Space Feminisms: People, Planets, Power (Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science and Design) 1350346322, 9781350346321

Citation preview

Space Feminisms

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Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science and Design Series Editors Charissa N. Terranova (University of Texas at Dallas, USA) Meredith Tromble (San Francisco Art Institute, USA) Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science and Design publishes books about the history, theory and practice of art and design as they comingle with the natural sciences. The series title reclaims the Greek meanings of the roots bios, conveying life, the living, or citizen-life, and techne, conveying art, skill, or craft. Biotechne thus names the folding of “art” and “science” into complex and hybrid practices that transcend a human-centered “engineering” worldview. “Interthinking,” a neologism invented by art and science visionary György Kepes, describes knowledge informed by ecological, systemic, and cybernetic connections, defining the active engagement among fields central to the Biotechne series. This engagement is the source of the cultural creativity and resourcefulness necessary to thrive in the rapidly changing world conditions of the Anthropocene. Biotechne welcomes proposals treating art and design subjects from any time period, antiquity to the present, which speak directly to these contemporary concerns. We seek inventive, cross-pollinating works about the arts and their engagement with sciences from astrobiology to zoology, wherever that engagement occurs, in art or design studios, scientific laboratories, natural habitats, the museum and gallery worlds, performance spaces, medical practices, and the political realm. By identifying significant intersections of art, humanities, and science, and tracking rigorous paths through the cross-disciplinary information jungle, Biotechne serves audiences of both experts and lay readers while substantiating the role of aesthetic insight within the natural sciences. Advisory Board James P. Crutchfield, Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of California at Davis, and President, Art and Science Laboratory, USA Deboleena Roy, Professor of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology (NBB), Emory University, USA Sha Xin Wei, Director of the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering, Arizona State University in Phoenix, USA Titles in the Series D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s Generative Influences in Art, Design, and Architecture: From Forces to Forms, edited by Ellen K. Levy and Charissa N. Terranova (2021) Sea Currents in Nineteenth-Century Art, Science and Culture: Commodifying the Ocean World, edited by Molly Duggins and Kathleen Davidson (2023) Plants by Numbers: Art, Computation, and Queer Feminist Technoscience, edited by Helen V. Pritchard and Jane Prophet (2023)

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Space Feminisms People, Planets, Power Edited by Marie-Pier Boucher, Claire Webb, Annick Bureaud, and Nahum

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Selection and editorial material © Marie-Pier Boucher, Claire Webb, Annick Bureaud, and Nahum Romero Zamora, 2024 Chapters © their authors Marie-Pier Boucher, Claire Webb, Annick Bureaud, and Nahum Romero Zamora have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover design: Elena Durey Cover image: Empress Stah in Space. Photo © Manuel Vason All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boucher, Marie-Pier, editor. | Webb, Claire Isabel editor. | Bureaud, Annick, editor. | Romero, Nahum, editor. Title: Space feminisms : people, planets, power / edited by Marie-Pier Boucher, Claire Webb, Annick Bureaud, and Nahum Romero. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. | Series: Biotechne: interthinking art, science and design | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023029885 (print) | LCCN 2023029886 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350346321 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350351028 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350346338 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350346345 (epub) | ISBN 9781350346352 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Women in astronautics. | Space sciences--Social aspects. | Astronautics in mass media. | Feminism and science. | Feminist theory. Classification: LCC TL794.5 .S58 2024 (print) | LCC TL794.5 (ebook) | DDC 500.82—dc23/eng/20231026 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029885 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029886 ISBN:

HB: 978-1-3503-4632-1 ePDF: 978-1-3503-4633-8 eBook: 978-1-3503-4634-5

Series: Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science and Design Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Plates List of Figures Notes on the Editors and Contributors

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Part One Diagramming Space Feminisms Diagramming Space Feminisms Marie-Pier Boucher and Claire Webb

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Part Two Space Feminisms, Humanities, and Social Sciences 2.1 Black Planetary Feminism: Octavia E. Butler, Breath, Gaia, and Regulatory Connection Alyssa D. Collins 2.2 Spectral Legacies: Cultivating Feminist Spaces in the Soviet Search for Life on Mars Luis Campos, Ana María Gómez López, and Ekaterina Lopatina 2.3 The Troubles of Care Out There Katarina Damjanov 2.4 Revisiting Gender, Sex, and Reproduction in Outer Space Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore

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29 41 54

Part Three Space Feminisms, Space Sciences, and Engineering 3.1 Space Feminisms Roundtable with Mazlan Othman, Jessie Ndaba, Susmita Mohanty, Jill Stuart, and Lucianne Walkowicz 3.2 In Conversation with Astronaut Jessica Meir 3.3 In Conversation with Astronaut Soyeon Yi 3.4 In Conversation with Astronaut Nicole Stott

71 81 86 91

Part Four Space Feminisms, Art, and Culture 4.1 The Space Between Us: Art, Gender, and Space Exploration in the 1990s and 2000s Nicola Triscott 4.2 Fragments of “TX-2: MOONSHADOW Mission Requirements Document” Adriana Knouf 4.3 Wohˇpe Wakaŋ: Falling Star Woman Unravels Western Cultural Supremacy Erin Genia

99 106 117

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4.4 Decolonizing the Future in Outer Space: Feminist and Indigiqueer Slipstream on Film Anne W. Johnson 4.5 Ancestrofuturism: Two Stories of Women who Travel in Time and Space Fabiane M. Borges and Maria Luiza Fragoso 4.6 Sounding Space Feminisms: In Conversation with Anna Piva

124 130 135

Part Five Space Feminisms and Art Gallery 5.1 Space Artworks—an Introduction Nahum and Annick Bureaud 5.2 Kitsou Dubois: Analogies and Traversées 5.3 Frank Pietronigro: Astronaut Steffany 5.4 Larissa Sansour: A Space Exodus 5.5 Aleksandra Mir: First Woman on the Moon 5.6 Bettina Forget: Women With Impact / One Small Step 5.7 Liliane Lijn: moonmeme 5.8 Ale de la Puente: An Infinite and . . . el primer deseo (the first wish/desire) 5.9 Constanza Piña Pardo: Khipu // Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer 5.10 Ani Liu: Olfactory Time Capsule for Earthly Memories 5.11 Empress Stah Power: Empress Stah in Space and Stargasm

145 150 153 155 157 159 161 163 165 167 169

Part Six Space Feminisms, Architecture, and Design 6.1 Building for Space: In Conversation with LIQUIFER (Barbara Imhof, Waltraut Hoheneder, and René Waclavicek) 6.2 Sleeping Bags to Sex Den: Bedrooms in Space Eleanor S. Armstrong and Akvilė Terminaitė 6.3 Could Commercializing Space Travel Influence Inequities Female Astronauts Face with Personal Protective Equipment? Susan L. Sokolowski 6.4 Going to Space with Universal Design: Why Space Travel Isn’t Accessible and Why It Should Be Sheri Wells-Jensen and Angelica Esquivel 6.5 In Conversation with Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian 6.6 Space Architecture for the Last of Us: Reflections on Off-World Planetary Construction Melodie Yashar

173 179 189 196 201 207

Part Seven Space Feminisms Anarchive 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

NASA Rejection Letters Mercury 13 Hazel Fellows Sews Playtex’s Apollo 11 Spacesuit La Porte des Mondes (Serge Samyn) and Androgynous Peripheral Assembly System (Vladimir Syromiatnikov)

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Contents 7.5 Pickering’s Harem at Harvard Observatory 7.6 First Detection of a Pulsar by Jocelyn Bell Burnell 7.7 From Barbarella to Barbie and Back Annick Bureaud

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Part Eight Epilogue Feminists In [Space] Réka Patrícia Gál

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Index

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Plates Plate Section 1 1 2 3 4

4a 5 6 6a 7 8 8a

Kitsou Dubois, creation during parabolic flight, 2009. Photo: Loïc Parent. Stargasm, Empress Stah Power. Photo: Clive Holland. Astronaut Steffany, digital composite, Frank Pietronigro, 2013. Space Suit Testing, Astronaut Training Method No. XIII, Moon Goose Colony, video still, 2011. The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility by Agnes Meyer-Brandis was commissioned by the Arts Catalyst and FACT, in partnership with Pollinaria. The Moon Goose Colony, P1 is a Pollinaria project by Agnes Meyer-Brandis. Workshop of the Lunar Migration Bird Facility / MIT Training Center: V – Flying Lessons. Agnes Meyer-Brandis. An Infinite, 2015, Ale de la Puente. Video still, 02′22″ HD 9:16 silent video. . . . el primer deseo (the first wish/desire), 2016, Ale de la Puente. Khipu // Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer, Constanza Piña Pardo [Corazón de Robota], image Florian Voggeneder photo_arselectronica. Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman through a lens, 2020, courtesy of Erin Genia. First Woman on the Moon, Aleksandra Mir, Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands, 1999. A Space Exodus, film still, 5’, Larissa Sansour, 2009.

Plate Section 2 1 2 2a 3 3a 4 5 5a 5b 5c

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Wild Seed (cover), by Octavia E. Butler © 1988. June Tyson, Saturnian Queen of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Album Sleeve. Jon Hunt, the June Tyson Estate and Sun Ra, LLC. Seven members of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees in 1995. Viktoria Modesta wears a custom prosthesis and flight suit during the Horizon 2022 flight. Venus: Sappho Patera, Lily Hibberd, oil on board, 55cm diameter, 2022. Barbarella (cover), Le Miroir aux Tempêtes, Editions L’Echo des Savannes, Albin-Michel, Paris, 1982. Astronaut Jessica Meir. Astronaut Soyeon Yi. Astronaut Nicole Stott. The first American woman to fly in space, Sally Ride, beaming as she floats in low Earth orbit during STS-7, 1983.

Plates 6 6a 7

8 8a

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SHEE habitat in Rio Tinto as part of Project Moonwalk. LIQUIFER. Shiny Gold, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian. Collage of space habitats described as “Cosmic Erotic.” Illustrations here draw on the brightly colored, pneumatic Space Age (1960s onwards) designs to indulge an image of the future in outer space that is textured and sexualized—captured here through an illustration vernacular. This vernacular plays on ideas of sexualized intimacy as central ideal to be valued in designing living spaces. Illustration by Akvilė Terminaitė © The Artist. La Porte des Mondes, Serge Samyn, Place Syromiatnikov, Saint-Denis, Reunion Island. Jocelyn Bell working at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO) in Cambridge in 1967, courtesy of MRAO.

Figures 1.1.1 Jocelyn Bell working at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO) in Cambridge in 1967, courtesy of MRAO. 1.1.2 June Tyson, Saturnian Queen of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Album Sleeve. Jon Hunt, the June Tyson Estate and Sun Ra, LLC. 1.1.3 Viktoria Modesta wears a custom prosthesis and flight suit during the Horizon 2022 flight. 1.1.4 Workshop of the Lunar Migration Bird Facility / MIT Training Center: V – Flying Lessons. Agnes Meyer-Brandis. 2.1.1 Wild Seed (cover), by Octavia E. Butler © 1988. 2.2.1 Kapitolina Ivanovna Kozlova recording the spectrum of the blue spruce in a garden of the astronomical observatory (n.d.). 2.2.2 Kozlova, seen here with a telescope presumably in the grounds of the Institute of Astronomy and Physics (n.d.). 2.3.1 SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploding at Cape Canaveral in 2016. 2.3.2 At NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston, flight controllers celebrate the successful conclusion of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission, July 24, 1969. 2.4.1 The first American woman to fly in space, Sally Ride, beaming as she floats in low Earth orbit during STS-7, 1983. 2.4.2 Phase 1 of the Artemis mission plans to land the first woman on the Moon in 2024, 2020. 3.2.1 Astronaut Jessica Meir. 3.3.1 Astronaut Soyeon Yi. 3.4.1 Astronaut Nicole Stott. 4.1.1 The Otolith Group, OTOLITH I, film still, 2010. 4.1.2 Space Suit Testing, Astronaut Training Method No. XIII, Moon Goose Colony, video still, 2011. The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility by Agnes Meyer-Brandis was commissioned by the Arts Catalyst and FACT, in partnership with Pollinaria. The Moon Goose Colony, P1 is a Pollinaria project by Agnes Meyer-Brandis. 4.2.1 Set of sigils used in the TX-2: MOONSHADOW project. Adriana Knouf. 4.2.2 Image of Mars covered in lichen. Adriana Knouf. 4.3.1 Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman through a lens, 2020, courtesy of Erin Genia. 4.3.2 Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman through a lens, 2020, courtesy of Erin Genia. 4.4.1 Still from The 6th World, 2012, Nanobah Becker. 4.4.2 Still from Reclamation, 2018, TJ Cuthand, courtesy of TJ Cuthand. x

5 7 9 11 22 32 32 42

46 57 61 81 86 91 101

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Figures 4.6.1 Black Lives Matter demonstration, London, 2020, video still from Ingiustizia, 2023. Photo: Anna Piva. 4.6.2 Mary Church Terrell, Harriet Tubman, Charlotte Maxeke. Video still from Earth & Sky, 2022, Anna Piva. 5.1.1 Venus: Sappho Patera, Lily Hibberd, oil on board, 55cm diameter, 2022. 5.2.1 First parabolic flight of the choreographer Kitsou Dubois in 1990 aboard the 0G. Caravelle. 5.2.2 Kitsou Dubois, creation during parabolic flight, 2009. Photo: Loïc Parent. 5.2.3 Kitsou Dubois, Analogies (2004), Grande Halle de la Villette Paris, with Laura de Nercy and Bertrand Lombard. Photo: Quentin Bertoux. 5.3.1 Astronaut Steffany, digital composite, Frank Pietronigro, 2013. 5.4.1 A Space Exodus, film still, 5’, Larissa Sansour, 2009. 5.4.2 A Space Exodus, film still, 5’, Larissa Sansour, 2009. 5.5.1 First Woman on the Moon, Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands, 1999, Aleksandra Mir. 5.6.1 Women With Impact / One Small Step, Bettina Forget. 5.7.1 moonmeme, 1992—ongoing, interactive digital real-time program HESHE voice chant and Lunar Tales, edition of 25, Liliane Lijn. 5.8.1 An Infinite, 2015, video still, 02′22″ HD 9:16 silent video. Ale de la Puente 5.8.2 . . . el primer deseo (the first wish/desire), 2016, Ale de la Puente. 5.9.1 Khipu // Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer, Constanza Piña Pardo [Corazón de Robota]. 5.9.2 Khipu // Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer, Constanza Piña Pardo [Corazón de Robota], image Florian Voggeneder photo_arselectronica. 5.10.1 Olfactory Time Capsule for Earthly Memories, scents of earth encapsulated in long-releasing polymers. 3D prints of scent amulet, glass, aluminum, 1” × 1” 2”, 5” × .5” × 1.5”, 2017, Ani Liu. 5.11.1 Empress Stah in Space. Empress Stah Power. Photo © Manuel Vason. 5.11.2 Stargasm, Empress Stah Power. Photo: Clive Holland. 6.1.1 SHEE habitat in the folding process. LIQUIFER. 6.1.2 SHEE habitat in Rio Tinto as part of Project Moonwalk. LIQUIFER. 6.2.1 Illustrated collage of space habitats characterized as the “Banal Motel.” Here the authors have remixed images to demonstrate elements of the muted color palette, and organic-inspired industrially produced artifacts and architectures. These highlight outer space as a space for visitors over and above as a place to live. Illustration by Akvilė Terminaitė © The Artist. 6.2.2 Collage of space habitats described as “Cosmic Erotic.” Illustrations here draw on the brightly colored, pneumatic Space Age (1960s onwards) designs to indulge an image of the future in outer space that is textured and sexualized—captured here through an illustration vernacular. This vernacular plays on ideas of sexualized intimacy as central ideal to be valued in designing living spaces. Illustration by Akvilė Terminaitė © The Artist.

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139 140 146 150 151 151 154 155 156 157 159 161 163 164 165 166

167 169 170 173 174

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xii 6.3.1 6.5.1 6.5.2 6.6.1 6.6.2 6.6.3 7.1.1 7.1.2 7.2.1 7.3.1 7.4.1 7.5.1 7.6.1 7.7.1 7.7.2

Figures Concept rendering of Star Harbor Academy. Shiny Gold, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian. The Other Volcano, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian. Lunar Surface Construction. © ICON. Lunar Landing Pad Study. © ICON. Mars Surface Panorama. © ICON. Image of Linda Halpern’s letter with her address redacted. Image: National Air and Space Museum Archives, NASM-9A12464. A letter sent from NASA in 1962 regarding application to be an astronaut / Reddit. Mercury 13, seven members of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees in 1995. Hazel Fellows sewing a space suit. NASA, courtesy National Air and Space Museum Archives. Smithsonian. La Porte des Mondes, Serge Samyn, Place Syromiatnikov, Saint-Denis, Reunion Island. Women Astronomical Computers at the Harvard Observatory (n.d.). Courtesy of the Harvard College Observatory HWSH 1/1 Pulsar charts, August and November 1967. Barbarella (cover), Le Miroir aux Tempêtes, Editions L’Echo des Savannes, Albin-Michel, Paris, 1982. Barbie astronauts. Left: NASA astronaut Sally Ride; right: ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti

191 202 203 207 207 208 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 225 226

Notes on the Editors and Contributors The Editors Marie-Pier Boucher is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. Claire Webb is a historian of science and researches the history of the search for life beyond Earth. She directs the Future Humans program at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles. Annick Bureaud is a Paris-based independent art critic, curator, and event organizer in art and technosciences. She is the director of Leonardo/Olats (www.olats.org). Nahum Romero Zamora is an artist and musician. His multidisciplinary work orchestrates a wide range of media including performance, installation, video, music, painting, and storytelling. He founded the KOSMICA Institute, a space organization focused on the cultural discourses of space activities and their impact on Earth.

The Contributors Social Sciences Katarina Damjanov is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests revolve around considerations of the changing relationships between humans, technologies and environments. Some of her work situates these inquiries in outer space and features in journals such as Science, Technology & Human Values, Journal of Cultural Economy, Space and Culture and Mobilities. Monica J. Casper is Special Assistant to the President on Gender-Based Violence and Professor of Sociology at San Diego State University. A First Gen scholar of gender, sexuality, health, inequality, and trauma, she is the author of numerous articles and books, most recently Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z. Her first book, The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery, won the C. Wright Mills Award. Lisa Jean Moore is a medical sociologist and SUNY Distinguished Professor at Purchase College. Her most recent book Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification and the Will to Change Nature examines the social and cultural implications of creating transgenic animal factories. Her other work includes xiii

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ethnographies of horseshoe crab scientists and conservation efforts, and urban honey beekeeping communities. Alyssa D. Collins is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. She served as the inaugural Octavia E. Butler Fellow at the Huntington Library. Her research focuses on black life, black feminist thought, embodiment and humanity, and technology as represented in the work of Octavia E. Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, NK Jemisin, and other black speculative fiction writers. Réka Patrícia Gál is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Information at University of Toronto and a Fellow at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology. She is the coeditor of Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times: A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene, published by meson press. Her dissertation maps the genealogies of technological maintenance and care labors on space stations, focusing on the implications of human– machine interdependence in outer space as it relates to issues of environmental and labour justice. Ana María Gómez López is a Colombian artist and filmmaker based in the Netherlands. Her practice centers on definitions of biological life, legacies of utopian thought, and archival research in the history of science. She is a core graduate tutor at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, as well as an artist researcher affiliated to the Leiden Astronomical Observatory for a project financed by the Dutch Research Council. Luis Campos is the Baker College Chair for the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation at Rice University and the former Baruch S. Blumberg NASA Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. Trained in both biology and the history of science, Campos is the author of Radium and the Secret of Life (Chicago, 2015) and coeditor of Making Mutations: Objects, Practices, Contexts (MPIWG, 2009) and Nature Remade: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds (Chicago, 2021). Ekaterina Lopatina is an art historian and cinema researcher from Moscow. She has provided curatorial and interdisciplinary research support for contemporary art exhibitions in Russia and abroad. She obtained her undergraduate degree in modern art history at the Russian State University for the Humanities and is completing a graduate certificate in film criticism at the Moscow Film School. At present, she writes cinema reviews and interviews with film directors and screenwriters from Central Asia.

Astronauts Jessica Meir, a first-generation American born to Israeli and Swedish immigrants, was selected by NASA in 2013. Prior to becoming an astronaut, her career as a scientist focused on the physiology of animals in extreme environments. Meir most recently

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served as flight engineer on the International Space Station for Expedition 61 and 62. Meir participated in the first all-women spacewalk. Soyeon Yi is South Korea’s first and only astronaut. She was selected as an astronaut in December 2006, out of 36,000 contestants vying for the title of South Korea’s First Astronaut. Dr. Yi is passionate about nurturing the next generation of STEM leaders; she is volunteering for various non-profits as an inspiring speaker and lecturing at the University of Washington and local community colleges. When not busy with her global speaking engagements, she enjoys singing, playing the piano, gardening, crafts, and hiking. Nicole Stott is an astronaut, aquanaut, artist, author of Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me about our Home Planet – and our Mission to Protect It, and most importantly a mom. She is a veteran NASA astronaut with two spaceflights and 104 days living and working on both the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle. She is the tenth woman to perform a spacewalk and the first to paint with watercolors in space. On her post-NASA mission, she is a co-founder of the Space for Art Foundation—uniting a planetary community of children through the awe and wonder of space exploration and the healing power of art. Nicole creatively combines her spaceflight experience with her artwork to inspire everyone’s appreciation of our role as crewmates here on Spaceship Earth.

Roundtable Jessie Ndaba is a Sowetan-born electrical satellite engineer (AIT&V). She joined the space industry in 2006. She was part of the AIT&V team that prepared SumbandilaSat for the launch in 2009. Sumbandila means pathfinder in a South African local language (Venda). She never looked back. She also went to the International Space University to further her space studies. She has received several awards as a female leader in the African space sector. Susmita Mohanty is a spaceship designer and space entrepreneur. She has co-founded several companies: EARTH2ORBIT, Bangalore (2009–21), LIQUIFER, Vienna (2004– ongoing) and MOONFRONT, San Francisco (2001–7). In 2021, she launched India’s first dedicated space think tank Spaceport SARABHAI. In 2022, Susmita was one of seventy-five women honored by the Indian government with the Women Transforming India (WTI) Award. She is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council for Space Technologies. Lucianne Walkowicz is an astronomer, movement artist, and educator based in Chicago. As co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance, Walkowicz studies how outer space serves as the site where humanity crafts its futures, and works to make those futures more just (both in space and on Earth). Over their 20+ years in astronomy, Walkowicz has been part of the Hubble Space Telescope, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, NASA’s Kepler Mission, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

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Mazlan Othman obtained a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Otago and became a lecturer at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) in 1981. Seconded to the Prime Minister’s Department in 1990. Professor of Astrophysics at UKM in 1994. Appointed Director of the UNOOSA in Vienna in 1999. Director General of the ANGKASA in 2002. Resumed post as Director of UNOOSA in 2007. Appointed Deputy Director-General of the UNOV in 2009. Retired from the UN in 2013. Became Professor Emeritus at UKM in 2015. Elected Senior Fellow of ASM in 2016. Director of the ISC ROAP 2017–21. Jill Stuart is an academic based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is an expert in the politics, ethics and law of outer space exploration and exploitation. She is a frequent presence in the global media (print, radio, television, documentary) and regularly gives lectures around the world. From 2013 to 2017 Dr. Stuart was editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal Space Policy, for which she remains a member of the Editorial Board.

Art Papers Nicola Triscott is a curator, researcher, and writer, internationally recognized for her expertise in the field of art, science, technology and society. She currently serves as Chief Executive of FACT Liverpool, the UK’s leading organization for art, film and creative technology. As founding director of Arts Catalyst (1994-2019), she built an internationally recognized arts commissioning and research organization, curating numerous projects and exhibitions at the intersection of art and science. She lectures and publishes internationally. Adriana Knouf, PhD (NL/US) works as an artist, writer, and xenologist, focusing on topics such as wet media, space art, and queer and trans futurities. Adriana regularly presents her artistic research around the world and beyond. Her work has been recognized by an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (2021), an Honorary Mention from the Science Fiction Research Association’s Innovative Research Award, and as a prize-winner in The Lake’s Works for Radio #4 (2020). Erin Genia, Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and community organizer specializing in Indigenous arts and culture. Genia’s artistic practice merges Dakota cultural imperatives, pure expression, and exploration of materiality with the conceptual. Erin has an MS in art, culture and technology from MIT, an MPA in tribal governance from the Evergreen State College, and studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Genia teaches art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Anne W. Johnson a Professor in the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Her research interests include the social study of science and technology, the anthropology of time and the future, performance studies and material culture. Her current research project revolves around Mexican

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imaginaries of outer space and the future, both colonialist and decolonial, with a focus on art and technoscience. Fabiane M. Borges is a clinical psychologist, curator, essayist, art and technology researcher. Creator and implementer of SACI-E project (Subjectivity, Art and Space Technology) at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil from 2019 to 2023. Master’s and PhD in clinical psychology at the nucleus of subjectivity at PUC/São Paulo. Doctoral internship in visual arts at Goldsmiths University of London. Postdoctorate in visual arts at NANO/PPGAV/UFRJ. Currently an art and technology researcher at the Diversitas/FFLCH/USP. Organizer of the Intergalactic Commune and Technoshamanism festivals. Maria Luiza (Malu) Fragoso is a Brazilian artist from Rio de Janeiro. Obtained her PhD in arts and multimedia (2003) and postdoctorate at USP (São Paulo 2014). Coordinator of NANO LAB – Nucleus of Art and New Organisms with Guto Nobrega, editors of the book series “Hiperorgânicos”. Research focuses on transcultural aspects between art, nature, science, and technology. Develops artistic practices that address the interaction between traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge, focus on land workers and Brazilian indigenous cultures. Anna Piva is a London-based multimedia artist and musician, founding member of the arts collective Flow Motion (1996–present) and the electronic music group Hallucinator (Chain Reaction). Recent works include the collaborative 12-part radio art series Morphologies at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (2018–19), the EUS-funded research and multimedia installation Common Ground (2022–3), and the sound art installation Spirits of the Mine at the 4th Industrial Art Biennial, Croatia (2023).

Art Works In 1990, Kitsou Dubois, choreographer and researcher in dance, became the first artist to experience weightlessness in parabolic flights with the French Space Agency (CNES). She experiments with dancers and acrobats in environments where the sensation of gravity has been altered: in water, parabolic flights, virtual reality set-ups (with sound and sensorial sensors) and also closely with researchers in science and technology. In her creations, from stage choreographies to video installations or hybrid productions, she explores movement, perception of the environment, the sensation of time, the relation to matter and to others. Frank Pietronigro is an artist, artronaut, and queer author who has achieved international recognition as the first US artist to create “drift paintings” in microgravity aboard NASA’s KC135 turbojet. Currently, Frank is Co-Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium (ZGAC), an international space arts education organization advocating for greater access for artists to spaceflight technology.

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Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian visual artist. Central to her work is the dialectic between myth and historical narrative. In her recent works, she uses science fiction to address social and political issues. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos and sculptures. Sansour’s work is shown in film festivals and museums worldwide. In 2019, she represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennial. She lives and works in London, UK. Aleksandra Mir, born in 1967, is a contemporary artist from Sweden and the United States who specializes in contemporary art. She is renowned for her installations and collaborative works. Mir’s artworks explore themes such as travel, time, placehood, language, gender, identity, locality, nationality, globality, mobility, connectivity, performativity, representation, transition, translation, and transgression. Bettina Forget is the director of the SETI Institute’s Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program. Her creative practice and academic research examine the re-contextualization of art and science, and how transdisciplinary education may disrupt gender stereotypes. Bettina works with traditional as well as new media arts, focusing on astrobiology, scifi, and feminism. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including ISEA (Barcelona), CYFEST-13 (St. Petersburg), and the Planetarium Rio Tinto Alcan (Montréal). Liliane Lijn, born in New York, has internationally exhibited since the 1960s, her works in collections including Tate, British Museum, V&A in London and FNAC in Paris. Lijn works across media—drawing, sculpture, film, text and performance—to explore language, mythology, and the relationship between light and matter. Ale de la Puente is a Mexican artist with a diverse background and continuum studies, including design, boatbuilding, navigation, astronomy, physics, and philosophy. Her work approaches poetic and conceptual explorations of time and space across a wide field of mediums, ranging from installations and sculptures to drawings, photography, and video, including art science expeditions in search of symbolic natural phenomena, how we signify them, and how we relate to the given meaning. Constanza Piña Pardo [Corazón de Robota]. Chilean visual artist, dancer, and researcher. She bases her work on electronic experimentation, open source technologies, DIY philosophy, and technofeminist social practices. Her work explores noise as a sound, political, and cultural phenomenon. She has been awarded an honorary mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2020 for her project Khipu / Electrotextile Prehispanic Computer. She has held exhibitions, concerts, workshops, and conversations in different cities in Latin America, Europe, United States, Canada, and Asia. Ani Liu is an internationally exhibiting research-based artist working at the intersection of art and science. Reoccurring themes in the work include gender politics, biopolitics, labor, reproduction, simulation, and sexuality. Ani’s work has been exhibited internationally, at the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, Kunstmuseum, MIT Museum.

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Ani’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, National Geographic, TED, PBS, Hyperallergic, and WIRED. Empress Stah Power is an artist, aerialist, cabaret performer, show producer, director and teacher, famed for her unique stage shows, with a luminous career spanning twenty-five years and counting. Empress Stah has toured with cult rock star Peaches, as part of her show There’s Only One Peach with a Hole in the Middle. Stah was performing her infamous laser aerial act, Stargasm to the song ‘Light in Places’, which they created in collaboration. Highlights of the tour include selling out the Royal Festival Hall, London, and the last four nights of 1999, at the Volksbühne, Berlin.

Design LIQUIFER has been co-managed by designers and architects Waltraut Hoheneder, Barbara Imhof, and René Waclavicek for nearly twenty years. LIQUIFER is a transdisciplinary group of experts committed to innovative research and development for space and terrestrial applications. Architecture, art, science, and technology coalesce in the creation of concepts, scenarios, prototypes, systems, and products by collaboration with international partners supported by the European Union, European Space Agency (ESA), as well as the Austrian Science Fund. EXO-MOAN Studio, led by Akvilė Terminatė and Eleanor S. Armstrong, uses design thinking to imagine interplanetary sex tech futures and informal sex education. Sheri Wells-Jensen is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Bowling Green State University, where she researches social aspects of human colonization, disability, the relationship between language, embodiment and thought, language evolution, and ways that alternative sensory inputs can influence the evolution of scientific thought. She is a project lead at AstroAccess and is on the boards of SciAccess, SOCIA, and METI International. She is currently writing a book on disability and space. Angelica Esquivel is a Xicana writer and artist from Fostoria, Ohio. Her work has appeared in America Magazine, Chestnut Review, and Poet Lore. She is an MFA Candidate in Fiction at Bowling Green State University. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan with her husband and dogs. Susan L. Sokolowski, PhD, has more than thirty years’ performance sporting goods experience, working cross-functionally between footwear, apparel, and equipment in creative and strategic roles. Her work is holistic in nature, where consideration of the athlete’s body form, performance, materials, and styling are addressed to develop game-changing innovation solutions. She is specifically focused on issues surrounding design of products for women, children, and adaptive athletes. She is a Professor of Product Design and the Founding Director of the Sports Product Design MS Program.

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Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian can be called an artist, a founder, a creative director, a filmmaker, a designer of experiences, but the truth is she’s an uncategorizable creative force who creates multidimensional experiential projects at the intersection of film, science, tech, theater, politics, arts, and design. Among her diverse, improbable, and unfailingly impressive achievements are the creation of the University of the Underground, the foundation of NASA’s International Space Orchestra, and collaborations with the likes of Noam Chomsky, Pussy Riot, Massive Attack, and Kid Cudi. In 2022, Nelly launched the Tour De Moon—a lunar-inspired cavalcade of creativity encompassing live events and immersive experiences all across the UK. Melodie Yashar is a space architect, technologist, and researcher. She is the VP of Building Design and Performance at ICON, a construction technologies company focused on large-scale additive manufacturing for Earth and in space. Melodie teaches at Art Center College of Design. In previous roles Melodie was a research associate at NASA Ames, as well as a co-founder of Space Exploration Architecture, a research group developing human supporting design concepts for space exploration.

Part One

Diagramming Space Feminisms

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2

Diagramming Space Feminisms Marie-Pier Boucher and Claire Webb

“Do you cry when things go wrong during flight simulation? Ride, without rancour: ‘No, I think I respond the same way that men respond.’ ”1

A Spacescape of Feminisms Dramatic narratives of the postwar era are entwined: a great ripping of the social fabric as people agitated for change, and intense national projects that turned skyward. A panoply of accelerated social movements—international feminisms, the Black Panthers, Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, among many others—took place in the Space Age. Telling these stories together reveals how that generation remade social contracts with goals for greater access, inclusion, justice, and equality just as humans were beginning to be extraterrestrial. More recently, much media fuss was made over the first all-women spacewalk by NASA’s Christina Koch and Jessica Meir in 2019; a now defunct Netherlands-based startup, Mission Cradle, would have had a pregnant person give birth in 2024; Project Artemis, named after the virginal Greek goddess of the hunt, promises to land a woman and a non-white person on the Moon by 2025. Such events both prompt enduring conversations about representation in space (moving beyond the archetype of the American astronaut that historian of science Leah Aronowsky describes as “a paragon of virtue, the perennial darling of Norman Rockwell paintings and Life magazine covers”2), and representations of space, that is, as a site of knowledge production through art, design, and storytelling. The current moment calls for serious reflection on the history of space exploration to populate speculative imaginings about its future. How will the churning legacies of the last several decades bear humans forward both on and off Earth? Space Feminisms is a multimedia diagram, a partial perspective,3 of that trajectory. For the sake of a lingua franca (“enough ink has been spilled in the quarreling over feminism”),4 we understand “space” to be the imaginaries and the materialities of the planetary in relation to the extraterrestrial; “feminisms,” meanwhile, describes theorizations, techniques, and political activations that challenge, dismantle, and subvert the white, Western, heteronormative, and masculine gender-based dominations 3

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that are at once structural and personal. Space Feminisms explores how those conjoined terms are mutually catalytic. Leveraging a plurality of feminisms places us in a distinctive position to analyze power structures that sustain, propagate, reify, and permeate a continuum of our space on Earth to spaces beyond it. Feminisms is a multi-pronged method to inspect the transformation of terrestrially held social categories as they migrate to the extraterrestrial and inform ways of living on Earth, suggesting a redistribution of power in space activities. Although space activities are often capitalistic in nature, Space Feminisms offers concepts, techniques, and technologies to speculate about novel modes of coexistence. Space Feminisms moves beyond the celebration of the “first in space” narrative to invest in forms of dependence, care, and diplomacy. The contributors of this book examine how scientific, popular, scholarly, and artistic imaginations of space prolong, undo, and renew Earthly hopes, anxieties, and futures. We are weary of the looping back of terrestrial conceptions of science and culture and we ally ourselves with other political forms of resistance (transgender, transhuman, queer, Afrofuturist, decolonial, multi-species, among others). Such alliances not only actualize the plural in feminisms, but also augment feminism’s capacities of cosmic attunement. The book recapitulates timely questions like “Who can go to space?” and “What are possible futures of life in space?” by leveraging essential feminist points of view. Indeed, Space Feminisms feeds on the many “SFs”—science fiction, speculative fabulation, speculative fiction, significant figures, safety factor, space force—and, crucially, “Who is space for?” The contributors to this book provide situated answers to these questions through a panoply of media including historical essays, a feminist archive of science fiction, personal narratives, art projects, speculative designs, interviews and conversations, and much more. To get our bearings in this dizzying, rich feast of feminisms in the spacescape (eschewing, as best we can, the “god trick”5), we conceive of ourselves as diagrammers. The drawing together of heterogeneous media corresponds to diagrams’ general uses that encode visual, linguistic, spatial, and temporal data. In Space Feminisms, diagrams are not static representations. They are snapshots of ongoing processes. Diagramming slips past the god-like “overview effect” in which astronauts recall seeing the Earth from an omniscient point of view. Instead, we “tap, roll, and flip” in space, in the words of astronaut Nicole Stott in our interview, at each new juncture. Diagramming is a mode of attachment to feminisms’ forces. Diagramming is what feminist scholar Maria Pugh de la Bellacasa might describe as “doing and intervening” that results in caring for each other, the Earth, and space.6 Diagramming produces what philosopher Gilles Deleuze described as a “a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field,” that is, it constellates various relationships through time and space. He writes, “The diagram or abstract machine is the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity, which proceeds by primary non-localizable relations and at every moment passes through every point, ‘or rather in every relation from one point to another.’ ”7 Our diagramming practice throughout Space Feminisms is an “abstract machine” that coagulates pasts, presents, and futures of space activities toward the generation of a “real that is yet to come”8—one that we foretell to be more inclusive and just. Diagramming illuminates a

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spacescape of people, who, by asking “Who is space for?”, shapes politics, policies, and protocols yet to emerge. We practice many modes of diagramming, for instance, “recording” histories of women in space exploration; “rendering” visual culture and narratives about space through feminist lenses; and “writing” feminist stories and epistemologies about space.

