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Geopolitical Imaginaries of the Space Shuttle Mission Patches
Abstract
This paper engages with the (geo)political imaginaries of the Space Shuttle mission patches, through a consideration of the iconography they contain. Each Space Shuttle mission had a unique patch designed to represent the mission, which were typically worn on the arm of astronauts’ space suits. Drawing on visual methodologies and popular geopolitics, this paper critically engages with the patches’ iconography, their descriptions in official documentation, and the histories that frame their production. In doing so, this paper advances three interrelated arguments. First, that the mission patches of the Space Shuttle programme presented a uniquely American framing of outer space in their iconography and can thus be read as geopolitical texts. Second, that the iconography within the patches reflected the contemporary geopolitics of their time of production, but continued to subtly demonstrate American dominance in outer space. Finally, that the consumption of the patches in museums and through popular culture assist in the construction of American Manifest Destiny in outer space. This paper presents tangible examples of humanity’s engagement with outer space through the production of material cultures, while also pushing forward the agenda for further critical geographical engagement with outer space.
Designated as one of the global commons, outer space steadily matures as a commodity frontier at which to propel the designs and imaginaries of capitalist economy. While plans to mine the Moon, massify space tourism and colonise Mars are still works in development, the routes of its conquest expand exponentially down here on Earth, as its spectacular proceedings are mediated into a range of images, events, artefacts, samples, and experiences that disperse across the productive and reproductive ambits of terrestrial cultures. These spin-off commodities herald the evolution of the high-tech structures of power that seek to seize control over shared natural and social resources and temper the ways in which the species assembles around the commons of space. I attend to the endeavour to incorporate space into the capitalist world-system by exploring the cultural logics that precede and underpin its expansions along its ‘final frontier’. Highlighting the role of commodity in more-than planetary accumulations of capital, I suggest that its proliferation is not merely an outcome of nascent forms of technological imperialisms as they set out to claim their cosmic share, but a vital resource from which to thrust their appetites for production, consumption, and destruction out there.
The recent emergence of a new 'critical geopolitics' has opened up traditional geopolitical texts for thorough interpretation. Yet there is little work which contextualizes traditional, elite geopolitical texts within the institutions of their social reproduction. The media are the prime example of a site of representation at which elite texts are interpreted in the terms of popular culture and assessed in these terms. It is also through socialization at these sites that elites form their interpretative structures. This paper will make the case for the importance of studying popular conceptions of geopolitics in America through an examination of the popular magazine The Reader's Digest from 1980-90.
Spaceport America, a spectacle to see with curvilinear geometry that itself looks like a spacecraft rising out of the desert near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, conveys a hope of the everyman astronaut. Yet this private-public project, spending over $200 million in state taxpayer money to build and with a $2.85 million operating budget for 2017, does not provide the vertical transport analog of an airport. As Virgin Galactic stalls in launching its astronomically-priced zero-gravity music festival and commercial passenger flights, the facilities have been dusted off for educational rocketry club launches and Hollywood film backdrops while most public access to the grounds is restricted to expensive guided tours. As with the Spaceport, access to outer space itself raises questions of public versus private ownership and exclusivity. With the shifting role of nation states in offplanet activity, there are openings for outer space to become another site of capital accumulation or to manifest as envisioned by social movements and “community space programs.” This paper traces the ongoing realignment of public and private interests in offworld activity, of which Spaceport America is representative, considering how notions of offworld access have evolved since the aspirational vision of space as a commons laid out in the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty. The paper juxtaposes the emerging public-private hegemony with the actions of three autonomous space organizations that actively construct alternative political economic models, technological systems, and cultural imaginaries of offworld access.
This paper addresses geopolitical cultures of outer space by examining the selected life and works of Arthur C. Clarke (1918–2008), one of the leading space technology advocates of the twentieth century, in the specific context of his adopted home of Ceylon/Sri Lanka. Within the framework of studies that have connected critical geopolitics and science, further discussions concerning the interface between imperialism, technology and tropicality help demonstrate the relevance of Clarke’s geographical imagination to understanding geopolitical cultures of outer space. Three aspects of Clarke’s life and works are examined: First, his underwater exploration activities in Ceylon from the late 1950s to the early 1970s; second, his 1979 Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel The Fountains of Paradise; and finally, his promotion of Sri Lanka as a future hub of outer space technologies in the early 1980s. The paper suggests that geopolitical readings of outer space can be understood through investigating diverse aspects of place, landscape and identity.
