Dr Space Junk vs The Universe: Archaeology and the Future
Dr. Alice Gorman is one of the pioneers of space archaeology, a field even many space exploration buffs have never heard of. We think of archaeology as the study of ancient civilizations, but archaeologists work right up to the present day, and anywhere humans have gone is a potential archeological site.
Gorman comes at this from an interesting perspective thanks
to growing up in Australia, a nation that isn’t a major space power but has
always been a player. Australia has hosted tests and launches and, most
famously, has served as the home for tracking and telemetry stations throughout
the Space Age. The most famous station, at Woomera, supported the Apollo
flights to the moon.
Gorman grew up on a farm. Like most farms, it had a dump
site and a field for rusting, abandoned machinery the children liked to explore.
These are the kinds of places archaeologists use as treasure troves of
information about the past.
Gorman cites a document called the Burra Charterdeveloped by
the Australian chapter of the International Council on Monuments and Sites that
establishes the principle “do as much as necessary and as little as possible”
to save the past. It was not written with the idea of applying to things in
space, but it could. She notes discarded technology tells us about the society
that discarded it as well as that which built it.
While an archaeologist named James Deetz was apparently the
first to write about it, space archeology didn’t establish itself until
publications around the turn of the century. Gorman presented her first papers on the topic
in 2003. [Arthur C. Clarke may have predated all these with his suggestion that
Vanguard 1 would be collected for a museum.]
Gorman gives a quick sociological sketch of the Space Age to
set the conversation. She makes one common error, saying the U.S. government
picked the Vanguard satellite over the proposal that became Explorer to keep it
as civilian as possible: I and many other historians have failed to find
evidence of this. She examines the importance of Vanguard 1, noting the
Vanguard program spurred the global MiniTrack system, and she speculates on the
current condition of Vanguard 1 in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
She discusses some satellites generally overlooked but
culturally significant. These include the first amateur satellites and LAGEOS 1
and 2, smallsats covered with reflectors
which are still used every day by ground lasers to inform us of their distance
and provide data on the Earth’s rotation and magnetic field. She examines the
Soviet Venus probe Venera 14 (noting it looks like a Dalek from Dr, Who) and
suggesting it had the mass of “six standard Daleks.” The ESA Rosetta mission
left a lander and the main spacecraft’s crash site on a comet. To Gorman, the
location of an artifact, whether on a landing site, an orbit, or a trajectory,
is part of its significance, and one of the considerations in deciding how to
study it and whether to retrieve it.
One of Gorman’s recurring themes is that spacecraft, born of
high-visibility projects, have great cultural and political significance. I
don’t think anyone can dispute that, although she perhaps overreaches in
finding the launch of Elon Musk’s Tesla not just a brilliant PR stunt but
conspicuous consumption, in addition to a red sports car being a symbol of
masculinity. She wonders if there was a selection committee that might have pondered
this, or if Musk did: I doubt both. But there’ s no doubt everyone will
remember this as a tipping point in the awareness of space privatization.
Gorman probes a central question – how do you do archaeology
on things you can’t touch or often even visit? One answer is that much of the archaeology
work is done on Earth, in launch sites and other locations and by telescope and
telemetry reception. Reactions to space events like the short-lived fad of
Sputnik-inspired food and the creation of playgrounds with rocket shapes, is
also archeological information. She explores the sites in Australia left from
the nation’s early space age, which she laments is almost forgotten.
There are, she calculates whimsically, the masses of 1,000
African elephants of human stuff in space. The stakes in managing all this are
high and can include human lives. It’s not all important, but what of this
qualifies as space junk, “junk” being a cultural term that different people
apply to different objects? Much of it much be removed for safety. “Empty”
space is not a pristine nothingness, but a dynamic and endless region:
archeology basically goes from the Earth up and unites us with space through our
objects. We have to consider risk, environmental impact, and other things when
we launch and when we destroy or remove. An intriguing question I’d never thought
about is, “When is a satellite dead?” When it stops being used? When it no longer
generates power? When does it become junk?
Then there is the Moon. She traces the history of our fascination,
which essentially made it a human cultural landscape before we physically
touched it. It was the scene of the first physical archaeology done in space,
when Apollo 12 took parts of the Surveyor 3 lander home. She notes the
complexity of ownership: the US owns the lunar launders, but the sites they are
on? The tracks of boots and rovers? Gorman notes that even the most
insubstantial things mattered. We created new shadows, which are starker, more
dramatic things than on Earth. There are many open questions about landing
habitation, and exploitation of the moon, like mining.
You’ve grasped by now that Gorman is not sticking strictly
to archeology as the lay reader normally conceives of it. There’s a great deal
of philosophy and sociology and political science in here. Archeology does not
take place in a vacuum (even in space, where it sort of does), Along the way we
learn things about archaeology itself, I never knew there was a standard book by
which archeologists classify colors of objects and images. The author describes
how even the smallest, most common objects are part of an endeavor or culture,
using cable ties as her example for space. Gorman writes in a personal, welcoming
style, as if she were sitting in the reader’s living room and talking about her
topics.
Space exploration carries with it two clashing narratives,
that of colonialism and that of “shared human global endeavor.” This connects
us all, some more strongly than others: Gorman remembers feeling disconnected
when Voyager 2’s messages to Earth went temporarily silent. Gorman talks about
how regions defined by dust and shadows and temperatures and solar winds become
part of our “ocean” when we reach out and visit and measure them. She discusses
the development of the Voyager Golden Records and the long debate about what
sounds to include. Music from Australian Aboriginal artists is included. It
reminds us that the cultures on Earth we sometimes think of as vanished or vanishing
are not only with us, but immortal when we carry them to the stars.
Into this comes the question, “Who owns space?” The Outer Space
Treaty declares space is our “common heritage,” but Gorman wonder if even that
is too narrow. It’s still Earth-centric. Space is a cultural landscape as well
as a place: we change it everywhere we touch it. Naming things is just the
first step. Archaeologists always want to know what names cultures give to
places. The IAU now tries to include all human cultures in naming conventions.
A few features are named with Aboriginal words, and Gorman traces them back to
their origins with a people who were in some cases affected or displaced by a
rocket range.
We also become part of where we die. Humans haven’t died in
orbit or on other bodies, but we will. The first remains in space are on the
Moon and in orbit.
Gorman closes with a vignette of a future archaeological
mission going toward Earth, finding more and more evidence of life – current or
past - as it encounters probes and landing sites. She asks us to imagine
reversing the journey we are now taking and consider what it would be like.
Gorman does not devote many pages to the methods of physical space archeology. Tools and techniques will need to be developed as we go. Her focus instead is placing space exploration in an archaeological context and vice versa. This is a pioneering work that will be part of the canon as this field matures and grows.
Matt Bille is a space historian, science writer, and novelist living in Colorado Springs. His book The First Space Race is a groundbreaking account of the first satellite programs in the 1950s. See www.mattbilleauthor.com or contact him at mattsciwriter@protonmail.com
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