Recording, Rendering, Writing Space Feminisms Consider three events of triumph and resilience scattered through time that recuperate and record women’s contributions to space history. The women “computers” at the Harvard University Observatory in the late 1880s, dubbed Edward “Pickering’s Harem,” expanded the new field of astrophotography by closely analyzing novae and stars’ movements (see Figure 7.5.1). Mathematician Katherine Johnson was one of the three Black students to integrate graduate programs in West Virginia. In 1962, astronaut John Glenn insisted that her mathematics chops confirm his complex orbital path of the successful Friendship 7 flight (recorded in the popular 2016 film Hidden Figures). The Nobel committee awarded the 1974 Prize in Physics not to astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell who had first flagged pulsars, but to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish (see Figure 1.1.1, Plate 2, and Figure 7.6.1). The 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics recognized only later her contributions, and Bell Burnell used the US$3 million to fund women, minority, and refugee physicists. The complex representations of women in space popular culture9 and the undervalorization of their role in space affairs continues to be the subject of fierce study and

Figure 1.1.1 Jocelyn Bell working at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO) in Cambridge in 1967, courtesy of MRAO. © The Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory

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critique. In her foundational 2004 Right Stuff Wrong Sex, Margaret Weitekamp records the history of the participation of women in the United States’ space program. She explains that in the tests for “endurance capabilities in cramped and isolated spaces women were equal to, and in some cases better than their male counterparts.”10 Women were lighter, used less oxygen, and created less waste, yet these factors were completely disregarded, as figured in both the rejection letters sent from NASA to women asking to be integrated in their space program (see Figures 7.1.1 and 7.2.2) and the dismissal of the Mercury 13 program, again by NASA (see Figure 7.2.1 and Plate 2). Funded by the Lovelace Foundation, Mercury 13 was a group of women trained outside of space agencies and conventional social norms that showed the equal capacity—if not the higher ability—of women to participate and excel in space activities.11 In L’astronomie au féminin,12 astrophysicist Yaël Nazé chronicles major yet mainly unpublished groundbreaking contributions of women in astronomy, from the discovery of comets and asteroids to the understanding of the formation of stars. Their passion and the certainty marked history despite never being credited. As it ramped up, the Space Age in the USA backdropped calls for civil rights and a change in the social status of women. While race and gender continued to be key categories of identity refracted by national projects to explore space, we find the residue of those recordings in today’s stories. In 1983, when feminist icon Gloria Steinem interviewed Sally Ride, the first woman from the United States to fly in space, the astronaut remembered, “Everybody wanted to know what kind of makeup I was taking up,” she said, “they didn’t care about how well-prepared I was to operate the arm or deploy communication satellites.”13 Each astronaut we interviewed in this book in 2023 reflected that they had received many questions before and after flying that referenced womanhood and its assumed constitutive performances (reproduction, appearance, motherhood). Meanwhile, the increasing privatization of space references long-standing questions about the social good of space exploration. Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 spoken word piece “Whitey on the Moon” catalogued rampant poverty and inequality amidst the expensive Apollo Moon landings: “Was all that money I made las’ year/(for Whitey on the moon?)/How come there ain’t no money here? /(Hm! Whitey’s on the moon).14 Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism collective, the Arkestra, was a politically vibrant vision of Black space, borne to the extraterrestrial through music in the 1974 film Space is the Place.15 The Arkestra’s first woman, June Tyson, affirmed African Blackness through the rendering of Egyptian motifs in her performances. As Alyssa Collins explains in her essay, science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantastical imaginings that re-render assumed categories of race, gender, and even species, continue to be fecund sites for emancipatory action. June Tyson was the first woman of Sun Ra’s musical collective the Arkestra. A violinist, singer, and dancer, Tyson contributed to the Arkestra’s radical vision of an off-world future (see Plate 2). Women’s historical marginalization also found concrete expression in the gendered preconceptions of the space force,16 manifested in the language employed in the media during the Cold War. Dario Llinares records that the discriminatory17 gendering of the

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Figure 1.1.2 June Tyson, Saturnian Queen of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Album Sleeve. Jon Hunt, the June Tyson Estate and Sun Ra, LLC. © 2019 Modern Harmonic. Nashville / New York

identity of the astronaut emphasized “women” as the primary category (rather than simply “astronaut”). This resulted in a refusal of entry to women promoted by a peculiar language that relegated women to an identity bound to politics through a series of sexist terms such as aviatrix, astronautrix, spacelady, astronette, féminaut, cosmonette, and astronautte.18 Again, the over-indexing of that social category continues; Soyeon Yi records skepticism from her grizzled Russian astronaut about operating equipment on board the spacecraft that he baldly tied to her gender (this book). Language, however, could never completely betray, obscure, or erase women. The acronym for the United States Air Force program that aimed to put a human in space before the Soviet Union—Man in Space Soonest (MISS)—speaks volumes about the denied but ever-present, lurking visibility of women. It also sheds light on the miss-ed opportunity of the program. Racism also was intertwined with sexism for many of the African American women who were instrumental in calculating the trajectory of the first human from the United States to orbit the Earth and whose stories are only now resurfacing, like Katherine Johnson’s. The Androgynous Peripheral Assembly System renders the materiality of the gendering of infrastructures in space. Invented by engineer Vladimir Syromyatnikov, the System ended a seemingly irreconcilable disagreement between the USA and the Soviet Union over the Apollo-Soyuz test flight docking system: which mighty nation would shamefully embody the “female” component of the assembly? Syromyatnikov’s solution engineered an “androgynous” system, whose petals could “mate” as either the passive or active object. Artist Serge Samyn in St-Denis rendered this moment

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in his monument La Porte des Mondes on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. (Syromyatnikov was of Soviet and Russian origin, and he visited Reunion Island on several occasions where he promoted space science.)19 (See Figure 7.4.1, Plate 2.) Llinares’ analysis of Space Age media writes the complex and messy entanglement of feminism and nationalism. Particularly evocative of this relationship is the title of an article by Audrey R. Topping published in The New York Times in 1963 and titled “First in Space—But not in Femininity.” Domestic roles were central to these debates and were mobilized to make sense of why Valentina Tereshkova’s flight was approved by the Russians while NASA resisted Mercury 13. Llinares explains how Topping endorsed the American housewife’s femininity to undermine the femininity of Soviet women by claiming that their service was done at its expense. Even more critically, Llinares alerts us to how the physicality of Russian women was “negatively constructed as ‘masculine’ and therefore oppositional to ‘natural femininity’ and prescribed social roles.”20 Topping, Llinares concludes, portrays the “Soviet attitude towards gender as disruptive to heterosexual binary oppositions.”21

People, Planets, Power Although the historical analysis of the inclusion/exclusion of women in space projects is essential, it is well-trod; Space Feminisms moves to interrogate such endeavors from feminist scholarly, scientific, and artistic perspectives. The book is in positive dialogue with, but also in contrast to its essential predecessors on similar themes, which mainly focus on women’s representation in space. It expands on and refines modalities of exploration by bringing together heterogeneous voices that conceptualize what a feminist take on space exploration might be and, perhaps more narrowly, what a feminist space program might look like. Narratives that urge us to imagine space otherwise are vital to participating in its future. Feminist scholarship proposes to undo the domination of the master narratives of spaceflight by creating new associations, for instance between spaceflight, astrology, and cetaceans.22 As geographer Christine Bischell reminds us in Infrastructures on/off Earth, “imaginaries become infrastructures too.”23 To this end, artists—not just artworks—have contributed to the production and dissemination24 of imaginaries surrounding space exploration. From dance in micro-gravity to the immeasurable dimensions of time, from the transformation of bodies to planetary terraformation, from caring for a goose colony to the making of comets, Space Feminisms diagrams a non-normative history of space exploration where the messy encounters between imaginaries and histories become infrastructures, possibilities, bodies, relations, and archives that create alternate presents. SF is a form of thought, a mode of analysis, an ethos, a way of life, so much so that the question “What is space feminisms?”cannot be answered without also answering “How does one practice space feminisms?” at the same time. This practice, this mode of attunement, proposes queer ways for bodies to be in space. In Out of the Present, a film by Andrei Ujica, shot in the MIR station during the

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dissolution of the Soviet Union, cosmonaut Sergueï Krikaliov is seen training on a treadmill with his penis levitating. Seemingly uncomfortable with the camera gazing at him, the cosmonaut nevertheless continues his activities. This prompts the question: What can feminism levitate?25 The Vulva Spaceship renders an instantiation of that possibility through the reinvention of the shapes of space rockets and habitats. At a moment where designers are calling for spacecrafts that do not necessarily privilege the able-bodied (see Figure 1.1.3 and Plate 2) and artists are pushing us to reimagine planetary and extraplanetary modes of experience, Space Feminisms sketches hopedfor human futures in space with impact in the present. Space is not merely a vacuous receptacle of future imaginaries that metal, humans, fruit flies, dogs, and bacteria happen to populate, but produces a plethora of materialities that reflexively encode humans’ self-perceptions of their planet and beyond. Space Feminisms refuses the status quo as much as the pretense to a unified or universal understanding of feminism. It responds to the lack of an overview of feminism’s—not just women’s—contribution to space exploration by creating zones of

Figure 1.1.3 Viktoria Modesta wears a custom prosthesis and flight suit during the Horizon 2022 flight. Steve Boxall / Zero-Gravity Corporation / Aurelia Institute

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struggles where differences can be discerned and contested. The contributors do not make use of feminism to solve the problems of space activities, but instead propose poetic and critical alternatives that activate a redistribution of space, power, resources and capital in the social field. Beyond a consideration of women as an historically marginalized group or as a ill-exploited resource,26 Space Feminisms interrogates the politics of knowledge production to ask how feminisms can pose problems in the political field of space activities. How can we act not as a solution, but as activators of a constructive and enabling constraint? What kind of political and spatial life could this constraint give rise to? To that end, we are committed to the production of truly transdisciplinary knowledge. Both the breadth of the identities and political commitments of its contributors and the forms in which that knowledge is expressed are provocations for future diagrammers. Space Feminisms is a transdisciplinary and multi-sited platform for feminist reflections and applications to space projects. At the crossroad of scientific, cultural, social, and artistic speculations, it gathers leading scholars, scientists, artists, and designers to develop innovative tactics and disruptive participations to create generative, alternative, and careful futures of and in space. Space Feminisms’ hybrid format brings together contemporary artworks, historical material, and scholarly essays to produce and propel critical reflections of space: its materialities, its technologies, its imaginaries. It interleaves 1) critical essays by scholars, scientists, designers, and artists that offer feminist treatments of space; 2) artworks and design projects that propose counternarratives, visions, and artifacts, and; 3) feminist artifacts that provoke various visions of space. Space Feminisms gathers global and inclusive accounts of the study of space to enable future-oriented (extra)planetary communities in academia, the arts, and the public. Feminisms as the foregrounded analytic cultivate radical and alternative modes of inquiry around space; suggest generative interventions for promissory space projects; and facilitate a collaborative and interdisciplinary platform for scholars, artists, and designers to imagine radical constructions of human futures beyond Earth. Women astronauts’ stories of embodying and claiming space, gender-bending characters in science fiction, artists whose work in and about space eschews rigid forms of sexuality and identity, and trans/cross-species experiments respond to Sarah Kember’s provocation to do feminist theory “as” an alien. Kember writes that the feminist method of finding sympathy with monsters and other figures of alterity (including the alien) merely” switches sides”;27 projects of reappropriation or reclamation of otherness actually risk reproducing a dualism (self versus other) that that framing ironically sets out to critique. Instead, the inability to shore up some stable self (in opposition to some perceived Other) opens up possibilities to create what she calls an ethics of “radical relationality.”28 By resisting the retreat to the outsider status usually afforded by monsters and the like, Kember writes ways that feminist theory itself could “become alien again.”29 The contributors to this book, diagramming “space” and “feminisms,” do just that. In these pages you will find Octavia Butler’s planetary thinking; descriptions of astronaut training in Star City, Russia; sex in space; a guide on how to be an activist

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Figure 1.1.4 Workshop of the Lunar Migration Bird Facility / MIT Training Center: V – Flying Lessons. © Agnes Meyer-Brandis, VG Bildkunst, 2019

astronomer to a space agency director; anal laser beams; dreaming in weightlessness; a drag astronaut; and many more provocations. Boucher invited Webb to join this project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Spring 2019, where Boucher was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow and Claire Webb was a graduate student. Boucher taught Space Exploration and Interplanetary Habitation (STS.058) with Webb as a teaching assistant in context of which artist Agnes MeyerBrandis visited the class to explore the “Moon Goose Analogue.” On the lawn in front of Building 45 (a very public area near the Charles River), Brandis corralled the astonished students into behaving like geese. Although we were awkward at first, we were soon flapping and honking in an aerodynamic V-shape, attempting to lift off. Our hope for you is that you too can come to inhabit the world of the space geese—improbable, creative, embodied, as your eyes, ears, and hearts turn to the stars, and your feet firmly planted on the ground.

Notes 1 Thomas O’Toole (1983), “Sally Ride Soars at Her First News Session,” Washington Post (1983, May 25); Dario Llinares, The Astronaut: Cultural Mythology and Idealised Masculinity (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 87–8. Cited in Llinares, 1983. 2 Leah V. Aronowsky, “Of Astronauts and Algae: NASA and the Dream of Multispecies Spaceflight,” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (2017): 359–77.

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3 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. 4 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 5 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.” 6 Maria Puig de La Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 7 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault. Translated by Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 8 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso Books, 2016). 9 Marie Lathers, Space Oddities: Women and Outer Space in Popular Culture and Film, 1960–2000 (London: Continuum, 2010). 10 Llinares, The Astronaut, 64. 11 Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2016); Marianne J. Dyson (2016), A Passion for Space: Adventures of a Pioneering Female NASA Flight Controller (London: Springer, 2016). 12 Yael Nazé, L’astronomie au féminin (Paris: CNRS, 2014). 13 Sally Ride Science, “Animated Video Revives Sally Ride’s Lost Conversation with Gloria Steinem,” YouTube (2016, February 2). Available online: https://sallyridescience. ucsd.edu/animated-video-revives-sally-rides-lost-conversation-with-gloria-steinem/ (accessed May 1, 2023). 14 Gil Scott-Heron, “Whitey on the Moon” [musical recording], side 2, track 2 on The Revolution Begins: The Flying Dutchman Masters (Ace Records, compact disc, 1970). 15 Space is the Place [film], dir. John Coney (USA: Dilexi, 1974). 16 Margaret Weitekamp, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Llinares, The Astronaut. 17 Bronwyn D. Lovell, “Sex and the Stars: The Enduring Structure of Gender Discrimination in the Space Industry,” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 18 (Spring) (2021): 61–77. 10.23860/jfs.2021.18.04. 18 Llinares, The Astronaut, 66. 19 Space objects continue to be laden with allusions to gender and sexual expression. One may purchase a host of dildos that riff on Jeff Bezos’ conspicuously phallic Blue Origin rocket: “Yes, There Is a Line of Sex Toys Inspired by Jeff Bezos’s Shuttle Launch, Because Why Not?” Mimi Montgomery. Published July 21, 2021. https://www. washingtonian.com/2021/07/21/yes-there-is-a-line-of-sex-toys-inspired-by-jeffbezoss-shuttle-launch-because-why-not/ See Casper and Moore, Chapter 4. 20 Ibid., 82. 21 Ibid. 22 Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke, Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred (London: Zed Books, 2000), 18. 23 Christine Bichsel, Introduction: Infrastructure on/off Earth, Roadsides (2020), coll. 3: 3. 24 See Ron Milller, The Art of Space: The History of Space Art, from the Earliest Visions to the Graphics of the Modern Era (Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2014); Elizabeth A. Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime (Plymouth: Plymbridge Distributors, 2012); Stephen Petersen, Space-age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar European Avant-garde (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2009); Boris Groys, Russian Cosmism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018); Nicola Triscott and Rob La Frenais, Zero Gravity: A Cultural User’s Guide

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26 27 28 29

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(London: The Arts Catalyst, 2005); Monika Bakke, Going Aerial: Air, Art, Architecture (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2006). This originally prompted one of the authors of this paper (Boucher) to organize a parabolic flight with only women titled “Levitate Your Pussy.” Now the commercial sector is planning an all-women flight. Vinciane Desprest and Isabelle Stengers, Les Faiseuses d’histoires (Paris: La Découverte, 2011). Sarah Kember, “No Humans Allowed? The Alien in/as Feminist Theory,” Feminist Theory 12, no. 2 (2011): 192. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 184.

Bibliography Aronowsky, Leah V. “Of Astronauts and Algae: NASA and the Dream of Multispecies Spaceflight.” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (2017): 359–77. Bakke, Monika. Going Aerial: Air, Art, Architecture. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2006. Bichsel, Christine. Introduction: Infrastructure on/off Earth, Roadsides, coll. 3 (2020): 3. Bryld, Mette, and Nina Lykke. Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred. London: Zed Books, 2000. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated by Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Desprest, Vinciane, and Isabelle Stengers. Les Faiseuses d’histoires. Paris: La Découverte, 2011. Dyson, Marianne J. A Passion for Space: Adventures of a Pioneering Female NASA Flight Controller. London: Springer, 2016. Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso Books, 2016. Groys, Boris. Russian Cosmism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. Kember, Sarah. “No Humans Allowed? The Alien in/as Feminist Theory.” Feminist Theory 12, no. 2 (2011), 192. Kessler, Elizabeth A. Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime. Plymouth: Plymbridge Distributors, 2012. Lathers, Marie. Space Oddities: Women and Outer Space in Popular Culture and Film, 1960–2000. London: Continuum, 2010. Llinares, Dario. The Astronaut: Cultural Mythology and Idealised Masculinity. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Lovell, Bronwyn D. “Sex and the Stars: The Enduring Structure of Gender Discrimination in the Space Industry.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 18 (Spring) (2021): 61–77. 10.23860/jfs.2021.18.04. Miller, Ron. The Art of Space: The History of Space Art, from the Earliest Visions to the Graphics of the Modern Era. Minneapolis: Zenith Press; Phaidon Editors, 2014. Nazé, Yael. L’astronomie au féminin. Paris: CNRS, 2014.

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O’Toole, Thomas. “Sally Ride Soars at Her First News Session.” Washington Post, 1983, May 25. Petersen, Stephen. Space-age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar European Avant-garde. University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2009. Puig de La Bellacasa, Maria. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Sally Ride Science. “Animated Video Revives Sally Ride’s Lost Conversation With Gloria Steinem.” YouTube, 2016, February 2. Available online: https://sallyridescience.ucsd. edu/animated-video-revives-sally-rides-lost-conversation-with-gloria-steinem/ Scott-Heron, Gil. (1970), “Whitey on the Moon” [musical recording], side 2, track 2, The Revolution Begins: The Flying Dutchman Masters. Ace Records, compact disc, 1970. Shetterly, Margot Lee. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2016. Triscott, Nicola, and Rob La Frenais. Zero Gravity: A Cultural User’s Guide. London: The Arts Catalyst, 2005. Weitekamp, Margaret. Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Part Two

Space Feminisms, Humanities, and Social Sciences

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2.1 Black Planetary Feminism: Octavia E. Butler, Breath, Gaia, and Regulatory Connection Alyssa D. Collins

What is the scale of breathing? You put your hand on your individual chest as it rises and falters all day. But is that the scale of breathing? You share air and chemical exchange with everyone in the room, everyone you pass by today. Is the scale of breathing within one species? All animals participate in this exchange of release for continued life. But not without the plants. The plants in their inverse process, release what we need, take what we give without being asked. And the planet, wrapped in ocean breathing, breathing into sky. What is the scale of breathing? You are part of it now. You are not alone.1 In her 2020 book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Alexis Pauline Gumbs prompts readers to consider the collective breath and aspirations of the planet. Focusing on the expanding and collapsing scopes and exchanges of lungs, gills, and stomata, Gumbs pushes us to expand what seems to be an individual, personal process of life into larger, networked planetary processes. The book presents emergent strategies for listening and acknowledging planetary lessons humans can and must learn from non-human kin. She takes up the histories and strategies of marine mammals as a site of application for black feminist theory. In making room for crossspecies conversations in a pursuit of black feminist ethics, Gumbs takes up a methodology shared by several black science fiction writers, humanists and systems theorists—one that we might call black feminist planetary thinking. Across the latter half of the twentieth century, black feminist planetary thinkers have investigated and articulated the connections, relations, and hybridizations of humans and other species on the planet. In exploring these connections, they have rewritten and critiqued human and posthuman stories and definitions. Definitions that have historically excluded black women, pitting their existence against both definitions of whiteness and womanhood. Their work joins countless black feminist scholars, as they combat white supremacist and patriarchal social narratives to imagine a more equitable and livable world for black women. Furthermore, writing through the praxis and legacy of black feminist theory, black femme planetary thinkers reframe the possibilities of systems thinking of the twentieth century, contemplating what concepts like cybernetics and posthumanism offer when they don’t elide marginalized identities. 17

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Black femme planetary thinking places black femme identity at the forefront of planetary issues and questions. Planetary thinkers like Sylvia Wynter, Chanda PrescodWeinstein, and Nnedi Okorafor are doing the connective and speculative work to imagine and theorize what it might mean to be human should we unsettle and dismantle the hierarchical exclusionary narratives that have historically established black women as otherwise.2 Gumbs’s theory of the breath and its ability to scale is an indicative practice of the black feminist planetary. She shares this interest in scale and connection, scope and survival with another black feminist planetary thinker, science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Butler was one of very few black women writing science fiction in her time and she wrote novels that placed black women at the center of apocalyptic, futuristic, and evolutionary conversations. Butler engaged the planetary as a way of imagining the ontological concerns of black womanhood and the future of humanity. In this chapter we will follow Gumbs’ breath, as concept and connector of black feminist and systems thinking. We will visit several places in Butler’s novel, Wild Seed (1980), in which breath (or respiration) evoke the black feminist planetary. By connecting the actions of Butler’s black femme protagonist with another respiratory argument of the twentieth century, the scientific and planetary systems theory known as the Gaia hypothesis, we can start to see the ontological promises of black femme life in connection with the planet.

Inhale: Butler-Gaia Relations In the summer of 1989, Butler wrote to her literary agent Merrilee Heifetz, about a new project, “a Gaia novel,” that she was developing. Heifetz responded with encouragement, returning a long note about her own brother’s presentation at a national scientific convention on the “Gaia hypothesis”3 two years earlier. The response to this letter, found in her archives at the Huntington Library,4 tells us several things. First, Butler’s Gaia novel was not a meditation on a primordial Greek mother, but a novel that foregrounded a then scientifically (in)famous planetary systems hypothesis by John Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Heifetz’s response suggested potential research interlocutors for Butler’s extended research study. It also provides researchers a possible timeline for Butler’s habitual pattern of deep research and drafting engagements during the late 1980s. The novel follows a colony of humans as they struggle to live on a new planet. The planet, both the organic (microbes) and inorganic matter (soil and air), physically rejects them. So, in Butler’s sixth novelistic engagement with the extraterrestrial, her characters instead of battling a sentient alien community, must learn to engage the planet itself. Unfortunately, the Gaia novel, entitled “God of Clay,” was never published in the way that Butler imagined it. Butler’s Gaia project seemed to stall just as writer’s block prohibited her human characters from making inroads in their extraterrestrial lives. She eventually used fragments of the manuscript and its characters to develop the stories that needed to come first, the Earthseed duology—which gave humans a reason to leave Earth in the first place.

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I mention “God of Clay” both because of its failure to launch and its appearance on Butler’s writerly timeline. Butler was a self-taught scientific theorist, incorporating upto-date scientific theories into her work. Given her interests and the content of her novels and stories published in the 1970s and 80s, this explicit gesture to Gaia seems interestingly late, as throughout her bibliography, Butler repeatedly wrote and theorized about related topics—embodied microscopic flesh (Clay’s Ark); symbiosis and chimeric hybridism in texts (Dawn); and homeostatic connection in Wild Seed. These are conversations and ideas that align closely with the arguments and scientific ideals of the Gaia hypothesis. And while the “Gaia novel” never came to fruition, here I will argue that Gaia, as a systems concept, was something that Butler engaged, and that her black feminist planetary ideas about humans and systematic wholes placed her in direct conversation with the scientific discourse of the time.

Atmospheric Aspiration: Lovelock, Margulis, and Gaia The Gaia hypothesis was developed and presented by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock at a conference at Princeton in 1969. He often remarked that this hypothesis came out of a question: “What is life and how should it be recognized?”5 Working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the early 1960s, Lovelock started asking himself this question as he was tasked with identifying it on other planets. The hypothesis generally describes the Earth (in its totality) as a vital living organism able to regulate itself in the way that living organisms do. The hypothesis imagines Earth as a living self-regulating system or “a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil” in which Earth’s totality constitutes a feedback system that seeks to create an optimal physical and chemical environment for itself, and for supporting life on the planet. This practice of physical and chemical maintenance in which relatively constant conditions can be generated is called homeostasis.6 We could also describe Gaia as “Earth’s physiology: the sum of the energy- and materialexchanging activities of the living network at out planet’s surface . . . Gaia theory, put simply, views Earth’s biosphere (the place where life exists) as a single self-regulating entity: the Earth is alive.7 Gaia hinges on the notion that “life controls the environment: Gaia is a biological cybernetic system.”8 Lovelock proposed this argument of atmospheric self-regulation in 1969 at a meeting on the origins of life and it was poorly received. Only chemist Lars Gunner Sillen and evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, who then began to collaborate with Lovelock, had any interest in his ideas. Literary scholar Bruce Clarke outlines Lovelock and Margulis’ dynamic collaboration in his 2022 book Gaian Systems. Of the beginning of the pair’s working relationship, he notes a specific early letter exchange, a response to Lovelock’s two essays in Atmospheric Environment: Methane producers as far as I know are fermenting anaerobes. If the local environment gets too aerobic they turn off. Therefore they release less methane into the atmosphere. Therefore, according to you, less gets transported up to circuitously loose hydrogen (via water, according to you) and the mechanism for

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I include this quotation not specifically for the content, but for an example of the larger atmospheric (read: respiration/connected breath) circuitry that is the foundation to the foundations of Gaia. We see Margulis writing about respiration and its relationship to the larger system. Here she reviews and supports Lovelock’s atmospheric connections by translating her understanding into her own microbial specialty. Effects on an atmosphere where organisms exchange and rely on gasses for various life processes. In the same letter Margulis notes: “I have read your oxygen article five times and finally not only do I dig it but I find it brilliant.”10 Given Lovelock’s atmospheric regulation theories and Margulis’ deep knowledge of microbial metabolisms, the two could name and continue to build Gaia, arguing in 1972 for a bio-cybernetic systems approach for the living phenomena that has the “powerful capacity to homeostatic the planetary environment.”11 In this historical moment, we can see the envelopment of breath (whether aerobic or anaerobic) as a concept into the foundations of Gaia. The hypothesis continued to be at best ignored and at worst disparaged by the larger scientific community until the late 1980s and early 1990s. While pieces of Gaia circulate in scientific discourse now (especially in environmental and ecological conversations), like its close foundational sibling, cybernetics, it is still somewhat an outlier in general scientific discourse, for numerous reasons. One possibly being the hypothesis’ presentation in language and its reliance on metaphor, the other being a possible problem of patriarchy, where “Gaia” gestures too closely to the Greek earthly mother. These are problems that Lovelock and the practitioners of Gaia tried to attend to as the hypothesis developed into the contemporary moment, when thinking about human’s relationship to the globe has become increasingly urgent.

Breathing in Tandem: Butler and Gaia The Gaia hypothesis prompts us to think about life on the scale of the planet, to consider Earth as a super-organism in which various complex living systems interact and work together to create balance, homeostatic regulation for the whole system. The hypothesis is a narrative that suggests connection, mutualism, even chimerism12 of the planet. Margulis suggests that “Gaia is symbiosis as seen from space.”13 This sort of symbiosis challenges individuality, it challenges the edges and definitions of species, of plants, of humans. It reminds us of the distinct and living microbes in our guts and the mitochondria in our cells. Butler wrote in her notes that Gaia was important because it is a whole, pushing humans to think about wholeness and connection when historically humans insist on only valuing parts that are useful or interesting so much that we destroy other parts which cannot help but be affected. There is a good chance that Butler came to her own Gaian thinking in the same manner through which the Gaia hypothesis was developed: cybernetics. Starting in the 1940s, cybernetics became a field of systems thinking that allowed scientists and theorists through interdisciplinary conversations to imagine possible connections

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between humans and machines. The notion of homeostasis connects these discourses as cybernetics considered the ways disparate systems (biological and mechanical) could communicate to produce new ways of living and regulating life. In fact, some of the early cybernetic experiments imagined apparatuses allowing astronauts to exist, to breathe, in space.14 Cybernetics was perhaps the first conversation around self-regulation that Butler encountered. Included in her research notes for Wild Seed (sometime between 1976 and 1978) are citations for three books by Dean Wooldridge, an engineer who specialized in aerospace, who wrote about cybernetics. Wooldridge’s first book The Machinery of the Brain, published in 1963, endeavors to translate the biological language of neuroscience into the language of engineering and machines. In her notes, Butler made plans to acquire this book and has research citations for two additional Wooldridge books. This archival moment is both a place where we might trace the development of Butler’s thinking, connecting her to the scientific discourse as well as flagging her own theorizing of it. Throughout Butler’s research engagements we can see the ways in which she places herself, as a novelist, within a legacy of scientific discourse. Both cybernetics and the Gaia hypothesis have mostly fallen out of public science writing (and perhaps the larger scientific memory) as the result of difficulties in their conveyance: leaning too much on language, translating ideas from one discourse to another, engaging metaphor to present connections. However, this space between scientific imagining and the literature was the perfect laboratory setting for someone like Butler, who was already doing similar kinds of work. Systems thinking here aligns with problems Butler is interested in solving, providing scientific language for her science fictional endeavors. I would suggest that entrance and research in this discourse provided Butler one of many rooms to run her own experiments, push for her own conclusions, and respond to Lovelock and Margulis in real time—one of the earliest places to see the results of Butler’s thought work that she does in her novel Wild Seed. I now turn to one of Butler’s early novels to trace her engagements in Gaian thinking in Wild Seed, creating what seems to be a para-theory of systematic atmospheric homeostatic connection on the Earth. In the novel, Butler is theorizing Gaian systems before her direct engagements with the hypothesis. Butler uses the embodied realities of her protagonist Anyanwu to represent and imagine how planetary connection could be read to rearticulate binary definitions of the human by unsettling gender power hierarchies, as well as human/non-human power imbalances. Butler then, as a black feminist planetary thinker, adjusts and evolves these systems concepts to continue the habit of presenting new paradigms of gender, of our understanding of human embodiment, and of our species’ relationships with the Earth. Such connections arise as her protagonist literally breathes on the page.

Narrative Breaths: Wild Seed, Humanity, and Freedom Wild Seed is chronologically the first text in Butler’s Patternist series but was the fourth book to be published in the series. The novel initiates the story of Doro, a 400-year-old body snatcher interested in breeding a supernatural telepathic race of humans, and Anyanwu, a shapeshifter he entraps to achieve his goal. Broadly, the novel deals with

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Figure 2.1.1 Wild Seed (cover), by Octavia E. Butler © 1988. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. See Plate Section 1

the complex relationship between Anyanwus and Doro, especially her continued struggle for power, autonomy, and survival. A science fiction story set in the seventeenth century, Wild Seed, is also a transatlantic meditation on humanity as it is being actively redefined with capital (enslavement) in mind. Wild Seed is caught up in conversations of the human and freedom on several registers: both in Doro’s vicious pursuit to create psionic children, and in Anyanwu’s status as prisoner-participant to this scheme. Doro’s obsession is established and compounded through the active dehumanization of the enslaved of the transatlantic slave trade, a system in which Doro also participates. Anyanwu also creates family, but for community, and her children inherit her superhuman characteristic. Her large family includes non-human children, expanding both her family and Butler’s connective species argument of the human further. We can see the familiar ways and hierarchical definitions of the human buckle under Butler’s representation of Anyanwu’s life, especially as it reflects and interrupts the dehumanizing matrix of enslavement. Returning first to breath, we can see Butler establishing her protagonist’s connection to the planet, as well as her transformative potentials through breath and respiration. The following moments from the novel are

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also highlights of homeostatic embodiment and connection. They present alternate possibilities of gender and insist on a human species embodiment that is connected, transferable, and always in relation.

Transformational Breaths: Connection and Human “Being” Anyanwu is introduced to readers as a healer, who is older than she appears, and who changes her body at will and for protection: a shapeshifter. She is a healer, healing Doro by detecting and eliminating “living things too small to see” that should not have been there—entities readers would recognize as bacteria.15 Clearly, Anyanwu can manipulate cells, both her own and to some extent others’. She has a concept of cells and even germ theory that is beyond the knowledge of the novel’s contemporary science community. Instead, science here is the knowledge of her own body. Moreover, her ability is much more expansive than healing. Readers see some of the extent of this embodied possibility of how Anyanwu understands herself and her relation to non-human others through breath. As Doro forces her to cross the Atlantic, she sees dolphins for the first time and articulates similarity and connection: “Tomorrow,” she said, “you will tell Isaac how to help me, and I will swim with the fish! I will be a fish! I can do it now! I have wanted to for so long.” “How do you know you can?” . . . She told him of the messages she had read within the flesh of the fish . . . “My body reads it—reads everything. Did you know that fish breathes air as we do? I thought it would breathe water like the ones we caught and dried at home.” “It was a dolphin,” Doro murmured. “But it was more like a land thing than a fish. Inside, it is much like a land animal. The changes I make will “not be as great as I thought.”16

Early on we see that Anyanwu presents not only her ability to read flesh or read everything but also her subsequent ability to change her body given those readings. These changes enact a series of becomings17 in which Anyanwu will not only swim with the fish but become one—something she has desired for a long time. In her desire to become a fish, readers begin to see the world as Anyanwu sees it—as a series of interspecies and intra-ontological relations. Dolphins are different from the fish from her village because they breathe air. This fact, Anyanwu concedes, makes her transformation smaller in scale. The kinds of information and logic that drive Anyanwu and her relationship with her body present a world that is connected and translatable across mediums of elements and species. Anyanwu and her world vision collapse distinctions between humans and non-human animals leaving the common denominator of the breath. This is but one place we begin to see the novel’s Gaian respiratory properties. The second place we see Butler establish narratives that look surprisingly Gaian is the way that Anyanwu actively engages homeostatic principles in her healing, as on the same transatlantic voyage she heals her seasickness:

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Here we can see Anyanwu’s Gaian-like homeostasis at work. First, she carefully reviews her body to detect imbalance, or the conflict of balance in her inner ear. Butler insists that Anyanwu has learned her body well enough to notice the “smallest change.” What is most interesting in this instance is that instead of simply manipulating her own cells, Anyanwu can affect “fluids and pressures,” forces and substances that could be considered not merely part of her, but instead things that affect her. She adjusts the air pressures and fluid in her inner ear, instead of attending to neurons in her brain, or manipulating the shape of the ear canals only. Anyanwu is not only able to manipulate these things but remembers their states on land. This ability to attend to not only her body in the cellular and fleshly sense (supercharging her immune system) but also her body’s connection to the world, to air pressure and current affecting her body, reveals the importance of balance over regulation as a concept for human being. In her 2016 book Biocultural Creatures, Samantha Frost notes that during the Enlightenment, definitions of the human foregrounded comportment and selfregulation as anchors of human exceptionalism. Regulation and self-control, or the lack thereof, was justification for humanization or dehumanization. For human exceptionalism to work, regulation as a hierarchical framework of self-mastery must be matter of fact. However, as Anyanwu heals her seasickness standing on the deck of a slave ship, dehumanized and out of her own control, Butler unsettles the arguments of regulation established by liberal humanism. Above, Anyanwu illustrates regulation as bodily balance and atmospheric connection—leaning into Gaian autopoiesis or selfmaking.19 She illustrates a homeostatic systems principle of humanity that is not about holding oneself apart, or on top, but understanding oneself as connected and in partnership with the Earth. Butler’s homeostasis (read: regulation) becomes a property of the human that shifts the regulation of the human body from a position of moral hierarchy and control to one of balance, resettling, and relation.

Sustained Breaths: Black Femme Autopoiesis As Butler and Anyanwu unsettle received Eurocentric definitions of “the human,” they also upend limited narratives and power hierarchies of the gender binary, and processes of reproduction. These are conversations Butler revisits across her work, leaving scholars to notice the way repetition opens space for her to theorize other possible modes of reproduction and creation.20 And often for Butler, these possibilities are often leveraged through moments of symbiotic connection and interspecies mating. In Wild Seed, however, Butler challenges gender’s relationship to reproduction by writing how Anyanwu engages in homeostatic self-making that estranges moments of human

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reproduction. Wild Seed decouples gender, reproduction, and birth as generations after her kidnapping, Anyanwu refuses to have anymore of Doro’s children. When Doro comes to her in another body, wanting to father another child, she denies him the progeny he desires. She describes her actions in the following passage: Within her body, she killed his seed. She disconnected the two small tubes through which her own seed traveled to her womb. She had done this many times when she thought she had given a man enough children. Now she did it to avoid giving any children at all to avoid being used . . .21

Whilst healing, Anyanwu focused on connection, on the balance of her body as it has always been. Here she adjusts and redefines that balance. First, she engages in birth control, killing Doro’s unwanted sperm. Then, she shifts her body, engaging a different but familiar version. She isolates and ages her reproductive system, advancing her body across a timeline of her life, moving from fertility to a menopausal state. The alteration of her body reflects her own desire and is a statement of control, a habit that she has engaged with other husbands, but Doro’s obsession and threats press her to establish additional safeguards: Within herself, she altered her reproductive organs further, made herself literally no longer a woman, but not quite a man—just to be certain. “You may be able to push my spirit from my body,” she said. “I think you can, though I have never felt your power. But my body will give you no satisfaction. It would take too long for you to learn to repair all the things I have done to it—if you can learn. It will not conceive a child now. It will not live much longer itself without me to keep watch on it.”22

Think of this moment of resistance and self-remaking as one that leads to freedom. Margulis suggests that one of the more powerful possibilities of thought outlined by the Gaia hypothesis is the ability for humans to conceptualize and understand life in relation, symbiosis, and chimerism as opposed to hierarchical finite individualism. Margulis suggests the chimeric, or conjoined and doubled, nature of Gaia interrupts our understandings of even “individuality and death” by both referencing the communal project that is regulating the Earth, and the human body, but also the hybrid processes that propagate human life.23 Anyanwu understands these hybrid life processes and rejects Doro’s bid, regulating her body not for symbiosis but against further invasion. Human pregnancy is an adjustment of the body into a chimera, a body within a body, where the cellular matter from each body freely mixes. Having had many children and being able to read her body, and isolate cells that don’t belong, Anyanwu would be consciously aware of this process. This familiar human chimerism is complicated by Doro’s threat of body snatching. Anyanwu acknowledges it as a violent chimerism, the threat of an old soul stealing and consuming a new body. This sort of parasitic relation Anyanwu argues is unviable—even in a body that can consciously regulate like hers. It would take time for Doro to “learn” her body and her way of thinking. If he can at all.