Cultural geography is once again concerned with representations. In this report I focus on how, in the wake of various non-representational theories, recent work stays with what texts, images, words, and other representations do. I argue that this work is animated by a concern with the force of representations: their capacities to affect and effect, to make a difference. Accompanying this orientation to questions of force is a shift in the unit of analysis to ‘representations-in-relation’ and a multiplication of the modes of analysis through which cultural geography is performed, including the emergence of reparative and descriptive modes.
Research into outer space has burgeoned in recent years, through the work of scholars in the social sciences, arts and humanities. Geographers have made a series of useful contributions to this emergent work, but scholarship remains fairly limited in comparison to other disciplinary fields. This forum explains the scholarly roots of these new geographies of outer space, considering why and how geographies of outer space could make further important contributions. The forum invites reflections from political, environmental, historical and cultural geographers to show how human geography can present future avenues to continued scholarship into outer space.
This successor edition picks up the story where the first edition left off in 1997, and runs through to Mir’s de-orbiting in March 2001, providing the definitive account of the Mir Space Station. The book reviews the origins of the Soviet space station programme, in particular the highly successful Salyuts 6 and 7, describes Mir’s structure, environment, power supply and maneuvering systems, and provides a comprehensive account of how it was assembled and how it operated in orbit.
Tells how the Soviet Union's experience with a succession of Salyut space stations led to the development of Mir, which was assembled in space, piece by piece, between 1982 and 1996 and became an international research laboratory whose technology went on to form the 'core modules' of the International Space Station.
In this innovatory book Daniel Sage analyses how and why American space exploration reproduced and transformed American cultural and political imaginations by appealing to, and to an extent organizing, the transcendence of spatial and temporal frontiers. In so doing, he traces the development of a seductive, and powerful, yet complex and unstable American geographical imagination: the ‘transcendental state’. Historical and indeed contemporary space exploration is, despite some recent notable exceptions, worthy of more attention across the social sciences and humanities. While largely engaging with the historical development of space exploration, it shows how contemporary cultural and social, and indeed geographical, research themes, including national identity, critical geopolitics, gender, technocracy, trauma and memory, can be informed by the study of space exploration.
After the Apollo program put twelve men on the moon and safely brought them home, anything seemed possible. In this spirit, the team at NASA set about developing the Space Shuttle, arguably the most complex piece of machinery ever created. The world’s first reusable spacecraft, it launched like a rocket, landed like a glider, and carried out complicated missions in between. Bold They Rise tells the story of the Space Shuttle through the personal experiences of the astronauts, engineers, and scientists who made it happen—in space and on the ground, from the days of research and design through the heroic accomplishments of the program to the tragic last minutes of the Challenger disaster. In the participants’ own voices, we learn what so few are privy to: What it was like to create a new form of spacecraft, to risk one’s life testing that craft, to float freely in the vacuum of space as a one-man satellite, to witness a friend’s death. A “guided tour” of the Shuttle—in historical, scientific, and personal terms—this book provides a fascinating, richly informed, and deeply personal view of a feat without parallel in the human story. © 2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved.
