Dissertation Research: Extending Human Presence: Spacecraft Design Practices and the Making of a Social Outer Space

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Since the Apollo era, government space agencies have aimed not just to put humans into outer space, but to establish a human presence in space. Now, a new extended human presence in space is in the making, as governments aim new spacecraft toward the moon, Mars, and beyond. This comparative ethnographic project asks what this epistemic change means in practical terms and in different sociocultural contexts. Itproposes to answer this question by investigating the ways that new spacecraft and sociopolitical objectives are co-produced in representation, discourse, and practice in NASA and the European Space Agency. Emerging government human spaceflight vehicles are both an ideal and unique focus for such an investigation. More than just machines built to leave the earth, their developing contours reveal the distinct shapes ofsocial collaborations and struggles, political bids to reorder society and nature, new scientific and technological practices, and future imaginaries of national or regional advancement. Because outer space is their destination, these vehicles precipitate new experimental engagements with existing ideas about humans as biological and social beings and nature as a given environment. These controversial and multibillion dollaractivities to build new spacecraft and promote new concepts of a human presence in space have broad global implications. They include how long-range human/technology relationships are defined, how new supraglobal territories are recognized as social and political, and how the radically inhuman frontier of space is made into a natural environment and resource. To achieve its aims, the project will conduct and compare case studies at NASA and the European Space Agency. These case studies will track and compare the ways new spacecraft and the associated concept of an extended human presence in space are being created and envisioned at three social levels: 1) the micro, or laboratory, level of human factors and technical design processes, 2) the mid, or institutional, level activities of human space exploration program management, and 3) the macro, or international, arena of space agency difference, collaboration, and competition. The researcher will construct the case studies by collecting archival data, monitoring of the changing use of archives, and conducting participant and direct observation and interviews. Intellectual merit: By gathering comparative empirical data on the making of a human presence in space, this project aims to contribute a better understanding of government space agency discourses, practices, and goals. These agencies, throughinteractive engagements with broader local and global social processes such as political and economic policy-making and technological transfer, continue to reshape the pathways and expectations that link the social development of earth to that of space. The analysis produced by this project is intended to enrich scientific and general understandings and debates about how human spaceflight projects turn outer space into a unique political and scientific medium in which to remake relationships between humans, societies, technology, and the environment.