Turning Fylingdales inside out: making practice visible at the UK's ballistic missile early warning and space monitoring station.l

菲林代尔皇家空军是英国的弹道导弹预警和空间监测站。它是英美核威慑力量的一部分，监视太空中导弹活动的迹象，还监视着北半球的大片空间。后一种功能对于维持世界各地的经济和社会生活至关重要；英国皇家空军菲林代尔基地跟踪1700颗在轨运行的军用和民用卫星，包括那些使全球定位系统（GPS）等技术发挥作用的卫星。它是支持国际空间站的基础设施的一部分。它还监测环绕地球运行的43000块太空碎片。这项研究旨在彻底了解英国皇家空军菲林代尔，使其实践和功能可见，并揭开其运作的神秘面纱。英国皇家空军负责运营这个高度安全的基地，他们敏锐地意识到需要更多的公众知识和了解空间站及其功能，并且是研究项目的合作伙伴。在缺乏广泛公众理解的情况下，关于空间站的小说和幻想占据了主导地位——例如，它拥有核武器，或者它拥有对外星生命形式的特权洞察力，或者它参与监控我们的电子通信（它没有做任何这些）。研究小组的动机是致力于增进学术界和公众对空间监测和核威慑的了解，这两方面在专家圈子之外仍然知之甚少，理解也很差。本研究有三个目标：概念创新、实证发现和公众参与。概念性的目标是以一种新的方式来理解英国皇家空军菲林代尔空军基地。大多数传统的关于核威慑和空间监测的学术分析都集中在管理国防和安全的抽象国际和国家政治体系上。然而，这些方法完全掩盖了一个现实，即核威慑和空间监测的存在只是因为人们在特定的地方工作，使它们发生。在这项研究中，我们将重点放在社会构成和产生的核威慑和空间监测上。我们会检视在工地受雇的人员，从雷达监察到场地维修等日常工作。我们将考虑地理位置如何影响菲林代尔斯的选址、能力和功能。我们将调查它在现在和历史上的各种空间监测和核威慑行动，利用该站的文件、照片和物体档案来解释这个地点及其历史。最终，我们希望考虑并揭示英国皇家空军菲林代尔基地是社会、技术、核、军事和工业组件的集合体，共同实现核威慑和空间监测。该研究将使用三种核心方法。创造性的艺术实践将与档案馆的文件和实物一起使用，使用绘画，雕塑和视听多媒体实验来研究RAF Fylingdales的功能是如何构成的。访谈和民族方法学观察将帮助我们从在那里工作的人那里了解电台是如何运作的，通过详细观察其员工个人和团队的工作。文化地理实地考察将使我们能够接触到这个地方的军事地理、景观和体验。我们会透过一系列公众活动、学术刊物及为主要机构举办的研究简报会，向他们传达我们的研究成果。我们将与我们的指导小组合作，为未来可持续和现实的管理英国皇家空军的档案和资源制定战略。在获得安全许可的情况下，收集到的大部分数据将在项目结束时以数字格式存放于可公开访问的档案中，供公众使用。

RAF Fylingdales is the UK's ballistic missile early warning and space monitoring station. It is part of the UK/US nuclear deterrent, watching space for signs of missile activity, and it also monitors a swathe of northern hemispheric space. The latter function is vital for the maintenance of economic and social life around the world; RAF Fylingdales tracks the 1,700 operational military and civilian satellites in orbit, including those that enable technologies such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to function. It is part of the infrastructure that supports the International Space Station. It also monitors the 43,000 pieces of space debris which orbit earth. This research aims to turn RAF Fylingdales inside out, making its practices and functions visible and demystifying its operations. The Royal Air Force, which operates this highly secure site, is acutely aware of the need for greater public knowledge and understanding about the station and its functions, and are project partners in the research. In the absence of wider public understanding, fictions and fantasies about the station dominate - that it hosts nuclear weapons, for example, or that it has privileged insight into extra-terrestrial life-forms, or it is involved in monitoring our electronic communications (it doesn't do any of these). The research team are motivated by a commitment to greater academic and public understanding of space monitoring and nuclear deterrence, which remain little known and poorly understood beyond specialist circles.The research has three objectives: conceptual innovation, empirical discovery and public engagement. The conceptual objective is to understand RAF Fylingdales in a new way. Most conventional academic analyses of nuclear deterrence and space monitoring focus on the abstract international and national political systems that govern defence and security. However, these approaches completely obscure the reality that nuclear deterrence and space monitoring only exist because people, working in a particular place, make them happen. In this research, we focus on nuclear deterrence and space monitoring as socially constituted and produced. We will examine the daily workplace practices undertaken by a range of people employed at the site, from radar monitoring to grounds maintenance. We will consider how geography influences Fylingdales' siting, capabilities and functionality. We will investigate its varied space monitoring and nuclear deterrence operations, both in the present and historically, drawing on the station's archive of documents, photographs and objects explaining the site and its history. Ultimately, we want to consider and reveal RAF Fylingdales as an assemblage of social, technical, nuclear, military and industrial components that together bring nuclear deterrence and space monitoring into being. The research will use three core methods. Creative arts practice will be used with the archive's documents and material objects, using drawing, sculpture and audio-visual multi-media experimentation to investigate how RAF Fylingdales' functions are constituted. Interviews and ethnomethodological observation will help us understand, from the people who work there, how the station operates by looking in detail at what its workforce do, individually and as teams. Cultural geography fieldwork in and around the site will give us access to the military geographies, landscapes and experiences of this place. We will communicate our research findings through a programme of public activities, academic publications and research briefings for key organisations. We will work with our steering group to develop strategies for future sustainable and realistic management of RAF Fylingdales' archive and its resources. Subject to security clearance, much of the data collected will be made available for public use at the end of the project through deposition in digital format in publicly accessible archives.