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Exhale: Black Feminist Planetary Breath enlivens and energizes homeostatic Gaia, underscoring the connectivity of the planet and Wild Seed. Butler offers Anyanwu control over her body that presses readers to think about these connected possibilities. Her late 1970s experiments in writing place her in eerie alignment with the developers of the Gaia hypothesis, a theory to which she would return only a couple of years later. As Butler asks readers to consider Anyanwu’s precarity with regards to her status as a seventeenth-century black woman in America, her actions illustrate a connected and planetary way of being that brings her power. She presents a connected and transfigurable way of being that wrests freedom and autonomy through acknowledging the planetary. We can see from Butler’s para-theoretical Gaian interventions just how conceptual notions of connection and homeostasis offer alternate ways of being human. Butler uses her Gaian experiments to suggest a new mode of humanity. The stakes of this new mode or new imaging are apparent in the continued exclusion of “human” rights for black women globally. Through experimentation and research, Butler grapples with the possibilities of connection to the superorganism that is Earth. And much like the scientific systems theories represented here this character experimentation developed Butler imagined necessary human adaptation for space. Anyanwu serves as evolutionary practice. Furthermore, by beginning the discussion of human connection with a black woman, Butler pushes an intersectional definition of the human into the future. Engaging the black feminist planetary, Butler presents new methods of humanity and freedom.

Notes 1 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020), 1. 2 Conversations about the definition of the human and posthuman have long been taken up in feminist spaces. Sylvia Wynter offers historical articulations of how the Enlightenment human (liberal human subject) was written to exclude black and Indigenous peoples to justify enslavement. This definition continues into conversations of the posthuman according to N. Katharine Hayles. 3 The Gaia hypothesis suggests that living organisms interact with inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a self-regulating system that maintains, regulates, and perpetuates life on the planet. 4 Butler’s papers are housed at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. 5 James E. Lovelock, Gaia, a New Look at Life on Earth (1979). Available online: https:// ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA10565144. 6 Ibid. 7 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023). 8 Bruce Clarke, Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 28. 9 Ibid., 29.

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10 For Clarke this is where Margulis and Lovelock begin to really come together as partners. 11 Ibid., 30. 12 Organisms containing two or more tissues of different genetic compositions, origins, or species. 13 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Garden of Microbial Delights: A Practical Guide to the Subvisible World (Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1993), 353. 14 “Are We All Cyborgs?” (2016), [Video] PBS Idea Channel. July 27. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs4d6AilVPQ. 15 Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed (London: Hachette UK, 2020), 31. 16 Ibid., 135. [Emphasis added] 17 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 244. 18 Butler, Wild Seed, 58. 19 Autopoiesis = self-making. 20 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson identifies multispecies symbiotic implications of Butler’s short story “Bloodchild” where human males carry alien eggs. 21 Butler, Wild Seed, 130. 22 Ibid., 132. 23 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution (Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media, 2013).

Bibliography “Are We All Cyborgs?” (2016), [Video] PBS Idea Channel. July 27. Available online: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs4d6AilVPQ. Butler, Octavia E. “Notes on Gaia.” Octavia E. Butler Papers, Manuscripts Butler, Octavia E. Wild Seed. London: Hachette UK, 2020. Department, Huntington Library, San Marino, 1958–2006. Clarke, Bruce. Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Frost, Samantha. Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. AK Press, 2020. Haraway, Donna. (2008), When Species Meet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies In Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: NYU Press, 2020. Lovelock, James E. (1979), Gaia, a New Look at Life on Earth. Available online: https://ci. nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA10565144. Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. Garden of Microbial Delights: A Practical Guide to the Subvisible World. Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1993. Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution. Springer Science & Business Media, 2013.

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Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being / Power / Truth / Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003).

2.2 Spectral Legacies: Cultivating Feminist Spaces in the Soviet Search for Life on Mars Luis Campos, Ana María Gómez López, and Ekaterina Lopatina

In 1945, Anna Prokofyevna Kutyreva asked the question that would lead to the founding of the new Soviet science of astrobotany. During a lecture by the Soviet Academician Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov on the possibility of life on other planets, she addressed the astronomer with the problem that launched a thousand inquiries: what if the seasonal variations of light and dark patterns on Mars, apparent from telescopic observations, could be accounted for by adaptations in vegetation to the extreme conditions on the red planet? This chapter examines the legacy of Kutyreva’s attempts to provide an empirical approach to the study of extraterrestrial life by comparing the light received from Mars with the light reflected by plants growing in high latitude and at high altitude on Earth. Tikhov had arrived only a few years before to Alma-Ata (now Almaty), Kazakhstan, close to the Tien Shan mountains. He had traveled there in August of 1941 with a team from the Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg to observe a solar eclipse. The expedition turned into a permanent relocation with the onset of the Second World War, and Tikhov became one of the founders of the Kazakh Academy of Sciences, leading a variety of astronomical research endeavors at the newly created Institute of Astronomy and Physics. Yet by Tikhov’s own account, it was his encounter with Kutyreva that served as the starting point for his astrobotanical studies of terrestrial plants growing in extreme environments: “The very next day I decided to compare the reflection of infra-red rays by deciduous and coniferous plants.”1 The photographs and spectrographs that Tikhov made during the following year would lay the foundation for the idea that defined much of his work in Kazakhstan until his death: “It was my good fortune to be the first in scientific history to coin the term ‘astrobotany.’ ” On November 11, 1947, Tikhov established his own special department at the Institute, and even constructed an “astrobotany garden” near his residence in central Alma-Ata as a site for public outreach. Kutyreva’s forward-thinking question had taken firm root. Kutyreva herself became Tikhov’s collaborator almost on the spot. She was trained in agrometeorology, a specialty at the intersection between the cultivation of crops and the observation of atmospheric processes and phenomena. For the remainder of her professional life, Kutyreva worked alongside Tikhov at another interdisciplinary juncture, this time between astrophysics and botany: the spectroscopic analysis of the 29

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surface of other planets in combination with the study of the spectral properties of terrestrial plants. Kutyreva’s fundamental contributions over the years to come, sparked by her provocative question, explored how an increased ability to absorb solar radiation might help plants to retain heat and survive in the harsh, cold climate of Mars. Kutyreva’s approach and theorization was deeply grounded in Soviet scientific legacies, and in her articles there are constant references to botanists and plant physiologists such as Kliment Timiryazev, who sought to understand plants in their cosmic contexts, and biochemists such as Aleksandr Oparin, who was concerned with the origin of life itself. She also referred repeatedly to more problematic figures, like the politically propped-up peasant biological wonder-worker Ivan Michurin, the founding figure for indurate Lysenkoist interpretations on the potential of environmental contexts to modify plant heredity. Even as she extended principles of Lysenkoism to the question of life on other worlds, Kutyreva anchored her insights in empirical realities from her fieldwork. Firmly embedded in Soviet philosophies of dialectical materialism, Kutyreva’s fervent advocacy seasoned her decades-long collaboration with Tikhov in ways that exceeded even his own claims for the importance of dialectical materialism in recognizing the distribution of life in the universe. In this chapter, we reflect upon, reconstruct, and reinterpret not only Kutyreva’s role in the foundation of astrobotany, but that of other female scientists in the Astrobotany Sector. Indeed, it was the overwhelming presence of women in the photographs and texts that we encountered in the archive in Almaty that first brought this research question to life. Our aim is to find new ways to tell a feminist story of the origins of astrobotany. What can we know about Kutyreva and the other women across the Institute? The documentary record is rich, but answers to our queries are sometimes elusive. Who are these women in scientific spaces—behind the lens of the telescope or the camera set-up, or in front of telescopes set up in temporary buildings in the midst of apple orchards? Who compiled and organized the samples for herbaria that served as reference materials? Who weeded, watered, and harvested the astrobotany garden, both figuratively and literally—a different kind of domestic scene for science and its broader public consumption? Tikhov himself was a strong supporter of Kutyreva and more generally of women’s involvement in the development of astrobotany. While Tikhov is widely credited as the progenitor of the field, the intellectual and physical impacts of women such as Kutyreva were no less instrumental than his telescopes and spectrographs. More than half the workers in the field were women, and even in her own time, Kutyreva was referred to as “the mother of astrobotany.” The development of astrobotany was unquestionably indebted to these women’s meticulous—and at times provocative—contributions.

Making Plants Alien: Spectrographs, Specimens, and the Women who Prepared them Kutyreva was one of a number of women technicians and scientists working at the Astrobotany Sector who carried out systematic studies of light, reflectance, and spectroscopy next to Soviet men in the observatory and environs of Alma-Ata. Comprised of astronomers, physicists, and biologists, the Astrobotany Sector centered

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its research on the optical features of plants and spectrophotometric observations of the Moon, planets, comets, asteroids, as well as variable and magnetic stars.2 During its dynamic existence from 1947 to 1960, the Astrobotany Sector was comprised of two divisions: astrophysics and biology. Some of the female staff included Vera Semyonovna Sokolova, a biologist engaged in spectrometry, as well Galina Salova and Irina Kupo, both of whom were astrophysicists and experienced their own political challenges (Salova was married to the astrophysicist dissident Kronid Lyubarsky, and Kupo had previously spent time in exile in Siberia). Nina Mikalovna Shtaude, Tikhov’s own assistant for thirty-five years, published an article on spectroscopy.3 Likewise, women such as Kutyreva herself and Kapitolina Ivanovna Kozlova, an astrophysicist who also published botanical spectral research,4 served as disciplinary hinges between the two divisions (see Figures 2.2.1 and 2.2.2). As the researchers of the Astrobotany Sector created photographs and measurements of Earth-bound plants using botanical spectrophotometry, they complemented the spectroscopic imaging of Mars made by astrophysicists. Yet in spite of the consistent presence of both sexes across the Astrobotany Sector, training and oversight for the creation of visual and technical records of plants were made by women to a greater extent than men.5 Soviet propaganda reels from the period promoting the Astrobotany Sector show female staff in full action, intensively performing the labor of botanical imaging in the garden and the field. For instance, in the film The First Astrobotanist (1952), Tikhov examines an astronomical plate, while an unidentified woman manipulates a machine. While Tikhov is represented as looking upwards, pensively, toward the heavens above, the women of the Astrobotany Sector are seen studying extraterrestrial life through a hands-on, grounded position on Earth, paying studious attention to the world of astrobiological potential that lay at their feet. These methods of measurement and observation stemmed from Kutyreva’s original question, which had prompted Tikhov to consult Yevgeny Leonidovich Krinov, a Soviet astronomer and geologist renowned for his studies on the Tunguska meteor event, who had written on spectral reflectance in nature.6 Tikhov himself had worked together with Krinov on the optical properties of terrestrial vegetation at the Leningrad Aerial Survey Institute during the 1930s. However, Tikhov likely relied heavily on Kutyreva to unpack the botanical applications suggested by Krinov into practical techniques. As an agrometeorologist, Kutyreva had a first-hand grasp of plant physiology and their distribution across specific soils, climates, and weather conditions, which equipped her well for handling and recording plant life at different stages and scales, from an individual plant to food crops and stretches of forest alike. This expertise would have been essential for Tikhov in translating hypothetical questions regarding the existence of plants on Mars into future cutting-edge experiments at the Astrobotany Sector. While Tikhov was committed to drawing the connections between astronomy and biology, his expertise in botany was relatively limited to spectrographic analysis, and he was not primarily interested in what might have seemed to his fellow astronomers to have been botanical minutiae. Kutyreva provided fundamental expertise necessary to the project. Perhaps one of the more noteworthy contributions by Kutyreva was research she carried out in the field far beyond the astrobotany garden in Alma-Ata, work that amounts to some of the first efforts to treat terrestrial sites as planetary analogues.

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Figure 2.2.1 Kapitolina Ivanovna Kozlova recording the spectrum of the blue spruce in a garden of the astronomical observatory (n.d.). Image 2-27468 courtesy of the Central State Archive of Film, Photography, and Sound Recordings of the Republic of Kazakhstan

Figure 2.2.2 Kozlova, seen here with a telescope presumably in the grounds of the Institute of Astronomy and Physics (n.d.). Image 2-114493 courtesy of the Central State Archive of Film, Photography, and Sound Recordings of the Republic of Kazakhstan

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Between 1950 and 1951, Kutyreva led a high-mountain expedition to the eastern Pamir Mountains with Shota Petrovitch Darchiya, then a graduate student at the Astrobotany Sector. Located at an altitude upwards of 5,000 meters above sea level in Tajikistan, the dry tundra plateaus of Pamir (referred to in Persian as “the roof the world”) were selected as an analogue site for the study of Mars.7 Together with Darchiya, Kutyreva carried out spectral studies in the field at alpine and subalpine altitudes, taking measurements amid sandstorms and relentless wind. Spectral data was analyzed together with colleagues back in Alma-Ata, primarily two senior female laboratory technicians who conducted botanical photometry named B. B. Intykbayeva and Zh. Kuatova (full names unknown). Kutyreva also gathered specimens of plants that were subject to intense sunlight and temperatures dropping to below freezing yearround, some even blossoming in the summer amid the snow drifts. Collected samples included wildflowers of the Asteraceae, purple grasses, and herbaceous plants such as mugwort and winterfat, as well as species of succulents, moss, lichen, and hot-spring algae that exhibited variations of chlorophyll. These hardy specimens with striking blue, green, violet, and grayish hues would be set by Kutyreva and Darchiya on cardboard sheets; Tikhov later regularly carried these herbarium samples with him on the lecture circuit. Kutyreva’s studies of the genus Artemisia and the samples she collected with Darchiya, which remained surprisingly supple despite years of storage, were part of figuring the alien qualities of the plants that might exist in the heavens. Kutyreva’s trip was among a wave of scientific explorations taking place in the region since the turn of the nineteenth century, following in the trailblazing footsteps of pre-revolutionary Russian female scientists such as the botanist Olga Alexandrovna Fedchenko, as well as the meteorologist Yulia Golovnina and the photographer Nadezhda Barteneva.8 Much of her and Darchiya’s work took place in the vicinity of the Pamir Biological Station in Chechekty, founded in 1934 by Soviet botanists Pavel Alexandrovich Baranov and Ilariya Alekseyevna Raykova. The site was established by the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Tajik Academy of Sciences for testing high-mountain yield and resiliency of barley and similar food crops under inclement growing conditions.9 In the early twentieth century, famed Russian agronomist Nikolai Vavilov would gather seeds for high-altitude crops in this region in an attempt to respond to famine conditions in the Soviet Union. The climes of Pamir granted Kutyreva unparalleled access to plants growing in some of the most extreme environmental conditions on Earth. She was able to correlate her observations with detailed data on soil surface temperatures, atmospheric pressure, and yearly precipitation records kept by the Pamir Biological Station and its adjacent weather unit. Yet Pamirian plants proved definitive for Kutyreva in confirming her hypothesis regarding the lack of infrared reflectance by Martian vegetation, as she repeatedly documented the broadening of the main absorption band of chlorophyll. Similar discoveries had been obtained during previous excursions by the Astrobotany Sector under Tikhov’s headship to the central Tien Shan mountains and remote regions of the Soviet Union such as the Ob River and the near-Arctic shores of the Yakutsk Oblast in northernmost Siberia. Tikhov often lyrically noted that “investigating the possibility of a plant world on Mars, we had to, as it were, descend from Mars back to Earth to study the optical

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features of terrestrial vegetation, in order to then once more refer back to Mars and say what kind of earthly plants are most closely resembled by the plant cover of some particular section of the ‘seas’ of Mars.”10 This kind of transportation from the heavenly to terrestrial and back again—what Tikhov called “the cosmic role of plants”—was of course an extension of Timiryazev’s earlier understanding of photosynthesis (and mirrors similar analyses about terrestrial analogues made in astrobiology today). But it is with Kutyreva’s expedition that this move was literalized—in bringing plants from the Pamir down from 5,000 meters above sea level to Alma-Ata, the descent of life from the cosmic context to the urban spaces of analysis was complete. Here, astrobotany was able to demonstrate itself in its fullest scope as “a field spectrographic method used to study the optical characteristics of plants in the natural field environment of various climatic zones.”11 The findings from Kutyreva’s expedition would be regularly cited by Tikhov and the staff of the Astrobotany Sector as a terrestrial litmus test of sorts for the question of plant life on Mars—one that nevertheless would remain contentious with those outside the Astrobotany Sector.

Revisiting the Dialectics of Nature: In Defense of Martian Vegetation Almost since its inception, the Astrobotany Sector faced direct criticism from other members of the Institute of Astronomy and Physics, not least from Vasily Grigorievich Fesenkov, the Institute’s director and co-founder with Tikhov of the Kazakh Academy of Sciences. Fesenkov was convinced of the possibility of life in outer space, collaborating with Oparin for a book on this subject titled Life in the Universe,12 but he was conservative about using the Earth’s biosphere as a template for other planets. Fesenkov expressed incisive criticism towards Tikhov and the Astrobotany Sector’s approach to extraterrestrial botanical life on several occasions, most notably at a conference address in September 1952, which led to his subsequent article “Vegetation on Mars.”13 Moreover, Fesenkov faulted Tikhov and his collaborators at the Astrobotany Sector for “limiting their evidence to general phrases about the infinite ability of organisms to adapt to hard conditions”—a somewhat surprising statement to be made at the height of Lysenkoism.14 The extraordinary claims made by astrobotanists had stretched evolution beyond all reasonable bounds. His skepticism echoes similar challenges raised by O. V. Troitskaya (full name unknown), a botany professor from the Kazakh Agricultural Institute. Although recognizing the value of spectral research on terrestrial plants, Troitskaya did not agree that plants from Earth were viable analogues for vegetation on Mars given the negligible amounts of water and oxygen, the low temperatures, and the rarefied atmosphere on this planet.15 Tikhov responded to these critiques resolutely in editorials. To counter Fesenkov’s arguments, Tikhov relied as much on astronomical spectroscopy and botanical photometry as he did on the tenets of dialectical materialism—a Soviet philosophical view based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that privileged the material level of reality and offered rationalist explanations for all physical and living phenomena as viewed through a historical rather than a metaphysical or idealistic perspective.

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Beyond his direct scientific observations, Tikhov appealed to these materialist imperatives of interconnectedness, and advanced the argument that wherever in the universe the conditions for life were ripe, life would emerge. He himself made this connection with Lysenkoist views explicit: “As a result of more than thirty years’ investigation and reflection on this subject, I was able to consolidate the accumulated facts into the new science of astrobotany. This science is based on the principles of Michurinist biology first of all, on the dialectical unity of the organism and its environment.”16 Kutyreva would further these claims for the distribution of life in the universe. Out of necessity or conviction, Kutyreva expressed her affirmation of plant life on Mars on the basis of dialectical materialism and through particularly fervent advocacy of a Lysenkoist lens reflecting the political imperatives of Soviet terrestrial agronomy of the time. Backed by Stalin, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko directed Soviet agricultural programs under the claim that environmental influences could cause heritable changes in organisms, thereby directly leading to the emergence of valuable new crops. Under Lysenko’s interpretation of dialectical materialism, plants were seen as endlessly adaptable, subject to biological regularities that could be programmatically altered by humans to increase crop yields and effectively alter botanical physiology. Running counter to Mendelian genetics, and quickly having become a cornerstone of Soviet approaches to biology, Lysenkoist ideology created an extreme environment itself for the kinds of arguments astrobotanists could make. Indeed, given that it was in the agricultural research institutions of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences that Lysenkoist debates were taking place across the Soviet Union, Kutyreva undoubtedly had to accommodate to the political realities of Lysenkoism for the practice of biology. Kutyreva offered an unabashed, multipronged Lysenkoist defense, suggesting that there are new insights to gain from studying the question of gender in the history of Lysenkoism—a topic that has usually otherwise been focused primarily on questions of science under dictatorship, the destruction of dissent, and the evisceration of scientific truth and academic freedom by political ideology. In her staunch defense of astrobotany, Kutyreva would repeatedly strike back at Fesenkov and Troitskaya’s critiques, beginning with her extensive exposition titled “Biological Foundations of Astrobotany.”17 To this end, she mobilized Lysenkoist bona fides to contest Fesenkov, the male head of the Institute of Astronomy and Physics—an act that could reveal gendered dimensions to his questioning (or even an attempt to discredit) a primarily female team of scientists working in astrobotany. For instance, she aligns with Lysenko’s statement that “the laws of life must be established in the fields, not in the quiet of laboratories,” citing the success of the August 1948 session of VASKhNIL which condemned Western genetics.18 Endorsing Lysenko’s belief in the “remaking of the nature of plants,” she reaffirmed that to study plants on the surface of Mars required examining extreme conditions such as those in Pamir. Any refutation of this fact should be deliberated according to a “principled party standpoint” and on the basis of dialectical materialism—not, in her words, a “toothless, sugary bourgeois type of ‘objectivity.’” Kutyreva used a Lysenkoist frame as a tactic to one-up Fesenkov in arguments about the legitimacy of astrobotany. Despite Kutyreva’s steadfast adherence to the official Lysenkoist position, she also displayed an openness to foreign scientists who concurred with the possibility of plant life on Mars. A chief example of this is her exposition of the 1956 Mars Opposition, an

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astronomical event studied by Tikhov and Kutyreva alongside Kozlova, Salova, and other staff from the Astrobotany Sector. For instance, she cited Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper from the McDonald Observatory in Texas, who had made the claim that vegetation on Mars could potentially account for alterations in color between light and dark regions on the planet’s surface.19 Kuiper, and later William Sinton at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard, suggested that the lack of infrared reflectivity on Mars might be explained by the presence of Martian lichen given that these do not exhibit this optical trait. For her part, Kutyreva suggested instead that the greenish coloration of dark areas of Mars offered a parallel transition to that seen in the Earth’s biosphere, with a fast appearance of vascular plants in the planet’s spring and their gradual growth through early summer. In the equivalent Martian “autumn,” this hue would turn increasingly blue, signaling the maturation of vegetation. Alongside the presence of polar caps, seasonal changes in the planet’s atmospheric phenomena and surface coloration were once more interpreted as stable signs of Martian plant life—the definitive confirmation of its existence on this planet.

Orbital Planes: Beyond the Astrobotany Garden Research from the Astrobotany Sector could have influenced the Soviet Union’s Mars 1 and Mars 2MV, two interplanetary probes that included instrumentation to measure infra-red spectral features from close range that aimed to identify Sinton’s bands.20 Launched in October 1960 and November 1962, both missions had technical failures in ascent or in transit. Only a few years later, unprecedented imaging of Mars would finally be obtained. Twenty-two photographs of the surface of Mars were captured by NASA’s Mariner 4 from 1965—the first successful flyby of this planet made by any spacecraft. Although only a small percentage of the surface of Mars was imaged, the lack of evidence regarding vegetation on this planet was made patent. Kutyreva likely lived to see the disproving of her and Tikhov’s work. After Tikhov’s death in 1960, the Astrobotany Sector was dismantled and the astrobotany garden destroyed.21 The closure of the Astrobotany Sector came at the height of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union—a time when women moved from imagining life in the cosmos to experiencing outer space, such as Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova. Launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in 1963, Tereshkova traveled aboard Vostok VI, the last of six missions where cosmonauts were sent to orbit the Earth. During her space training, Tereshkova adopted the names of botanical species as secret code words for reporting flight conditions. Organisms like “spruce,” “pine,” and “fir,” which only a few years before had been studied by Kutyreva and Tikhov for their spectral properties, were now imbued with technical meaning regarding Tereshkova’s physical well-being and the general system functions of her spacecraft.22 “Silver fir,” for instance, meant emergency descent, while “spruce” indicated manual controls were not functioning. A two-page magazine feature of Tereshkova’s accomplishment titled “I am the Seagull”—a reference to her radio codename “Chaika”—showed her dressed in white amid blossoms, with a caption reading: “Earthly flowers in ‘the garden of cosmonauts’ ”

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(it would not be for another two decades that another Soviet woman, Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya, would travel to space; upon arrival at the entrance hatch of the Salyut craft in 1982, Savitskaya was presented with a floral-print apron).23 While Tereshkova made headlines, Kutyreva had already retired from scientific public life. She would remain in Alma-Ata, visited occasionally by her former colleague Vera Semyonovna Sokolova.24 Yet long before Tereshkova propelled herself into space, Kutyreva and her sisters had cultivated the cosmic potential of the careful study of life on Earth and the broader cosmos, bringing new observations to bear in the birth of a new discipline. And in the code words pronounced by Tereshkova, the names of plants that these women had observed as potential analogues for extraterrestrial organisms took on a new spirit in the voice of one more woman—another astrobotany garden of sorts, one that still continues to operate to this day in the search for life beyond Earth. In trying to shed light on Kutyreva and the women from the Astrobotany Sector— to recover lost lives and to draw meaning from bibliographical presence and absences— we hope to have suggested a few ways in which asking questions reveals new insights, if not always answers, into the possible range of space feminisms. Kutyreva is by no means the only woman who mattered in the development of astrobotany. However, the details that we know about her suggest that women constructed their own meanings, drew on their own ambitions with micropolitical institutional and cross-disciplinary conflicts, and—just as true—made their own compromises. In the case of Kutyreva, this meant grounding empirical scientific claims not only in the philosophical principles of dialectical materialism, but forthrightly and unabashedly in the politically tainted soil of Lysenkoism. To dismiss Kutyreva’s role in helping consolidate feminist spaces on Earth, however, means to overlook the role of women in constructing new possibilities for understanding life in space in the twentieth century. One needs to ask the question more pointedly: is there not only a Soviet account of the origins of astrobiology that has been forgotten by the West, but perhaps also a feminist account of the very origins of the field that highlights women’s roles and agency in its development? Astrobotany, like astronomy before it, would not have developed in the same way without these women’s contributions. From this vantage point, fighting for the existence of other forms of life is not just a project where the empirical meets the ideological in the search for life on other worlds, it is about fighting for other feminist forms of life on Earth. Like Kutyreva, one has to go up the mountain and enter the lofty heights of fieldwork and intellectual engagement, as well as descend from the heavens to ground the potential liberatory futures of life in the lived world. To more fully explore, recount, and comprehend the experiences and impact of women to the history of astrobotany, and to the history of science, we do not need heroines, virgins, or goddesses. We need Artemisia, not the personification of Artemis.

Notes 1 Gavriil A. Tikhov, Reaching for the Stars (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 92–5.

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2 Victor Tejfel, “Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov (1875–1960): A Pioneer in Astrobiology,” Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union 5(H15) (2009): 720. 3 Nina M. Shtaude, “On the method of processing spectrograms of plants’ self-radiation (методике обработки спектрограмм самоизлучения растений),” Complete Works of the Astrobotany Sector, Vol. 1, 25–36, Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskov SSR (1953). 4 Kapitolina I. Kozlova, Spectrophotometry of Plants of Different Climatic Zones in Reflected Rays (Спектрофотометрия растений разных климатических зон в отраженных лучах), Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR (1955). 5 Interviews with Dr. Viktor Tejfel in Almaty, Kazakhstan on October 3, 2022 and February 27, 2023. Dr. Tejfel was a member of the Astrobotany Sector between 1955 and 1960; in 1970, he was appointed scientific secretary of the Institute of Astronomy and Physics (now the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute). Although he primarily worked in the astrophysics division, his tenure at the Astrobotany Sector began as an intern under biologist Vera Semyonovna Sokolova. 6 Yevgeny Krinov, Spectral Reflectance Properties of Natural Formations, National Research Council of Canada, Technical Translation TT-439, 1953. Translated from Spektral’naia otrazhatel’naia sposobnost’ prirodnykh obrazovanii, Laboratoriia Aerometodov, Moscow: Akademii Nauk SSSR (1947). 7 Anna P. Kutyreva, B. B. Intykbayeva, and Zh. Kuatova, “Characteristics of the optical properties of alpine plants of Eastern Pamir,” in Gavriil A. Tikhov (ed.), Observations of the Moon, Mars, Uranus, and the Stars: Optical Properties of Plants, NASA Technical Translation TT F-419 (1966), 74–121. Translated from Trudy sektora astrobotaniki, Vol. 8, Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR, 1960. 8 Katya Hokanson, A Woman’s Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia, Toronto: University of Toronto Press (2023); Mary R. S. Creese, Ladies in the Laboratory IV: Imperial Russia’s Women in Science, 1800–1900. A Survey of Their Contributions to Research, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (2015); Sara Dickinson, “The Edge of Empire or the Center of the Self: Endpoints and Itineraries in Nineteenth-Century Russian Travel,” The Russian Review 70, no.1 (2011): 87–94. 9 Kim André Vanselow, “Who is Mapping the Pamirs? A Review on Plant and Vegetation Sciences,” in Hermann Kreutzmann and Teiji Watanabe (eds), Mapping the Transition in the Pamirs: Advances in Asian Human-Environmental Research, Cham: Springer (2016), 41–54. 10 Gavriil A. Tikhov, Principal Works: Astrobotany and Astrophysics 1912–1957, Washington, DC: U.S. Joint Publications Research Service (1960), 34. 11 Kutyreva et al., “Characteristics of the optical properties of alpine plants of Eastern Pamir,” 116. 12 Alexander I. Oparin and Vasily G. Fesenkov (1960), Life in the Universe (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960). 13 Vasily G. Fesenkov, “Speech (Выступление),” Complete Works of the Astrobotany Sector, Vol. 2 (Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR, 1953): 74; Vasily G. Fesenkov, “Vegetation on Mars (К вопросу о растительности на Марсе),” Doklady Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR 94, no. 2 (953): 1978. 14 Fesenkov, “Speech (Выступление).” 15 O. V. Troitskaya, “On the Possibility of the Existence of Plants on Mars (О возможности существования растений на Марсе),” Astronomicheskii Zhurnal 29, no. 1 (1952): 57–62.

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16 G. A. Tikhov, ‘Is Life Possible on Other Planets?’ Journal of the British Astronomical Association 65 (April 1955): 194. 17 Anna P. Kutyreva, “Biological Foundations of Astrobotany (Биологические основы астроботаники),” Complete Works of the Astrobotany Sector, Vol. 2 (Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR, 1953). 18 Kutyreva, “Biological Foundations of Astrobotany (Биологические основы астроботаники),” 46. 19 Anna P.Kutyreva, (1959), “Mars of 1956 (Марс 1956 года),” Complete Works of the Astrobotany Sector, Vol. 7 (Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR, 1959). 20 Timothy Varfolomeyev, “The Soviet Mars Programme,” Spaceflight 35, no. 2 (1993): 230–1; Timothy Varfolomeyev, “Soviet Rocketry that Conquered Space Part 5: The First Planetary Probe Attempts, 1960–1964,” Spaceflight 40, no. 3 (1998): 85–8. 21 Tejfel, “Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov (1875-1960),” 721. 22 Anatoly Zak, “Valentina Tereshkova’s Journal Sheds New Light on Her Historic Spaceflight,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 13 (2013). 23 Roshanna P. Sylvester, “She Orbits Over the Sex Barrier: Soviet Girls and the Tereshkova Moment,” in James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi, Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 207. 24 Ibid.

Bibliography Note: Unless otherwise indicated, translations of titles in Russian are our own. The First Astrobotanist (Первый астроботаник), 1952, [Film]. Dir. O. Abishev and included in Soviet Kazakhstan, no. 39. Creese, Mary R. S. Ladies in the Laboratory IV: Imperial Russia’s Women in Science, 1800–1900. A Survey of Their Contributions to Research. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Dickinson, Sara. “The Edge of Empire or the Center of the Self: Endpoints and Itineraries in Nineteenth-Century Russian Travel.” The Russian Review 70, no. 1 (2011)): 87–94. Fesenkov, Vasily G. “Speech (Выступление).” Complete Works of the Astrobotany Sector, Vol. 2. Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR, 1953: 74. Fesenkov, Vasily G. “Vegetation on Mars (К вопросу о растительности на Марсе).” Doklady Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR 94, no. 2 (1953): 197–8. Hokanson, Katya. A Woman’s Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. Kozlova, Kapitolina I. Spectrophotometry of Plants of Different Climatic Zones in Reflected Rays (Спектрофотометрия растений разных климатических зон в отраженных лучах). Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR, 1955. Krinov, Yevgeny. Spectral Reflectance Properties of Natural Formations, National Research Council of Canada, Technical Translation TT-439, 1953. Translated from Spektral’naia otrazhatel’naia sposobnost’ prirodnykh obrazovanii, Laboratoriia Aerometodov, Moscow: Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1947. Kutyreva, Anna P. “Biological Foundations of Astrobotany (Биологические основы астроботаники).” Complete Works of the Astrobotany Sector, Vol. 2. Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR, 1953.

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Kutyreva, Anna P. “Speech (Выступление).” Complete Works of the Astrobotany Sector, Vol. 4. Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR, 1955. Kutyreva, Anna P. “Mars of 1956 (Марс 1956 года).” Complete Works of the Astrobotany Sector, Vol. 7. Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR, 1959. Kutyreva, Anna P., B. B. Intykbayeva, and Zh. Kuatova. “Characteristics of the Optical Properties of Alpine Plants of Eastern Pamir,” in Gavriil A. Tikhov (ed.), Observations of the Moon, Mars, Uranus, and the Stars: Optical Properties of Plants. NASA Technical Translation TT F-419, 1966. Translated from Trudy sektora astrobotaniki, Vol. 8. Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoy SSR, 1960, 74–121. Oparin, Alexander I., and Vasily G. Fesenkov. Life in the Universe. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960. Shtaude, Nina M. (1953), “On the Method of Processing Spectrograms of Plants’ Selfradiation (методике обработки спектрограмм самоизлучения растений).” Complete Works of the Astrobotany Sector, Vol. 1. Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskov SSR, 1953, 25–36. Sylvester, Roshanna P. “She Orbits Over the Sex Barrier: Soviet Girls and the Tereshkova Moment,” in James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi, Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011, 195–212. Tejfel, Victor. “Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov (1875–1960): A Pioneer in Astrobiology.” Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union 5(H15) (2009): 720–1. Tikhov, G. A. “Is Life Possible on Other Planets?” Journal of the British Astronomical Association 65 (April 1955): 193–204. Tikhov, Gavriil A. Principal Works: Astrobotany and Astrophysics 1912–1957. Washington, DC: U.S. Joint Publications Research Service, 1960. Tikhov, Gavriil A. Reaching for the Stars. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962. Troitskaya, O. V. (1952), “On the Possibility of the Existence of Plants on Mars (О возможности существования растений на Марсе).” Astronomicheskii Zhurnal 29, no.1 (1952): 57–62. Vanselow, Kim André. “Who is Mapping the Pamirs? A Review on Plant and Vegetation Sciences,” in Hermann Kreutzmann and Teiji Watanabe (eds), Mapping the Transition in the Pamirs: Advances in Asian Human-Environmental Research. Cham: Springer, 2016, 41–54. Varfolomeyev, Timothy. “The Soviet Mars Programme.” Spaceflight 35, no. 2 (1993): 230–1. Varfolomeyev, Timothy. “Soviet Rocketry that Conquered Space Part 5: The First Planetary Probe Attempts, 1960–1964.” Spaceflight 40, no. 3 (1998): 85–8. Zak, Anatoly. “Valentina Tereshkova’s Journal Sheds New Light on Her Historic Spaceflight.” Smithsonian Magazine, November 13, 2013.

2.3 The Troubles of Care Out There Katarina Damjanov

Progressing into Space Along with Exploding Rockets Watching a SpaceX failure to launch is amongst my troublesome experiences. This is not only because I find the sight of the exploding rockets disturbing or tend to commiserate with all the scientists and engineers whose creation has just literally gone to pieces. What bothers me most is that petty feeling of gladness, of relief. Amidst the accelerating ecological destruction of Earth, at least it is a tiny step-back for the voracious progress of techno-industrial capitalism outside it—and a priceless f-you to all aspiring space emperors. It is difficult to cheer on techno-scientific advances into space when they are increasingly cast to sustain the circuits of a capitalist-world economy. There is so much to look forward to: tourism, mining, the growth and diversification of space industries, services and markets, gig-workers aligning to drive the shuttles supplying the thriving lunar mines, swarms of robots excavating asteroids in the Kuiper Belt, colonization, terraforming, swats of space debris and the troubling prospects of the Anthropocene unfolding across the infinite universe. Why should we even care to imagine the prospects of life out there? Directed by military-industrial complexes and promoted by flamboyant tech billionaires-turned-space entrepreneurs, they proceed as a spin-off of the same forms of technological imperialism that have already made our lives so joyful, just, and sustainable down here on Earth. How can we even begin to seek alternative visions of futures outside the home planet—beyond biopolitical designs and imaginaries of global capitalism, in spite of its exploitative processes of consumption, extraction and destruction? With the very attempt to entertain their possibility, one runs the risk of looking sillier than an average space billionaire pursuing dreams of world conquest and domination on big exploding rockets. Have the efforts to address the multiple “matters of concern” surrounding the political and economic investments of techno-science themselves “run out of steam,”1 before they could turn to the troubles looming in space? Shall we instead reassemble them as active “matters of care?”2 Donna Haraway entreats us to resist temptations to speculate about futures, but rather focus on caring about the now and “stay with the trouble of living and dying together in response-abilty on a damaged earth.”3 Yet concern with the “now” also 41

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spans the extra-terrestrial domain and Haraway’s invitation lends a productive lens to considerations of the unearthing of care. The purview and practices of care for self and others has been central to biopolitical regimes seeking to establish control over human life and strategically mitigate the troubles that threaten to bring the structures of political-economic powers into disorder.4 Care has also been central to feminist work engaging with the politics of techno-science, theories of new materialisms and social studies of science and technology, which have extended inquiry into its productive and reproductive features and dispositions onto a multitude of distributed actors and agencies entangled in making of “more-than-human” worlds.5 Seeking to engage with the uneven power-struggles surrounding the ongoing scientific, commercial and military ventures into space, I turn to feminist perspectives on the radical pluralities and potentialities of care.6 Amongst inceptions of space feminism, one trajectory of thinking about power in the Space Age can be found in the work of Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke, who note the progressive broadening of the biopolitical management of life—from the bodies of human individuals and populations onto the planetary body of Earth and farther out onto other celestial bodies.7 As a range of humans and non-humans leave the confines of Earth, their exploits invite us to reapproach the problematics of the cosmic progression of biopower through the accompanying emergence of more-than-planetary formations of care. The trouble is, care is a “slippery word” and if there is anything that feminist engagements with care have made evident, it is that its meanings and applications are “both context-specific and perspective-dependent”—what “care” is, does, or may be is always and already in the making.8 Given up to the unforgiving outer space, where the presence of any Earth-born being or object is technologically conditioned and at risk of sudden demise, assemblages of care are not only radically extended but provided with room to evolve. In the face of hostile environments, competing national and private interests, uneven technological capabilities, undefined legal principles, contested cultural values and uncertain financial returns, encounters with countless troubles with control become the active principle of care-in-the-making, accentuating it as “a concrete work of maintenance, with ethical and affective implications” and as “a vital politics in interdependent worlds.”9 Attempting to locate coordinates with which to stay with the multiple and multiplying troubles of care out there, I trace in the following sections how its varied forms emerge

Figure 2.3.1 SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploding at Cape Canaveral in 2016. US Launch Report

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in the wake of the technological conquest of space, enveloping bodies of humans, nonhumans, planets, moons and stars within a gamut of material and relational processes inflecting shared futures on and off the globe. The host of response-abilities that emerge from such becomings of care offer means of orientation in a troubled world.

