Space History

Psychologists have been called upon in recent years to look into the psychological effects on humans, after being in space for prolonged periods, as both government and private corporations work towards making the idea of living in space for long periods of time a reality. Over the course of a few decades, psychological research into “analogue sites” here on earth, simulations, and astronauts living and working in orbit has started to show how humans are affected by such environments. In general, findings show the potential for conflict or emotional deterioration during long-term isolated periods, but it may have more to do with people’s perceptions of their environment more so than the environment itself. Even still, living in isolated and confined areas can cause stress and problematic behaviours that may interfere with productivity and relationships. Communication, homesickness, and habitat design also become important factors in the success of long-term missions in space. Several factors pertaining to culture such as nationality, gender roles and sexual orientation become important aspects to learn about in order to work harmoniously with others in a long-term space environment and to avoid any misunderstandings. The broad definition of culture also becomes an important aspect of living and working off world. Most researchers are aware of the problems when studying culture such as pinpointing the parts of culture that are causing such issues. Therefore, it is suggested that future research defines culture more clearly while learning more in depth information regarding participants’ ideas of their own identities. This independent study will explore the psycho-social issues of living in isolated and confined spaces, culture and gender for long-term missions off world.

The Project Icarus Study Group’s objective is to design a mainly fusion-propelled interstellar probe. The starting point are the results of the Daedalus study, which was conducted by the British Interplanetary Society during the 1970’s. As the Daedalus study already indicated, interstellar probes will be the result of a large scale, decade-long development program. To sustain a program over such long periods, the commitment of key stakeholders is vital. Although previous publications identified political and societal preconditions to an interstellar exploration program, there is a lack of more specific scientific and political stakeholder scenarios. This paper develops stakeholder scenarios which allow for a more detailed sustainability assessment of future programs. For this purpose, key stakeholder groups and their needs are identified and scientific and political scenarios derived. Political scenarios are based on patterns of past space programs but unprecedented scenarios are considered as well. Although it is very difficult to sustain an interstellar exploration program, there are scenarios in which this seems to be possible, e.g. the discovery of life within the solar system and on an exoplanet, a global technology development program, and dual-use of technologies for defence and security purposes. This is a submission of the Project Icarus Study Group.

Numerous estimates for the date of the first interstellar mission have been made in the existing literature. However, these estimates are not based on existing elaborate scenarios from other domains, which project the next 100-300 years. In this paper, the implications of these projections on the hypothetical development of an interstellar probe are assessed. For this purpose, first, relevant scenarios are selected, where the Gross Domestic Product is chosen as the key indicator for the increase in technological capability. Second, different funding patterns from past space programs are derived in order to estimate the funding distribution over time for an interstellar program. Finally, integrated scenarios are developed and it is analysed how different funding structures shift the estimated earliest date where an interstellar program can be initiated. Depending on the political and economic background, potential dates stretch from within the 21st century to the 24th century and beyond. The earlier the potential program initiation date, the bolder the economic and political projections get from today's viewpoint. This is a submission of the Project Icarus Study Group.

Following Dennis Tito's flight to space aboard the Russian Soyuz capsule in 2001, suborbital has become a new form of commercial activity. Fueled by an eager public and decreasing prices, the industry is rapidly expanding. Because the current space law regime was originally designed for governmental exploration, it is inadequate to handle the range of legal challenges emerging from this private commercial activity. This article therefore suggests that the current legal regime is incapable of sustaining the space tourism industry and that there is an urgent need for a new international convention.

As space exploration has almost advanced to the point of being able to go to the moon at will, this also has created various conflicting and multifarious legal afflictions. In essence, there are two to five nations that are in competition with each other regarding the establishment of a Moon outpost. Many major space agencies have stated their willingness to send a manned mission to Moon with a corresponding outpost for future operations in the next two decades. In essence, this also brings in the question of Mining Rights of nations that are able to go to the Moon. Principles of International Law enunciate that states posses the freedom to explore and use outer space. However, it also attests that no state shall claim territorial sovereignty on celestial bodies. The national appropriation of outer space and celestial bodies is expressly prohibited by various agreements and international treaties. Exploration must be in the interest of world peace, security, as well as international cooperation and understanding, which shall benefit all of mankind. The earnest concern is that no state has the right to deplete a natural resource occurring on a celestial body in space and therefore up to what extent a state can utilise the same for its peculiar ambitions has to be determined. Analogous postulates have been deduced for the deterrence of mining of minerals in Antarctica, though environmental facets also played a key role. Exploitation of Helium-3 and other minerals from the moon shall minister the economic fortunes of the states. According to latest research, Helium 3 is a promising material which is found on the moon that allows for fusion without the corresponding radioactive by products. Thus, through the utilization of Helium 3, unlimited cheap and safe energy can be created for those nations that are able to mine this product from the Moon. At present, it can be foreboded that U.S. and Russia will be primeval to entrench bases on the moon and thereafter the other emerging powers will follow the course. The status quo should not abet the technologically levated nations like the United States of America and the Russian Federation, to infringe the rights of the emerging nations like India and China. No state must be acceded to devour the Helium-3 and other minerals from the moon. This paper will explore these concepts and take a case study of Helium 3 mining rights on the moon.

