Dr Space Junk vs The Universe: Archaeology and the Future

305 Pages·2019·4.32 MB·English

by  Alice Gorman

Alice GormAn is an internationally recognised leader in the
field of space archaeology. She investigates the archaeology
and heritage of space junk, planetary landing sites, rocket
launches and antennas. She is a Senior Lecturer at Flinders
University in Adelaide, and a Director on the Board of
the Space Industry Association of Australia. In 2017 she
won the Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing.
Dr Gorman tweets as @drspacejunk and blogs at Space
Age Archaeology.
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This book is dedicated to the women of my family
across four generations:
my grandmother, Alice, my mother, Tish,
my sister, Claire, and my niece, Stella.

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A NewSouth book
Published by
NewSouth Publishing
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
AUSTRALIA
newsouthpublishing.com
© Alice Gorman 2019
First published 2019
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose
of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process
without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the
publisher.
ISBN 9781742236247 (paperback)
9781741244495 (ebook)
9781742248950 (ePDF)
A catalogue record for this
book is available from the
National Library of Australia

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus
Cover design Peter Long
Cover images NASA; loriklaszlo; and Depositphotos
Printer Griffin Press
All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright
material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not
be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.
This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or
sustainably managed forests.
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xii
INTRODUCTION: LOOKING UP, LOOKING DOWN 1
On Earth as it is in heaven 3
A new era of space 9
Dr Space Junk’s tour of the solar system 12
CHAPTER 1: HOW I BECAME A SPACE ARCHAEOLOGIST 16
Outback and out of this world 17
The Moon in the living room 20
Venus in glasses 23
Archaeology or astrophysics? 25
Back to the past 30
Stories from stone 33
Lying in the gutter, looking up at the stars 37
Launching into orbit 41
CHAPTER 2: JOURNEY INTO SPACE 44
1940s: a rocket and a bomb 47
1950s: waging peace in the Cold War 51
1960s: ... and all I got was this lousy dust 56
1970s: the backyard satellite 60
1980s: aiming for the planet of love 64
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1990s: if Versace were to design a satellite 67
2000s: a tale of two Rosetta stones 69
2010s: the Starman cometh 73
The phases of the Space Age 76
CHAPTER 3: SPACE ARCHAEOLOGY BEGINS ON EARTH 79
The Cold War stayed for dinner 82
A space for children 87
The rocket park comes Down Under 90
The ultimate rocket playground 93
Cold War in the desert heat 96
How to forget your own Space Age 98
Valley of the cable ties 100
Artefact of the Space Age – or rubbish? 104
The story of a space age object 108
CHAPTER 4: JUNKYARD EARTH 114
One thousand elephants orbiting the earth 119
The cane toads of space 125
The cosmos in our backyard 131
Environmental management in space 135
What is dead can never die 141
‘And warm with human love the chill of space’ 143
CHAPTER 5: SHADOWS ON THE MOON 146
When birds migrated to the Moon 149
The children’s Moon 155
The Moon of science or the Moon of lovers? 157
The future of the lunar past 160
An ephemeral archaeology 166
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A descent into darkness 169
Shadows and dust 174
The many-coloured Moon 179
CHAPTER 6: THE EDGE OF KNOWN SPACE 181
The new worlds 185
The archaeology of not-quite-there 192
The ghost in the machine 198
The place defined by wind 202
Beyond the morning star 206
CHAPTER 7: WHOSE SPACE IS IT ANYWAY? 212
The ‘sweet poison of the false infinite’ 213
Exteriores spatium nullius 217
Who has the rights to space? 223
A planet by any other name 226
Reflecting Earth in space 229
Contested territories 234
Lines on a map 241
CHAPTER 8: FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGY 244
True infinite 247
The body in the machine 252
Space marked by death 256
When life means gravity 260
The abandoned solar system 265
The Small Dance 274
SELECTED REFERENCES 276
INDEX 283
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FOREWORD
There’s something nicely counterintuitive about the concept
of space archaeology. We generally think of archaeologists
as people who dig down, trowelling through the topsoil and
uncovering the deeper past beneath. Alice Gorman and her
ilk dig, as it were, up – into the heavens above the breath-
able sky – as well as into the dirt, to extract the debris that
has fallen, Lucifer-like, from the heavens. History is the past,
and archaeology is often assumed to be the deep past, but
many people still think of spaceflight as science fiction and
so therefore, to some degree, futuristic. And perhaps most
strikingly of all we think of archaeology as slow: the pains-
taking scraping away of layers, brushing dust from a half-
cracked bowl. Space is, whatever else it is, fast – we need to
be moving at 40 000 kilometres an hour just to get there, and
a body in orbit will be zooming along at somewhere between
24 000 and 32 000 kilometres an hour, depending on the kind
of orbit we’re talking about.
In Alice Gorman’s wonderful book, the world is turned
viii
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Foreword
upside down. The past is above us rather than below. The
immensely expensive and cutting-edge technologies of
Apollo are junk. She takes us on a marvellous odyssey
through the Space Age in terms of what it has left behind,
rooting her expertise in her own life experience as well as in
the grander narratives of the Cold War struggles and titanic
engineering feats.
As Dr Gorman notes it’s wrong to think that the term
‘history’ only applies to temporal remoteness. ‘Heritage,’ she
says, ‘is about things from the past which are significant to
people in the present, and which they want to keep into the
future. This applies to very recent things like space explora-
tion as much as it does to ancient rock art.’ History means
everything that’s been that has any kind of resonance to the
present. It situates, speaks to and explains the nature of the
present. There are many reasons why historical amnesia is
an evil, but a main one is that such forgetfulness allows the
unscrupulous to replace history with mythology. Myths make
good stories, but because they are not true they are easily bent
to malignant ideological purposes. There is an absolute need
to keep the past alive in the present, both to avoid its mistakes
and – particularly where the glories of our human Space Age
are concerned – to remind us of what we were once capa-
ble. If ever it feels like contemporary humanity is stumbling,
or perhaps shuffling backwards, it is salutary to remember
that within living memory we as a species were capable of
striding all the way to the Moon. It makes the hairs prickle
on the back of my neck just to think about it. If I am certain
of one thing about that troubled century, the twentieth, it is
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