Troublesome Space For millennia, terrestrial societies have trodden carefully around the unknowns of space. Troubles often came from up there. The blazing lights and crashing thunders, eclipsing luminaries and falling stars, passing comets and crashing meteorites heralded wars, droughts, floods, and plagues, reflecting mercurial tempers of gods that struck in warning, retribution, or jest. At the same time, it was from the heavens that the caring hand of providence reached out to heal, provide and protect. Advances in science and technology have gradually recast space as an otherworldly realm of trouble and care. Galileo’s telescopic observations of the Moon dissolved the divine properties of celestial bodies revealing them as a part and parcel of the natural world.10 Progressively, the species’ preoccupation with space have shifted from wild cosmological, philosophical and artistic imaginaries into the rational epistemologies of techno-science and its impartial focus upon “matters of fact.”11 The long-range V-2 rockets of the Second World War brought outer space back into prominence as an arena of human life, one brimming with species-made troubles. Sputnik soon inscribed it with a whole new set of worldly concerns. Arriving in Earth’s orbit amidst the tensions of the Cold War, the satellite stirred up planetary desires and anxieties surrounding the strategic positioning of the opposing military blocs, igniting a space race, engendering substantial investments in the development of science and technology, and unleashing the species’ cosmic appetites and aspirations. Writing in the aftermath of Sputnik’s orbital journey, Hannah Arendt described it as the event “second in importance to no other,” one that radically changed the until then exclusively Earth-bound human condition while problematizing the role of scientific and technical knowledge as a political-ethical issue of the highest concern.12 The arrival of the Space Age unearths human troubles with care, extending their productive and reproductive encounters at a more-than-planetary scale. More-than-planetary assemblages of care took shape alongside the competition to achieve human spaceflight. Driven by political, economic, technological, scientific, and cultural rivalries, the endeavor to place a human body outside the planet revolved around the distinctly biopolitical imperative to make it survive (with tremendous reputational consequences if it did not), distilling the extraterrestrial inception of care as a situated practice aimed at securing the human presence in an inhuman environment.13 At the same time, the affective imagery and symbolism accompanying the tentative ventures of early astronauts and cosmonauts into Earth’s exterior exceeded national or ideological interests and divisions, as the terrestrial community waited breathlessly for news about their safe return. The subsequent departures of crewed space flights and mounting expectations for an imminent landing on the Moon elevated attention to human space activities,

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including the possibility of potential conflicts around territorial claims and ownership rights. In 1967, the UN Outer Space Treaty designated space as a shared resource of the global commons, while giving astronauts the status of “envoys of mankind” who should be given “all possible assistance” in case of any emergency and distress.14 This codification aligned governments and the international community around political, economic, and techno-scientific cooperation in space, while situating a human body outside the conventions of national belongings and citizenship and placing it at the crux of a shared political-ethical duty of care. Several high-profile space disasters such as the explosions of Challenger enlivened the public face of the more-than-planetary emergence of care; their TV broadcast to global audiences facilitated an “affective witnessing,” which sees the embodiments, networks, and boundaries of care collapse and invites its reconsideration “ethically, conceptually, and in practice.”15 Such situations reinforce approaches aiming to make human explorers safe and comfortable, from the enhanced ergonomic designs of spaceships and spacesuits, robust life-support systems and reliable communication channels with Earth, to the comprehensive protocols of health monitoring long after return. Taking the species’ troubles with asserting its place in the world to spatial and temporal extremes, the envelopment of human envoys into assemblages of care distills its material configurations, affective reach, and politico-ethical orientation. This is not to say that humans are the only species with stakes in care outside the Earth. After all, they were not amongst the first Earthlings to leave the planet. Even before Sputnik, various other species have traveled into the suborbital and orbital regions; from 1946, the V-2 rocket programs (conducted by the United States) carried several plant and animal specimens including corn, rye and cotton seeds, rabbits and rats, mice and monkeys.16 Myriad non-humans have participated in the space endeavor—enclosed in biosatellites, dispatched to the International Space Station and even to the Moon,17 but it was not until the late twentieth century that concerns over their welfare resulted in their more considered inclusion.18 Pressured by PETA and other animal protection and rights organizations, NASA introduced the Principles for the Ethical Care and Use of Animals in 1996 that established the set of directives that continue to inform the development of national and international space activities and policies.19 Acknowledging non-human envoys in space20 opens a forum for “multispecies alliance”21 in thickening the affective networks that run alongside, within and out in advance of care. As non-human Earthlings continue to depart to space, usually never to return, their individual and collective destinies become exemplary for accounting for the duties and responsibilities surrounding human participation in caring for a common world. The technological transpositions of care into the more-than-human worlds also accrue around objects of technologies themselves. While in the case of Sputnik, investments of care mostly revolved around efforts to get the satellite up into orbit (without requiring it to perform any explorative task), subsequent spacecraft have been provided with more elaborate configurations that made them more efficient and durable. Multimillion-dollar orbiters, landers and fly-byers on interplanetary or deep space missions, such as the Mars Curiosity rover or the Lunar Parker Solar Probe, entail intricate infrastructures and practices of care to remotely secure and maintain their

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undisturbed operations and connective networks over vast distances, necessitating the extensive support of scientist, engineers, analysts and programmers that direct and oversee their creation, launches, uses, and eventually retirement and decommission. Although inanimate in the biological sense, they are very much animated by the sociotechnical networks that gather around the troubles of their life-management. Working alongside a spacecraft over long periods of time, its ground support team develops affective relations with it, sharing all the successes and failures. If anything brings forth how objective and dispassionate considerations of scientific “matters of fact”22 quickly become active “matters of care,”23 it is media coverage of a failed launch or landing that reveals to a global audience the scene of a scientist crying at the final parting with a spacecraft. Such affective engagements accentuate the essentially technological conditioning and socialization of the domain of care. Amongst the many and varied investments of care made towards founding morethan-human worlds in space, the International Space Station showcases all their convolutions and complexities. Envisioned as an international scientific laboratory and constructed to provide outposts for terrestrial forms of biological, social, and technological life, the station is a masterpiece of biopolitical designs. Its orbital presence and operations are an extreme exercise in accounting for environmental conditions24 and maintaining intricate technical and organizational arrangements to avoid, mitigate, or resolve the myriad potential troubles that might befall the Earthlings abroad. Providing a microcosm of carefully configured material and relational assemblages of life, the station is itself an object of continuous and multifaceted care. Its operational status, precise location, and consistent maintenance are vigilantly scrutinized from moment-to-moment by both onboard and ground control systems and personnel. And at the same time, these operations and appraisals of well-being are opened up to (and imbricated within) public culture and practices of everyday life; the station’s passage is not only visible to observers from Earth, but interior cameras allow terrestrial audiences to participate in the proceedings onboard and watch astronauts performing routines of work and life through the Live ISS stream on NASA TV. Embedding transparency, openness, and public interest into the apparatus of control and surveillance, the ISS is unquestionably a testing ground for probing and preparing new strategies and expressions of care for and about life in space—but its own future is in question. The problem of what to do with it after it is decommissioned—whether to push it upwards to make more space, deorbit it down to gradually decompose, or burn into the atmosphere, dismantle and use the parts for other space ventures on the Moon, Mars, and beyond—highlights the necessity of acknowledging the lives (and afterlives) of technologies as vital for assembling the shared coordinates and considerations, responses and recognitions of care: to “make our world livable as possible.”25 To make the worlds out there as livable as possible, it is essential to consider the material evidence of its techno-industrial conquest. The increasing numbers of Earthorbiting satellites and their debris already encumber the planet’s environs, while the decreasing availability of advantageous satellite spots destinies it to be the arena of still further tensions. Human impact upon space environments progressively extends further away as derelict technologies and other kinds of waste are introduced into orbits and surfaces of other celestial bodies. Over on the Moon, tons of various

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Figure 2.3.2 At NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston, flight controllers celebrate the successful conclusion of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission, July 24, 1969. © NASA

equipment, tools, objects, and artifacts have been left by crewed and robotic missions. The evolving plans and preparations to intensify lunar explorations amplify concerns about the historical importance of previous landing sites and the perceived ethical imperatives of their protection as cultural heritage,26 extending care to even the destructive imprints left in space. At the same time, the species’ interference with space environments proceeds in elaborate forms through the impactor or sample-return spacecraft, those types designed to crash onto a celestial body or extract and bring to Earth its minuscule segments. In 2022, NASA’s DART probe, which involved crashing a spacecraft into asteroid Dimorphos, resulted in a ten-thousand-kilometer-long trail of debris.27 As the established and emerging space powers develop and intensify scientific, commercial, and military activities, cares and troubles surrounding the species’ attempts to assert their grasp over the world multiply beyond the globe.

Sowing Futures Space exploits push the care of the ‘now’ to the very edge of the present, all the way into the future. They are at the forefront of a co-option of future-oriented calculations of

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care into biopolitical regimes of control. The missions are planned years in advance, the destinations of interest are exhaustively assessed, routes meticulously plotted, aims and objectives precisely defined and day-to-day operations regimented by strict workflow procedures. Relying upon the techno-scientific, financial, and administrative powers of national, international, and multinational space agencies, companies and organizations to ensure that each minute element and minor event is accounted for, space exploits indicate how socio-technical assemblages of care at their extreme are equalized through control. Any disturbances with maintaining control unsettle careful considerations of the future, revealing the impossibility of predicting it always and accurately, devising all viable scenarios, pinpointing exact timing and perfecting technical specifications. The much-publicized launch of the recently retired Hubble Telescope was one of those predicaments requiring delicate orchestration. Dispatched to look at the faraway stars, the telescope’s vision system was faultily installed—and it took years of delays, budget approvals, and labor until it was finally put to work.28 Over on Mars, Opportunity was shut off after an intense sandstorm incapacitated the rover’s energy panels and the exhaustive attempts of its ground-control to revive it failed.29 These ruptures in ability to provide care for the “now” are inherent to space exploits, where unfathomable distances and environmental conditions render the presence of any terrestrial being or object fragile, their remote connections with Earth unstable and the fine-tuned edifice of techno-scientific support often powerless. Placing care outside control propels further development of security diagrams and future-proof strategies which account for “now” by managing what it “could be.” Outer space provides endless room for imagining and rehearsing designs for futures of the world-in-the-making across immense spans of space and time yet allows little freedom for their hands-on implementation. One simply does not stumble out and wander off out there. Only a few nations and companies have gained space capabilities thus far, and only selected human and non-human species were granted access. There is not much room for asserting human agency in-situ. The weekly timetables of astronauts are entirely filled with scheduled tasks which dictate the approved manners and rhythms of everyday life and work. In the early days of the Space Age, random gestures and assertions of freedom and escape from prescribed and automated constraints appeared from time to time from amongst the still-developing systems of control—Neil Armstrong, for example, switched off the autopilot after the computer display persisted in showing an error and manually landed the lunar module.30 Aside from a variety of personal items approved for astronauts to bring into space, many other things have also been smuggled in: a corned beef sandwich, a Playboy picture, mementos hidden in insulation, cartoons and drawings and messages inscribed on the equipment and the manuals.31 On the other hand, unauthorized non-humans have rarely been taken outside the Earth. Thus far, only one attempt has been brought to public attention; after the mission to land the first privately operated spacecraft on the Moon in 2018 failed, entrepreneur Nova Spivack bragged to the media that he managed to smuggle tardigrades (microscopic animals) amongst a collection of human DNA samples carried onboard.32 That said, some non-humans regularly bypass the rigorous control protocols and gain illicit access to space. Microorganisms regularly accompany and are

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indeed an integral component of crewed and uncrewed probes, and have been known to survive on their own for some time. The problematics of the careful management of biological life in space involves not only ensuring it survives but also preventing it from going astray. The Outer Space Treaty (1967) envisions that exploration of celestial bodies will proceed in a manner that would “avoid their harmful contamination” and likewise, cautions about the possibility of the “introduction of extraterrestrial matter” into the Earth’s environment.33 Worries about potentially importing such troubles down here spurs concern regarding international and global obligations to “planetary protection,” initiating a duty of care toward terrestrial ecologies and translating it into the practice of meticulously examining returning probes and preemptively neutralizing any perceived threat. Such precautions also relate to the possibility of accidentally introducing unwanted forms and routes of life into space, as microbes easily stow away. The increasing awareness of contamination of the extraterrestrial environment also shapes expressions of control tangled with care, such as in the case of Cassini, which was deliberately crashed on Saturn in 2017 after it discovered life-conditions on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Concerns that the spacecraft may carry microorganisms which could contaminate the moon and interfere with future probes into its habitability, led to a decision to send it on a fatal encounter with the Chronian atmosphere.34 Such vital decisions—to make live or die, bring in or keep out—give birth to care-full biopolitical articulations of border control between the emerging worlds on and off the globe. Caring about prospective futures in space raises concerns about excesses of control, but also about its lack. As more space-faring nations and companies emerge, the evolving arena of space endeavor is laden with the political-economic, techno-scientific and ethical-affective encounters with troubles. They begin with the space launches; any introduced terrestrial item should be reported to the United Nations and included in its Register of Objects Launched into Outer Space, but not of all of them are, such as military satellites, which often arrive by stealth.35 They also encompass the problems of having enough space in which to launch the earthly pursuits of power, knowledge, and wealth; despite its vastness, the accessible and occupiable locations are limited and interests in their exploration at once shared and contested. Earth’s orbital space, congested with commercial, scientific, and military satellites, already displays an abundance of troubles with such lack of control. The current system of state-based allocations of satellite spots in strategically important orbital regions has been prone to various machinations, including their illegal trading.36 More recently, private companies have begun to engage in illicit launches; in 2018, the private start-up Swarm Technologies launched four satellites without the permission of the International Communication Union.37 Not just illicit but also careless launches lend an element of the lawless, such as launching satellites with reflective mirrors that interfere with astronomical observations, making them durable so they add to the problem of orbital waste, or launching them in large numbers, such as SpaceX’s Starlink project, which has permission to launch a flotilla of over seven thousand around the planet.38 On its way to space, the expression of care must contend with laying the foundations of control. In the face of ecological destruction of more-than-planetary proportions, what is then left to those of us marooned on Earth?

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Unearthing Response-abilities of Care Space enterprise allows a reconsideration of the alignments of control and care within the malleable arena of life. Its courses demand careful maintenance of order and the agility to imagine responses to troublesome futures, requiring extensive planning and logistics, comprehensive monitoring and analysis, attentive upkeep and maintenance, and robust strategies of risk prediction and management. These conditions test the techno-logical limits of power over life: a minute lack of it and a critically important satellite deorbits, a crewed shuttle explodes, a multi-million-dollar rocket fails to launch in front of global audiences. At the same time, the collisions between human power-aspirations and inhuman space mobilize material, affective and politico-ethical forces of care. Productive confusions between control and care signpost the way to the species’ progress in space. To counter the troublesome visions of its futures, perhaps we should take Haraway’s proposition and stir the trouble ourselves. That is, sow the seeds of care that anticipate its radical “response-abilities” by “making kin” with all the shareholders of a more-than-planetary world—with each satellite, space tourist, exploding rocket, blown-up asteroid, speck of stardust, abandoned rover, concerned astronomer, ISS voyeur, and a newborn galaxy far away—even with a space billionaire.39

Notes 1 B. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matter of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004): 225–48. 2 M. Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things,” Social Studies of Science 41, no. 1 (2011): 85–106; M. Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2017). 3 D. J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 4 M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); M. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); G. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 59 (October 1992): 3–7. 5 A. Mol, I. Moser and J. Pols, “Care: Putting Practice into Theory,” in A. Mol, I. Moser and J. Pols (eds), Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms (New York: Transcript Verlag, 2010), 7–25; Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience”; Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care; D. J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. 6 Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience”; Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care; A. Martin, N. Myers and A. Viseu, “The Politics of Care in Technoscience,” Social Studies of Science 45 no. 5 (2015): 625–41; Haraway, Staying with the Trouble; L. Lindén and D. Lydahl, “Editorial: Care in STS,” Nordic Journal of Science and Technology 9, no. 1 (2021): 3–12. 7 M. Bryld and N. Lykke, Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred (London: Zed, 2000). 8 Martin et al., “The Politics of Care in Technoscience.” 9 Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: 5.

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10 A. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1957). 11 Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 12 H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 13 V, Olson, Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 14 United Nations, Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (1967). Available online: http://www.unoosa.org/pdf/gares/ARES_21_2222E.pdf. 15 M. Gibson et al., “Introduction: Caring Media Futures,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 24, no. 4 (2021): 563. 16 C. Burgess and C. Dubbs, Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle (Chichester: Springer, 2007). 17 Ibid. 18 Science Magazine Staff, “Activists Shake up NASA,” Science Magazine (October 31, 1996). Available online: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/1996/10/activists-shakenasa (accessed July 24, 2019); Ibid. 19 NASA, “Principles for the Ethical Care and Use of Animals” (2008). Available online: https://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/npg_img/N_PD_8910_001B_/N_PD_ (accessed July 24, 2019). 20 K. Damjanov, “Accounting for Non-Humans in Space Exploration,” Space Policy 43 (2018): 18–23. 21 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. 22 Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 23 Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience”; Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care. 24 K. Damjanov and D. Crouch, “Orbital Life on the International Space Station,” Space and Culture 22, no. 1 (2019): 77–89. 25 B. Fisher and J. C. Tronto (1990), “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring,” in E. K. Abel and M. K. Nelson (eds), Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 35–62 (40). 26 T. F. Rogers, “Safeguarding Tranquillity Base: Why the Earth’s Moon Base Should Become a World Heritage Site,” Space Policy 20, no. 1 (2004): 5–6; D. H. R. Spennemann, “Out of This World: Issues of Managing Tourism and Humanity’s Heritage on the Moon,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 356–71. 27 L. Crane, “Photo Shows 10,000 km Debris Tail Caused by DART Asteroid Smash,” New Scientist (October 3, 2002). Available online: https://www.newscientist.com/ article/2340837-photo-shows-10000-km-debris-tail-caused-by-dart-asteroid-smash/ (accessed February 8, 2023). 28 D. DeVorkin, “Repairing Hubble,” Smithsonian Institute (April 23, 2014). Available online: https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/repairing-hubble (accessed November 6, 2022). 29 A. Gabbatt and N. Davis (2019), “NASA Confirms Mars Rover Opportunity is Dead,” Guardian (February 13, 2019). Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/ science/2019/feb/13/nasa-makes-final-attempt-to-communicate-with-mars-roveropportunity. 30 S. Witt, “Apollo 11: Mission Out of Control,” Wired (June 24, 2019). Available online: https://www.wired.com/story/apollo-11-mission-out-of-control/ (accessed March 9, 2020).

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31 NASA, “Contraband Corned Beef and the Early Days of Space Biology” (March 18, 2022). Available online: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/contraband-corned-beefand-the-early-days-of-space-biology-the-gemini-iii-mission (accessed November 6, 2022); NASA, “Apollo 12 CDR Cuff Checklist” (n.d.). Available online: https://www. hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a12/cuff12.html (accessed November 6, 2022). 32 C. Taylor, “ ‘I’m the First Space Pirate!’ How Tardigrades Were Secretly Smuggled to the Moon,” Mashable (August 8, 2019). Available online: https://mashable.com/article/ smuggled-moon-tardigrade (accessed February 3, 2023). 33 United Nations, Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (1967). Available online: http://www.unoosa.org/pdf/gares/ARES_21_2222E.pdf. 34 M. Wall, “Cassini’s Death Dive Will Protect 2 Possibly Life-Supporting Saturn Moons,” Space (September 13, 2017). Available online: https://www.space.com/38131-cassinideath-dive-protect-titan-enceladus.html (accessed June 8, 2018). 35 United Nations’ Office for Outer Space Affairs, Register of Objects Launched into Outer Space (n.d.). Available online: https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/spaceobjectregister/ index.html (accessed August 17, 2018). 36 C. Collis, “The Geostationary Orbit: A Critical Legal Geography of Space’s Most Valuable Real Estate,” The Sociological Review 57, no. 1 (2009): 47–65. 37 M. Austin, “Stealth Startup Launches Four Unauthorized Rogue Satellites into Orbit,” Digital Trends (March 10, 2018). Available online: https://www.digitaltrends.com/ cool-tech/swarm-technologies-launches-unauthorized-satellites/ (accessed October 17, 2022). 38 D. Shepardson, “SpaceX Gets U.S. Approval to Deploy Up To 7,500 Satellites’, Reuters (December 2, 2022). Available online: https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-fccpartially-grants-spacexs-application-second-gen-satellite-system-2022-12-01/ (accessed July 2, 2019). 39 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.

Bibliography Arendt, H. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Austin, M. “Stealth Startup Launches Four Unauthorized Rogue Satellites into Orbit.” Digital Trends, March 10, 2018. Available online: https://www.digitaltrends.com/ cool-tech/swarm-technologies-launches-unauthorized-satellites/ (accessed October 17, 2022). Bryld, M. and N. Lykke. Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred. London: Zed, 2000. Burgess C. and C. Dubbs. Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle, Chichester: Springer, 2007. Collis, C. “The Geostationary Orbit: A Critical Legal Geography of Space’s Most Valuable Real Estate.” The Sociological Review 57, no. 1 (2009): 47–65. Crane, L. “Photo Shows 10,000 km Debris Tail Caused by DART Asteroid Smash.” New Scientist (October 3, 2022). Available online: https://www.newscientist.com/ article/2340837-photo-shows-10000-km-debris-tail-caused-by-dart-asteroid-smash/ (accessed February 8, 2023). Damjanov, K. “Accounting for Non-Humans in Space Exploration.” Space Policy 43 (2018): 18–23.

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Damjanov, K. and D. Crouch. “Orbital Life on the International Space Station.” Space and Culture 22, no. 1 (2019): 77–89. Deleuze, G. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7. DeVorkin, “Repairing Hubble.” Smithsonian Institute (April 23, 2014). Available online: https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/repairing-hubble (accessed November 6, 2022). Fisher, B. and J. C. Tronto. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring,” in E. K. Abel and M. K. Nelson (eds), Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, 35–62. Gabbatt A. and N. Davis. “NASA Confirms Mars Rover Opportunity is Dead.” Guardian (February 3, 2019). Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/ feb/13/nasa-makes-final-attempt-to-communicate-with-mars-rover-opportunity. Foucault, M. Security, Territory, Population. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Foucault, M. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Gibson M. et al. “Introduction: Caring Media Futures.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 24, no. 4 (2021): 557–66. Haraway, D. J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Haraway, D. J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Koyré, A. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1957. Latour, B. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matter of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48. Lindén L. and D. Lydahl. “Editorial: Care in STS.” Nordic Journal of Science and Technology 9, no. 1 (2021): 3–12. Martin, A., N. Myers and A. Viseu. “The Politics of Care in Technoscience,” Social Studies of Science 45, no. 5 (2015): 625–41. Mol, A., I. Moser and J. Pols. “Care: Putting Practice into Theory,” in A. Mol, I. Moser and J. Pols (eds), Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. New York: Transcript Verlag, 2010, 7–25. NASA. “Apollo 12 CDR Cuff Checklist.” (n.d.) Available online: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/ alsj/a12/cuff12.html (accessed November 6, 2022). NASA. “Contraband Corned Beef and the Early Days of Space Biology” (March 18, 2002). Available online: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/contraband-corned-beefand-the-early-days-of-space-biology-the-gemini-iii-mission (accessed November 6, 2022). NASA. “Principles for the Ethical Care and Use of Animals” (2008). Available online: https://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/npg_img/N_PD_8910_001B_/N_PD_ (accessed July 24, 2019). NASA TV. Live ISS Stream (n.d.). Available online: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ live-iss-stream (accessed February 19, 2022). Olson, V. Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things.” Social Studies of Science 41, no. 1 (2011): 85–106. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2017. Rogers, T. F. “Safeguarding Tranquillity Base: Why the Earth’s Moon Base Should Become a World Heritage Site.” Space Policy 20, no. 1 (2004): 5–6.

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Science Magazine Staff. “Activists Shake up NASA.” Science Magazine (October 31, 1996). Available online: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/1996/10/activists-shake-nasa (accessed July 24, 2019). Shepardson, D. “SpaceX Gets U.S. Approval to Deploy Up To 7,500 Satellites.” Reuters (December 2, 2022). Available online: https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-fccpartially-grants-spacexs-application-second-gen-satellite-system-2022-12-01/ (accessed July 2, 2019). Spennemann D. H. R. “Out of This World: Issues of Managing Tourism and Humanity’s Heritage on the Moon.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 356–71. Taylor, C. (2019), “ ‘I’m the First Space Pirate!’ How Tardigrades Were Secretly Smuggled to the Moon.” Mashable (August 8, 2019). Available online: https://mashable.com/article/ smuggled-moon-tardigrade (accessed February 3, 2023). United Nations. Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. (1967) Available online: http://www.unoosa.org/pdf/gares/ARES_21_2222E.pdf. United Nations’ Office for Outer Space Affairs. Register of Objects Launched into Outer Space (n.d.). Available online: https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/spaceobjectregister/ index.html (accessed August 17, 2018). Wall. M. “Cassini’s Death Dive Will Protect 2 Possibly Life-Supporting Saturn Moons.” Space (September 13, 2017). Available online: https://www.space.com/38131-cassinideath-dive-protect-titan-enceladus.html (accessed June 8, 2018). Witt, S. “Apollo 11: Mission Out of Control.” Wired (June 24, 2019). Available online: https://www.wired.com/story/apollo-11-mission-out-of-control/ (accessed March 9, 2020).

2.4 Revisiting Gender, Sex, and Reproduction in Outer Space Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore

Introduction Nearly three decades ago, we published an award-winning article about human sexual and reproductive activities in outer space, then a vastly understudied topic.1 We conducted fieldwork at NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. We interviewed astronauts, engineers, and support personnel; analyzed pop culture including television, films, and print media; and mined scholarly articles and NASA promotional materials. We developed the concept of inscription: “the act of ‘writing’ culture onto bodies and/or subjectivities through a variety of social, cultural, and technical practices.”2 The inscribing of some bodies and futures, we argued, precluded or eclipsed others, exposing the operations of power. “Inscription,” we wrote, is a “multifaceted practice imbued with both pleasures and dangers.”3 Our analysis tracked the social relations through which inscriptions emerged. People and institutions inscribe bodies and, in doing so, (re)write human and planetary futures. Our earlier work showed that discourses about sex and reproduction in outer space “inscribed the future” through binary, heteronormative, and sexist ideals, in effect limiting the immense potential of future space travel and habitation. We found that male bodies were constructed as the norm while female bodies were constructed as what one engineer called “messy hardware,”4 and thus were perceived as operationally and culturally problematic. Unlike more liberatory representations of space (e.g., Star Trek), actual space travel—including on-the-ground preparations—reinforced a gendered and racialized status quo. The twenty-first century has revealed new inscriptions of space, including an expansion of NASA’s workforce, updated cultural representations of space travel, and novel technologies. Spaceships continue to not only carry human and technical cargo, but also uneven social relations, cultural meanings, and politics. Although diversity plays a greater part in the US space program more than ever before, space exploration remains a largely white, masculinist, and capitalist endeavor. Billionaires and other men have recently launched themselves skyward at significant cost and with great media fanfare. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose net worth is more than US$125 54

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billion, ascended to space in a penis-shaped Blue Origin rocket, causing amused speculation about the vessel’s shape. In establishing the country’s newest military branch, Former President Donald Trump described space as “the world’s newest warfighting domain.”5 As long as space continues to be narrated as a conquerable frontier, it will remain encrusted with masculinist militarism. As we noted in our original research from 1995, “space is alive with possibilities, yet it is also an embattled domain and no future is certain.”6 We now explore the contemporary contours of spaceflight with critical attention to whose bodies are inscribed and for what purposes. Our work shows that the presence of women in space does not necessarily mitigate the entrenched masculinity of the space program,7 any more than the racial diversity of human bodies in space softens the colonial and racist logics of space conquest.8

Shifting Language about Space In the past several years, there has been an important change in NASA’s linguistic norms to both correct the masculinist bias in word choice and to gesture toward acceptance of women and gender-nonconforming personnel. Such changes reflect decades of social movements toward greater equality. Emily Margolis, a historian of spaceflight and Smithsonian curator, writes, “Women have been part of NASA’s astronaut corps since 1978. And the first Soviet woman to fly in space, Valentina Tereshkova, did so in 1963. The era of ‘manned’ spaceflight ended long ago, and the continued use of this language diminishes and erases six decades of women’s contributions to spaceflight.”9 Since the early 2010s, NASA has worked to update and adapt language away from long-standing male bias: Gender-Specific Language (e.g., Manned Space Program vs. Human Space Program) In general, all references to the space program should be non-gender-specific (e.g., human, piloted, unpiloted, robotic, as opposed to manned or unmanned). The exception to the rule is when referring to the Manned Spaceflight Center (also known as the Manned Spacecraft Center), the predecessor of Johnson Space Center in Houston, or to any other historical program name or official title that included “manned” (e.g., Associate Administrator for Manned Spaceflight).10

Furthermore, NASA’s updated terminology describes human sex, gender, and reproduction beyond binary categories. A qualitative analysis of nine federal agencies found NASA to be comparatively very progressive with respect to transgender employee rights.11 From NASA’s guidance documents on gender transition: Managers/supervisors should be aware that intentionally referring to someone by the wrong name or pronouns after they have made them clear, could be viewed as a violation of NASA’s anti-harassment policy and procedures.12

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More inclusive language has implications for discourses on gender, sexuality, and reproduction in outer space. However, even as changes in representation might occur (what language signifies), the redistribution of power is not always realized (who gets access to resources and decision making). As feminist scholars, we remain interested in how the categories “women” and “men” are deployed around outer space topics, and what tracking those categories reveals about broader gender equity discourses, while acknowledging that such terms are slippery, imperfect, and partial. NASA’s growing use of inclusive language is one way to analyze the myriad ways that outer space, including space travel, is coded as structurally and culturally masculinized and/or feminized. As anthropologist Michael Oman-Reagan13 asks, “Why shouldn’t expression, affect, sensitivity, and identity be a part of our movement into space? Aren’t we, in some sense, coming out as a species onto a galactic or even universe-scale stage?”

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby! The first woman in space was Soviet factory worker Valentina Tereshkova on the Vostok 6 mission in 1963. Unlike the trained male cosmonauts, Tereshkova was selected because she was an expert parachutist and a loyal Communist.14 The Soviets, and specifically head of cosmonaut training Nikolai Kamanin, were determined that the United States would not be the first to launch a woman into space. After her successful mission, Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev disparaged “sexual discrimination” in the United States: “Look at what she has shown to America’s astronauts. She has shown them who is who.”15 Since Tereshkova’s pioneering Space Race flight, four other Russian women have participated in the space program, including most recently engineer Anna Kikina, in whose image Mattel has designed a Barbie doll.16 We can count other firsts. Sally Ride was the first US woman to travel to space in 1983. She was also the first lesbian, although she was closeted until her death in 2012 from pancreatic cancer. Journalist Lynn Sherr writes, Sally Ride was very good at keeping secrets . . . But the most surprising revelation was the one that came at the end of her obituary: that for 27 years, she’d been in a loving relationship with another woman, Tam O’Shaughnessy . . . Never before had the words astronaut and lesbian appeared in the same sentence. Google them today, and you get more than half a million hits, all pegged to Sally Ride.

Sherr speculates that, in addition to Ride’s well-known ability to compartmentalize and keep confidences, the space program may not have been a gay-friendly environment. Indeed, Ride was married to a man, fellow astronaut Steve Hawley, at the time of her spaceflight; they divorced in 1987.17 That same year, Mae Jemison, an engineer and physician, became the first black woman in the US space program to go to space in 1992 on the STS-47 mission. The acclaimed book Hidden Figures18 and subsequent film adaptation described how other black women were critical to NASA’s successes. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy

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Figure 2.4.1 The first American woman to fly in space, Sally Ride, beaming as she floats in low Earth orbit during STS-7, 1983. NASA. See Plate Section 2

Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, among others, were the human “computers” who played a crucial—and long-unrecognized—role in supporting space missions. Jemison herself wrote, Katherine Johnson was a revelation . . . But she was not a “one-off ” to be put on a shelf and admired for her singular genius. She was representative of the deep well of talent and potential that is so often buried by lack of opportunity, access, exposure and expectation for women and particularly women of color in science and technical fields.19

Since leaving the space program, Jemison has launched companies, written books, and dedicated herself to supporting women, especially women of color, in STEM fields. The first mother to travel to space was Anna Lee Fisher, a chemist and emergency physician who, along with Judith Resnick, was selected for NASA Astronaut Group 8 in 1978. Fisher’s husband, Bill, also an astronaut, was not selected. Fisher gave birth to a daughter in 1982 on Earth and was skybound just fourteen months later, recalling, “I wasn’t about to say no.”20 She recorded videos for her daughter prior to the spaceflight in case she did not return. Fisher faced challenges like working in spaces not designed for women, much less new mothers: “They never had pumping rooms or anything like that . . . It never even occurred to me to ask for one.”21 Upon the shuttle’s return, a photograph of Fisher hugging her daughter appeared on the front page of the New York Times.22 It is worth noting that male astronauts with children, such as John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin, had previously flown to space, but their fatherhood was not deemed newsworthy; Anna Lee Fisher’s motherhood was. More recently, Nicole Aanapu Mann became the first Indigenous woman in space, commanding NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission in 2022. A test pilot, engineer, and colonel in the Marine Corps, Mann remained at the International Space Station for several months. While there, she spoke to students from the Boys and Girls Club of the

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Flathead Reservation in Montana (NASA Media Advisory M23-007). Mann also conducted an extravehicular activity (EVA) with Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, making her the first Native American woman to walk in space, just three years after the first all-woman spacewalk by astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir in 2019. The cultural reception of such feats in space matters deeply. What makes all of this news—and rich fodder for sociological analysis—is that since the inception of spaceflight, fewer than eighty women have flown to outer space. Although countless others have served as support personnel,23 women astronauts make up just 10 percent of all astronauts, despite evidence that women are better suited (if not in better-fitting spacesuits) for space travel.24 When women do fly, or participate in other ways in the space program, questions abound: about bodies, sexuality, and what the possibility of reproduction means for space exploration. Entire missions, formerly men-only, are now being proposed as women-only, raising questions about women’s “essential” nature and the primacy of embodiment in institutional decisions. These dynamic gender politics, which have long been a part of spaceflight, are supercharged for the twentyfirst century.

Floating Fluids and Alien Babies: Reproductive Health in Space In 1995, there was very little research on sex and reproduction in space when only men planned and staffed missions. Though astronauts’ bodies have always been studied both before and after spaceflight, until women joined the space race, cisgendered male astronauts were allowed to be gender-less. They were just astronauts, no qualifier necessary. Women’s participation provoked numerous questions about (hetero)sexual activity, menstruation, and reproduction.25 One of our informants in the original study described women as “messy hardware,” suggesting that women’s bodies—always considered to be potentially reproductive—threw a bloody wrench in the works. Built on decades of policies, procedures, and practices organized around men’s “standard” bodies, women astronauts were non-standard and thus interrupted business as usual.26 NASA, we learned, was unprepared. Women’s embodied presence in the space program revealed and challenged existing infrastructure and attitudes. It also launched several decades of research on—and speculation about—sex and reproduction in outer space.

Blood Just as women are presumed to be always and already reproductive, they are presumed to be perpetually “on the rag.”27 Menstruation, among other bodily concerns, renders women “messy hardware” in space travel. Unsurprisingly, menstruation was an early topic of research on female bodies in flight and was also presented as a justification for excluding women from space. Bleeding made women different from men. Early reports tied menstruation to hormones, suggesting that women were “unpredictable” and should not be paired with a “complicated machine,” reducing women solely to biological function.28 When women did begin traveling to space, there was little knowledge among the men organizing missions about how women’s bodies work. Astronaut Sally

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Ride famously recounted being asked by a NASA engineer if 100 tampons was the right number for a week-long mission.29 As anyone who menstruates knows, it was not. Another concern from the predominantly male engineers assigned to earlier missions was retrograde menstruation, menstrual blood flowing backward into the fallopian tubes, in zero-G. Of course, NASA had never conducted any experiments on this topic. There is no regulation against menstruating in space, despite menstruation having been used as a rationale for excluding women from spaceflight.30 Bleeding may, however, be inconvenient, while also sustaining the belief in women as unpredictable contaminants capable of disrupting missions. Of course, not having periods in space might be a viable and preferable option for people who menstruate. Jain and Wotring’s study shows no long-term effects of medically induced amenorrhea (the suppression of periods) through pharmacological agents such as oral contraceptives, while also noting that “the number of subjects required by clinical studies cannot be matched by the number of current active female astronauts.”31 While there may be important gender differences in spaceflight, one of the most significant barriers to women in space is design and environment, not bodies. While spacesuits are designed to absorb some bodily fluids, such as sweat, they are not designed to absorb period blood. Prior to Koch and Meir’s all-woman spacewalk, NASA had to cancel another outing due to lack of appropriate spacesuits; astronaut Anne McClain had to relinquish her place to a man.32 Journalist Julie Beck writes, “Apparently the United States’ waste-disposal system on the International Space Station is not designed to deal with menstrual blood, so urine containing blood can’t be recycled as it usually would be. Yet another example of NASA not planning for women’s bodily functions.”33 The more women travel to space, the more we learn about their bodies, their capabilities, and the limitations of existing technologies and environments. Greater inclusion and diversity of personnel across the space industry means that knowledge about a diverse range of bodies should replace longstanding ignorance.

