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

长期以来，科学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组织和人类与机器意识形态的假设一起构建的。空间科学项目也许是大规模科学奋进的最具代表性的例子，在这些科学努力中，这些社会技术假设涉及跨学科，跨组织，跨国家，甚至跨行星际距离的合作。该项目将在现有工作的基础上，通过人种学、访谈和NASA火星探测漫游车使命的档案工作以及比较案例研究，详细探讨这些相互联系。在早期对NASA火星探测漫游车使命的研究中，团队成员一致认为，与NASA资助的其他无人驾驶任务相比，他们的使命是独一无二的成功和和谐，这些任务被认为是分层和分散的。据称，早期的任务在航天器的科学和操作团队成员之间存在敌对关系，而漫游者使命是有目的地组织起来的，以支持不同的原则。在这项研究中，调查人员问：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，这个项目与其他项目有什么区别？网络基础设施作为其工作要素的作用有哪些特点？对这些问题的回答将提供一个详细的，有根据的案例研究，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可见性科学工作。通过进行比较工作，该项目将得出组织文化和结构在这些“行星际社会技术系统”中的特别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."