This dissertation concerns the role of place in scientific practice. Ideas of place, I argue, shape and are shaped by science. I specifically look at the community of planetary scientists who, though they cannot step foot on the objects they study, transform planets into places. This is an ethnographic work that draws on 18 months of fieldwork during which time I encountered several different communities of planetary scientists. At MIT, I worked alongside astronomers looking for planets around other stars. These "exoplanet" astronomers transformed numerical counts of photons into complex worlds with atmospheres and weather. Data visualizations characterized the work of a community learning to see unseen planets in specific, place-based ways. I also traveled with an astronomer to a Chilean observatory where she studied the night sky hoping to find a "habitable planet." Many other astronomers share this goal and have designed various ways to detect a planet like Earth. The importance of these projects signifies that exoplanet astronomers are more interested in finding planetary kin - planets that are familiar places - than exotic aliens. To determine how the planetary places created by exoplanet astronomers differ from those in our own Solar System, I spent time at the NASA Ames Research Center with a group of computer scientists who create high resolution and three-dimensional maps of Mars. These maps reflect the kind of place Mars is today: it is available to everyone to explore, it is displayed such that you can imagine standing on the surface, and it is presented as geologically dynamic in ways similar to Earth. Even though these maps help give Mars a sense of place, Martian science is still stymied by the inability to send humans to its surface. Instead, planetary scientists travel to terrestrial sites deemed to be "Mars-like" to approximate performing geologic fieldwork on Mars. I went to one of these locations to see how, during these outings, Mars and Earth become entwined as scientists forge connections between two planetary places. These diverse scientific activities, I conclude, are transforming our view of the cosmos. Outer space is becoming outer place.
Describing the events of 9/11, President Bush asserted that "All of this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell on a different world." With these words he reinforced a general perception that the world had changed irrevocably and utterly on one September day in 2001. It was a day we will always remember, and the president was articulating an emotional truth---but not an analytical one. America Between the Wars shows that America did not change in one day. The tragedy of 9/11 and its aftermath had its origins twelve years earlier, when the world really did shift in ways that were incomprehensible at the time. Strangely, the date mirrors a much happier moment: it was November 9, 1989---11/9---when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War was effectively over. During the last decade of the twentieth century, America and the West declared victory. Democracy and the free market had prevailed, and the United States emerged as the world's triumphant superpower. The finger-on-the-button tension that had defined an earlier generation was over, and it seemed that long-lasting peace was at hand. The next twelve years passed in a haze of self congratulation and inward preoccupation---what some now mistakenly call a "holiday from history." When that complacency about the world shattered on September 11, 2001, confused Americans asked themselves: How did we get here? Renowned foreign policy analysts Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier provide a compelling answer to that question. They blend deep expertise and broad access to the key players across the political spectrum in a narrative of how the decisions and debates of the years between the fall of the Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers shaped the events, arguments, and politics of the world we live in today. By doing so, this is the first book that examines these years as a distinct and decisive era in American history. America Between the Wars reveals the ways that debates about America's role in the world framed the intense political struggles between Republicans and Democrats. It is an important inside story of a generation of leaders grappling with a decade of dramatic transformation. This book changes how we should think about the recent past, and uncovers important lessons for the future.
This paper explores the relationship between national iconography, banal nationalism and conceptions of the state. It begins by reviewing scholarship on visual culture associated with official products of the state: namely, stamps and money. This reveals a preoccupation with content analysis and a tendency to assume state control over the symbolic content of money (and stamps) without clarifying the nature of design processes, the nature of state involvement in these processes, or how ‘the state’ is being conceptualized. The paper addresses these lacunae, beginning with an examination of approaches to banknote design and clarification of the role of the state in these processes. This analysis reveals that non-state actors and institutions are frequently responsible for this key mechanism of official iconographic representation and this, in turn, supports calls for a reassessment of the concept of the state. After outlining an alternative conception of the state, as an idea that produces ‘state effects’ rather than an empirical entity separate from society, the value of this concept is illustrated by showing how it can explain banknote production in the stateless nation of Scotland. The revelation that commercial banks can be co-constitutive of state effects – things like banknotes, national institutions, iconography and identity –challenges presumptions of a discrete state that controls its own representation and the regulation of society.
This paper examines how ‘ways of seeing’ landscape, as practised within the little-known American astronomical art community, can be used to examine the popular geopolitical scripting of an American manifest destiny in outer space. A significant body of work in critical geopolitics has sought to recognise the way in which culturally manifest representations of space and place, together with embedded visual practices, can reproduce and elucidate the construction of geographical imaginations. Despite this, cultural representations of outer space have frequently been overlooked in readings of American popular, geopolitical discourse and associated geographical understandings. As a response to this lacuna, this paper interrogates how visual motifs of an American manifest destiny, developed in nineteenth-century American romanticism, have been mobilised through American astronomical art to explain and popularise conceptions of outer space that invite American human space exploration. By way of conclusion, the paper stresses how the inscription of outer space under the rubric of an American manifest destiny continues to frame the way in which the American space programme, and by extension American geopolitical and geographical imaginations, can be understood today.