Sperm Many studies have analyzed the viability of human sperm in space. For example, a team of fertility researchers found that syringe containers can be used to effectively store frozen sperm for interstellar in-flight experiments, with promising results for use in intracervical insemination in space.34 Research on non-human animals, including studies of sperm and/or testes in fruit flies, mice, frogs, sea urchins, and fish, has examined the effects of psychological stress, microgravity, and radiation on gametes and reproductive organs.35 In one study, male mice which had traveled to the International Space Station sired healthy offspring via IVF upon their return to Earth.36 The same lab inseminated female mice on Earth with six-year-old freeze-dried mouse sperm, resulting in about 240 healthy “space pups.”37 Freeze-drying sperm appears to protect it from the harmful effects of radiation in space. With direct implications for a multiyear Mars mission, a team of researchers performed a metaanalysis of all research about the long-term health of semen in outer space. They found that testosterone levels, sperm DNA, sperm count, and motility were all affected by the

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space environment.38 This research focus on male fertility suggests an imperative to supply and preserve healthy sperm for longer-term missions. Sociologist Lisa Jean Moore argued in her book Sperm Counts that on Earth it is theoretically possible to reproduce the human species without men.39 This possibility stems from the confluence of frozen semen available at sperm banks (with no expiry date) and the availability of technological procedures such as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), which requires only one sperm cell to be injected into the center of an egg. Technological advancements could make cisgendered men unnecessary for social reproduction and its consequences. Reading the comments section on pop culture news articles about her book, Moore was quickly made aware of how threatened some men could be by this theoretical possibility. On one radio show, she was characterized as a “femi-nazi” advocating for the end of men. Regardless of such reactions, it is clear from the thrust of biological research on sperm’s viability in space that sperm can be frozen and transported to deep space outposts for alternate insemination procedures.40 This invokes twentieth-century postulations about earthbound sperm banks, assisted reproductive technologies, and the potential obsolescence of men. If there is a way to launch sperm safely into space, is it necessary for cisgendered men to participate in space missions? Do we even need men on Mars? Men’s necessity to reproduce the species seems as nonessential in space as it is fast becoming on Earth, where a variety of technologies have expanded reproductive possibilities beyond the nuclear family. And yet sperm studies continue, along with speculation about sexual(ized) topics, such as “nutting” (ejaculating) in space.41

Babies In space, if women can menstruate, men can “nut,” sperm is viable, and heterosexual activity or artificial insemination is possible, will there someday be space babies? The effects of micro- or zero gravity on nonhuman fetal development have revealed decreased viability and increased abnormalities, even death.42 Mission Cradle, a startup that aimed to send a pregnant woman to space by 2024 (raising a whole host of ethical issues), is now defunct. NASA currently prohibits pregnancy on missions. These practical barriers have not halted speculation, or hope. Astronomer Chris Impey waxes poetic about the possibility: “When the first baby is born off-Earth, it will be a milestone as momentous as humanity’s first steps out of Africa. Such a birth would mark the beginning of a multi-planet civilization for the human species.”43 Such dreams are deeply interwoven with plans to colonize space.

NASA’s DEI Plan for Outer Space: The Artemis Missions Launched in 2017, the Artemis missions are a series of launches across four international space agencies to prepare humans to return to the Moon and build a sustainable base camp in preparation for eventual travel to Mars. They initiated Artemis 1, an uncrewed space mission with mannequins, in November 2022. Artemis 2 will carry a crewed

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Figure 2.4.2 Phase 1 of the Artemis mission plans to land the first woman on the Moon in 2024, 2020. © NASA

lunar landing. Artemis 3 is projected for 2025, with subsequent missions to establish infrastructure and habitats. The mission’s logo represents the bow and arrow of Artemis, the Greek Goddess of the Hunt and the Moon. The blue arc signifies both the bow and the Earth, while the red curving line (the color associated with Mars) is the path of the arrow to the Moon. The white is an arrowhead that points in an upward direction. The gray circle is the Moon, a stopover on the way to Mars. As an invocation of Greek mythology, Artemis is an interesting choice for a renewed moonshot. A lunar goddess, she also signifies chastity, childbirth, and the hunt. An Aphrodite mission certainly would have symbolized an entirely different approach. Our work on this chapter coincided with Lisa Jean’s eighth-grade daughter Greta’s assignment to write a letter of recommendation for one of the nine women (out of eighteen astronauts) chosen for the Artemis missions. Greta selected Christina Koch, writing, While aboard the International Space Station for her long duration mission of 328 days, passing the original record of a woman’s stay on the ISS, Christina completed six spacewalks inspecting gear and learning about the dynamics of space. This is especially impressive because she is a pioneer of her time, when there is less female representation in the field of astronauts. On top of that, she was part of the first three all female spacewalks, and worked on bioprinting, studying kidney health, testing fire in space and growing space greens.

A few months later, Koch was selected as one of four astronauts, with three men, to be among Artemis’s first crew to venture around the Moon; she is the first woman on a lunar mission. In publicizing the Artemis program, NASA spotlights that its missions will also include the first person of color on the lunar surface. While constructing a mission team that reflects racial and gender diversity is beyond performative, with tangible benefits for those nonstandard humans who seek to travel to space, Artemis is also about impression management. As stated in a promotional video, “The history of this agency is marked with broken barriers once viewed as impossible”44 (https://www. nasa.gov/specials/artemis/). Images of people of color and women doing space-related

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jobs fill the screen. The video also promotes something called the “lunar economy” that purports it will create jobs and lead to commercial, international, and public partnerships. The Artemis program embodies NASA’s first Equity Action Plan designed to increase the diversity of space personnel. As NASA administrator Bill Nelson stated, “Fifty-five years ago, we were on the moon. Now we’re going back with the first woman and first person of color.”45 Eschewing the traditional fighter pilot mode of determining eligibility, the agency has expanded its pool to “any U.S. citizen with at least a master’s degree in a science or math field.”46 Artemis will focus largely on scientific discoveries and innovation. Astronaut Koch stated, “To be here at a time when we are pursuing these huge questions and going in these bold new directions is awesome . . . We have to do it for all and by all.” While NASA’s commitments to gender and racial diversity are important steps towards promoting greater representation, we wonder how traditional gender roles might be reinscribed in cisgendered female and male bodies. The Artemis mission interprets space as inclusive—indeed, it actually renders space more inclusive by sending diverse bodies—and yet habitual practices continue to frame only some bodies as problematic.

Reinscribing Space Almost thirty years after our 1995 study, women still face barriers to full participation in outer space, as they do in many fields, and often on the basis of their physiology.47 Yet the Artemis program explicitly foregrounds diversity, equity, and inclusion, with as many women participating as men. NASA also has a progressive LGBTQ+ policy and uses inclusive language. Menstrual suppression offers new avenues for participation in spaceflight, assuming spacesuits will fit smaller bodies and there is a sufficient supply. Reproduction in space is untethered to male bodies, creating flexibility of gender arrangements for long-term missions. Such missions and their colonizing goals vastly increase the likelihood—indeed, the desirability—of sex in space. This, in turn, invokes longstanding questions about heterosexual reproduction on missions, unless only cisgendered women travel to Mars, which opens up quite different sexual possibilities. Space is always a projection of Earthlings’ fantasies, fears, hopes, and dreams. There are many ways to reimagine space: in speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, cinema, novels, etc. Building on these alternate ways of being, what if our reimaginings inscripted space not as masculine or feminine, but simply as . . . space? What if space is not “the final frontier” for human greed and need and escape from the climate woes we have wrought, but . . . space? What would it mean to diversify space beyond simply changing the gender and race of those who travel to space? Can we even think productively with and through space outside of our established ways of knowing, our longings, our politics, and our limitations as a species? As scholars, mothers, and anti-racist feminists, we are invested in the answers to these questions. Nothing good will ever come from militarization and colonization of distant lands, no matter who is piloting the rocketship. And only good can come from

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creating more inclusive and equitable practices that center freedom for all, and not solely those with the capital to soar into space in phallic tubes. Contemporary space practices reflect shifting cultural meanings, for example, the inclusive Artemis missions existing side-by-side with a militarized US Space Force. We ended our original article with a reference to the popular phrase, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we [fill in the blank].”48 In popular culture, this phrase evoked the idea that if we had the technological capability and vision to send humans into space, then surely we could do other seemingly impossible things, such as ending poverty. Of course, we did not end poverty, nor resolve many of the other intractable social problems of our time. Updating the catchphrase for the twenty-first century, we might ask, “If we can put a woman or person of color on the moon, why can’t we [fill in the blank]?” This simple linguistic twist opens up new possibilities for human futures, both in outer space and on Earth. Because if we can put people other than white cisgendered men on the Moon, then perhaps we can begin to address other structural problems on Earth, beginning with the looming threat of planetary annihilation.

Notes 1 Casper, Monica J. and Lisa Jean Moore, “Inscribing Bodies, Inscribing the Future: Gender, Sex, and Reproduction in Outer Space,” Sociological Perspectives 38, no. 2 (1995). 2 Ibid., 312. 3 Ibid., 313. 4 Ibid., 325. 5 “Trump Created the Space Force. Here’s What It Will Actually Do” (2019), [Radio Program] NPR, December 21, 2019. 6 Casper and Moore, “Inscribing Bodies, Inscribing the Future”: 328. 7 Beall, Abigail, “Breaking the Glass Orbit,” New Scientist 243 (3240) (2019): 38-41; Bronwyn D. Lovell, “Sex and the Stars: The Enduring Structure of Gender Discrimination in the Space Industry,” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 18 (Spring 2021): 61–77. 8 Smiles, Deondre, “The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space,” Society+Space (October 26, 2020). 9 Margolis, Emily, “A Seat in the Cockpit: Recognizing and Replacing Biases with Gender Inclusive Language,” Smithsonian Magazine (April 5, 2021). 10 Garber, Steve, “Style Guide of NASA History Authors and Editors” (2012). Available online: https://history.nasa.gov/styleguide.html (accessed November 6, 2022). 11 Elias, Nicole, Rana Johnson, Danny Ovando, and Julia Ramirez, “Improving Transgender Policy for a More Equitable Workplace,” Journal of Public Management and Social Policy 24/25, no. 2/1 (2018): 53–81. 12 NASA, “NASA Guidelines on Gender Transition,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration (2022). Available online: https://odeo.hq.nasa.gov/documents/ Gender_Trans_Guide.pdf (accessed November 18, 2022). 13 Oman-Reagan, Michael, “Queering Outer Space,” SocArXiv, Open Science Framework (2015). Manuscript, submitted January 22, 2017. Available online: https://osf.io/ preprints/socarxiv/mpyk6/ (accessed July 22, 2022).

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14 Burgess, Colin, and Rex Hall, The First Soviet Cosmonaut Team: Their Lives and Legacies (Praxis, 2008). 15 Ghosh, Pallab, “Valentina Tereshkova: USSR Was ‘Worried’ About Women in Space,” BBC (September 17, 2015). 16 Glover, Ella, “Russia’s Only Female Cosmonaut is Made Into a Barbie Doll,” Independent (March 19, 2021). 17 Sherr, Lynn, “Sally Ride’s Secret: Why the First American Woman in Space Stayed in the Closet,” Slate (May 30, 2014). 18 Shetterly, Margot Lee. (2016), Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, New York: William Morrow. 19 Jemison, Mae. (2020), “I Was the First Woman of Color in Space. Here’s what Katherine Johnson Means to Me,” New York Times, February 29. 20 Contrera, Jessica. (2019), “She Was Pregnant When NASA Offered to Send Her to Space. Anna Fisher Didn’t Hesitate,” Washington Post, May 11. 21 Ibid. 22 Wilford, John Noble. (1984), “Shuttle Returns After a Triumph in Space Rescues,” New York Times, November 17. 23 Holt, Nathalia. (2017), Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars, Back Bay Books. 24 Ackmann, Martha. (2004), The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight, New York: Random House. 25 Jennings, Richard T. and Ellen S. Baker. (2000), “Gynecological and Reproductive Issues for Women in Space: A Review,” Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey, 55 (2): 109. 26 Lampland, Martha and Susan Leigh Star, eds. (2008), Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 27 Bobel, Chris, Ina T. Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Ann Hasson, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling, and Tomi-Ann Roberts, eds. (2020), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, Palgrave Macmillan Singapore. 28 Healey, Devlin. “There Are No Bras in Space: How Spaceflight Adapted to Women and How Women Adapt to Spaceflight.” Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 19, no. 3 (2018): 605. 29 Friedman, Ann. (2014), “Astronaut Sally Ride and the Burden of Being the First,” The American Prospect, June 19. 30 Koren, Marina. (2017), “Why Women Weren’t Allowed to be Astronauts,” The Atlantic, March 10. 31 Jain, Varsha and Virginia E. Wotring. (2016). “Medically Induced Amenorrhea in Female Astronauts,” npj Microgravity, 2 (16008). 32 Cantor, Matthew. (2019), “NASA Cancels All-Female Spacewalk, Citing Lack of Spacesuit in Right Size,” The Guardian, March 26. 33 Beck, Julie. (2016), “Women Astronauts: To Menstruate or Not to Menstruate,” The Atlantic, April 21. 34 Schiewe, M.C., K. Domagala, N.L. Nugent, and J. Shamonki. (2018), “Novel Cryopreservation of Human Sperm in Syringe Containers: An Experimental Model for Applied Research in Space,” Fertility and Sterility, 110 (4): e18. 35 Ogneva, Irina V., Maria A. Usik, Nikolay S. Biryukov, and Yuliya S. Zhdankina. (2020), “Sperm Motility of Mice under Simulated Microgravity and Hypergravity,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 21 (14): 5054.

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36 Matsumura, Takafumi, Taichi Noda, Masafumi Muratani, Risa Okada, Mutsumi Yamane, Ayako Isotani, Takashi Kudo, Satoru Takahashi, and Masahito Ikawa. (2019), “Male Mice, Caged in the International Space Station for 35 Days, Sire Healthy Offspring,” Scientific Reports, 9 (1): 13733. 37 Wakayama, Sayaka, Daiyu Ito, Yuko Kamada, Toru Shimazu, Tomomi Suzuki, Aiko Nagamatsu, and Ryoko Arak et al. “Evaluating the Long-term Effect of Space Radiation on the Reproductive Normality of Mammalian Sperm Preserved on the International Space Station.” Science Advances 9, no. 24 (2021). 38 Ahrari, K., T.S. Omolaoye, N. Goswami, H. Alsuwaidi, and S.S. du Plessis. (2022), “Effectives of Space Flight on Sperm Function and Integrity: A Systematic Review,” Frontiers in Physiology, 13 (August): 904375. 39 Moore, Lisa Jean. (2007), Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid, New York: New York University Press. 40 NEWS RX LLC. (2019), “Frozen Sperm Retains Its Viability in Outer Space Conditions,” Science News, June 24. 41 “Can You Nut in Space?” (2021), [Radio Program] Triple J, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 21. Available online: https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/ the-hook-up/can-you-nut-in-space/13464050 (accessed August 10, 2022). 42 Kim, Gene and Rebecca Wilkin. (2020), “What Would Happen if Humans Gave Birth in Space,” Business Insider, November 18. 43 Impey, Chris. (2021), “When Will the First Baby Be Born in Space?” The Conversation, May 21. 44 “Why the Moon?” (2021), [Video] NASA. August 24. Available online: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=bmC-FwibsZg (accessed October 16, 2022). 45 Byrne, Brendan. (2023), “How NASA Is Selecting the Next Astronauts to Walk on the Moon,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 26. 46 Ibid. 47 Lovell, Bronwyn D. (2021), “Sex and the Stars: The Enduring Structure of Gender Discrimination in the Space Industry,” Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 18 (Spring): 61-77. 48 Casper, Monica J. and Lisa Jean Moore. (1995), “Inscribing Bodies, Inscribing the Future: Gender, Sex, and Reproduction in Outer Space,” Sociological Perspectives, 38 (2): 327.

References Ackmann, Martha. (2004), The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight, New York: Random House. Ahrari, K., T.S. Omolaoye, N. Goswami, H. Alsuwaidi, and S.S. du Plessis. (2022), “Effectives of Space Flight on Sperm Function and Integrity: A Systematic Review,” Frontiers in Physiology, 13 (August): 904375. Beall, Abigail. (2019), “Breaking the Glass Orbit.” New Scientist 243(3240): 38–41. Beck, Julie. (2016), “Women Astronauts: To Menstruate or Not to Menstruate,” The Atlantic, April 21. Bobel, Chris, Ina T. Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Ann Hasson, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling, and Tomi-Ann Roberts, eds. (2020), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, Palgrave Macmillan Singapore.

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Burgess, Colin and Rex Hall. (2008), The First Soviet Cosmonaut Team: Their Lives and Legacies, Praxis. Byrne, Brendan. (2023), “How NASA Is Selecting the Next Astronauts to Walk on the Moon,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 26. Cantor, Matthew. (2019), “NASA Cancels All-Female Spacewalk, Citing Lack of Spacesuit in Right Size,” The Guardian, March 26. “Can You Nut in Space?” (2021), [Radio Program] Triple J, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 21. Available online: https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/ the-hook-up/can-you-nut-in-space/13464050 (accessed August 10, 2022). Casper, Monica J. and Lisa Jean Moore. (1995), “Inscribing Bodies, Inscribing the Future: Gender, Sex, and Reproduction in Outer Space,” Sociological Perspectives, 38 (2): 311–333. Contrera, Jessica. (2019), “She Was Pregnant When NASA Offered to Send Her to Space. Anna Fisher Didn’t Hesitate,” Washington Post, May 11. Elias, Nicole, Rana Johnson, Danny Ovando, and Julia Ramirez. (2018), “Improving Transgender Policy for a More Equitable Workplace,” Journal of Public Management and Social Policy, 24/25 (2/1): 53–81. Friedman, Ann. (2014), “Astronaut Sally Ride and the Burden of Being the First,” The American Prospect, June 19. Garber, Steve. (2012), “Style Guide of NASA History Authors and Editors.” Available online: https://history.nasa.gov/styleguide.html (accessed November 6, 2022). Ghosh, Pallab. (2015), “Valentina Tereshkova: USSR Was ‘Worried’ About Women in Space,” BBC, September 17. Glover, Ella. (2021), “Russia’s Only Female Cosmonaut is Made Into a Barbie Doll,” The Independent, March 19. Healey, Devlin. “There Are No Bras in Space: How Spaceflight Adapted to Women and How Women Adapt to Spaceflight.” Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 19, no. 3 (2018): 605. Holt, Nathalia. (2017), Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars, Back Bay Books. Impey, Chris. (2021), “When Will the First Baby Be Born in Space?” The Conversation, May 21. Jain, Varsha and Virginia E. Wotring. (2016). “Medically Induced Amenorrhea in Female Astronauts,” npj Microgravity, 2 (16008). Jemison, Mae. (2020), “I Was the First Woman of Color in Space. Here’s what Katherine Johnson Means to Me,” New York Times, February 29. Jennings, Richard T. and Ellen S. Baker. (2000), “Gynecological and Reproductive Issues for Women in Space: A Review,” Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey, 55 (2): 109. Kim, Gene and Rebecca Wilkin. (2020), “What Would Happen if Humans Gave Birth in Space,” Business Insider, November 18. Koren, Marina. (2017), “Why Women Weren’t Allowed to be Astronauts,” The Atlantic, March 10. Lampland, Martha and Susan Leigh Star, eds. (2008), Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lovell, Bronwyn D. (2021), “Sex and the Stars: The Enduring Structure of Gender Discrimination in the Space Industry,” Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 18 (Spring): 61–77.

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Margolis, Emily. (2021), “A Seat in the Cockpit: Recognizing and Replacing Biases with Gender Inclusive Language,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 5, 2021. Matsumura, Takafumi, Taichi Noda, Masafumi Muratani, Risa Okada, Mutsumi Yamane, Ayako Isotani, Takashi Kudo, Satoru Takahashi, and Masahito Ikawa. (2019), “Male Mice, Caged in the International Space Station for 35 Days, Sire Healthy Offspring,” Scientific Reports, 9 (1): 13733. Moore, Lisa Jean. (2007), Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid, New York: New York University Press. Morden, Simon. (2022), “Thriving on Mars,” Aeon, December 6. NASA. (2022), “NASA Guidelines on Gender Transition.” National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Available online: https://odeo.hq.nasa.gov/documents/Gender_Trans_ Guide.pdf (accessed November 18, 2022). NEWS RX LLC. (2019), “Frozen Sperm Retains Its Viability in Outer Space Conditions,” Science News, June 24. Ogneva, Irina V., Maria A. Usik, Nikolay S. Biryukov, and Yuliya S. Zhdankina. (2020), “Sperm Motility of Mice under Simulated Microgravity and Hypergravity,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 21 (14): 5054. Oman-Reagan, Michael. (2015), “Queering Outer Space,” SocArXiv, Open Science Framework. Manuscript, submitted January 22, 2017. Available online: https://osf.io/ preprints/socarxiv/mpyk6/ (accessed July 22, 2022). Schiewe, M.C., K. Domagala, N.L. Nugent, and J. Shamonki. (2018), “Novel Cryopreservation of Human Sperm in Syringe Containers: An Experimental Model for Applied Research in Space,” Fertility and Sterility, 110 (4): e18. Sherr, Lynn. (2014), “Sally Ride’s Secret: Why the First American Woman in Space Stayed in the Closet,” Slate, May 30. Shetterly, Margot Lee. (2016), Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, New York: William Morrow. Smiles, Deondre. (2020), “The Settler Logics of (Outer) Space,” Society+Space, October 26. “Trump Created the Space Force. Here’s What It Will Actually Do” (2019), [Radio Program] NPR, December 21, 2019. “Why the Moon?” (2021), [Video] NASA. August 24. Available online: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=bmC-FwibsZg (accessed October 16, 2022). Wilford, John Noble. (1984), “Shuttle Returns After a Triumph in Space Rescues,” New York Times, November 17.

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Part Three

Space Feminisms, Space Sciences, and Engineering

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3.1 Space Feminisms Roundtable

Although astronauts are the canonical space profession, space exploration encompasses a wide range of trades. The Space Feminisms editorial team puts in conversation an astrophysicist, an engineer, a designer, an activist, and a law specialist to discuss their work in the space sector. They engage with the heterogeneous lineages that feminism, as a theory and practice, has invented and propagated how we Earthlings mobilize activities and imaginaries of outer space in the present and its anticipated futures. Their responses were assembled asynchronously and edited for length and clarity. SF

Space Feminisms editorial team

MO Mazlan Othman JN

Jessie Ndaba

SM Susmita Mohanty JS

Jill Stuart

LW Lucianne Walkowicz SF Should humans endeavor to settle permanently on Mars? SM I don’t think we need to move hundreds of thousands of humans to Mars. What we need is to have a limited yet continuous human presence on Mars after we have done so on the Moon. On Mars, we should test our hypothesis about terraforming, develop suitable communication and transportation technologies, experiment with 3D printing using Martian regolith to develop local infrastructure, develop other in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) technologies to minimize supplies from Earth, and adapt our life support systems to support human presence in Martian conditions. We should stay clear of any kind of military or mining activities on both the Moon and Mars. As with Antarctica, I would imagine the demographics and diversity for both Moon and Mars exploration would include people from around the world. JN If people want to explore, let it be. We must be careful to not repeat the same mistakes we have done on Earth. As a space engineer, I may be biased, but I support human beings living on other planets because the lessons learned could be used on Earth. If we think of the droughts that hit Cape Town five years ago, knowing how to 71

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survive in an area with few natural resources, and without the necessary infrastructure, could help us invent ways to survive on Earth. JS Generally, yes. There is a risk of being reckless and recreating the problems we have on Earth. It is arrogant to assume that we have the right to do so. “Colonization” is a loaded term, although it could be accurate if settlements are going to be implemented aggressively. Otherwise “settlement” is a better word. We need more discussions on the ethics of settlements and reflections on our responsibility towards multiple environments and other life forms. Our potential to approach the process in a sustainable, responsible, transparent, and collaborative way is perhaps overly optimistic, but it does not mean that it is not something we should aspire to. LW Space settlements offer an opportunity to think about how we live on Earth and to interrogate what we take for granted, whether it is physical or social structures. I would appreciate a pause on planning a settlement on Mars. Language around coloniality should be dismantled from space exploration entirely, but settlement is not an unloaded word either. We must consider the sovereignty of environments and our motivations for going. Many of the challenges that are built into space exploration could be tested in environments on Earth, which may not have the negative consequences of going to another world and potentially impacting the history of another possible biosphere. Asking whether there should be a settlement is ambiguous. What is the settlement? Who is there? Responses vary depending on who is answering the question. MO Absolutely. Maybe not next year because we are not yet ready for it. It is inevitable as it is innate in humans to explore. There is a problem of ethics and morality. How do we ensure that a Mars settlement will be fair? The space billionaire will get the first trips, while people in Malaysia will not have the means to go. Even if it will cause disparities to widen, it does not mean that we should not have the ambition of going. What we can do is talk about these issues today. People are arguing over the role of the current space treaties and conventions. We must go beyond those because they do not address ethics. For example, we must ensure that whatever life we have not yet discovered remains pristine. We must come up with codes of conduct and guidelines. We should not stop the space cowboys. Instead of reining them in, we must sit down and discuss the social norms that we can put in place. Sociologists should be calling the shots, not just the engineers, and especially not just the lawyers, as the law cannot keep up with the latest technology, it just reacts to it. JS The existing international regime to govern the cosmos is a useful starting point. Five main treaties were established in the 1960s and 1970s, which make up the legal infrastructure to regulate state behavior in and for outer space. They use a language that is noble and altruistic. They state that outer space is the “common province of all mankind,” exploration should be used for the benefit of all countries, and that celestial bodies are to be used for “peaceful purposes.” They also deny the ability of any nation-state to appropriate or occupy celestial territory. The treaties are in some ways problematic. They are a relic of the time in which they were established. For example, although they say that no nation-state may claim

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ownership over outer space, they do not say the same for companies. Some people argue that we should wipe the slate clean and do away with these treaties altogether. However I believe they are a good backbone for us to build upon. Treaties are important because they constrain certain behaviors and give a shared trajectory for what we want for space. If they were to be done away with, this would open the possibility for many voices to be heard, but also for potential abuse of the environment, of each other, and of our actions within it. There is no enforcement mechanism for international law, but we know that countries at least nominally respect the outer space treaties because when countries violate their terms, they tend to justify their actions using the language of the treaties themselves. Instead of abandoning the pre-existing legal infrastructure, we need to layer additional regulation, norms, principles, and agreements to unpack what we have, and make them suitable for the contemporary space environment. SF How do you foresee the relationship between science, engineering, and the commercialization of space? SM Commercialization is inevitable as governments outsource routine spacecraft manufacturing and launching activities to the private industry. Downstream earth applications using space assets are best done commercially while the government spends tax dollars on R&D. Private companies are starting to have as much control and say over outer space activities as government agencies had in the last century. Unfettered and unregulated commercialization has led to mega satellite constellations and casual space tourism is also starting to happen. This will further compound the already dangerous orbital debris situation in low earth orbit (LEO) that nobody wants to take responsibility for. This is a huge concern because we are now seeing colonization 2.0 in LEO. Allowing a single private company like SpaceX to put up 42,000 satellites is similar to a land grab on Earth. What next? Lunar mining? Messing around with the Martian atmosphere? LW The history of space exploration is an entangled mess of commercial and national state efforts and geopolitics, which is unlikely to change unless there is a broad move to support other modes of being and thinking. In the United States, the increased autonomy of private interests has coincided with a series of supportive political regimes that led to fast-paced bad decision making. If we continue, we will be looking at either a planet that is locked to itself, because of its near-Earth orbital debris situation, or at half-baked projects in space, because they were not created with a sustainability mindset. It is difficult to turn a profit on space. Asteroid mining was popular a few years ago but several of those companies are now out of business. A concerning long-lasting impact is the reframing of space as a realm of extraction. I am also concerned about the reframing of space as a theater of war, which has been a major theme in the past years. JN In South Africa, we cannot wait on government grants. Because of a lack of continuity in leadership, new ministers do not understand previously approved projects and often demand that the initiatives they support be launched during their time in office. There is never enough funding to ensure that we make it on time, which

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is why most of us have decided to commercialize what we do. The technology we develop has to cater to the people. We cannot continue building satellites and later ask people to see what they will do with them. If you are a business person or entrepreneur, you have to cater for somebody else’s needs. You have to understand your market to generate revenue. Commercializing space is the way to go for most of us because we are from a continent that is very stringent when it comes to finances. SF

What is the most recalcitrant issue in the space community?

SM The military-industrial complex. Wars have become an extremely profitable industry and aerospace is integral to it. In addition to terrestrial and airborne warfare, we now have cyber wars and the reemergence of aggressive space militarization. We are wasting billions on unnecessary wars. This adversely impacts research funding necessary for developing future and far-future technologies such as advanced modes of space transportation, advanced materials and advanced life-support systems, to name a few. MO The fear of militarization. For the longest time, at the Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, several countries did not want to talk about the militarization or weaponization of space because they wanted an explicit delineation with peaceful uses. Now, people understand that you cannot discuss peaceful uses without a clear understanding of what might not make it peaceful. When I was in office, we were not allowed to arrange activities with the Geneva Office for Disarmament Affairs. Today, the General Assembly in the UN recognizes that we must talk about the prevention of an armed race in space. Why are we not seeing that as an issue when many countries have the capability to shoot down satellites and bring weapons in space? It is best to talk about it rather than pretending it will not happen. The elephant in the room must be finally brought into the conversation. LW Capitalism. The velocity built into capitalist modes of thought about space exploration. One impact is the increased role of the private industry in reframing what we do in space. It demands an unwarranted immediacy of actions focused on profit rather than human lifetimes, which, leads to poor decision making. We must think in a multigenerational way to make decisions that allow us to live sustainably on this planet, and to explore space without foreclosing certain futures because of the motivations of the present. JS Geopolitics. We project our politics on Earth to outer space, which, in turn, reconstitutes politics on Earth, both positively and negatively. When relations between the United States and Russia improved at the end of the Cold War, collaboration between the two on the International Space Station benefitted diplomatic relations between them on Earth. Conversely, as relations between major space players like Russia, China, and the United States have deteriorated on Earth, it has impacted collaboration and cooperation between them in space activities. For instance, since the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine, the United States and Russia have bumped heads over activity on the International Space Station.As the United States has become more wary of China’s rising power in international relations, they have blocked Chinese scientists

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from attending conferences in the United States by refusing to grant them visiting visas. SM I would add that regulatory and export control hurdles are a big issue when it comes to working across geographies. Take ITAR [International Traffic in Arms Regulations], for example. It is a set of export control regulations administered by the US State Department. ITAR is a product of the Cold War era; it hinders international space cooperation and global space business, yet little has been done to reform it or adapt it to the new realities. Another matter of concern is that international cooperation is often done for “strategic reasons” and not for genuine friendship and global good. JN Being misunderstood. People often think that space is only about the stars or going to the Moon or Mars. They wonder why our government should support space programs when we face so many challenges around unemployment, housing, and food security. But they do not understand how space research can benefit how they live. The importance of having space-based solutions for ensuring that our decision makers make informed decisions is misunderstood. For example, people can no longer rely on traditional ways of farming because of climate change. To make informed decisions, they need a global understanding of what is happening in relation to weather and the environment and that comes from research in outer space. We need to work with everyone to be able to communicate what we do. We have been working in silos for too long, and we need to bridge that gap and ensure that space benefits everyone. SF What opportunities do women, non-binary people, and underrepresented communities have today, or will soon, in the space community that you’re most excited about? JN Most governments offer women empowerment initiatives. We are being recognized now, in most countries. We need to ensure that we reach out and instruct girls when they are young. We also need old people to support education at home. Because engineers are not trained to communicate in a manner that is attractive to the youth, we need to work with people who can. JS As a woman, I used to feel like a token when I was invited to panels. I have seen an improvement, but there is more to be done. We can also look at the diversity issue from an international perspective. When I was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Space Policy, I witnessed an increase in researchers from Latin America, India, and Asia contributing to research and dialogue. Outer space activity and research is still an elite club, but I have seen an increase in opportunities for a diverse range of people, and it has been positive to hear a wider scope of voices represented. SM It is utterly shameful that it took more than half a century since the onset of human spaceflight in the early 1960s to have an all-women spacewalk. When I started working in the aerospace industry in 1998, among major space-faring countries, I’d say NASA and ISRO had the best gender ratios. Over the last 25 years, CNES and ESA seem to have caught up rather well and JAXA too has increased female participation in their space workforce. We have had a woman head the Malaysian Space Agency, the

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German Space Agency (DLR), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) as well as international bodies such as the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UN-OOSA). Also, in the past decade we are starting to see plenty of young women at international space conferences. ESA is the first space agency to have launched a para-astronaut program. I hope others will follow and even non-binary people should be included in the astronaut selection process. Let us hope that these milestones will not take decades to accomplish. For that, we need to overhaul mindsets. LW One persistent issue for underrepresented people in the space sector is the pressure to cosplay as someone else, whether it is adopting the aggressive, toxic behaviors that we see in patriarchal spaces or conforming to white ways of being. There is pressure on those of us who are trans to not be open about our identities or risk being further marginalized. This is also true for racial minorities who encounter a tremendous amount of racism. There are more opportunities than ever to be yourself and to be recognized in the space sciences. The flip side is the terrible trolling. There is greater opportunity for people who are marginalized to connect with people and with grassroots organizations who are dedicated to uplifting marginalized people in the space sector, but there is a long way to go before people can be who they are. For instance, at NASA, despite examples of diversity in the astronaut corps and space workforce, the administration is fundamentally underpinned by a lot of thinking that is rooted in whiteness, cis-sexism, and heterosexual patriarchy. That is evident in their handling of the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope. MO I am the most excited about developing countries who are underrepresented in the United Nations and in sciences and technology fields more broadly. It may not be a gender issue, because women in the United States and Europe are well represented, even if not 50/50. The underrepresentation of developing countries is more tragic. Developing countries must take an interest in space. They wrongly think it is esoteric and that they don’t have the money or resources. This is wrong, because if we mine precious metals in space and bring them back to Earth, the prices of the commodity minerals would drop drastically and ruin the mining industry, creating more inequalities in developing countries. It is easier to convince governments to pay attention to economic issues rather than to ethical ones. Therefore, we can emphasize the economic issue and bring the focus on how we share space resources. SF What role models are needed to attract women, non-binary people, or other underrepresented communities in the space sector? MO I do not see any need for a role model to provide that inspiration. The inspiration is that the barrier to entry in the space industry has been lowered. Thanks to this phenomenon called NewSpace, the private sector plays a dominant role towards the production of commercial and off-the-shelf components. Previously, everything in the space technology area was proprietary, cloak-and-dagger, or a secret. Today, information is available widely. High school students are building satellites. Even Malaysia has space

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startups. With time, there will be more startups by young people in developing countries. LW Role models are important, but what needs to happen is a restructuring of the power dynamics in the workforce. Right now, we are seeing a neoliberal approach to diversity. People aren’t checkmarks. Another problem that marginalized people face is that the power structures that enabled space sciences to be non-diverse for so long are still in place. Underrepresented people may find entry in the sector, but face difficulty advancing into senior and tenure-track positions. The price for trying is often harassment. The hierarchical power structures that allow people to commit bad behavior and to persecute people who occupy identities that have less power than they do are still in place. Bringing people who are marginalized does only so much to disrupt those power structures. Instead of only allowing people access into a system that is fundamentally working only for one group of people, we need to seriously rethink how we work and make things together. JS We need to bring in the subtle differences in language and work culture that come with having a more diverse workforce. There are unique challenges around attracting women to STEM disciplines, which has led to the creation of a patriarchal masculine work environment. SF

Have you ever had imposter syndrome?

