surrounded by white dots, like a cloud of silent bees. If you took Earth out of the middle, you would have a donut shape or torus where geostationary satellites are concentrated, and perhaps a series of intersecting tori for low to medium Earth orbit satellites. This is in stark contrast to terrestrial stratigraphy, which is conceptualised in a box-shape (even though Earth is spherical). Objects in this gravitationally-constrained tori move on elliptical paths inside the shape.

Let's put Earth back in. If we sliced a wedge vertically through through this cloud or swam, and froze the objects within it, what would we see? At the outer edge, the graveyard orbit, there'd be a thin smattering of defunct satellites. They are all dead. Below it, in the GEO range, there is thick ring of living and dead satellites. The 'type fossil' of this layer is the winged bird.

Then there is a sparse background scatter of satellites and junk until we hit the navigation satellites in the Medium Earth Orbit range. The US GPS network orbit at around 20, 000 km.

In LEO, we get the highest density of rocket bodies as well as satellites. There is a more diverse size range, from ENVISAT, the International Space Station, to cubesats and nanosats. There is the sparsest smattering of organic material.

There's a dead zone from LEO to the height of the tallest building or structure on Earth. Birds and aeroplanes fly at different altitudes, but they don't stay there or live there. There are gases, clouds, dusts.

On the surface of Earth, the ancient is mixed up with the modern. I suppose it is more like orbit than we might think, the living and the dead jostling side by side. Organic material is dense. Movement is slow. The deeper you go under the surface, the older things become. In this subterranean sphere, everything human is dead.

In all of these layers, the past and the present are mixed up to different degrees. The closer to the present you get, the higher and deeper human culture goes. Mines and building foundations cut into the dead deep past and overlay it with modern material. This is the variable borderland between the Pleistocene, Holocene and Anthropocene, a diachronous boundary that archaeologist Matt Edgeworth and his co-authors (2015) have discussed in an insightful paper (see below).

What is a place in orbit?

I'm relatedly curious about the concepts of setting or site in the orbital environment. Here, a 'place' is really a set of equations that defines the way an object moves - not just now but in the past and into the future. Place is a prediction, effectively. Place is movement, not stasis.

Could an orbital pathway, in and of itself, have heritage significance? Could it be 'preserved', and what would be the relationship between a culturally significant trajectory and the equations that define it? Could those equations, in and of themselves, also be considered culturally or archaeologically significant?

Perhaps in the future, there will be markers along the orbits of significant spacecraft that are not longer there, alerting anyone/thing who approaches that they are at a heritage orbit. Perhaps certain orbits - like Vanguard 1's - could be registered as significant so that nobody can launch something into the same orbit. An orbit has economic significance - so why not heritage significance too?

I think I have a lot further to go in this line of thinking. But it's a start anyway.

References

Matt Edgeworth, Dan deB Richter, Colin Waters, Peter Haff, Cath Neal, and Simon James Price 2015 Diachronous beginnings of the Anthropocene: the lower bounding surface of anthropogenic deposits.  The Anthropocene Review 2(1):33-58

Flannery, Kent G. (ed) 1976 The Early Mesoamerican Village. Academic Press