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

长期以来，从事科学技术社会和历史研究的理论家们一直在探索技术是如何与科学劳动组织的假设以及人类和机器的意识形态一起构建的。空间科学项目可能是大规模科学努力中最具代表性的例子，在这些科学努力中，测试这些社会技术假设，涉及跨学科、跨组织、跨国家，甚至跨越星际距离的合作。在现有合作的基础上，该项目将通过人种学、访谈、NASA火星探测车任务的档案工作和比较案例研究来详细探索这些相互联系。在早期对美国宇航局火星探测车任务的研究中，与其他美国宇航局资助的无人任务相比，团队成员一致认为他们的任务是独一无二的成功和和谐，而其他无人任务则被视为分层和分散的。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”任务则有目的地组织起来，以支持不同的原则。在这项研究中，研究人员提出了一个问题：“漫游者”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，哪些因素将这个项目与其他项目区分开来？作为他们工作的一部分，网络基础设施的作用有什么特点？这些问题的答案将为在复杂的组织环境中分布和虚拟的极端条件下进行的高能见度科学工作提供详细的、有根据的案例研究。通过参与比较工作，该项目将在这些“星际社会技术系统”的情况下，绘制出组织文化和结构的特别重要性，以及它们之间的关系。

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."