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

自阿波罗时代以来，政府太空机构的目标不仅是将人类送入外层空间，而且要在太空中建立人类的存在。现在，随着各国政府将新的航天器瞄准月球、火星和更远的地方，新的人类在太空中的存在正在形成。这一比较人种学项目探讨的是，在不同的社会文化背景下，这种认知变化在实际意义上意味着什么。它建议通过调查新的航天器和社会政治目标在NASA和欧洲航天局的表现、话语和实践中共同产生的方式来回答这个问题。新兴的政府载人航天飞行器是此类调查的理想和独特的焦点。它们的发展轮廓不仅仅是为离开地球而制造的机器，它们的发展轮廓揭示了社会合作和斗争、重建社会和自然秩序的政治努力、新的科学和技术实践以及国家或地区进步的未来想象的独特形状。由于外层空间是他们的目的地，这些飞行器催生了新的实验活动，与现有的关于人类作为生物和社会存在以及将自然作为给定环境的想法进行了接触。这些有争议的、耗资数十亿美元的建造新航天器和促进人类在空间存在的新概念的活动具有广泛的全球影响。这些问题包括如何界定长期的人类/技术关系，如何将新的超全球领土视为社会和政治领土，以及如何将极端不人道的空间边疆变成自然环境和资源。为了实现其目标，该项目将在NASA和欧洲航天局进行案例研究并进行比较。这些案例研究将跟踪和比较新航天器和相关概念在三个社会层面上被创造和设想的方式：1)人类因素和技术设计过程的微观或实验室层面，2)人类空间探索计划管理的中等或机构层面，以及3)空间机构差异、合作和竞争的宏观或国际舞台。研究人员将通过收集档案数据，监测档案用途的变化，以及进行参与者和直接观察和访谈来构建案例研究。智力价值：通过收集关于人类在太空中存在的比较经验数据，该项目旨在更好地理解政府空间机构的论述、实践和目标。这些机构通过参与更广泛的地方和全球社会进程，如政治和经济决策和技术转让，继续重塑将地球社会发展与空间社会发展联系起来的途径和期望。该项目的分析旨在丰富对载人航天项目如何将外层空间转变为重塑人、社会、技术和环境之间关系的独特政治和科学媒介的科学和普遍理解和辩论。

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.