This paper seeks to extend the remit of popular geopolitics by considering the role and significance of places and their inhabitants in shaping the narrative structures of films. By using the example of the James Bond series from the 1960s, it is suggested that there is more complex series of geographies to be acknowledged. Arguably most of the trade press reviewers were largely content to argue that places were simply ‘exotic locations’. With a detailed examination of screenplays from five Bond films, it is shown that United Artists and Eon Productions played an important and creative role in shaping the geographies of dangers and threats confronted by James Bond. Moreover, austere and or remote locations also played important roles in generating a sense of climax between the British secret agent and his enemies regardless of whether they were part of a criminal network or an evil genius. Finally, the paper concludes with an assessment of some of the outstanding challenges facing a popular geopolitics.
This paper considers the imbricated domains of space exploration and Cold War geopolitics by following the trajectory of the ‘Corporal’, the world's first guided missile authorised to carry a nuclear warhead. It examines the popular geopolitics of rocketry as both a technology of mass destruction and as a vehicle for the transcendent dreams of extra-terrestrial discovery. Avoiding both technical and statist accounts, the paper shows how these technologies of Cold War strategic advantage were activated and sustained through popular media and everyday experience. Particular attention is given to such mundane activities as children's play, citing the example of die-cast miniature toys of the Corporal. Through such apparently modest means, nuclear weapons were made intelligible in, and transposable to, a domestic context. The paper is also situated within a wider emerging literature on geographies and geopolitics of outer space.
This paper explores the way in which questions of affect are implicated in the relation between film and popular articulations of geopolitics. Recent work in political and cultural geography has foregrounded the role of affect in the performative enactment of space and spacing. Drawing upon such work, in this paper we explore the particular role of film as an affective assemblage through which geopolitical sensibilities emerge and are amplified. More specifically, we argue that the relation between cinema and enactments of geopolitical intervention must be understood not only in terms of the way one reproduces or subverts the discursively framed codes and scripts of the other but also in terms of the amplification and anchoring of particular affects through specific tactics and techniques. We illustrate this through a brief discussion of how the relations between the affective and geopolitical logics of intervention are implicated in U.S. involvement in Somalia in 1993 and its depiction in the 2002 film Black Hawk Down. In moving towards a conclusion, we draw upon this engagement with film in order to point to the possibilities for a more expansive engagement with the role played by the logics of affect in contemporary geopolitical cultures.
This article represents one step towards developing a sociology of humanity's relationship with the cosmos. It adapts a central question of sociological concern — how humanity transforms itself as it interacts with nature — to ask questions about how human subjectivities are affected by the increasing `humanization' of the universe and by developments in contemporary cosmology. The argument presented is that some (wealthy) sectors of society are increasingly relating to the universe in a narcissistic fashion, the roots of which can be found in the Renaissance `universal man'. At the same time, marginalized and less powerful people continue to experience the universe as a subject dominating their Earthly lives, a relationship heightened by the use of the universe in military and surveillance operations as well as abstract cosmologies. Problems with both these relationships with the universe are highlighted.
When critical geopolitics entered German political geography, its empirical verve helped crank up a discipline which had diminished into an academic backwater. Soon, however, conceptual doubts began to supersede the initial enthusiasm with which critical geopolitics had been welcomed into political geography. Critical voices in German geography highlight the conceptual heterogeneity of critical geopolitics which engenders clashes between different, partly incommensurable epistemologies. Our paper traces the empirical and conceptual trajectory of critical geopolitics and the multifarious critique of it in German geography, before venturing to take a fresh look at poststructuralist, postcolonialist and systems theoretical approaches which, in the German context, are discussed as conceptual avenues that might usefully inform the further development of critical geopolitics.