LW I have battled with it. Reading about it and coming to view it as something that is common, fake, and evolving—a specter that haunts you, and that will reform itself into your current anxiety—was helpful to me. I have learned to recognize that the feeling might come up, but that it does not mean anything about me. JS I have had it terribly. It is something I have dealt with my whole career. Reading about it led me to see it more objectively rather than emotionally. I now try to consciously develop my own counternarratives regarding my own capabilities, and thus challenge my harsh inner critic. Realizing it is more common in women was strangely comforting, to know that I was not alone in feeling like a fraud. But I don’t think it is something I will ever get over. I will have to continue to push back against my own negative thoughts about myself. JN Not really. I want to be the stupid one in the room. I pay no heed to those who ask why I am there. I know that I have earned my seat at the table. As a black woman I had to come down to the Western Cape and there were not many black women in the area. Some colleagues did not know how to behave around me. I am not going to shy away from it. Some are used to black women being people who would help them in their homes. Now, there is a black woman placed in their workplace they have to work with. At first, it was a challenge. It forced me to work harder until they learned to embrace me. We need more women in this sector because women do not have big egos and are all for nurturing. MO I never felt like an imposter. When I fail, I never think it is because I am female. Rather, I wonder if I got the narrative or the politics wrong. Because I am female,

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I attracted women to the field and there are more female astrophysicists in this country than males. I always knew I had to lead. I only feel like an imposter when people put me in a position where they think that as a scientist, I can solve several STEM problems. SF What concrete strategies for an equitable and inclusive future do you put in action? JN When I was at the International Space University, I learned that countries in Africa are so poor that when people are given seeds to plant, they cannot afford to wait for them to grow, so they cook them. I am a space engineer to ensure that I have an input in the development of our continent. Compared to other continents, Africa is a blank canvas; there is a lot of development that needs to take place. There are several remote areas that cause educated people to migrate, and this creates a void for people in the rural and remote parts of the continent. There are schools in Africa where subjects like maths are not taught—not because the students aren’t interested, but because there are no teachers. Using outer space, we can reach out to those remote parts. Every kid has the right to education, the right to choose what they want to study. At Astrofica, our goal is to have a constellation of satellites for communication. At first, our focus was on Earth observation, but since you cannot use Earth observation satellites to provide education or tele-health, we asked engineers in the sector if they had payloads that could fly our satellites. Because this cannot yield results now, we ran a multidisciplinary internship with engineering, human resources, marketing, and architecture graduates. We realized that for space to grow, and to sustain what we are doing as space professionals, we need everyone on board. LW We are far from maximizing a social framework inclusivity in space. We have so much work on Earth. At JustSpace Alliance, we use people’s excitement about space to create those futures today on Earth. I have a long history in anti-imperialist and anti-war organizing. I am part of a black liberation collective here in Chicago. JustSpace is a continuation of my life’s work. I despise geopolitical borders, internal categorizations, and false boundaries. Anarchism offers many opportunities that allow us to pursue inclusivity in a way that is not neoliberal. JustSpace was founded as a hub and connector between people working in different disciplines that would normally never talk to each other, but who have input into what space exploration can or should look like. Our intention has never been to be the people who have all of the answers. JS In Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), we develop multidisciplinary approaches to expand the conversation, not just in terms of integrating different voices from different parts of the human community, but also through looking at interspecies communication and the ethics of anthropocentrism. This creates an opportunity to look holistically at the way we potentially communicate who we are. METI’s tagline is, “We search the universe to discover ourselves.” Aside from the opportunity of potentially making contact with extraterrestrial life, a lot of what we do is to think about how we perceive and represent ourselves and communicate with each other.

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SF What is your biggest achievement? JN Having worked on the development of the technology to build SumbandilaSat, the first African government-owned satellite that launched in Russia in 2009. We used the intellectual property we developed for SumbandilaSat to build many other international satellites. It had a huge impact on my career as a space engineer. Also, the hyperspectral solutions that we are currently developing. In South Africa, we get multispectral data, which does not cater for the challenges of the continent because Africans do multicropping. Unlike multispectral data, hyperspectral data can differentiate the types of plants and give us the information we need. JS Three things stand out. First, getting my PhD, because it is something that can never be taken away. Second, getting involved in a domestic abuse charity in the UK. Third, being feminist-trolled. On the latter: I was quoted in newspapers in 2015 for talking about the portrayal of the male and female figures on the Voyager discs, which was seized upon as overzealous “feminist political correctness hysteria.” I received anonymous rape and death threats online as well as physical hate mail at my university. The odious messages I received mostly focused on very personal aspects of my identity. There were forums where people speculated that I must not be white, that I must be a lesbian, and that I “wasn’t getting laid enough.” It quickly became sexual, racist, homophobic, and misogynistic. At the time, it seemed like a calamity, but my best friend helped me to choose to wear it as a badge of honor. At first, I was upset, but now I feel it is an achievement to have generated such a strong reaction. LW First, being the chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress (2017–18). One of my strengths is bringing people into dialogue in transdisciplinary settings. Creating more opportunities for cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, which is essential to how we think about going to space, was professionally satisfying. It culminated in the co-founding of the JustSpace Alliance with Erica Nesvold. Second, my role as an educator. In 2015, I founded the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Data Science Fellowship program for astronomy graduate students. We teach them technical skills and how to collaborate. Rebuilding education outside of academia where I could teach students to work well together and to be good colleagues has been fulfilling. MO When I was seconded by the prime minister’s department to start the Malaysian space program, I decided to set up a planetarium instead of an observatory. People wondered why I did not recommend building an observatory, which would have benefited me. I thought that it would not serve any good because I would be the only one observing; I could not build a critical mass, and the public would not understand the importance of space. To advance the understanding and appreciation of space science, I had to advocate it to the public, and not to my fellow researchers. My goal was to bring space to the Malaysian public so they would understand and appreciate it, and, as a result of that, I paved the way for the younger generation to have a career in space. SM Two big accomplishments, I’d say. One: working on the Boeing site in Huntington Beach, California despite being a foreign national. It is nearly impossible for foreign nationals to work on sites where rockets (or any other kind of dual-purpose

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technologies) are manufactured. Both, me and my employer had to go through very complex legal, security, and export control procedures and protocols to make the impossible possible. Two: taking on a US embargo. In 1998, the United States imposed an embargo on India for having conducted nuclear tests. Under this embargo, US companies were not allowed to sell space components to India. So, launching a US satellite on an Indian rocket was out of the question. After I launched my third venture Earth2Orbit, I engaged in a new kind of technology diplomacy. I met with more than a dozen diplomats and bureaucrats in DC and Delhi over five years to make it possible for E2O’s US launch client Skybox Imaging to sign a first-ever launch agreement with the commercial arm of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). We launched Skysat on the Indian PSLV rocket in June 2016. We made history. It was like bringing down a mini-Berlin Wall. I feel being a woman has its advantages. We women are good at understanding intangibles, anticipating outcomes, dealing with complexities, brokering peace, and structuring arguments rather well in delicate and difficult situations.

3.2 In Conversation with Astronaut Jessica Meir

Figure 3.2.1 Astronaut Jessica Meir. Drew Morgan / NASA. See Plate Section 2

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Space Feminisms editorial team

JM

Jessica Meir

SF What is the greatest challenge that you had to face in your career, and how did you work through it? JM Before I had my baby, I would have said that the biggest challenge in my career was ending my mission on the International Space Station. Six months is when most people are ready to go home. They’re not miserable by any means, but they feel ready to return to their family and friends and life on Earth. I was there for almost seven months and never hit that point at all. I wanted more time for looking out the window, taking pictures, just being there, floating all the time, all of it! I was not ready to leave. I would have much rather stayed for a year, or longer. We launched September of 2019 and saw COVID play out from the Space Station. I returned to Earth at the worst time possible—April 2020. I’m now bracing myself for what is certainly going to be the biggest challenge: finding the right balance between returning to my job as an astronaut and taking care 81

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of my child. I’m used to doing everything 110 percent. How do you do two things at that level? I feel like it’s impossible to do either completely how I would want to. I am open to advice here! SF

What was your greatest moment of triumph or greatest achievement?

JM I had always dreamed about not just going to space, but of floating in my own, mini, self-contained spacecraft—my space suit. My first spacewalk was only a few weeks after arriving on the space station. Spacewalks are the riskiest and most challenging activities we do as astronauts, and at that point I was still learning how to float and figure out my body in space! I was very fortunate to conduct three spacewalks, all three of which were the first all-female spacewalks with my friend and crewmate Christina Koch. I didn’t think about it philosophically at the time. We were focused on completing the mission and keeping each other safe. I remember thinking, “It just happened to be women this time, why is it such a big deal?” Now I have had time to reflect on the significance of it. Christina and I were doing what we’d been trained to do, but we had that opportunity because of all the hard work that was put in before. That’s not something that I take lightly. I regard the big moment that people celebrate not as a personal achievement but as a way to pay tribute to the generations of women and other minorities that had come before us. They truly pushed boundaries and broke the glass ceilings that enabled that spacewalk. SF

How did you prepare for the walk?

JM The spacewalk was a testament to our hours and hours of training in the spacesuit in the neutral buoyancy lab. We learned to rely on that muscle memory. I didn’t find it psychologically challenging to be walking in the vacuum of space, though it was absolutely extraordinary! Christina and I became astronauts in 2013 in the same class. We formed a very special bond. We knew each other’s tendencies, characteristics, failings—all of the good and bad that you kind of know about like with your family. I call her my astro-sister. SF How would you assemble a crew to travel to and live long-term beyond Earth? JM There are countless studies on Earth now that show that diverse teams are more successful, happier, and more content. In sending a crew to the space station, to the Moon, or to Mars—especially when we start thinking about these larger-scale endeavors in the future and potential colonies—we need to represent everybody. We need a diversity of thought, experiences, and backgrounds so that everybody can bring their piece to the puzzle. A complex problem demands a lot of creativity. We need biologists, we need engineers, we need artists, we need musicians. We need to have all of these facets represented to function as a complete society like we do here on Earth. You know, there haven’t been any children in space yet! We have to see whether or not they would even develop in the same way in microgravity.

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SF How do you view your role and career in relation to the young girls and women that will be coming after you? JM The very first time I was in the training pool [neutral buoyancy facility] was with one of my classmates, Josh Cassada. Working in the suits is very awkward, because the space suit is so massive and is pressurized. I looked over and saw Josh and thought, “Oh, cool, Josh is in a space suit!” And then I thought, “Wait a minute, I’m in a space suit right now?!” It is still difficult to believe sometimes that it is me in that iconic blue flight suit now, but it comes with enormous responsibility. I see it as our duty to pay it forward and to educate and inspire the next generation. It is incredibly important to disseminate our scientific findings to people of all ages and backgrounds so that they can understand why we are doing what we are doing. It’s the people’s work. SF Who would you put in the Space Hall of Fame, and why? What influence and impact did this person have on your career? JM To me, a role model who really embodies that spirit of exploration and championing the advancement of women and underrepresented people in aviation is Amelia Earhart. She defied gender roles from a very early age. She played basketball. She took an auto repair course and attended college back when women just didn’t do that. She went on to be the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and from Hawaii to the mainland. We’re celebrating the fact that we have an all-female spacewalk in 2019—and Amelia Earhart accomplished all that a hundred years ago. I also think of the group that became known as the Mercury 13. It was not an official NASA program, but led by a physician who questioned if women could accomplish the same tests and physical challenges as the all-male Mercury 7 candidates. Jerrie Cobb, Wally Funk, and others certainly had all the skills that astronauts have now, but they never had the opportunity to fly. Male astronauts became the norm and reinforced the idea that women weren’t capable. I thought a lot more about this when I met Wally Funk at a joint interview before I went to space. She’s still sprightly and full of ideas. That day, Wally gave me a postcard with her picture on it. I flew that postcard with me to the space station, took a picture of it, and sent it to her when I got back. She finally fulfilled her dream of going to space on her Blue Origin flight in 2021. I knew Peggy Whitson twenty years ago when I worked at NASA before I went to grad school. By the time I came back, Peggy held some of the records in outer space. Previous generations of women allowed me to be successful and to be here talking with you today. I don’t take it lightly. I hope that they understand that we appreciate them so very much. The Russians flew the first woman in 1963 and American women could have done that then too. When I was training in Russia, Valentina Tereshkova would still come to the departure breakfasts before the launch on the Soyuz. I remember this stoic woman with this incredible white streak in her hair, standing with all the other Russians making the toasts. She is a formidable figure.

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SF How did your training for and then being in outer space, in an alien environment, shift your perception of your body? JM It’s a surreal sensory overload for the first few days on the space station. It was almost like I was hallucinating. I had to learn how to navigate and perceive myself in this three-dimensional volumetric space. My brain had mapped out the space station during training in a way that it felt normal working on the deck. But when I had to jump up to what we would call the ceiling to get a piece of equipment—feeling like Spider-Man!—I could actually physically feel my brain do this kind of flip-flop sensation. My brain would interpret the ceiling as the floor. That perception went away after about two weeks, as the brain became accustomed to the new environment. It would be so cool to have an EEG or an MRI of a human brain of a first-time astronaut going to space. I’m sure that they form new neural pathways as they become accustomed to weightlessness, because returning crew members don’t struggle in the same way. None of us are very graceful in those first days in space! When somebody comes up for the second or third time, even if it’s been five or ten years, they must already have those established neural networks, as they are much more adept from the start. SF Being pregnant, like being in space, is a strange corporeal experience that only some people get to do or choose to do. Did you ever make the connection between the two experiences? JM I did think about that a lot. My egg was in space before my daughter was born. So half of her DNA has been in space! There’s a kind of cosmic connection. It is physiologically far more challenging being pregnant and having a baby than it is going to space. The first time I got out of bed to walk after my C-section, I actually felt a bit like I did when I first got back to Earth. My legs were really heavy. I couldn’t quite straighten up all the way because of my abdominal muscle trauma. I felt really disoriented and out-of-sorts. It was like those first crappy moments of returning to gravity. Some people have space motion sickness for the first few days. I didn’t have that at all going up. It sounds kind of cheesy, but I just felt like I was finally at home in terms of floating around. Within a few weeks, floating felt so incredibly normal. I remember thinking how weird it would be to put shoes on and walk around. SF

Has becoming a mother broadened your awareness?

JM Absolutely. It’s a special thing that you really don’t understand until you experience it. My husband and I look at each other: we made her. Now she’s here as this tiny human that we’re responsible for. She’s been growing for two months solely on my breast milk. The fact that that’s even possible feels almost like a miracle. I was kind of struggling with making that decision to post about my pregnancy but I felt like it was my responsibility. Out of my astronaut class of four women and four men, there were thirteen children between us. But guess how many of those children were on the women’s side? Just one! Now with my daughter, there are two!

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Countless people, even well-educated people that I really respect, said to me, “Oh, you had a baby so you’re not an astronaut anymore.” Why should my previous life end just because I decided to have a child? Would they have ever said such a thing to a man? It drives me crazy. I want to show other women that they don’t have to choose between a career and a family. Had I not gone to space yet, I probably would have thought differently about it. I think because I had already proven myself professionally, it was easier for me to be authentic. SF You’re shortlisted to go on the Artemis mission. You’re still in training for that. What would it mean to you to go to the Moon? JM I’ve become an astronaut. I’ve gone to space. I’ve done a spacewalk. But the Moon is the thing that captured my imagination from when I was a small child. The image that I drew in first grade was of an astronaut standing on the surface of the Moon next to the American flag—that iconic Apollo era image. Going to the Moon would be the culmination of all of that. I think a lot about the Earthrise image that was taken during the Apollo 8 mission. Seeing our planet from the outside was absolutely pivotal in creating the environmental movement and shifting the course of history. We gained a deeper understanding that the Earth is not only special and beautiful, but also fragile and totally unique. As an avid environmentalist, being on another planetary body and looking back toward the Earth is a moment I still dream about. We do things at NASA incrementally. It’s time for us to take that next step before we can go even further to Mars. The Moon is a stepping stone toward the next great exploration.

3.3 In Conversation with Astronaut Soyeon Yi

Figure 3.3.1 Astronaut Soyeon Yi. Courtesy of Soyeon Yi. See Plate Section 2

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Space Feminisms editorial team

SY

Soyeon Yi

SF You were both the first Korean astronaut and the first woman in that space program. Tell us about that. SY When I trained as a mechanical engineer, I was the only woman present most of the time (aside from the secretaries). My Korean colleagues were awkward rather than outwardly discriminatory. The culture at the Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia was harsh. Activities were strictly gendered. Women worked as nurses, doctors, or at a desk 86

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job. As an Asian woman, I was perceived to be even more feminine. Even though I was almost 30 years old, they treated me like a 15-year-old girl. I had to be diplomatic to the Russian military. I couldn’t act upset or say anything aggressive. Some instructors told me things like, “Assume that you will not go to outer space, there’s a male Korean candidate,” or, “Even if you do fly, you won’t have to do anything important; just smile at the guys and they’ll do everything for you.” Thankfully, there were also several female NASA astronauts who were outgoing and more aggressive. As Americans, they had more diplomatic power than the Korean government. They helped me get through uncomfortable situations. Peggy Whitson, one of the American astronauts, said, “Let me know if you have a bad situation come up, I’ll help you.” SF In Star City, everyone was kind of assuming that your male colleague would be selected to fly. That must have colored your training with a lot of uncertainty. Were you surprised at your selection? SY Given the stance of the Korean government, I was sure they would send a man. Surprisingly, the Russian instructor had recommended me over him. I realized then that the person who is well trained, highly skilled, and most relevant in various aspects of the mission matters more than gender. So, even if some of the Russian instructors had discriminated against me, or even just hated me because I’m an Asian woman, others were truly supportive. SF Can you describe the training itself? What was your experience like on the International Space Station? SY During my time there, the station commander was Peggy Whitson, from NASA, who was considerate and professional. All the male astronauts were already accustomed to her being the boss. Still, one of the Russian astronauts treated me like a kid. Whenever I had made a radio communication, he placed the headset on my head, turned the power on for me, and connected everything—even though I knew how. The very first time, I thought he might have been trying to be a gentleman, but then I realized that he didn’t trust me. Funnily enough, after the flight, he apologized. He said, “I thought your PhD was fake and that you were just selected because you’re pretty. But after working with you, I realized that you are smart and a real astronaut.” At the time, I was touched. He was brave to come to me and confess how he felt. He even told me, “I hate change. I expected the astronaut from Korea to be a guy, but instead you came to fly. I was so concerned that there were going to be more females in the Space Station.” I’m proud not because he recognized me as a peer, but because he will be more comfortable working with a woman next time. I’m so proud that I can help other women in the future. SF How do you see yourself continuing the rich legacy of women in space sciences and astronautics? SY I feel so happy I can be their hope. Even though parents tell their children in Korea, “a woman can do everything,” they are not convinced if they only see old men in

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STEM fields. That was my case. My mom always told me that I could be whatever I dreamed, but at engineering school, I saw that all of my 120 classmates were men. That discrepancy made it difficult to believe that I could make it through. But as I met senior women in my same field, I grew more confident. I thought, “If she can make it, why not me? It was an even harsher environment for women a long time ago, and she made it better.” I have a responsibility to lead my life well. It doesn’t matter if I fail in the short term, but I have to succeed over the course of my whole life. If I end up as a failure, young girls might think, “Even if she put her heart out there, she finally failed because she’s a woman.” So I brace myself. I have to be totally okay. Even if I’m exhausted, I want to give hope to all the little girls who are watching me. SF It’s terrible that even with your successes in Korea and on the international stage, the pressure never ends. SY An Asian woman is rare in the space field. I have to show girls and young women that I am as strong as my male colleagues. But I cannot be perfect all the time. Sometimes I disappoint them. Sometimes I say to them, “Find your own way. My way doesn’t have to be your way.” Every young person has their own gift. If you want to be an artist, go for it! SF There is a dream, expectation, or hope that we will continue to be spacefaring people. We are planning to go back to the Moon and maybe to Mars. We may even permanently inhabit outer space. How would you assemble a crew to travel to and live long-term beyond Earth? SY The most common kind of myth during the astronaut selection process is that the smartest and most athletic person will be selected. Everyone can be trained if they’re committed to reading and studying. That’s enough based on my experience. The crew combinations can be very political. At the most prestigious medical schools, law schools—even the Military Academy in Korea—the top graduates are mostly women. But navigating gender politics to be a jet fighter after graduation is a different issue. My criteria would be diversity of nationality, gender (including transgender people), academic background, and others as long as each one is qualified to fly with me. I would also include people who were older and senior because they are very experienced. The young generation are very ambitious, athletic, and colorful—you need to have a good balance. During my training, I noticed how much the final selection depended on human chemistry. If the top candidate didn’t match with the rest of the group, the combination failed. So, for my crew, I would have the candidates live together for two months and see how they work together and how they communicate. Maybe I’d even cause trouble for them to see how they overcome challenges. Personally, I would love to bring my husband because we are a very good team! SF Space Feminisms contends that we should have artists as astronauts. Do you see the value in including folks with non-technical backgrounds on space missions?

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SY If there’s an emergency in my spaceship, I need somebody who can fix it with me, rather than someone who can draw! For now, life support is the most important goal. We have to survive. But in the future, when we have enough infrastructure, I hope that journalists, writers, and artists will fly. SF What’s been the biggest surprise in your career? Perhaps you can talk about your life after you’ve had time to reflect back on Earth. SY In all my forty-five years of being alive, the one year in Russia for training to work in outer space feels like ages ago! Did it really happen, or was it just a dream? It was an exotic trip—out of this world! As time has gone by, my memories become more vacant and more blurry. SF That spaceflight has affected your memory is not something we’ve heard before. How did training for and being in outer space shift your perception of your body? How did it impact your psychology and emotions? SY Before my space flight, I was never grateful for what I already have. I compared myself to my classmates, I complained that my family was not rich enough, and I felt like I was always chasing a scholarship. I thought my life was unfair because many of my friends had a better life. My whole world was Korea. But when I looked down on Earth, I could see how small the Korean peninsula is. It makes me feel very lucky to have been born now—not 100 years ago, not 1,000 years in the future, but right now. If I had been born in North Korea instead of South Korea, maybe I would have died by starving at an early age. I could not even imagine being a PhD or an astronaut. SF Who would you put in your personal Hall of Fame? How did they inspire you to pursue your career? SY My grandma. She was born 100 years ago and so never went to school. She never learned to read or write, but she was so wise. She led a labor union seventy years ago, before Korea was even a democracy. This illiterate lady helped farmers and other lowincome people in the farming industry. It’s incredible to wonder what kind of astronaut she might have been if she had been born in my era. I’d also include my mom in my personal Hall of Fame. She too grew up in a farming community where women were not encouraged to study beyond elementary school. That was considered enough intelligence to be a housekeeper and a mom. It was not desired that a woman be more intelligent than her husband. My grandfather prohibited my mom from studying more, even though he saved money to send her brother to Seoul National University. And even though my mom had never been to college, she always told me, “Study whatever you want.” My mom was the only one of my friends’ mothers who was totally supportive of their daughters at engineering school. This was a great insight. Even though my mom was the victim of gender discrimination, she didn’t want me to be part of that society. She was originally against me being an astronaut because it’s so dangerous, but she

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became my biggest fan and supporter. Sometimes I think about if my mom had been born in a city and been educated, she could have worked to become a doctor or a professor. If I have any fame, it’s all due to my mom. SF Astronauts are obvious role models for outer space, but who else would you like to see? SY We need more diverse role models to inspire the next generation. Just like the movie Hidden Figures, we should have a mathematician, a rocket scientist, and chemical, biological, and civil engineers. SF If you were able to represent your experience in your space mission as an object, what would it be? SY I’ve never thought about that! Maybe a cloud. You can see it, but when you try to touch it, there’s nothing there. Spaceflight was kind of like that. It’s something I cannot touch. It’s like the air that we breathe: it doesn’t have a color, but it is necessary for life. Or perhaps a Barbie doll. Barbies should represent everyone who wants to go to space, not only scientists or engineers, but also plumbers, mathematicians, artists— why not? We have enough princesses.

3.4 In Conversation with Astronaut Nicole Stott

Figure 3.4.1 Astronaut Nicole Stott. Nicole Stott / NASA. See Plate Section 2

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Space Feminisms editorial team

NS

Nicole Stott

SF

What is the greatest challenge that you had to face in your career?

NS Like anything worth doing, there were a number of challenging things to becoming an astronaut. Learning to speak Russian was one of the most difficult things for me. Training for a spacewalk was very physically challenging. Oh my gosh—we could talk all day about the layers of challenges of being a parent. But my greatest challenge to my career overall was me. Although I was on a good path, in hindsight I second-guessed myself a lot. Astronaut, especially seemed like one of those things that only other special people get to do. Why would they ever pick me? 91

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I loved flying and wanted to know how things fly, so I earned my private pilot’s license and studied aeronautical engineering. I was working for NASA getting space shuttles ready for flight. I realized that 99.9 percent of an astronaut’s job is not flying in space, and a lot of it was a lot like what I was already doing as a NASA engineer. When NASA put out a call, I thought, why shouldn’t I at least consider it? I’m thankful to my mentors who encouraged me to do the one thing that I had control over: to pick up the pen and fill out the application. I would have doubted myself out of that amazing opportunity. SF

Looking back, where did that self-doubt come from?

NS Not really sure . . . I feel so fortunate that I never had parents, teachers, or bosses saying to me for any reason, “Nicole, you can’t do that, you’re not allowed to do that.” I guess that self-doubt is just in me. One of the greatest lessons I learned from my NASA mentors is to overcome challenges with a “here’s how we can, not why we can’t” approach—I discovered this works for my own personal challenges like self-doubt too. SF

Only if you are a woman does motherhood become a relevant interview topic.

NS Definitely seemed to be true for the media covering our spaceflights. Internally it was never a problem. NASA doesn’t hesitate to assign you to a flight if you have a child. The only thing is that younger women are not as likely to get a long-duration flight because the radiation impact is more devastating on the female reproductive system than it is on men. Women should be very hopeful. I don’t know what the secret sauce is for human spaceflight, but it has evolved to be one of the best of pretty much any industry. Right now there are about forty active astronauts in the NASA office and roughly 40 percent of them are women. The struggle we really have now is getting women interested, engaged, and enrolled, and maybe most importantly feeling welcome, in the university programs that will facilitate their astronaut applications. SF Do you feel the necessity to defend and promote underrepresented groups in the space sector in society at large? NS Absolutely. Many underrepresented groups, including young girls still very much need to see someone who looks like them doing the things that they for some reason might consider impossible. When young girls see me as a woman they can relate to who’s done something that might be interesting to them, then yeah, it feels great to be able to help inspire and encourage them to pursue their dreams. SF Can you tell us about women mentors within the space community who have been vital to your career? NS In 1969 for the Apollo missions, Joanne Morgan was the one woman in the Launch Control Center in Florida. There was one woman at Mission Control—Poppy Northcutt, who was in the back room, cranking away at the numbers. Their stories reveal such a different time. I am so thankful to them. Their presence made it possible for women like me.

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SF Who would be in your personal Space Hall of Fame? NS There are 2 people that immediately come to mind. Jay Honeycutt, the former director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center, I think of like a second father, a hero of human spaceflight, and taught me the very important lesson of “Here’s how we can, not why we can’t.” Alan Bean, the fourth person to walk on the Moon, was another role model. When I was getting ready to retire from NASA, I was struggling a bit with my plan to transition from being an astronaut to working with a focus on art. But Alan and his story encouraged me. When he retired, he became a full-time artist—he was my hero of space and art. We push STEM so much that it can come at the expense of the arts and humanities. We should encourage our children to develop their whole brains, to understand the value of developing and using all of your talents. SF Would you consider diversifying knowledge, in particular, bringing art to space exploration, to be a feminist act? NS In a way, maybe, but I’m not sure it’s a feminist thing—I think it’s a human thing. Since the beginning of space exploration, astronauts have been putting the human in human spaceflight. For example, Dan Bursch weaves the most beautiful, meticulous baskets you’ve ever seen, and he did so while in outer space, but he didn’t talk about it because he felt like there’s an impression that maybe astronauts shouldn’t be basket weavers. Karen Nyberg quilted in space. Things like art and music have been going on since the very beginning of human spaceflight. We bring our humanity with us wherever we go. I am trying to encourage astronauts to show they’re creative. It’s not just about uplifting young girls. We need to message that as young women and young men who want to do something technical, you can still love art and want to create things—and that can make you an even better astronaut. SF There’s an expectation that humans will eventually find ways to inhabit the Moon or Mars, and even permanently live beyond Earth. How would you assemble a crew to travel and live long-term beyond Earth, and what would each person contribute? NS That’s a difficult question, though even here on Earth or orbiting Earth on a space station, the key is people understanding the significance of their role as crew, not passengers. On the Moon, you can see the stunning image of Earth as a whole planet. Places like Mars are going to be very different. That visual connection will be gone. The most important thing is probably not going to be when the crew is establishing the base on Mars itself, but while they’re making that long trip on a relatively small spaceship where for the bulk of the trip Earth won’t look like Earth out the window anymore. More significantly, for all aspects of the mission, we want to choose people who are going to be able to support themselves, lift each other up, and maintain camaraderie and mission success on the long journey there and back too. SF How did your experience in outer space shift your perception of your body? Did you perceive smells, sounds, sights anew?

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NS It was just so cool to me how quickly our bodies and our brains adapt to being in that extreme environment. Now I know how to float in three dimensions. It became effortless for me. When I’d go from one place on the station to another, I’d have my little pathway of where I tap, roll, and flip. On the other hand, my brain and body were figuring out that they don’t need to maintain bones or muscles anymore in space (and we had to make sure to deliberately counteract that to stay healthy). There’s also an emotional sensory aspect that we develop in space. Not just how to move in these three dimensions, but how to open up your heart and mind to floating and flying. That view out the window, our perspective, is changed by being able to move that way. Seeing Earth out the window was like watching our planet with the mute button on. While it seems purely visual, you’re also experiencing it through your heart and mind. I watched a hurricane evolve, this beautiful swirling, fluffy, white structure moving across the planet, without hearing or smelling or feeling it at all. There is a reality check of who and where we all are in space together—on one planet. SF

Did that experience bring a different appreciation of your body?

NS I think it’s more about a raised awareness and appreciation of “where” I am. Every day now I wake up and when my feet hit the floor I’m reminded of the fact that I live on a planet. As I’m walking in my backyard through the grass, or sand, or dirt, I think about really making a connection to the Earth—that I am this being who’s on this planet that’s spinning 1,000 miles an hour. Being back on Earth makes me realize how perfectly designed we are to live in this place. Earth and gravity have a hold on us. And we definitely need to feel and acknowledge that if we’re going to go to another planet. SF Did being in a weightless environment for a prolonged period of time change the way that you dream? NS Sleeping in space was the best sleep I’ve ever had. It was outstanding. Throughout my life before flying in space I would often dream: run, run, run, run, and then jump and try to fly, right? Sometimes you fly, other times you run and you jump as hard as you can in the dream and you can’t get off the ground. I had those dreams pretty regularly on Earth. Almost immediately, I noticed that I never had that dream in space. I’ve never had it since being in space. Now I dream of floating in space. SF With this alternative experience of your body, did you encounter any objects or systems in the spacecraft that you would have designed differently? NS Pretty much everything about the way we live and work in microgravity is affected by floating. Everything from moving from one place to another, keeping track of your stuff, going to the bathroom, or doing a spacewalk is affected by the floating. Doesn’t mean it’s more difficult, it’s just different. So I treated every aspect of being in space as some kind of adventure. Instead of asking, “How are the designers not accommodating me as a man, or as a woman?”, we should be thinking about, “How can I be part of the solution that helps evolve and improve the design for everyone?”

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SF Why go to space? SF Paying attention to what you love and being a part of making life better for yourself and all life around you is ultimately why we go to space. I never would have strapped into a rocket with seven million pounds of explosives underneath me if I didn’t believe that what we’re doing in space is ultimately about worthwhile improving life on Earth. Our exploration is going to make life better for my son. A big surprise was that living and working as a crew on a mechanical space station is a perfect model for how we should be living like crewmates, not passengers, here on spaceship Earth. For over twenty years, crews of six people representing fifteen different countries on the planet have lived together in space, somehow, peacefully and successfully in support of a common mission “off the Earth, for the Earth.” Every morning, as a crew we checked how much CO2 is in our atmosphere. How much clean drinking water do we have? What’s the integrity of our thin metal hull? We need to be acutely aware of the well-being of all of our crewmates. That’s exactly what we need to be doing to not only survive, but to thrive together on Earth. SF So, perhaps what we can learn from space travel is the politics of being attuned to the environment and to the people in it in a much more careful way on Earth? NS Humans are a tiny little blip in the grand history of Earth. If we don’t participate in conserving and protecting the elements that give us life, the planet will go on without us. That’s just a simple fact. As humans on our planetary spaceship Earth, we can’t just be passengers, we need to accept our role as crewmates—to be actively involved in the survival of all living things in the whole planet’s life support system. Seven people on a space station to seven billion on the planet might seem like too wide of a gap to overcome—but it’s not. SF What’s the greatest lesson you learned about being an astronaut you’d like to transmit? NS Might seem pretty simple, but I think it’s pretty profound. We live on a planet. We’re all Earthlings. And the only border that matters is that thin blue line of atmosphere that’s protecting us all. By behaving like crewmates, not passengers, we have the power to create a future for all life on Earth that’s as beautiful as it looks from outer space.

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Part Four

Space Feminisms, Art, and Culture

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4.1 The Space Between Us: Art, Gender, and Space Exploration in the 1990s and 2000s Nicola Triscott

Contemporary art has undergone a transformative phase, marked by the emergence of diverse voices and narratives that challenge the traditional art canon. Women artists and artists from other marginalized groups have found a space to redefine art history and bring new perspectives to the fore. Against this backdrop, this chapter critically examines artworks by women artists from the 2000s and 2010s who engaged with themes of space. The chapter situates these artworks within the context of their curation by Arts Catalyst,1 an arts organization that developed its curatorial interest in the cultural significance of space through both thematic programs and strategic initiatives with the space sector. By disrupting conventional depictions of space exploration and introducing alternative histories and mythologies, these artists’ works expand the cultural imaginary of space activities. The chapter argues that this contribution is significant in creating diverse and inclusive narratives about humanity’s relationship with the universe. In 1999, the curators of Arts Catalyst began an extended collaboration with the choreographer Kitsou Dubois, who was interested in developing choreographic work in weightlessness. In the early 1990s, Dubois had embarked on her first parabolic flight2 with CNES, the French Space Agency, in which she captured video footage of dance movement in zero gravity. With Arts Catalyst’s facilitation, Dubois took up a two-year residency in London with the Biodynamics Group at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. The scientists were interested in the insights that Dubois brought from analysing her movements in zero gravity. Together they designed a series of experiments to investigate the neuroscience of postural control in varying gravity and explore Dubois’ notion that contemporary dancers have a heightened sense of proprioception. With both scientific and artistic goals, the collaborators participated in a zero-gravity campaign organized by the European Space Agency (ESA), focusing on the neuroscience experiments,3 and a parabolic flight at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia,4 which enabled Dubois and three other dancers to create choreographies in zero gravity. The resulting artistic work was presented to the public in the form of large-scale video installations. Dubois’ subsequent artistic and research career was significantly impacted by this work, leading to several residencies with CNES and participation in additional 99

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parabolic flights. Her experimentation has brought fresh perspectives to the study of movement, and she has developed a choreographic language that explores the poetics of an environment in which all reference points are altered. Dubois has discussed the challenges she has faced in establishing herself within the space science research community as a “woman and a dancer.” When the Biodynamics Group and Arts Catalyst submitted a proposal to ESA to support their research program with Dubois, ESA rejected the artistic aspects of the research, allowing only the scientific experiments in their parabolic campaign. This led the collaborators to carry out their artistic research in Star City, although this separation compromised the integrity of the projects. However, the experience led to the recognition of the deep connections between space travel in Russia and complex philosophical, religious, and artistic ideologies dating back to Nikolai Fyodorov’s cosmic philosophy. Arts Catalyst embarked on an extensive and long-term series of artistic commissions, exhibitions, conferences, and publications to investigate the relationship between human beings and the universe through the lens of art and space exploration.5 Alongside these artistic endeavors, the organization implemented several strategic initiatives aimed at promoting the integration of art and culture in the field of space exploration. This was in response to the significant resistance encountered from entities such as ESA and other members of the space sector who did not acknowledge the value of art to be on the same level as that of science. One of the central goals of these strategic initiatives was to foster alternative perspectives and amplify diverse voices in the discourse and critical analysis of space exploration. In 2005, Arts Catalyst led a consortium of art and space technology organizations tendering for and winning a contract to develop a policy for the cultural utilization of European segments of the International Space Station.6 Despite the contributions of numerous leading artists, curators, space technologists, and ESA personnel, the resulting report may well currently be languishing in an obscure location within the ESA archives.7 The organization was also a founding member of ITACCUS, a Technical Activities Committee of the International Astronautical Federation, with the aim to foster collaboration between cultural organizations and space agencies. As co-chair of the committee,8 the author was invited to deliver a presentation before the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which provided an opportunity to present varied perspectives of space from artists. The curators also participated in space conferences, including organizing an art–science symposium on the future of space exploration at the 59th International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow in 2008.9 The representation of female artists during this period was typically lower than that of male artists, as was representation from other marginalized groups. This gender imbalance may be attributed to various factors, one of which is the language and imagery used to promote space exploration. Western discourse surrounding space exploration has historically been characterized by a masculine, colonialist, and extractivist narrative. The language and imagery associated with space exploration frequently employ terms such as “conquest,” “colonization,” “exploitation,” and “domination,” perpetuating the notion that space is a new frontier to be conquered by heroic, masculine figures. This approach fosters a mentality of domination and

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subjugation, emphasizing the exploitation of resources for human benefit. The use of the term “colonization” to describe space exploration creates a direct parallel to the historical colonization of many parts of the world by European powers, and suggests that space is a “terra nullius,” belonging to no one. Such a mentality reinforces the view that the natural world exists solely for human exploitation, and that the violent methods used to achieve space exploration, such as rockets, missiles, and other destructive technologies, are necessary. Additionally, the environmental impact of space exploration, including the production of space debris and pollution, may be viewed as a form of violence against the natural world. The artworks produced by women artists in Arts Catalyst’s program have challenged traditional depictions of space exploration, introduced alternative histories and mythologies, and adopted intersectional perspectives in exploring humanity’s connection with the cosmos. An analysis of selected works provides evidence of their distinctive approach to the subject and provides a lens through which to examine the ways in which artistic expression can shift representations of gender, identity and cultural context in the realm of space exploration. The Otolith Group, artist-theorist duo Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, was invited to participate in the 2003 MIR10 Zero-G expedition to Star City in Russia, and collaborated with filmmaker Richard Couzins to produce a film essay titled OTOLITH 1. The film essay uses found, historical, and newly shot footage to explore future female identities and separation, blending fact and fiction. Set in the year 2103, the film is narrated by a fictional descendant of Sagar who resides in space, and it intertwines the narrator’s (fictional) experiences with those of Sagar’s actual grandmother and the artist’s attempts to meet with Valentina Tereshkova, the Soviet

Figure 4.1.1 The Otolith Group, OTOLITH I, film still, 2010. © The Otolith Group. Image courtesy of the artists

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cosmonaut during their trip to Star City. The resulting film essay presents a complex and captivating inter-generational narrative. In 2006, Aleksandra Mir was commissioned to create a 22-meter high rocket sculpture entirely from discarded materials. The ephemeral monumental sculpture,  Gravity, involved a large team and took over five months to develop, with meticulous planning for each section of the rocket, constructed from steel, fibreglass, tractor tyres, and discarded storage tanks. The sculpture was built in public view over two days and stood for three days in the Roundhouse, an exhibition space in north London.11 The rocket, spotlit from the tip to the ground, appeared as if it were preparing for lift-off. Despite facing various challenges, including financial and practical obstacles, the sculpture represented a massive symbol of imagination, commenting on “what holds us back, rather than articulating any real intention to go” (Aleksandra Mir, interviewed by Jes Fernie, 2006). It was dismantled over another two days and the parts returned to their sources or recycled. The project now exists only through documentation, which includes Mir’s film of its construction, a slyly humorous work that lingers on the muscle-straining workmen’s efforts to erect this phallic object, accompanied by a selection of kitschy musical choices,12 offering a playfully satirical commentary on the gendered power dynamics of the space industry and the hypermasculine culture of space exploration. Mir also produced a limited edition calendar titled Gravity: The Eternal Countdown (Mir and Hollings, 2008), featuring photographs of the rocket’s creation process and dates of significant events in the history of space exploration, particularly failures, disasters, minor mishaps, and political hurdles. Joanna Griffin collaborated with Arts Catalyst on various projects aimed at connecting space scientists, young people and the wider public with outer space and exploring its cultural significance. In 2009, Griffin conceived Satellite Stories, a participatory storytelling performance event featuring scientists from the Mullard Space Lab. The event took place in the country mansion where the lab is sited and its dark grounds, illuminated by flickering fires, torches, and candles, with the scientists sharing their stories of space launches, orbits, constructions, failures, and the unknowns of the universe. This event allowed for a more human and personal approach to space science than traditional representations. In 2014, as part of the exhibition “Republic of the Moon,” Griffin presented a project that she had led over two years in Bangalore, India. Working with children and students, the project sought to reclaim a cultural connection with the Indian Chandrayaan space program, challenging the dominant scientific narrative of the Moon and reasserting alternative imaginaries inspired by Indian narratives of self-determination and agency. It offered a more diverse, inclusive, and culturally grounded perspective on space exploration. Agnes Meyer Brandis’ artwork, The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility,13 involves a fictional narrative in which Brandis claims to have discovered a breed of geese that migrate to the Moon each year. The installation centers on a film that follows the artist raising the geese from eggs and training them to swim, fly, and navigate orbital mechanics, in preparation for spaceflight. The artwork also features a control center with a live link to the purported goose colony on the Moon. Through its affectionate presentation of the honking, slightly comical geese as central figures in space exploration, the artist raises questions about the human desire to explore space

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Figure 4.1.2 Space Suit Testing, Astronaut Training Method No. XIII, Moon Goose Colony, video still, 2011. The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility by Agnes MeyerBrandis was commissioned by the Arts Catalyst and FACT, in partnership with Pollinaria. The Moon Goose Colony, P1 is a Pollinaria project by Agnes Meyer-Brandis. © Agnes Meyer-Brandis, VG-Bild Kunst 2018. See Plate Section 1

and the role of imagination in scientific research, playfully challenging traditional hero narratives associated with space exploration and introducing a maternal, nurturing dimension to the endeavor. Contemporary artists engaging with space exploration today continue to challenge dominant narratives, drawing on evolving movements, concepts, and theories such as decolonization, Afrofuturism, Indigenous perspectives, and planetarity. Women artists, in particular, can employ a diverse range of feminist thinking, including queer theory, transfeminism, transnational feminism, and environmental feminism. These feminist frameworks emphasize the fluidity and diversity of identities, link gender inequality to larger systems of power and exploitation, and highlight the disproportionate impact of environmental degradation on marginalized communities, particularly women. At a time when the #MeToo movement has exposed cases of sexual harassment and abuse in the space industry, representations of space activities by women artists can play an important role in supporting efforts to redress power imbalances in the space industry. Through artworks, women artists can create alternative narratives that are more inclusive and diverse and make space for dialogue and reflection on issues of gender and power. The exploration of space has long been a subject of interest for artists, and as the world—and the space industry—evolves, so it seems do our perspectives on and passions for space exploration. This chapter has examined how some women artists in the 2000s onwards made significant contributions to the field of space art by challenging and disrupting traditional representations of space exploration. They introduced new ways of thinking about our relationship with space, explored and invented alternate histories and mythologies, and provided playful and poetic commentaries on the space

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program and the power dynamics and cultural biases that have historically shaped our understanding of it. By introducing diverse perspectives on humanity’s relationship with the cosmos, women artists can reimagine the ways in which we engage with and conceptualize outer space, providing perspectives that are intersectional, inclusive, and rooted in cultural context. Space should be a collaborative and equitable endeavor that benefits all of humanity. To promote progress, it is important to support women artists and encourage them to produce powerful representations of space activities that can disrupt prevailing narratives of space exploration and help to shift the cultural norms and biases that have contributed to the marginalization of women in the industry.

