Review: Dr. Space Junk vs the Universe

 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