Space exploration utilizes some of the latest and highest technology available to human kind; synonymous with space exploration is the mission patch. This specialized art form popularizes the exploration of space with millions of mission patches sold around the world. Space tourism and education centres like the Kennedy Space Centre rely heavily on each space shuttle launch to support their merchandising of mission patches, from the traditional sew on badge to T shirts. Do mission patches tell a story? Are they Art? What is the origin and role of this art form in society? The art form of space mission patches combines the 21st century relevance with heraldic origins predating the ninth century. The space mission patch is designed by the astronauts themselves if it is a manned mission. As an education tool teachers and educators use the space mission patch to engage their students in the excitement of space exploration, the mission patch design is utilized as an education tool in literature, science and art. The space mission patch is a particularly powerful message medium. This paper looks at the origins of the space mission patch, its relevance to art and its impact on society.
This paper aims to establish outer space as a mainstream concern of critical geography. More than half a century after humans fi rst cast their instruments into orbit, contemporary human geography has been slow to explore the myriad connections that tie social life on Earth to the celestial realm. My starting point is a return to an early-modern geographical imagination that acknowledges the reciprocity between heaven and earth. Although other disciplinary engagements are discussed, this project represents the fi rst systematic attempt to explore how outer space both challenges and reanimates the 'geo' of geography. The example of Global Satellite Navigation Systems is used to illustrate what is currently at stake in the military contest for geopolitical control of Earth's orbit. Nigel Thrift's work on the technological refashioning of precognitive sociality is contextualized within those systems of state geopower that sustain the everyday uplinking and downlinking to and from space hardware. Lastly, the paper offers a critique of the application of classical geopolitics to outer space in the form of 'astropolitics' and its will-to-power variant of Astropolitik.
This is a study of identity and geopolitics in Hergé's Adventures of Tintin, a series of adventure comics created from 1929 to 1976. The Tintin comics became increasingly popular throughout the mid-twentieth century, and their creator, Hergé, is still a subject of intrigue in the press and popular publications. Recent work in popular geopolitics has pioneered the use of comics as a new type of source material in critical geography. Hergé's approach to the comics format combines an iconic protagonist with detailed and textured environments that draw upon some of the geopolitical discourses of the twentieth century. Three forms of geopolitical meaning are identified within the Tintin comics: discourses of colonialism, European pre-eminence and anti-Americanism. These overlapping trends amount to different facets of one single discourse, which places European ideologies at the centre of its world-view. This is highlighted by focusing on three geographical spaces of the Tintin series, and by contextualising the life and selected works of Hergé.
Previous studies of postage stamps noted their importance in promoting national identity and the objectives of the state. Neglected in this literature by geographers and others is a discussion of stamp themes and issues during political and economic transitions. A content analysis of issues during the Soviet Union's last three years and Russia's first three years revealed some significant changes. The Soviet Union issued many stamps and sets on a wide variety of topics, including nature, folk items and legends, international ties, and ideology. Russia issued fewer stamps: Nature was important, but religion and issues that promoted Russia's heritage replaced ideology and international themes. Early Russian stamps evoked an “inward” worldview that promoted a nascent nationalism. In its final years the Soviet Union noted evidence of these changes in priorities and themes with issues that depicted Soviet environmental disasters or honored the individuals killed in the failed Russian coup attempt in August 1991.
This article introduces comic books as a medium through which national identity and geopolitical scripts are narrated. This extension of the popular geopolitics literature uses the example of post-11 September 2001 (“9/11”) Captain America comic books to integrate various strands of theory from political geography and the study of nationalism to break new ground in the study of popular culture, identity, and geopolitics. The article begins with an introduction to the character of Captain America and a discussion of the role he plays in the rescaling of American identity and the institutionalization of the nation's symbolic space. The article continues by showing how visual representations of American landscapes in Captain America were critical to constructing geopolitical “realities.” A reading of post-9/11 issues of the Captain America comic book reveals a nuanced and ultimately ambiguous geopolitical script that interrogates America's post-9/11 territorialization.
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