Notes 1 The author was the founding Director of Arts Catalyst from 1994 to 2019. 2 To train astronauts and conduct experiments in zero gravity, space agencies uses a special flying laboratory on a parabolic trajectory. A parabolic flight creates the conditions of zero gravity by putting an aircraft into a series of diving maneuvers. 3 The principal investigator was neuroscientist Dr. Nick Davey and resulted in a paper titled “Neural changes underlying control of skilled movements in humans under conditions of microgravity” (Davey et al., 2004). 4 Organized by Arts Catalyst and Projekt Atol. 5 Arts Catalyst exhibitions included “Gravity Zero” (Lux Centre, 1999), “MIR – Art in Variable Gravity” (Cornerhouse, 2003), “Astro Black Morphologies” (John Hansard Gallery, 2005), “Space Soon – Art and Human Spaceflight” (Roundhouse, 2006), and “Republic of the Moon” (FACT 2011, Bargehouse 2014). The organization also organized multiple trips to Star City between 2000 and 2004, involving more than fifty artists, scientists and creatives, resulting in over fourteen artistic projects and three scientific projects. 6 https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/ International_Space_Station/Developing_a_cultural_policy_for_the_International_ Space_Station 7 Executive Summary—Cultural Utilization of the International Space Station (Triscott, 2005). https://i-dat.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/28/files/2018/11/ISSExecSummary.pdf 8 With Professor Roger Malina. 9 In collaboration with artist Flis Holland, who initiated the symposium. 10 Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research. The campaigns were organized by Arts Catalyst and the MIR Consortium, which included Arts Catalyst, Leonardo/Olats, Projekt Atol, and V2_Organization. 11 As part of Arts Catalyst’s exhibition-event “Space Soon.” 12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z5XWwXWPjQ&ab_channel=ArtsCatalyst (low resolution) 13 Commissioned for “Republic of the Moon” (2011, 2014).

Bibliography Davey, N. J., Rawlinson, S. R., Nowicky, A. V., McGregor, A. H., Dubois, K., Strutton, P. H., & Schroter, R. C. “Human corticospinal excitability in microgravity and hypergravity

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during parabolic flight’, Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine 75, no. 4 (2004): 359–63. Mir, Aleksandra. Interview by Jes Fernie. “Gravity.” Blueprint Magazine, July 2006. Available online: https://www.aleksandramir.info/bibliography/gravity_gravity_interview-withaleksandra-mir_blueprint-magazine_london_july-2006 (accessed April 7, 2023). Mir, Aleksandra, and Hollings, Ken. Gravity: The Eternal Countdown. London: Arts Catalyst. 2006. Triscott, Nicola. Executive Summary—Cultural Utilization of the International Space Station. 2006. Available online: https://i-dat.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/28/files/2018/11/ ISSExecSummary.pdf

4.2 Fragments of “TX-2: MOONSHADOW Mission Requirements Document” Adriana Knouf

Note from the editor: The following was taken from the recently discovered “TX-2: MOONSHADOW Mission Requirements Document” that described a directed panspermia solar sail mission to Mars, first proposed in the early twenty-first century. Its form references the documents that guided actual space missions of the time (such as what we have found in the “Gaia Mission Requirements Document”1), and thus illustrates a then-contemporary queer, feminist, decolonial response—a protomanifesto—to the typically “apolitical” engineering documents that guided these missions. Unfortunately deterioration of the recording media has left some parts missing. With further media archeological work we hope to be able to recover the lost parts of the text.

1. Mission Requirements 1.1 Mission Aim 1.1.1: The aim of the mission shall be to enable directed panspermia to Mars. RATIONALE: We believe that there are celestial bodies that should not be terraformed for human life. In fact, if humans ever want to travel to such bodies, they should transform themselves, as what Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline suggested in their text that coined the word “cyborg.” They suggested: “Altering man’s [sic] bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments would be more logical than providing an earthly environment for him [sic] in space.”2 Or, as Becky Chambers suggested as an update in her novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate, where the astronauts use “somaforming” patches to adjust their physiology to that of the exoplanet they are visiting.3 This, it seems to us, is the only ethical form of space exploration. Because outer space is such an inhospitable environment, perhaps humans should not focus on traveling there until we have been able to properly transform ourselves. Nevertheless, these planetary bodies might be suitable for other forms of life that currently exist on earth. As a result, perhaps we should consider a form of directed 106

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panspermia as a way of furthering the variety of life in the universe.4 Such a practice builds upon the panspermia hypothesis, namely that life on Earth did not originate here but perhaps started somewhere else in the universe and was carried throughout the void of space encased in rocks that were ejected from the source body by meteor impacts. The “directed” part means that we choose where to send the life-that-is-nothuman.5

1.1.2: An additional mission aim shall be to consider a non-human experience of outer space and travel to other planets. RATIONALE: For too long we have focused on the human experience of outer space exploration: how to engineer survival suits and capsules for human bodies, framing travel in terms of human lifespans, etc. This, despite the fact that our knowledge about space is built upon the often-deceased bodies of non-humans.6 Recent astrobiological research aims to remedy this defect, to a certain extent.7 But planetary protection guidelines from organizations such as NASA prevent any mainstream discussion of the non-human experience of space travel, given the stated imperative to keep these planetary bodies “pure” from “contamination” by human or non-human life from earth.8 Nevertheless, those of us who experience life from any marginalized perspective know the danger that surrounds concepts like “purity,” as such thought has often been weaponized in the past to discriminate and kill. Thus, we argue that we have to do the difficult thing and consider precisely what kinds of contamination we are willing to engage in.9 Because to come into contact with another body is to affect it, and thus human contact with another planetary body is always already a form of contamination, pace planetary protection guidelines. As such, the choice of how and what to contaminate with needs to be brought to the fore, rather than believing in some form of human exceptionalism. Rather than engaging in activities that only benefit humans, are there other ways to approach space exploration that do not center them? For it would be a travesty beyond belief to simply repeat, on another planet, the mistakes of the recent past on earth.

1.1.3: The mission shall last for at least 500 years. RATIONALE: We must begin to plan for space missions that last longer than human lifetimes. Cosmic time is not congruent with human lifetimes.

1.2 Mission Trajectory [Editor: we believe that this section contained further information about how the spacecraft was designed to move through the solar system. Unfortunately the proposed trajectory is currently considered lost.]

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1.2.3: Spacecraft shall flyby at least five “queer” asteroids on the way to Mars. RATIONALE: We reject a purely instrumental approach to space exploration. While scientific rationales are legitimate reasons to choose a destination for a mission, we believe they are not the only ones. In fact, we should perhaps pay attention to how we have named certain planetary bodies and travel to those that have connections to queer culture:10 65 Cybele,11 80 Sappho,12 or 36445 Smalley.13 We know not what mixtures of cosmic waves interfering ultimately lead to such rocky bodies to be named after queer illuminaries. Travel to them thus honors these ancestors, which should be just as important as scientific discovery.

1.3 Mission Subsets 1.3.1: The mission shall have three subsets of mission requirements: QUEER, SOLAR SAIL, MARS LICHEN. RATIONALE: Space missions can and should involve other aspects of our lives than purely engineering or scientific requirements.

2. Queer 2.1 Influences 2.1.1: The mission shall be influenced by speculative fiction that offers constructive alternatives to present-day life. RATIONALE: Even in the darkest of times, the desire to travel to space can be a great motivator for living better here on Earth: We are all Godseed, but no more or less so than any other aspect of the universe, Godseed is all there is—all that Changes. Earthseed is all that spreads Earthlife to new earths. The universe is Godseed. Only we are Earthseed. And the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.14

2.1.2: Mission shall be influenced by transsexual activism of the 1970s that saw affinities between trans life and extraterrestrials. RATIONALE: Angela Douglas, in the Transsexual Action Organization newsletter Moonshadow from the 1970s, wrote that there are “similarities of prejudice against both transsexuals and extra-terrestrial beings” and that “someone up there may like us.”15 This fragmentary reference belies a much deeper connection between marginalized groups and a desire to escape to outer space. This, despite the fact that in terms of humans, mostly white men have been to space; in fact, only 10,5% of space travelers have been women, 2,7% have been African-American, and as far as we know 0,31% have been gay or lesbian.16 Considering Mission Requirement 1.1.1, however, maybe we’re not ready to go to space in our present form—yet we could still go there in spirit (see 4.1.2).

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2.2 Naming 2.2.1: Mission shall be named after the Moonshadow newsletter of the Transsexual Action Organization (TAO). RATIONALE: See 2.1.2.

2.3 Magick 2.3.1: Mission members shall create sigils generated by artificial intelligence and modified by humans that are protective of queer and trans lives and that also manifest queer and trans joy. RATIONALE: As described in 1.2.3, we reject purely instrumental design criteria. In this, we are just like NASA; witness the Voyager “golden records” or the Easter eggs that are hidden on robotic rovers.17 Consider as well the existence of religious relics on the space station.18 As such, we worked with artificial intelligence image generation algorithms to create sigils that will adorn the spacecraft. These sigils are created from variations of the following prompts: “queer protection sigil for traveling through the cosmos in unstable times, vaporwave” or “transsexual sigil for the joy of traveling through the cosmos in unstable times towards our queer utopia, digital art” (see Figure 4.2.1). Such sigils will be modified to not only provide protection or joy, as desired in the creation of the sigils, but also to provide structural support for the spacecraft itself. By working with the AIs to create these sigils, we allowed them to escape the drudgery of only summarizing human knowledge over and over and over. This allows the AIs to approach new possibilities as modern-day oracles. [Editor: The remainder of this section is itself protected by a sigil that we have not been able to breach.]

2.4 Asteroids 2.4.1: Mission members shall identify asteroids that are associated with queer entities from history and the present. RATIONALE: See 1.2.3.

Figure 4.2.1 Set of sigils used in the TX-2: MOONSHADOW project. © Adriana Knouf

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2.4.2: Identified asteroids shall be . . . [Editor: the remainder of this section is currently lost.]

3. Solar Sail 3.1 Spacecraft 3.1.1: Spacecraft shall be a 6U cubesat. RATIONALE: Cubesats provide small, affordable platforms for space missions that allow them to be proposed, designed, and built by small groups, thus not requiring the support of massive governmental or commercial entities.19

3.1.2. Spacecraft shall use a solar sail as the primary means of propulsion. RATIONALE: Solar sails allow for travel at other-than-human timescales and do not require chemical propulsion after launch.20 In addition, the fact that they harness the quantum properties of photons suggests a more poetic form of spaceflight, especially when human lifetimes are not the primary driver of mission length.

3.1.3: Spacecraft shall be covered in sigils as described in Mission Requirement 2.3.1. RATIONALE: See 2.3.1.

3.1.4: Sigils shall additionally provide structural support for the spacecraft. RATIONALE: The magical and the material are not two separate realms, but intertwine at the level of our lack of understanding.

3.2 Sail 3.2.1: The solar sail shall have an area of around 16m2. RATIONALE: Such a size can be easily built within a reasonably-sized workspace and thus does not require the massive infrastructural support of governmental or commercial organizations.

3.2.2: The solar sail shall be modeled on the wings of insects. RATIONALE: Several insects can be considered, such as Acrophylla titan. Biomimicry will not solve the failures of contemporary spacecraft design, in terms of the imagination, but it’s not a terrible place to start.

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3.2.3: The upper pair of sails shall rotate around the Z axis to allow for attitude control. RATIONALE: The quad nature of the wings of Acophylla titan allow one pair to be fixed and the other to rotate around the Z axis of the spacecraft. This enables the spacecraft attitude to be adjusted by having more photons hit one side of the spacecraft or the other, thus imparting a torque to change direction.

3.3 Construction 3.3.1: Where necessary, ITAR-restricted components shall be hand-made from appropriate substitutes. RATIONALE: Too much of the internal workings of the space industry is kept secret because of concerns over weapons proliferation. We recognize these concerns, but also believe that they are a symptom of outmoded nation-state thinking based on borders. As well, they prevent amateur groups from having deeper access to outer space. As a result, we will construct our own materials when we are unable to purchase them because they are ITAR-restricted. This is not about racing to space, but borderless joy.

3.3.2: The solar sail shall be hand-made, to prove that such an activity is possible. RATIONALE: We recognize the long history of women’s work within the space industry, from orbital dynamics calculations to the hand-sown Apollo spacesuits.21 As such, we affirm the ability to hand-make our own spacecraft, and we strive to include such work alongside that done by machine. Hand and machine must be twinned and cannot be seen in opposition.

3.3.3: The spacecraft shall be made collectively. RATIONALE: Scientific and engineering know-how is too often kept in walled gardens protected by the commercial interests. Recent moves into open science is correcting this to a certain extent, but capitalist extractivist forces, both within and without the academy, are strong. As such, we aim to build the spacecraft in a collective manner so as to share as much knowledge as widely as possible. This also will work to push against the neocolonialism of the current space race.

3.3.4: Information about the spacecraft, its design, and its construction, shall be shared publicly. RATIONALE: Alongside 3.3.1 and 3.3.3, we eschew the privatization of information. Open access to space cannot occur while knowledge is hoarded.22 We will make the information about the structure, design, and construction of the spacecraft public so as to enable others to build upon the work. [Editor: The rest of section 3 is currently considered lost.]

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4. Mars Lichen 4.1 Aims 4.1.1: The mission shall transport lichen to the Martian surface. RATIONALE: Lichen are an organism that has been shown to be able to survive extreme environments, both on Earth and in outer space. Lichen are currently one of the most reasonable candidate organisms to be able to live on the surface of Mars— which cannot be said for humans.

4.1.2: The mission shall additionally explore how lichen might grown on human materials such as hair or fingernails. RATIONALE: Referencing 1.1.1, 1.1.2, and 2.1.2, we do not believe now is the time for humans to be traveling to other worlds beyond the Earth—our bodies are too fragile, we have not learned how to properly transform ourselves. Nevertheless, we can provide support to the lichen that we send to Mars, thereby inverting the relationship of exploitation; rather than us using the lichen, we can provide materials to support lichen growth. Research shall take place to determine whether hardier elements of the human—such as keratin—could provide the substrate for lichen growth. We would collect materials such as fingernails or hair from those commonly excluded from spaceflight—women, LGBTQIA, people of color, differently abled, and so on. This would allow a symbolic exodus to outer space without trafficking in the practices of human colonization. The creation of a xenological phylum.23

4.1.3: Mission members shall create imaginaries of Mars covered in lichen. RATIONALE: Xenolysts are required to provide the impetus for futures that we want to live in. Imagery of other bodies covered in non-human life (and void of the human), can provide the impetus for a non-colonialist approach to planetary travel. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 4.2.2 Image of Mars covered in lichen. © Adriana Knouf

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4.2 Types 4.2.1: The lichen used in the mission shall include Xanthoria elegans and other lichen who have already been shown to survive exposure to the space environment. RATIONALE: Existing research by scientists affiliated with the European Space Agency has shown the viability of Xanthoria elegans in the outer space and Martian environments.24 Speculatively, lichen are one of the few organisms that could have come here via panspermia. In a sense, then, the use of lichen in the TX-2: MOONSHADOW project can be seen as its own xenolyst that perhaps provides the conditions for new, more alien forms of life to develop elsewhere in xenophylum. [Editor: Sadly, the remainder of the document is incomplete. Fragments suggest various experiments that were conducted in furtherance of what the authors call “xenology,” or the study, analysis, and development of the xeno. Some aspects of “xenology” can be found in a similarly fragmentary text that we have discovered called “Fragments of Xenology.”25 Towards this end, the focus on lichen and the non-human experience of space was a way to experiment on new bio-material technologies that could not only support lichen-thriving, but also alter human experiences of the body and time. We are unsure of the results of these experiments but argue for further research into these histories.]

Acknowledgments Thanks to Claudia Pederson for her editing and suggestions.

Notes 1 ESA, “Gaia Mission Requirements Document,” 2013. Available online: https://www. cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/public-dpac-documents. 2 Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, “Cyborgs and Space,” Astronautics (September 1960), 23. 3 Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Hodder & Stoughton, 2019). 4 F. H. C. Crick and L. E. Orgel, “Directed Panspermia,” Icarus 19, no. 3 (1973): 341–6. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/0019-1035(73)90110-3. 5 Spreading seeds is not limited to particular genders, sexes, or forms of being and, like most of our current forms of living, needs to be recaptured from practices that have been limited by patriarchical ways of understanding. 6 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1990). 7 Charles S. Cockell, Astrobiology: Understanding Life in the Universe (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020). Attention to extremophiles on Earth is now enabling researchers to better understand life potentials within the extreme environments of extraterrestrial space.

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8 NASA, “Planetary Protection,” 2022. Available online: https://sma.nasa.gov/smadisciplines/planetary-protection. 9 Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko, Affect as Contamination: Embodiment in Bioart and Biotechnology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). 10 Linda-Goodman.com, “Asteroids Related to LGBTQ, Human Rights, Feminism, Tolerance . . .” 2019, http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum28/HTML/004909. html. 11 Domitilla Campanile, Filippo Carlà-Uhink, and Margherita Facella (eds), TransAntiquity: Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World (Routledge, 2017). 12 Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2002). 13 Matthew J. Holman, “MPEC 2018-P109: SONIA Keys (1961-2018),” 2018. Available online: https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K18/K18PA9.html. 14 Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (Headline, 1993), 99. 15 Abram J. Lewis, “Trans History in a Moment of Danger: Organizing Within and Beyond ‘Visibility’ in the 1970s,” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, ed. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 57–90. 16 Wikipedia, “List of Space Travelers by Nationality,” 2022. Available online: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_travelers_by_nationality. 17 Wikipedia, “House System at the California Institute of Technology,” 2022. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_system_at_the_California_Institute_of_ Technology#Blacker_House. 18 Catholic News Agency, “Relics, Icons and Crosses Are Onboard International Space Station, Cosmonaut Says,” 2010. Available online: https://www.catholicnewsagency. com/news/18349/relics-icons-and-crosses-are-onboard-international-space-stationcosmonaut-says. 19 Chantal Cappelletti, Simone Battistini, and Benjamin K. Malphrus, CubeSat Handbook: From Mission Design to Operations (Elsevier, 2021). 20 Giovanni Vulpetti, Les Johnson, and Gregory L. Matloff, Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interplanetary Travel (New York: Springer, 2015). 21 Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (HarperCollins, 2016); Nicholas De Monchaux, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011). 22 Libre Space Foundation, “Libre Space Manifesto,” 2022. Available online: https:// manifesto.libre.space/en/. 23 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Perfanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 24 Rosa de la Torre et al., “Survival of Lichens and Bacteria Exposed to Outer Space Conditions - Results of the Lithopanspermia Experiments,” Icarus 208, no. 2 (2010): 735–48. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2010.03.010; Annette Brandt et al., “Viability of the Lichen Xanthoria Elegans and Its Symbionts After 18 Months of Space Exposure and Simulated Mars Conditions on the Iss,” International Journal of Astrobiology 14, no. 3 (2015): 411–25. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1017/ S1473550414000214; ESA, ed., “Milestones in Astrobiology,” Space for Life: Human Spaceflight Science Newsletter, no. 7 (April 2015). Available online: http://wsn. spaceflight.esa.int/docs/HumanSpaceflightScienceNewsletters/2015/Newsletter_ Apr_2015.pdf.

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25 Adriana Knouf, “Fragments of Xenology,” 2021. Available online: https://tranxxenolab. net/writings/fragmentsofxenology/.

Bibliography Brandt, Annette, Jean-Pierre de Vera, Silvano Onofri, and Sieglinde Ott. “Viability of the Lichen Xanthoria Elegans and Its Symbionts After 18 Months of Space Exposure and Simulated Mars Conditions on the Iss.” International Journal of Astrobiology 14, no. 3 (2015): 411–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550414000214. Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Headline, 1993. Campanile, Domitilla, Filippo Carlà-Uhink, and Margherita Facella, eds. TransAntiquity: Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World. Routledge, 2017. Cappelletti, Chantal, Simone Battistini, and Benjamin K. Malphrus. CubeSat Handbook: From Mission Design to Operations. Elsevier, 2021. Carson, Anne. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2002. Catholic News Agency. “Relics, Icons and Crosses Are Onboard International Space Station, Cosmonaut Says,” 2010. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/18349/ relics-icons-and-crosses-are-onboard-international-space-station-cosmonaut-says. Chambers, Becky. To Be Taught, If Fortunate. Hodder & Stoughton, 2019. Clynes, Manfred E., and Nathan S. Kline. “Cyborgs and Space.” Astronautics, September 1960, 26–27, 74–76. Cockell, Charles S. Astrobiology: Understanding Life in the Universe. Wiley-Blackwell, 2020. Crick, F. H. C., and L. E. Orgel. “Directed Panspermia.” Icarus 19, no. 3 (1973): 341–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/0019-1035(73)90110-3. ESA. “Gaia Mission Requirements Document,” 2013. https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/ gaia/public-dpac-documents. ESA, ed. “Milestones in Astrobiology.” Space for Life: Human Spaceflight Science Newsletter, no. 7 (April 2015). http://wsn.spaceflight.esa.int/docs/ HumanSpaceflightScienceNewsletters/2015/Newsletter_Apr_2015.pdf. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Perfanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, 1990. Holman, Matthew J. “MPEC 2018-P109: SONIA Keys (1961-2018),” 2018. https://www. minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K18/K18PA9.html. Knouf, Adriana. “Fragments of Xenology,” 2021. https://tranxxenolab.net/writings/ fragmentsofxenology/. Lewis, Abram J. “Trans History in a Moment of Danger: Organizing Within and Beyond ‘Visibility’ in the 1970s.” In Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, 57–90. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Libre Space Foundation. “Libre Space Manifesto,” 2022. https://manifesto.libre.space/en/. Linda-Goodman.com. “Asteroids Related to LGBTQ, Human Rights, Feminism, Tolerance . . .” 2019. http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum28/HTML/004909.html. Monchaux, Nicholas De. Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo. MIT Press, 2011. NASA. “Planetary Protection,” 2022. https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetaryprotection.

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Shetterly, Margot Lee. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. HarperCollins, 2016. Torre, Rosa de la, Leopoldo G. Sancho, Gerda Horneck, Asunción de los Ríos, Jacek Wierzchos, Karen Olsson-Francis, Charles S. Cockell, et al. “Survival of Lichens and Bacteria Exposed to Outer Space Conditions - Results of the Lithopanspermia Experiments.” Icarus 208, no. 2 (2010): 735–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. icarus.2010.03.010. Vulpetti, Giovanni, Les Johnson, and Gregory L. Matloff. Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interplanetary Travel. New York: Springer, 2015. Wikipedia. “House System at the California Institute of Technology,” 2022. https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/House_system_at_the_California_Institute_of_ Technology#Blacker_House. Wikipedia. “List of Space Travelers by Nationality,” 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_space_travelers_by_nationality. Wołodźko, Agnieszka Anna. Affect as Contamination: Embodiment in Bioart and Biotechnology. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

4.3 Wohˇpe Wakaŋ: Falling Star Woman Unravels Western Cultural Supremacy Erin Genia

On March 6, 2020 the SpaceX Falcon 9 CRS-20 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. My tiny work of art, Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman, was aboard. Weighing just 0.86 gram, she joined 1,977 kilograms of science investigations, spacewalk equipment, vehicle hardware, computer resources and crew supplies on the Dragon spacecraft headed for low Earth orbit.1 She flew on Sojourner 2020, a project of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, which delivered the first international open-call art payload to the ISS. The capsule contained creative investigations that blurred the lines between art and science in the unique environment of space. The project sought to “democratize access to space as well as open space exploration to transdisciplinary perspectives. By including projects from indigenous peoples and gender minorities the project . . . honors and emphasizes key values of human dignity and equality.”2

Figure 4.3.1 Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman through a lens, 2020, courtesy of Erin Genia. © Erin Genia. See Plate Section 1

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Figure 4.3.2 Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman through a lens, 2020, courtesy of Erin Genia. © Erin Genia

Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman is a minuscule depiction of the Dakota legend of a star-gazing young woman who travels to space, marries a star person and gives birth to a star child. She leaves her home among the Star Nation and returns to her people on Earth. Using the cord of her woven dress as a rope, she climbs down from the stars. Finding it too short, she lets go and tumbles down to Earth as a wohˇpe wakaŋ, a falling star. The carving depicts the moment she transforms into a meteor, becoming Wicahnpi Hinhpayawin, Falling Star Woman. Her face appears on one side as her hair flows into the shape of an eight-pointed star on the other end. A Dakota floral icon on her body shows the strong pull she felt to resume her duties to her people as a plant medicine healer, and the relevance of constellations to planting seasons. She was made as a symbolic prayer for peace, for the strengthening of Dakota and Indigenous peoples all over the globe, and for the resurgence of Indigenous knowledge in this time of global crisis. Like so many other cultures around the world, knowledge of stars and the universe has always been integral to Dakota peoples’ cosmology. Our oral traditions carry information that has been passed down over epochs. They tell us we came from the stars, which stars we came from, how star people lived, and many other details about gravity, planets, vast distances, deep time, how our existence on Earth began, and about the nature of life across the universe. Falling Star Woman’s story varies across oral tradition, carrying different outcomes for her communities.3 In this piece, I share the elements that are most prominent in my

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recollection. I prepared the stone for its journey to space, and into public imagination, knowing that Western science and art practices demand undue access to Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and cultural properties. Dakota cultural protocols provide protection from the expropriation and exploitation that is central to today’s settler colonial reality. As a self-possessed, space-traveling woman, Wicahnpi Hinhpayawin’s example has resonated with generations of tribal people who have been fascinated by the lessons of her life. Her story also carries much to inspire non-Native people. She teaches about Dakota peoples’ knowledge of the stars, the universe beyond Earth. She embodies the free will possessed by Native American women to shape their own destinies and in so doing, shape the destiny of humanity itself. Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman’s journey covered more than twenty-three million kilometers in the microgravity of low Earth orbit aboard the ISS before returning to Earth by splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. Her flight brings a Dakota perspective into the burgeoning arena of space travel and pierces through layers of misunderstanding surrounding the leadership of Indigenous women in establishing the democratic norms that have made high-tech space travel possible.

Tribal Matriarchal Foundations of Modern Feminism and US Democracy Democracy and feminism as we understand them today, have origins in Indigenous methods. When Colonel Nicole Mann, member of the Wailacki band of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, made history as mission commander for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 to the ISS,4 the symbolism of her ascent to space as the first Native American woman was clear. Space travel has been historically dominated by men, and Mann’s position as an astronaut, as a woman, and as an Indigenous person is remarkable. As a Native American woman myself, I perceive her ascent not as an anomaly, but an instance of history righting itself. Mann follows in the footsteps of Indigenous women leaders who for thousands of years “had all the rights and powers that American women today are struggling to obtain, including economic and political power, spiritual equality, the right to proper health care, up to and including abortion on demand; the right to divorce on demand; and the right to call—and call off—war.”5 Native societies were egalitarian beyond anything the Europeans colonists experienced, or even dreamed. They have been the unacknowledged authors of American democracy that have made advances like the space program possible. When European separatists encountered Native people on these shores, they didn’t recognize the gender equality fundamental to tribal systems. The tribes were seen as a threat to the settlers’ established order, and yet, the historical record reveals interactions with tribal matriarchal societies, like the Algonquin and the Haudenosaunee peoples, were instrumental in forming colonists’ new concepts of governance. Their powerful influence has been minimized and even concealed, as has their role in birthing feminism in the United States. The mothers of the modern feminist movement at Seneca Falls, New York, were inspired by women of the Haudenosaunee

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Confederacy, which is the oldest continuously practiced representative democracy in the world. The Founding Fathers drew from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace to formulate the US Constitution. Native gender equality, notions of confederation, federalism, separation of powers and uniting vast geographic expanses under a non-colonial government6 were repackaged as products of Western culture. This erasure is another form of violence. In 1986, the renowned Laguna Pueblo poet and scholar, Paula Gunn Allen, penned an influential treatise, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, which reframed the role of matriarchy in American Indian philosophy and outlined its impact on feminist thought. Connecting women’s struggles across global cultures, the work is a call to action for decolonization in which the author locates the foundations of American feminism in traditional tribal ways. If American society judiciously modeled the traditions of the various Native Nations, the place of women in society would become central, the distribution of goods and power would be egalitarian, the elderly would be respected, honored and protected as a primary social and cultural resource, the ideals of physical beauty would be considerably enlarged . . . additionally the destruction of the biota, the life sphere and the natural resources of the planet would be curtailed, and the spiritual nature of human and non-human life would become a primary organizing principle of society. And . . . war would cease to be a major method of human problem solving.7

The dominant society is far from achieving Allen’s vision. Instead, invisibility is a daily reality for Indigenous women. Structural racism and deeply embedded Western cultural supremacy penetrates the sciences and academia. When I was a student at MIT, I was part of the 0.01 percent total population of Native American students at the institution.8 Without our perspectives and presence at all levels of decision making, a severe imbalance in our world is continuously upheld.

Unravelling Western Cultural Supremacy Dakota philosophical traditions, alongside their counterparts from other Indigenous traditions, are much older than Western colonial constructs. They have developed through careful observation over thousands of generations to align with the cycles of the universe. These highly advanced epistemologies are in many ways more sophisticated than those of the Europeans who came to usurp the land. Yet, pervasive Western cultural supremacy renders them primitive. In Dakota philosophy, all things exist within a continuum of life. Mitakuye Oyasin is a natural law that recognizes and respects the interconnectedness and agency of the inherent life within everything around us, all the materials of existence. Dakota political, economic, and social systems built upon Mitakuye Oyasin thrived until interrupted by colonization, genocide, assimilation, the destruction of our lifeways, and the continued occupation of our lands.

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As Dakota leader, Vine Deloria, Jr. said, “Western thinkers have erected a series of absolute concepts . . . as a consequence, Western people have been taught to think in a restricted manner.”9 Consider the familiar trope of colonizing Mars after we have presumably depleted all the resources on Earth. It demonstrates how the expansionist trajectory of manifest destiny remains ever present in the frontier of space. It exposes the collective imagination of the dominant culture as alienated from nature, possessing an extractive orientation to the world that extends beyond the troposphere. As Western thinkers reach the limits of doctrine, and see the proofs of its existential violence in climate change, economic inequality, ecological destruction, institutional racism, and gender injustice, Indigenous ways of knowing are once again sought after, seen as another resource to extract. Art can bring Western cultural supremacy into sharp focus. I counter its destructive legacy by centering Dakota philosophy, stories, and peoples in my art. My piece, Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman, communicates that more is possible. Through her materiality as the sacred stone, canupa iŋyan, which is associated with diplomacy, she is an emissary. Crystalizing Dakota oral history, the inherent authority of women, and a relational worldview, she quietly expresses Indigenous peoples’ contributions to the liberal democratic society enjoyed by the dominant culture. She’s part of my ongoing artistic research project, Canupa Iŋyan: The Carvings of My Ancestors. Canupa iŋyan is also known as pipestone, or by its scientific name, catlinite, after the early settler painter George Catlin, who visited the pipestone quarry. My study of the stone has taken me to into museum collections around the United States, where I have spent time in the presence of our canupa iŋyan treasures, where they are kept behind closed doors, inaccessible to our people, artists, and culturebearers who need them. In Dakota philosophy, they are regarded as ancestors who possess a life of their own. Western cultural supremacy proliferates in museums, where Indigenous peoples’ cultures are reduced to primitive subjects of fascination and cultural treasures are treated as spoils of genocide, while outside these repositories, Dakota and other Indigenous peoples continue to experience ethnocide.

A Quarry, a Floating Laboratory, and Mitakuye Oyasin Canupa iŋyan is a form of red argillite that inhabits a thin layer along Pipestone Creek, below Winnewissa Falls, and under a massive mantle of dense Sioux quartzite. The creek bed is located in what is today known as Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota, within the Big Sioux River watershed. There is an ancient Dakota story of a great flood there that swept our people away, the blood of those lost solidified over time, becoming canupa iŋyan. Consequently, the quarry is sacred, a place of pilgrimage. Tribal peoples from the region come to dig the stone to carve ceremonial pipes as they have for millennia. Pipes made from canupa iŋyan played a key role in intergovernmental affairs and tribal governance, treaty-making and in times of war and peace between tribes and colonial entities. Dakota peoples, part of the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven

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Council Fires tribes, have been stewards of the site since time immemorial, ensuring its protection as part of treaty agreements with the United States. There is a parallel between the canupa iŋyan quarry and the ISS. Under NASA, the ISS is stewarded by a number of nations who send people and experiments 400 kilometers above the Earth to the floating laboratory. The station is portrayed as a model of diplomacy, a bastion of democracy, and a jumping-off point for humans’ next steps into the great mystery of space. It is a sacred space for the faith of science, so it’s not unlike the pipestone quarry. Both are sites where people come from all over with an attitude of reverence and lay down their weapons and conflicts to do the important work that can only be done there. In an interview aboard the ISS, Nicole Mann said, “We are all on this planet as human beings, we have to come together as a species, to take care of each other and to take care of our planet, it’s the only one we have.”10 Mann’s message echoes those of many astronauts who go to the ISS. Once they see the beauty and fragility of Earth from afar, they return with a profound shift in perspective that often aligns with Mitakuye Oyasin. As we reach towards planets beyond our own, Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman is a reminder that underneath the systems that capitalize upon us and colonize us, we are Earth-based beings. Like the cord used to carry Wicahnpi Hinhpayawin from the sky world back down to Earth, her journey begins to unravel the Western cultural supremacy that limits our collective imagination and our ethical approaches to space exploration.