"The idea of the oceans as the new, seventh continent was popular in the mid 1960s.
Starting in 1965 and lasting until 1980, more than 65 of these habitats were built all around the world by industrialized states. This has led to the assumption that both the conquest of the deep sea and that of the space can be seen as an expansion of frontiers in the times of the Cold War and in the postcolonial era. For instance, in 1964, at the New York World Fair, a special exhibition called Futurama showed a model of a possible future civilization on the sea-floor as well as displaying proposals for settlements in the Antarctic as both were considered unsettled continents."

Paper given at the 2017 HOTCUS Annual Conference at University College Dublin.

The 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) saw an unprecedented display of international cooperation in space when American and Soviet spacecraft docked together in orbit. Outer space had long been synonymous with the future in both the American and Soviet imaginations and Apollo-Soyuz drew on these associations. The “handshake in space” was intended to be a visionary dramatisation of detente, Nixon and Ford’s policy of reducing Cold War tensions by entangling the USSR in a web of cooperative agreements. Detente’s supporters contended the project’s three years of intense cooperation between the former space race adversaries was an exemplary form of US-Soviet collaboration. If we can live and work together in space, went the argument, why not on earth?

This paper explores ideas that I hope to adapt into a journal article and was commended with an “Honourable Mention” from the HOTCUS Committee in the competition for best postgraduate conference paper. It examines the ideology behind Apollo-Soyuz and how its architects claimed its extremely specific form of scientific-technical cooperation was a blueprint that could be followed in wider US-Soviet relations. Apollo-Soyuz was held as the realisation of astronaut-cosmonaut kinship, an emotive and unbreakable bond between spacefarers that transcended ideological rivalry. Detente was construed as politicians catching up to a certainty that space travellers were supposedly well aware of: all men were brothers.  Ultimately, though, Apollo-Soyuz’s model of cooperation was not robust enough to survive the challenge posed by a decline in US-Soviet relations.  NASA had characterised space cooperation as a unique “window” to the USSR’s scientific-technical elite but, in an increasingly tense and mistrustful atmosphere, detente’s critics were able to caricature the ASTP as a conduit for Soviet technological espionage. The Apollo-Soyuz blueprint collapsed under the weight of the grand expectations placed on it and proved to be an anomaly during the Cold War rather than the beginning of a new cooperative paradigm.

How Ewen A. Whitaker of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) successfully located the landing site of the Surveyor 3, which was used to set the landing site for the Apollo 12 mission, whose astronauts visited the Surveyor lander.

This introduction adds some historical background and context to this re-printed document from 1958 that surveys early space medicine experiments at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The research summarized here shows the central role that the Air Force played in early space medicine research, and that the use of primates as test-subjects predates NASA’s inclusion of chimpanzees in Project Mercury.

Through the twentieth century, the continual exploration of outer space and its imaginary colonization in science and fiction has led to a new understanding of the space-time continuum. While the physical space surrounding planet Earth was conceptualized ever more precisely, the encounter with the immensity of time has provoked less resonance. This article analyzes the temporal dimension of the Age of Space in three steps. First, it juxtaposes various ways of conceptualizing the so-called Space Age as a significant period in human history. Second, it examines orders of time inherent in West-European space thought, in particular the widespread appeal of time dilatation as seen in Eugen Sänger’s popular 1950s photon rocket scenario. Third, it charts the experience of time on board spaceships, as detailed in astronauts’ autobiographies. This article argues that the appeal of the Space Age lay not only in the promise of continued physical expansion but also in the total control over the fourth dimension envisioned for the future.

