This Saturday (Saturday! Saturday!) I'll be giving a talk about space junk, the electromagnetic spectrum, astronomy, high altitude nukes, and everything in between, in the Albert Einstein Planetarium at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
That's right, inside a planetarium. There will be whizzbangs aplenty, and at least one big simulated real-time historical experience that I hope will bring HISTORY to LIFE. It will be followed by stargazing at the Phoebe Waterman Haas Public Observatory right outside, weather permitting.
The trailer linked above is a little spoiler-y, in my opinion, so click with caution (I also have a lower threshold for what I consider spoilers).
Last night I did something I hadn't done in years: went to an opening night for a Hollywood movie. I'd been hearing great things about Interstellar so I figured why not.
It was a great time in the movies. Let's just put it out there like that. As @earl-hof-ert so succinctly put it: it's a love letter to sci fi.
Yes, some of the dialog was hokey, particularly when they get into the physical power of Love. Yes, it was riddled with scientific inaccuracy, but Hollywood has been misrepresenting black holes for years, why stop now? To me, it had all the trappings of an excellent space epic: the Earth is doomed, what do we do? Like what the Star Trek reboot does every damn time, but this time driven by a really fantastic homage to the real history of the Dust Bowl, rather than some alien bent on dramatic global-scale revenge against one man (always a man).
One wonders if Star Wars would have been critiqued to all hell for its infidelity to the laws of physics if it came out today. Perhaps placing it a long time ago in a galaxy far far away was the best move George Lucas could have ever made. Because if he hadn't, he'd probably get bad reviews.
I cannot help but compare Interstellar to Gravity, which the above reviewer loved and I hated, for ostensibly the identical reasons why he hated Interstellar. I think these two films are entirely different animals. One was a grand epic that asks viewers to believe in a future totally different from the present universe we know, engaging in frontierism while also showing its darker side. The other could have been about what happens when we shut our own frontiers down prematurely, though it never explicitly engages with this question, settling instead for visually stunning whizz bangs without real reflection on how the world itself has changed.
Setting aside scientific inaccuracy -- which I admit I am MUCH more willing to do for Interstellar given that its universe is so far removed from our current one -- this film was exponentially more devoted to character development and plot than Things Hit Each Other in Space and George Clooney is a Transphobic Asshole 3D. Interstellar was a space epic with clear roots in classic space dramas and homages to its predecessors, the most obvious being 2001. Gravity had Sandra Bullock channel the title scene of Barbarella and bark at a dude on a ham radio, all while relying on men and dumb luck to survive rather than her own education and skill.
Interstellar gave me what I want out of a space epic--or really any movie. It's got smart, capable girls and women, one of the most innovative representations of AI ever, and even dedicates screentime to demonstrating how history still exists even in a fictional world as it unfolds.
I'm still scratching my head over the last 45 minutes of it. But at least I didn't laugh until I cried during moments that were meant to be dramatic like I did a year ago. Interstellar presents a carefully cultivated package that enabled me to joyously suspend my disbelief--a wonderful thing that only the best fiction does well, and which I am grateful to experience whenever it happens.
So we'll see what Neil DeGrasse Tyson has to say. As for me, except for my concerns about where all the space debris went (can't suspend all my hard-earned disbelief, natch), this film reminded me of why I love sci fi and space epics. To me, that's worth a little big screen pseudo-science.
How do you tell a good story about a fish that’s too boring to eat? And why would you even want to try? I found out why you’d want to cook this fish up into a story when I attended a workshop this week called “How to Write Good Stories about Science and Society.”
Being a good storyteller is a part of my identity I never wanted to abandon. This and having deadline fidelity sewn into the fabric of the soul are two reasons why I think all academic humanists and social scientists should have journalism training on top of our jargony disciplinary indoctrination.
The initial joy and immediate horror in the voices of bystanders in this video illustrates how powerfully sensory launches can be up close, and also how, even when nobody is hurt or loses their lives, there's something about the spontaneous destruction of space technology that triggers intense mourning anyway.
This looks like the answer to my long-running question of where the trash airlock led to. Still curious about what went down the hatch, though. And if they ever vented that waste tank. And if so, where and when.
I may very well be the only person in the world worried about this at this very moment. Which I guess means I'm doing something right in doctorateland.
This is the first gif I've ever made. It's not very good. But look at this amazing book I found in the G. E. Mueller Papers at the Library of Congress.
It was printed by Hallmark, circa 1960. It has extra pieces for interacting with the pop-up station modules. Or for swallowing.
Note that there is in fact a lady on board this space station for fine young astronauts. She's the equivalent of the phone operator, of course, and no brown people in space, because 1960.
Still a pretty Neat Thing, and certainly the most tactile fun I've had in the archive in a while.
Today while poring over some documents on a satellite tracking simulator from the late 1950s, I came across a familiar name. An astronomer I worked with back when I was an editor spent some time testing the simulator in 1958. There he was, corresponding with my historical actors just like he used to correspond with me fifty years later.
Some historians prefer not to work on topics within living memory. The living have so many opinions, after all.
I, for one, truly appreciated finding a friendly face among the mimeographs and dust mites. A rare delight.
