VOSS: The Social Life of Spacecraft: The Organization of Interplanetary Sociotechnical Systems

长期以来，科学和技术的社会和历史研究的理论家们一直在探索技术是如何与关于科学劳动的组织和人类和机器的意识形态的假设一起构建的。空间科学项目可能是检验这些社会技术假设的大规模科学努力中最具标志性的例子，涉及跨学科、跨组织、跨国家甚至跨星际距离的合作。在现有项目的基础上，该项目将通过人种学、访谈和NASA火星探测车任务的档案工作以及比较案例研究，详细探讨这些相互联系。在对NASA火星探测车任务的早期研究中，团队成员始终将他们的任务描述为独一无二的成功和和谐，而其他由NASA资助的无人任务被认为是等级森严和支离破碎的。早期的任务据称是航天器科学和操作团队成员之间的敌对关系，而火星车任务是有目的地组织起来的，以支持不同的原则。在这项研究中，研究人员问：罗孚项目是否像成员们认为的那样独特？作为一个社会技术系统，是什么因素使这个项目有别于其他项目？作为他们工作的一个要素，网络基础设施的作用有什么特点？对这些问题的回答将提供一个详细的、扎实的案例研究，说明在复杂的组织环境中，在极端的分布和虚拟条件下进行的高能见度科学工作。通过从事比较工作，该项目将指出在这些“星际社会技术系统”的情况下，组织文化和结构的特殊重要性及其之间的关系。

Theorists in the social and historical studies of science and technology have long explored how technologies are constructed alongside assumptions about the organization of scientific labor and ideologies of the human and the machine. Space science projects are perhaps the most iconic examples of large-scale scientific endeavor in which to test these sociotechnical assumptions, involving collaborations across disciplines, across organizations, across nations, and even across interplanetary distance. Building on existing engagements, this project will explore these interconnections in detail through ethnography, interviews, and archival work on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission and comparative case studies. In earlier studies of the NASA Mars Exploration Rover mission, team members consistently characterized their mission as uniquely successful and harmonious as compared to other NASA-funded unmanned missions which were seen as hierarchical and fragmented. Whereas earlier missions allegedly suffered antagonistic relationships between members of the spacecrafts' science and operations teams, the Rover mission was purposefully organized so as to espouse different principles. In this study, the investigators ask: Is the Rover project as unique as members believe? What factors distinguish this project, as a sociotechnical system, from others? What characterizes the role of cyberinfrastructure as an element of their work? Answers to these questions will offer a detailed, grounded case study of high-visibility scientific work conducted under extreme conditions of distribution and virtuality, in a complex organizational setting. By engaging in comparative work, the project will draw out the particular importance of, and relationship between, organizational culture and structure in these cases of "interplanetary sociotechnical systems."