Paper given at the HOTCUS Winter Symposium at the British Library's Eccles Centre for American Studies:

The “Second Cold War” that followed the breakdown of US-Soviet detente in the latter half of the 1970s led to a renewed cultural preoccupation with a potential nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. Furthermore, advances in space exploration, computer and laser technology provided the backdrop for proponents of ballistic missile defence to outline radical new scenarios by which the nuclear stalemate might be transcended, scenarios which would coalesce around Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” announced in 1983. This paper analyses the visions of space warfare that suffuse military and cultural discourse during this period. Using Reagan administration documents and representative examples of the genre, it will explore how futuristic conflict scenarios of the US and USSR battling over the heavens were expressed in both government propaganda and the increasingly popular “techno-thriller” –best-sellers that combined traditional masculine adventure literature with an obsession with technical and engineering minutiae and were often decidedly conservative in terms of politics.

Covering the period from the 1940s to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the “Embattled Heavens: The Militarization of Space in Science, Fiction, and Politics Conference” was held by Freie Universität Berlin in April 2014; it set out to realign perspectives on the Cold War and the Space Age. The conference chose an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the military in the history of outer space in three closely intertwined fields of study: science, fiction, and politics.

Following the CSA's July 2017 selection of two new astronauts, I observe that Canada's spacefarers remain an all-white group. I survey the history of this lack of diversity going back to the first NRC selection in 1983, and highlight the moral and practical implications.

This paper explores information from recently leaked documents on the classified satellites PAN and Mentor 4 (an ORION). Information from these documents is corroborated by and put in context with amateur observations. The documents confirm long held suspicions that PAN is an unusual SIGINT surveying various commercial satellites, and that Mentor 4 closely covers Thuraya 2. PAN is part of a program code-named NEMESIS

Entre 1680 e 1750, a colonização portuguesa na América adquiriu dimensão continental. Entre as atividades econômicas que impulsionaram o avanço dos caminhos do comércio
e a edificação de ambientes coloniais destacamos a pecuária. Na
Capitania do Ceará a pecuária transformou o ambiente, as paisagens e dinamizou o comércio com a produção de mercadorias
que abasteciam o mercado interno e externo. Discutimos aqui
as bases da relação entre exploração colonial e as dinâmicas da
economia-mundo europeia, o processo de expansão do gado nas
Capitanias do Norte, principalmente no Ceará, e a geografia do
comércio que absorvia a produção da pecuária nas redes continentais e marítimas, de circulação e acumulação. Assim, apontamos que estudos atentos à interface entre história econômica
e história ambiental podem se beneficiar de abordagens que
situem a expansão da pecuária na relação com a totalidade dos
espaços-tempo que estruturam a economia-mundo

Extra-terrestrial living and working environments are characterized by significant challenges in logistics, environmental demands, engineering, social and psychological issues, to name a few. Everything is limited: physical volume, air, water, power, and medicine … everything, even people, and therefore all is treated as valuable resource. This situation is complicated by the end product being the result of balancing many competing interests. The relationship between humans, space, and technology is forced, as well as a dynamic process. Although mathematical models for complex systems exist, long-term effects are hard to predict, and even more so to calculate. Even if we had technological solutions for all hazards and threats, there would still be the question of how these subsystems work together, how they are perceived, and if they are accepted by the inhabitants. Habitability design is vital to the success of future space exploration. Research into the dynamic system of 'living together in an isolated and extreme environment for a long time' does not lead to a single common solution. Instead, designers are left trying to translate differing firstperson astronaut accounts into a solution bound by the constraints of physics, schedule, and cost. The early days of human spaceflight were all about discovery. Trying to replace conjecture with experience and fact. For example, the Moon was thought to have meters of soft dust that would swallow landing spacecraft. We have built on the successes and failures, but some achievements have also been forgotten. Today, we use these lessons to create effective designs for 'living together in the isolated and extreme environment (ICE)' of space. Following are descriptions of historical and newer examples of possible solutions that show what can be achieved when the demanding constraints of space inspire creative solutions for combining human needs with technological possibilities.

O Programa Espacial Soviético foi um importante marco na história das repúblicas comunistas. Em 1957 a URSS lança o primeiro objeto em órbita, o satélite Sputnik e em 1961 a nave Vostok leva Iuri Gagarin (1934-1968), o primeiro homem a ir ao espaço.  Os soviéticos ficam muito à frente em relação ao seu maior oponente na época, os Estados Unidos. Mas toda essa empreitada teve como responsável um matemático autodidata proveniente de uma pequena cidade russa chamada Kaluga. Seu nome era Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), o responsável pela equação matemática que iria possibilitar a URSS cata-pultar seus foguetes e a própria história para a modernidade.