A nice excuse to reconnect, and maybe get a little oral history in. I wonder what it took to train people to see satellites before anyone had ever seen one in real life, in situ, overhead.
I am having a moment where I am utterly excited about something and simultaneously terrified of where that excitement might lead.
The image above is incredible for many reasons. It was the first photo taken by Neil Armstrong during the first moon walk, just over 45 years ago. That in itself is pretty amazing.
Even more incredible: This historic photo features a white object in the lower left corner. No joke: it's a space garbage bag.
I knew that astronauts vented human waste and other fluids out into space, and was aware of the occasional unintentionally dropped spare glove, tool, or camera. I'd read that sometimes astronauts (particularly cosmonauts) hand-push objects they want to destroy into low orbits for convenient incineration upon reentry to the atmosphere.
But there's something about the banal iconography of the garbage bag, and that it features so prominently in this moment of technical triumph, that has sent me down a wonderful rabbithole of frenetic research, trying to figure out the basic preliminary contours of a potential chapter on space litter -- something I am beginning to see as a separate category from other orbiting space junk.
Thus the being simultaneously terrified. History dissertations are already overblown as it is. And, as one of my mentors says, a good dissertation is a done dissertation.
Today I've been taking a look at texts listed under the "Space debris--Juvenile literature" heading at the Library of Congress. I've found some great stuff, all from the late 80s on, including contributions by Isaac Asimov.
What I love is that these children's books address some heavy stuff -- particularly the prospect of frontier closure. From one of the Asimov titles:
So far, nothing much has been done. If we continue to do nothing, increasing debris may put an end to space exploration once and for all.
Space Garbage from Isaac Asimov's Library of the Universe series, 1989.
This is really what concerns over a space debris crisis have always been about -- the possibility of permanently closing ourselves off from the rest of the universe, whether due to an inability to observe the cosmos through telescopes, the loss of information relayed by satellites and probes, or the physical inability to move human bodies beyond the atmosphere to go Elsewhere. Too much trash in orbit and the frontier closes. Period.
That said, after reading perennial proposals to launch nuclear waste into the Sun*, a black hole trash compactor sounds relatively peachy. No potential downfalls or unexpected outcomes due to hubris there!
*This wasn't just speculation by Popular Science. Treating the sun as a nuclear waste sink has been seriously proposed by space scientists, too.
My article got profiled in Popular Science! Take a look if you want to know the general gist of the piece without having to read my rambling thoughts on dystopian fiction, children's literature of the 1960s, and Shulamith Firestone.
Today would have been Amelia Earhart’s 117th birthday. The famous aviatrix was born on July 24,1897 and died July 2, 1937 while attempting to fly around the world. Her plane crashed while flying from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island. Earhart wrote two books during her life time: 20 Hrs. 40min.(1928) and The Fun of It (1932). While photographing 20hrs. 40min., I discovered that the book originally belonged to Bertha Shambaugh. Bertha’s husband, Benjamin Shambaugh, chairman of the University Lecture series, is in the photograph with Earhart.
On March 31, 1936, Earhart visited the University of Iowa as part of the University Lecture series. Bertha recorded the event in both her copy of Earhart’s book and in one of the Shambaugh house books—diaries Bertha kept that detail their lives and University campus life. In the house book she included several newspaper clippings and the University Lectures advertisement. Bertha described that “Amelia Earhart’s lecture is a not a great one - but is entertaining.” She did not attend the lecture herself, but instead recorded Benjamin’s report. The majority of the entry is dedicated to complaining about the ticket situation for the event which apparently was a mess—only 1,800 seats were available and the campus population was close to 7,000! Benjamin gave up his seat and listened to the lecture from a doorway! It seems that Benjamin made an impression as a host, Bertha particularly noted that “Miss Earhart seemed to appreciate Benjamin’s protection of her from exploitation. She thought there should be a special medal struck off for such chairmen. She has the dislike of the average ‘distinguished guest’ of banquets and receptions in her honor.”
Here’s to Lady Lindy!
-Jillian P.
Check out uimapcoll's earlier post of Richard Byrd’s flight map which was partially funded by Earhart!
I had forgotten the last verse about Manifest Destiny extending to the Moon. HT to savage-america for getting the tune in my head for a revisit.
For more in this vein, see the obit for astronaut Henry Hartsfield Jr. with its lovely recollection of Reagan-era space frontierism:
The president praised the astronauts for proving that “Americans still have the know-how, and Americans still have the true grit that conquered a savage wilderness.” He declared the Columbia program “the historical equivalent to the driving of the golden spike which completed the first transcontinental railroad.”
Video portrait of cake maker Amirah Kassem of Flourshop where we played homage to the silent film ‘a trip tot the moon,’ where a rocket crashes into the man in the moon. We iced her and crashed landed an ice cream into her face
Children’s books envisioned what many could not: marriage and childbirth as a space colonist.
No space junk here, but still something I wrote, and still about space and frontiers and futurity. It was fun to remember a time when I used to write about sexuality and genders. Not so much of that with space trash, but you never know when a representation of the Earth as Sacred Feminine (swarmed with angry metal bees) will crop up.
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