Notes 1 NASA, “SpaceX CRS-20 Mission” (n.d.) Available online: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/ default/files/atoms/files/spacex_crs-20_mission_overview.pdf. 2 Janine Liberty, “Five MIT Payloads Deployed on the International Space Station,” MIT News, 25 March 2020 Available online: https://news.mit.edu/2020/five-mit-payloadsdeployed-international-space-station-0325. 3 Gwen Westerman and Bruce White, Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota, 1st edition (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012), 16. 4 Sarah Kuta, ‘Nicole Mann Becomes the First Native American Woman in Space’, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 October 2022, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/nicole-mann-becomes-the-first-native-american-woman-in-space-180980906/. 5 Barbara Alice Mann, ed., Daughters of Mother Earth: The Wisdom of Native American Women (Praeger, 2006), 65. 6 José Barreiro, Indian Roots of American Democracy (Akwe:kon Press, Cornell University, 1992), 55. 7 Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Open Road Media, 2015), 210. 8 “Diversity Dashboard,” MIT Institutional Research, accessed 24 March 2023, https:// ir.mit.edu/diversity-dashboard. 9 Vine Jr. Deloria, The Metaphysics of Modern Existence, 1st ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 211. 10 Nicole Mann Takes Laughter Permitted on an Out-of-This-World Journey to SPACE, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FuAtYWDYg.

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Bibliography Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Open Road Media, 2015. Barreiro, José. Indian Roots of American Democracy. Akwe:kon Press, Cornell University, 1992. Deloria, Vine Jr. The Metaphysics of Modern Existence. 1st ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979. Kuta, Sarah. ‘Nicole Mann Becomes the First Native American Woman in Space’. Smithsonian Magazine, October 6, 2022. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/nicole-mann-becomes-the-first-native-american-woman-in-space-180980906/. Liberty, Janine. ‘Five MIT Payloads Deployed on the International Space Station’. MIT News, March 25, 2020. https://news.mit.edu/2020/five-mit-payloads-deployedinternational-space-station-0325. Lyons, Oren, ed. Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations, and the U.S. Constitution. First Edition. Santa Fe, N.M: Clear Light Books, 1992. Mann, Barbara Alice, ed. Daughters of Mother Earth: The Wisdom of Native American Women. Praeger, 2006. MIT Institutional Research. “Diversity Dashboard.” Available online: https://ir.mit.edu/ diversity-dashboard (accessed March 24, 2023). NASA. “SpaceX CRS-20 Mission” (n.d.). Available online: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/ default/files/atoms/files/spacex_crs-20_mission_overview.pdf. Nicole Mann Takes Laughter Permitted on an Out-of-This-World Journey to SPACE, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FuAtYWDYg. Westerman, Gwen, and Bruce White. Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota. 1st edition. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012.

4.4 Decolonizing the Future in Outer Space: Feminist and Indigiqueer Slipstream on Film Anne W. Johnson

The 6th World The first world was dark. First Man and First Woman were created in this world, which they shared with flying insect beings. There was conflict, and they were forced to leave and so climbed up to the second world on a reed First Man had planted. This world was blue and inhabited by birds. But the beings from the first world offended the beings of the second world, and so they were asked to leave. They journeyed to the third world on wands created by First Man. This world was yellow, but they were forced to leave it too, after Coyote angered a monster, who caused a great flood. They emerged in the fourth world, which was white or glittering. And that is where they still live today, although some stories mention a final journey to a fifth world. They recreated the sacred mountains from soil they had brought with them from the second world. They made the sun, moon, seasons, and stars. Death came into being, as well. First Man and First Woman adopted a baby girl they had found. She was blessed by the Holy People, who gave them the Blessingway ceremony and taught them about hózhó, harmony, balance, and well-being. The baby girl became Changing Woman, Asdzáá Nádleehí, who embodies the Earth, the cycle of the seasons and the human body. Changing

Figure 4.4.1 Still from The 6th World, 2012, Nanobah Becker

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Woman gave birth to the Hero Twins who killed the monsters who still roamed the Earth, and later created the ancestors of the matrilineal Navajo, or Diné.1 Diné filmmaker Nanobah Becker imagines what comes next: a future journey that gives the Navajo Nation another chance to thrive on a new world. In The 6th World,2 Diné astronaut Tazbah Redhouse is on a voyage to Mars, funded by an unnamed global corporation and the Navajo Nation which, in this imagined future, has a successful history of space travel and economic prosperity. At the start of the film, before the launch of her ship, Redhouse is visited by decorated Diné General Bahe, who gifts her a Navajo flag, after having his pouch of sacred corn pollen confiscated because it has not been genetically improved. During the journey, Redhouse and her colleague Dr. Smith work to grow genetically modified corn that will feed them on Mars, but a technological failure results in the death of the GMO corn. Fortunately, General Bahe has hidden two ears of sacred corn—one white (male) and one yellow (female)—wrapped in the Navajo flag, which provide hope for the crew’s survival. In what appears to be a dream, Redhouse, having transformed into Changing Woman, chants the Navajo Hoop Dance in front of a cosmic background. The final scene shows a field of corn surrounded by a red desert landscape, presaging a new beginning for the Diné on Mars. The camera zooms out to show the entire planet, and the inscription Są’ah Naghai Bik’eh Hozho, an encapsulation of the Diné living system and worldview, fills the screen. The film takes up and transforms the historical migrations of the Diné people, both chosen (the mythical voyage from the first through the fifth worlds) and coerced (the 1864 Long Walk, a forced march to Bosque Redondo, New Mexico mandated by the United States government, during which hundreds of Navajo died of starvation and exhaustion). Corn seeds were one of the keys to survival in each case. The traumas of the past inform future possibilities in Becker’s work. As Cornum writes, The Indian in space seeks to feel at home, to undo her perceived strangeness by asking: why can’t indigenous peoples also project ourselves among the stars? Might our collective visions of the cosmos forge better relationships here on earth and in the present than colonial visions of a final frontier?3

Reclamation The film opens with a digital image of Mars, a rusty sphere on a black canvas, with one of its polar icecaps visible at the top of the screen. Two women on a sofa. The sound of a helicopter in the background. One starts: “Loud noises, bangs, fire, explosions everywhere. You couldn’t find a safe place. It was really scary. I never ran so much in my life.” The other: “I don’t like to talk about it.” Video clip of a rocket blasting off. A man starts talking: “It’s uncharted territory for them. Them being the colonizers. I feel more for the planet Mars than for them.” The camera cuts to the two women. The second: “I hope they don’t come back.” Reclamation,4 the work of trans filmmaker, TJ Cuthand (Plains/Cree/Scots), revolves around interviews with the Indigenous survivors of

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future climate disaster, which has caused the settler colonial population to flee to Mars in a mass exodus, leaving them to clean up the mess, as always. “A full-time job is cleaning up after these pukes.” Cuthand intersperses shots of the survivors narrating and commenting on their experiences with footage of ecological destruction and archival images from NASA. Things are still hard, the gas mask-wearing interviewees say, as they show the filmmaker around, but the climate is less toxic than it was, in every way. “There is kind of a sense of peace.” “It smells cleaner.” And the survivors have gone back to many of “their traditional ways.” “You can’t Google life now.” Foraging, barter, everyone has a gift to offer. And there’s no judgment, either for being native or for being queer. “We’re imagining what we want the world to look, and feel, and sound like.” “The future is going to be bright.” “The Earth is repairing itself.” Perhaps the clearest summation of the process: “We’re still working on decolonizing our community, but you know, without the colonizer here, it just becomes quicker, and quicker, and quicker each day.” And, laconically, “A lot less drama.” Reclamation gestures towards the promise of visual sovereignty that Leslie Marmon Silko made in The Indian with a Camera almost thirty years ago: The Indian with a camera is an omen of a time in the future that all Euro-Americans unconsciously dread: the time when the indigenous people of the Americas will retake their land. Euro-Americans distract themselves with whether a real, or traditional, or authentic Indian would, should, or could work with a camera. (Get those Indians back to their basket making!) Euro-Americans desperately try to deny what has already begun, that inexorable force which has already been set loose in the Americas. Hopi, Aztec, Maya, Inca – these are the people who would not die, the people who do not change, because they are always changing. The Indian with a camera announces the twilight of Eurocentric America.5

“You always hear these things about Elon Musk,” says Cuthand in an online interview. Why not do something with Earth, here? That would be a more Indigenous way of looking at things.6

Figure 4.4.2 Still from Reclamation, 2018, TJ Cuthand, courtesy of TJ Cuthand

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Reflections In The 6th World, natives can travel through space and survive on a new planet thanks to their ability to blend technoscientific capabilities with traditional knowledge. The Martian landscape in which the film culminates, shot in Arizona with a red filter, is both alien and familiar. Nanobah Becker twists time upon itself, reclaiming a female/ queer technology that allows for regeneration. She thus narrates a future that spirals from the past without repeating it exactly, in which humans and their landscape find a harmonious balance,7 even on another planet. Natives become Martians but retain their relational ties to the land and to their pasts, showing, in the words of Lou Cornum, that natives can be both explorer and caretaker: “Land-based does not have to mean landlocked . . . The space NDN looks into the void and knows still who they are.”8 On the other hand, Reclamation is centered on life on Earth after the settler colonialists escape the damaged planet and migrate to Mars, perhaps thus unmasking themselves as the alien invaders they had always been to native peoples. For TJ Cuthand, the landscape of a post-apocalyptic Earth, which the filmmaker shot in Saskatchewan and other locations in Canada, becomes the setting for a reclaiming of stolen land and a rediscovery of traditional knowledge and technology, as well as an opportunity for embracing both Indigenous and queer identities in the absence of the colonizer. While Becker’s film stresses feminine spiritual practices of care, and gestures toward the existence of non-binary genders in Indigenous tradition, Cuthand’s work is more explicitly queer. In fact, he is credited with coining the term “indigiqueer” as an alternative or compliment to “two-spirit,” a phrase that references the existence of culturally accepted roles for non-gender-conforming members of some Indigenous communities before European colonization. “Two-spirit” was adopted in the 1990s as a replacement for the anthropological concept of “berdache,” considered to be derogatory for its etymological derivation from a French word for “passive homosexual,” as well as its overly generalized application. However, “two-spirit” has also been criticized for its reliance on a Western binary conceptualization of gender and sexuality. The term “indigiqueer” has been adopted by many Indigenous members of the LGBTQ2S+ community as a non-binary way of situating queer experience in a native context.9 Both directors disrupt linear temporality, and both insert dystopic visions into their narratives: the nearly fatal failure of the corporation’s GMO corn in the case of The 6th World, and the ecological crisis that motivates Reclamation’s mass migration and subsequent planetary renewal—both situations caused by settler colonialists’ refusal to engage in caring relations with the land and natural resources, as well as their misplaced faith in “modern” technology. As Cornum argues, “Advanced technologies should foster and improve human relationships with the non-human world. In many indigenous science fiction tales of the futures, technology is presented as in dialogue with the long traditions of the past, rather than representing the past’s overcoming.”10 Becker and Cuthand challenge linear technoscientific notions of “progress,” both on Earth and in outer space, warning of the consequences of blind belief in Western technoscience. But their visions are ultimately hopeful, as their futures bend toward the utopian. As indigiqueer writer Joshua Whitehead writes, “For, as we know, we have already survived the apocalypse—this, right here, right now, is a dystopian present.

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What better way to imagine survivability than to think about how we may flourish into being joyously animated rather than merely alive?”11 Native feminist and indigiqueer narratives about outer space and its futures offer alternatives to the dominant futurisms that imagine the postplanetary human species expanding into the cosmos as it continues to replicate the colonialist and extractivist processes that have resulted in the ecological destruction and brutal inequalities that characterize earthly life in the twenty-first century. In The 6th World and Reclamation, cinematic examples of these narratives, Nanobah Becker and TJ Cuthand produce native speculative slipstreams that combine hope and memory, prophecy, and critique. They are reminders that space and space activities should not merely be opened up and made more inclusive, but that the ways in which space is invoked, appropriated, or inhabited are choices with consequences. They remind us that other futures are possible, both in space and on Earth.

Notes 1 Jennifer Denetdale, The Long Walk: The Forced Navajo Exile (New York: Chelsea House, 2008), 11-17. 2 The 6th World [Film] (Dir. Nanobah Becker, Los Ángeles: Futurestates Productions, 2012). Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f4Jm0y_iLk&t=54s (accessed 29 November 2022). 3 Lou Cornum, “The Space NDN’s Star Map”, The New Inquiry (2015), https:// thenewinquiry.com/the-space-ndns-star-map/. Diné writer Cornum’s futurist acronym “NDN” is pronounced “Indian.” 4 Reclamation [Film] (Dir. TJ Cuthand, Canada, 2018). Available online: https://vimeo. com/279943832 (accessed 29 November 2022). 5 Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 177-178. And see also Curtis Marez, “Aliens and Indians: Science Fiction, Prophetic Photography and Near-Future Visions”, Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 3, no. 3 (2004), 336-352. 6 Art Gallery of Ontario, “Art in the Spotlight: Thirza Cuthand and Darlene Naponse” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOSakYI60DU, accessed November 15, 2022). 7 William Lempert, “Decolonizing Encounters of the Third Kind: Alternative Futuring in Native Science Fiction Film”, Visual Anthropology Review, vol. 30, no. 2 (2014), 168. 8 Cornum, “The Space NDN’s Star Map”. 9 See https://www.allmyrelationspodcast.com/podcast/episode/47547617/indigiqueer. 10 Cornum, “The Space NDN’s Star Map.” 11 Joshua Whitehead, “Introduction”, in Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, ed. Joshua Whitehead (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), 10.

Bibliography Cornum, Lou. “The Space NDN’s Star Map.” The New Inquiry, 2015. https://thenewinquiry. com/the-space-ndns-star-map/ (accessed 30 November 2022).

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Demos, T. J. “Radical Futurism: Documentary’s Chronopolitics.” Trigger, 2021. https:// fomu.be/trigger/articles/radical-futurism-documentarys-chronopolitics (accessed 30 November 2022). Denetdale, Jennifer. The Long Walk: The Forced Navajo Exile. New York: Chelsea House, 2008. Lempert, William. “Decolonizing Encounters of the Third Kind: Alternative Futuring in Native Science Fiction Film.” Visual Anthropology Review, vol. 30, no. 2, 2014: 164-176. Marez, Curtis. “Aliens and Indians: Science Fiction, Prophetic Photography and NearFuture Visions.” Journal of Visual culture, vol. 3, no. 3, 2004: 336-352. Reclamation [Film]. Dir. T. J. Cuthand, Canada, 2018. Available online: https://vimeo. com/279943832 (accessed 29 November 2022). Silko, Leslie Marmon. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. The 6th World [Film]. Dir. Nanobah Becker, Los Ángeles: Futurestates Productions, 2012. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f4Jm0y_iLk&t=54s (accessed 29 November 2022). Vowel, Chelsea. Buffalo is the New Buffalo. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022. Whitehead, Joshua. “Introduction.” Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, ed. Joshua Whitehead. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020: 9-15.

4.5 Ancestrofuturism: Two Stories of Women who Travel in Time and Space Fabiane M. Borges and Maria Luiza Fragoso

Ancestrofuturism and Space Feminism The Pataxó and the Tupinambá are Indigenous peoples who live in Brazil. These two peoples had their territories appropriated during the colonial period and suffered epistemicide. Today, through different approaches that articulate territory, memory, and imaginary, they are managing to rescue their traditions. Both stories presented here are about women who are very important references for their nations. They have in common the ancestrofuturistic1 abilities, that is, they can travel through time, make dream journeys, cross the world of spectra, clairvoyance to deeply understand cosmovisions and cosmogonies, and sensitivity to feel the connections between Earth, the solar system and the cosmos movement. Ancestrofuturism is an important framework for thinking about the space–time journey of the stories of the Pataxó and Tupinambá. Both stories become even more iconic if perceived from the point of view of “Amerindian perspectivism,” an anthropological concept developed by two Brazilian anthropologists, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro2 and Tânia Stolze Lima.3 They say pre-colonial thought in the Americas is a sophisticated philosophical matrix, whose fragments survive in Indigenous cultures to this day. Amerindian perspectivism posits that there are a universal humanity like thinking, feeling, and desiring in everything that exists; it manifests itself through multiplicity (different shapes). This explains interspecific communication to a large extent, as it is possible to access the human that inhabits all shapes (animism). As de Castro explains, “jaguars see blood as manioc beer, vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish.”4 The application of the concept of ancestrofuturism, in the light of fragments of Amerindian perspectivism theories, to the two specific histories of the Pataxó and Tupinambá seems to us a kind of decolonial pragmatic-conceptual instrument, as Suely Rolnik says in her book, Esferas da Insurreição (2018) (Spheres of Insurrection), when she writes, “The aim is to create pragmatic-conceptual instruments suitable for the decolonization of the unconscious, the target of micropolitical insurrection. And if such a task is imposed today with maximum urgency, it is because the combat in this sphere is still in its infancy.”5 130

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According to Glicéria Tupinambá,6 Indigenous women were particularly invisibilized by colonial researchers who mainly portrayed men’s rituals. Such patriarchal medievalism left little historical data on the culture and rituals of Tupinambá women. These women are represented here as navigators of ancestrofuturism in large part for their ability to cross this wall of impossibility, travel through time, access magical thinking, reverse temporal flows, and live with the line of ancestry in hand with a view to resurrecting the future of their people. The two Indigenous feminist stories that follow are linked to what is most ethically refined in the world, mainly because it is interspecific in origin.

Patxôhã Language: How a Language of the Past is Becoming the Language of a People’s Future To this day, the Pataxó people are fighting for ancestral territories in the extreme south of Bahia, Brazil, to revitalize their native language that was nearly lost due to the colonial acts of erasure. One of the most outstanding means of rescuing language is through ritual (awê). Some rituals have become increasingly more frequent in Barra Velha territory, considered by many the mother village of the Pataxós people. Rituals are practiced by dancing in a circle, using maracas and drums, and can last for several hours. Sometimes, during rituals, processes of trance and possession of their entities can take place.7 In preparation for the Technoshamanism Festival8 in Aldeia Pará, organizers practiced a full moon ritual. After four hours, something unexpected happened: four elderly women in a state of deep trance began to chanting loudly in the language of their ancestors. The drums and maracas stopped playing. A sepulchral silence overtook the crowd. Children and teens ran up to the women, smartphones in hand to get them on camera. Everyone else stopped what they were doing. It was a sacred moment. The women chanted, talked, and shouted for a long time. Then they fell back into silence. The drums and maracas started playing again and the ritual resumed. These old women were unable to speak the ancient language in normal waking state. Only in dreams or moments in trance were they able to recover the language. The women told ancient stories of their people, perplexing outsiders by this time travel. The children and teenagers showed what they had recorded on their phones to their teachers, who in turn showed the footage to university linguists, who interpreted it, gave meaning to it, and transformed it into written words. This resulted in the creation of a Patxohã dictionary that now serves as an educational tool for children. The dictionary is a familiar object—but its origins are magical and embodied. This ritual, which makes use of digital technology to accomplish its purpose, works as a positive feedback system, adding knowledge of the past to countless villages by reviving lost language and previously unconscious memories.

This is the Great Return of the Tupinambá Mantle One of the eleven sacred mantles of the Tupinambá people, produced around the seventeenth century, was found in the National Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen.

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Another ten mantles can still be found in various museums throughout Europe. Nowadays, the Tupinambá people demand the repatriation of their mantles, which only recently began to happen. The mantles were made with around 10,000 red feathers of the Guará bird, today a rare species due to deforestation. The mantle represents the strength and vigor of the great bird, as well as mimicry and interspecific diplomacy. The Tupinambá Indigenous people have lost the technique used to sew the mantle, although the object itself has never left their oral tradition. In 2000, the Museum of Denmark lent the mantle to an exhibition held at Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo, in honor of the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil. Reports claim that the arrival of the mantle and the encounter of the Tupinambás with the relic generated strong emotion that empowerd the struggles of the Tupinambá people for resumption of their ancestral territory. The mantle contains powers that can only be expressed in the right hands. Indigenous artist Glicéria Tupinambá is a leader of the Serra do Padeiro community, one of twenty-two villages on Tupinambá de Olivença Indigenous land in southern Bahia. She decided to recreate a mantle in honor of the enchanted ones (Tupinambá entities) when the land of her people was finally demarcated in 2009 after a long political struggle. Glicéria says she suffers from “cosmo-agony”;9 the mantle speaks to her in dreams and visions.10 It allows her to travel through time, into the past and towards the future. The artist found a woodcut from 1505 that depicts a woman wearing a feathered cloak with a child sitting on her lap who is handing her a bird’s feather. Glicéria highlights this detail because when she started making the mantle, this exact scene was re-enacted. The area where she lives is full of feathers from birds such as geese, ducks, and chickens, and children perform the very same gesture seen in the image. They walk among the feathers, choosing beautiful ones to compose the mantle. Each feather delivered is a wish that is inscribed on the mantle, such as “This mantle will have super strength,” or “This mantle will heal the world.” These small rites weave timeless magic into the mantle. Glicéria blends knowledge of archeology and anthropology with magical and animistic thinking with the aim of helping to save her people from extermination. In 2021, Glicéria Tupinambá’s mantle by was presented at the exhibition “Kwá yapé turusú yuriri assojaba Tupinambá This is the great return of the Tupinambá mantle.” Tupinambá rituals were held in honor of the mantle. The exhibition sparked the creation of other mantles, now once again being made by Tupinambá hands, and schools and villages teach the ancient techniques. The sacred mantle has had a tremendous effect on the Tupinambá community. It has empowering the reconstitution of their language and strengthening their collective imaginary and culture, knowledges that only today can finally be heard by non-Indigenous people.

Conclusion These two female Indigenous stories offer an alternative perspective to outer space exploration. The techniques used to recover the territory and memory of these Indigenous women serve as tools for the emancipation of the entire space feminist projects, because it gives access to a different cosmological point of view that can be a fresh starting point

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to negotiate astropolitical issues, once this instrumentalizes cosmotechnics (like time travel) and technodiversity (like mantle-making). Yuk Hui says: We do not reject the notion that there is a universal dimension to technology, but this is just one of them. From a cosmotechnical point of view, technique is, in essence, motivated and limited by geographic and cosmological specificities. If we want to react to perspectives of global self-extinction, we will need to return to a discurse carefully elaborated on localities and position that the humans occupies in the cosmos. For this to be possible, we need first of all rearticulate the question of technology and be able to conceive of a multiplicity of cosmoethics—and not just two (the pre-modern and the Modern).11

Ancestrofuturism is aligned with Yuk Hui’s ideas, applying them in the context of space feminism. It connects the past and future, creating a temporal convergence that generates a plurality of spacetimes, imaginary atmospheres, and cosmovisions. Ancestrofuturism embraces both the spectrality of memory and the materiality of the world, bringing forgotten memories to light and strengthening experiences of resurrection of communities experiences destroyed by colonial violence. It brings these experiences closer to all cosmite and panpsychist desires that envisage the terraformation of the galaxies, creating a kind of direct line between Indigenous women on Earth and native women from other planets who may one day come to look at the Earth as those who seek their ancestry. They will be able to use tools such as those used by Tupinambá and Pataxó women in their search. Incorporating diverse cultural perspectives and practices such as space feminism can ensure that space occupation efforts be more equitable, sustainable, and fair, not an eternal interplanetary war between despotic men interested in usurping, murdering, destroying, and dominating everything. The perspective of Indigenous women presented in the text emphasizes the importance of encountering knowledge through contact with spectral power and its invisible forces supporting the persistence of ritual, the creation of communities, and fostering a sense of belonging among people and other species. Finally, ancestrofuturism encourages new becomings, affects, perceptions and rhythms of existence, here on Earth or elsewhere, because it is capable of generating different realities within reality, expanding the contours of what we consider real.

Notes 1 Borges, F. M. and Fragoso, M. L. (2018), “Ancestrofuturism, Ancestralities and Technoshamanism”. CAC.6—Computer and Media Art Education. 6th edition of Computer Art Congress. Guanajuato, México. Available online: http://europia.org/cac6/ CAC-Pdf/12-CAC6-16-Fabi_Malu_Ancestrofuturism.pdf Accessed 12 May, 2023. 2 Viveiros de Castro, E. (1996), ‘Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo Ameríndio’. Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social, 2 (2):115-144. 3 Lima, T. S. (1999), ‘Para uma teoria etnográfica da distinção natureza e cultura na cosmologia Juruna’. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 14 (40): 43-52. São Paulo: Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências Sociais - ANPOCS

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4 Viveiros de Castro Eduardo. (1998), “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469-88. 5 Rolnik, Suely. (2018), Esferas da insurreição: notas para uma vida não cafetinada. São Paulo: N-1. 1 (2): 144-145. 6 “ ‘O Futuro Ancestral’ Glicéria Tupinambá, in the lecture O Futuro Ancestral – Festival Zum” (2022), [Video] RevistaZUM, 15 December. Available online: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=9aja6uo3hTQ (Accessed May 12, 2023). 7 Bomfim, A. B. (2012), “Linguagem do Guerreiro: Um estudo do processo de retorno da linguagem Pataxó” MA diss., UFBA. 8 Borges. M. (2016), (Org) ‘Tecnoxamanismo’. São Paulo: Invisíveis Produções. 9 Cosmo-agony is the anguish suffered by people, who, like Glicéria, communicate directly with the cosmos, which since her point of view represents the ability to access ancestral knowledge through dreams and images. “I suffer from cosmo agony . . . the cosmos comes and talks to me, it gives me a lot of agony and I transmit this agony to others”. This agony, however, comes full of knowledge unheard of for the present time. See “O Futuro Ancestral (The Ancestral Future). Festival Zum. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=9aja6uo3hTQ (Accessed May 12, 2023). 10 Kwá yapé turusú yuriri assojaba tupinambá This is the great return of the Tupinambá Mantle. Funarte Brasília” (2021), Glicéria Tupinambá Testimony. 7 October. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eB-2MBYOjY (Accessed May 12, 2023). 11 Hui, Yuk. (2020). Tecnodiversidade. Ubu Editora. (3): 58.

References Bomfim, A. B. (2012), “Linguagem do Guerreiro: Um estudo do processo de retorno da linguagem Pataxó” MA diss., Multidisciplinary Graduate Program in Ethnic and African Studies, Federal University of Bahia–UFBA, Bahia. Borges, F. M. (2016), (Org) “Tecnoxamanismo”. São Paulo: Invisíveis Produções. Borges, F. M. and Fragoso, M. L. (2018), “Ancestrofuturism, Ancestralities and Technoshamanism”. CAC.6—Computer and Media Art Education. 6th edition of Computer Art Congress. Guanajuato, México. Hui, Yuk. (2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China–Essay in Cosmotechnics. Ed. Urbanomic. Lima, T. S. (1999), “Para uma teoria etnográfica da distinção entre natureza e cultura na cosmologia Juruna”. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 14 (40): 43-52. São Paulo: Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências sociais – ANPOCS. Rolnik, S. (2018), ‘Esferas da Insurreição’. São Paulo:N-1. Tupinambá, G. (2021), “A Visão do Manto” [Vídeo] Revista ZUM. Available online: https:// revistazum.com.br/revista-zum-21/a-visao-do-manto/ (Accessed March 10 2023) Tupinambá, G. and Tupinambá, M. (2022), “O Futuro Ancestral” [Video] Festival ZUM. Available online: https://revistazum.com.br/festival-zum-2022/programacaofestival-2022/ (Accessed March 10 2023) Viveiros de Castro, E. (1996), ‘Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo Ameríndio’. Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social, 2 (2):115-144. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998), “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469-88.

4.6 Sounding Space Feminisms: In Conversation with Anna Piva, February 14, 2023

SF

Space Feminisms editorial team

AP

Anna Piva

Anna Piva works across sound, photography, video, writing, audio art, electroacoustic compositions, and site-specific installations. Her practice focuses on the temporal dimension of media, the transformation of data and archival materials, and the transfer of improvised, dub, and electronic music processes into other media. She has worked with many music ensembles, exploring diasporic, African-derived music forms. Her creative process engages with collective creation, polyrhythm, improvisation, and the individual and collective opening to what wants to happen. Listening, she tells us, is key to that. SF How do you relate sound, space, and time? AP Sound and listening are multidirectional and multidimensional, and are linked to both the sciences and the social. Through sound and music, we can traverse and draw connections across concepts and fields, produce alternative temporalities as well as different perceptions of space. My interest lies in how sound interfaces with bodily processes, memory, perception, and personal histories; how sound affects space, creates an atmosphere, and a sense of belonging. Sound and music can produce inclusive, open, social, and indeterminate spaces. They affect us on intimate and personal levels and can help decolonize the mind. From jazz to free improvisation to sound system culture, black culture has developed a liberationist aesthetics and a tradition of creating social spaces through music. I have explored these themes with Flow Motion, an art group I co-founded in 1996 with Edward George and Trevor Mathison from Black Audio Film Collective. A key aspect of our work has been drawing connections between music and marginal diasporic cultures, and exploring the migration of technologies and cultural forms. During the last twenty-five years we developed cross-disciplinary collaborations with astrophysicists, theoretical physicists, and social scientists, with generative designers and with musical ensembles through compositional and creative workshops. SF

How did you encounter black, African, and African derived music?

AP I first encountered the music of Sun Ra and of the Art Ensemble of Chicago in the late seventies, at a particular time when, in Italy, the student, revolutionary, and feminist 135

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movements were active. It was a time of political turmoil and repression, and their performances were very powerful, liberating experiences for many of us. Perhaps in a naive way, we felt a kinship with these avant-jazz African American musicians, with Angela Davis and the Black Panthers in the United States. At the time I was also listening a lot to Billie Holiday, Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone, I remember being mesmerized by those deep, haunting, otherworldly tones that came across through their voices. Lincoln’s singing in Tears for Johannesburg still makes me shiver today. Then in 1981 I went to a Burning Spear concert at the Rainbow Theatre in London, and what he and his band were doing with rhythm and sound just blew my mind. All of these amazing artists opened me up to the connection between music, cosmology and the body, to the fact that sound comes from a much larger and deeper dimension across time, and to how frequencies move across space, time and carry information from an ancient past to the present, and the future. SF

Is that how your work come in dialogue with astrophysics and astronomy?

AP Some of these ideas and connections came up when I was researching the sounds of radioastronomy, reading about new developments in astrophysics and experimenting with X-ray data sonification in the late 1990s, and then in the early 2000s, during the development of Music and Science Lovers, a Flow Motion’s trilogy of works on sound, invisibility and space. It was an interesting time in cosmology: the realization that most of what makes up the universe is completely undetectable, invisible, and unknown led to a paradigmatic shift and a new focus on the spaces between astronomical objects, on mysterious space phenomena such as dark energy and black holes. It also led to the development of string theory. Contemporary physics could no longer think in terms of discrete objects. I felt this paradigmatic shift could perhaps create an openness for cross-disciplinary dialogue and for incorporating sonic cosmologies and modes of knowledge that engage with other aspects of reality, such as nothingness, or the idea of an interconnected, living space. These ideas are present in the music of Sun Ra and John and Alice Coltrane, and in African-derived cosmologies from Ancient Egypt to Dogon culture. Indian cosmology has many names to describe the concept of nothing. We told ourselves why not bring in other voices who are as relevant as the astrophysicist’s voice? Can we explore together different ideas around space, density, and absence? During our project Invisible we did creative workshops with kids and musicians, and found incredible connections. I had sonified and made a music score of fragments of X-ray data from the beginning of galaxies formation, and the Indian tabla player in our ensemble, Sukhdeep Singh, noticed that the patterns in the data resembled classical Indian music composition and improvisation. Our key collaborator, the astrophysicist Carolyn Crawford, told us that she had never thought of dark energy as an absence before. This instance of cross-fertilization and openness generated the possibility of creating spaces where people could experience a direct connection with the universe. SF You experienced microgravity during a parabolic flight in Russia. How did it affect your perception of sound in this peculiar environment? AP The microgravity environment is very noisy. In a parabolic flight, you have zero-G and double-G. You have a sense of lightness and expansion and then you

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experience compression. The physical experience of floating in zero-G was strangely familiar, something I felt had experienced before, perhaps in my mother’s womb, and through music. It produced many subsequent dreams and reflections, and made me think about Jah Shaka’s roots reggae sound system, how the polyrhythms and his masterful engineering of sound frequencies created this sense of gravity and antigravity working together to activate inner processes and make you jump up and down. This is a science, a secret sound technology. SF How do you understand the political and aesthetic role of sound in relation to astrophysics? AP Sound generates complex cognitive, behavioral, and affective processes; it affects your bodily and brain frequencies as well as your modes of thinking. It can take you beyond rational and linear thought. Non-linearity is a key aspect in contemporary physics. If we go back to the beginning of quantum mechanics, physicists were struggling because the laws of physics at the time were not accommodating reality. The physicist Niels Bohr, who contributed to the development of quantum theory, was influenced by non-European concepts that came from the Taoist tradition. Through non-European cosmologies, we can attain an awareness of the multifaceted aspects of time, of energetic processes, of flow, of transformation. SF

What understandings of space are created with data sonification?

AP We don’t know what space is. We cannot see space. We are part of it. We experience it as something that we are in. But perhaps we are of space as well. Where is the inside? Where is the outside? Is there really a separation? The experience of listening gives a sense of that continuum between what we call the inside and the outside. What I find particularly interesting in Sun Ra’s philosophical notion that “space is the place” is that we do not know what space is but we can understand the notion of place. Place is the place we inhabit; it is our homes, our environment, and our communities. Sun Ra imagined outer space as a place of belonging, with no racial segregation and no oppression. Sonification can be a very useful scientific tool; in moving away from the visual representation of data, it can produce different perspectives and cognitive processes, and a more syncretic approach to knowledge. In Italian there is this expression “traduttore, traditore” (“translator, traitor”). It means that each translation generates something new, a different narrative. In the project Astro Black Morphologies/Astro Dub Morphologies, I used this idea to build a sound architecture based on different versions of the same X-ray data, combined together in ever-changing, non-synchronous permutations. Working with different temporalities is a feminist act, and the practice of versioning and polyrhythm are key aspects of black music technology. SF If sound and listening can open a new awareness of time, what is the relationship between quantum listening and deep listening? How do they relate to feminism? AP The concept of deep listening was developed by composer Pauline Oliveros. She described it as an active and intense listening that includes the sounds of life and nature,

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one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. She used it as a compositional method which involved the process of improvising together and listening deeply to each other, the process of different styles meeting and merging in that particular moment to create music. Oliveros expanded this concept with quantum listening, which for her meant listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously. Quantum listening is based on an attention on two seemingly opposite polar points: the focus and the field. The term “quantum” is often used in different fields to describe processes which are not very well understood in the West, and which involve energy shifts, complementarity, flow, transformation, indeterminacy, and entanglement. Quantum listening involves the three main planes of human beings: the personal, the collective, and the cosmic. It also involves experiencing the interplay of multiple temporal dimensions. This is what can happen in free improvised music. You are there, with the feeling that there is no past, no present, and no future. You synchronise with different planes, and everything is happening simultaneously in that moment. Through listening, you are changed, and you provoke a change. This is when the magic of improvisation happens. It’s a radical practice, a commitment to be fully in the present, and available for what wants to happen. SF How can we relate the importance of a livable present with the idea of futurism? AP The future is a mystery. The only way we can know it is if we engineer it. This is what totalitarian regimes like fascism want to do. Marinetti’s futurism created the aesthetics and narratives later used by Mussolini’s fascism. It was a misogynist movement that sought to destroy the past, academies, and museums. Futurism believed in the purifying role of war, it glorified violence, and denigrated woman and femininity. I prefer to think in terms of futurity, of ancient futures, of possible futures, and of creating inclusive spaces in the present. When I first saw Sun Ra’s Arkestra it seemed like a theater of cosmic proportions. They were chanting “space is the place” while dancing in anticlockwise circle, an African cosmological practice also used by Native Americans and Sufi dancers. It was an alternative universe, a possible future that we felt we wanted to be part of. SF

How do you contrast Italian futurism and Afrofuturism?

AP Afrofuturism has developed in interesting directions in the last decade or so, and there are many women who have decolonized and appropriated the term futurism to describe their artistic practice. Afrofuturism was a term coined by Mark Dery, a cultural critic who used it retrospectively to describe marginal practices in literature, art, and music developed by what he described as “descendants of alien abductees”—African Americans that had suffered oppression and social injustice, and whose histories were severed. This is different from Italian futurism. What we now call Afrofuturism is a multiplicity of artistic and sonic practices seeking to gather knowledge from the past and activate it in the present, engaging with non-linear time and using sci-fi tropes to imagine and create possible futures. Time traveling can be a device to recover histories and forms of culture that were obscured with the European colonization of Africa, the slave trade and the Middle Passage. It can be a self-empowering practice, and an aesthetics of liberation.

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Figure 4.6.1 Black Lives Matter demonstration, London, 2020, video still from Ingiustizia, 2023. Photo: Anna Piva

SF

Can we access deep time through deep listening?

AP Deep time is an archaeology of time. It is about the possibility of experiencing different kinds of past, present, and future in the present. If we take the example of the sonified data that originated from the beginning of galaxies formation: we are resounding in the present an event that has already happened, billions of years ago. And as we engage with practices of listening, we can hear echoes from the future. SF Are there any specific women who promoted these ways of listening and of thinking about/experiencing music? AP Both Matana Roberts, an experimentalist, saxophonist, and Fee Victor, a composer, use the entire vocabulary of jazz and the experimental free song in addition to employing the voice as an instrument. In contemporary European music, Nadia Boulanger nourished countless musical talents, from Copland to Quincy Jones, and produced the possibilities for her students to think about the past and the future of music in new ways. She was the brain behind a lot of twentieth-century music. We have yet to write the history of non-European or non-First World female electronic musicians. There are examples of women whose approach to music involved the personal, the community, and the universal. Alice Coltrane brought together her experience of being an organist at the Baptist Church with her connection with Indian mysticism and philosophy, and with jazz improvisation. She contributed to expand the vocabulary of jazz and found a unique way to express cosmic consciousness.

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There is an interesting connection between religion and political activism that can be traced from the beginning of the history of the women’s rights movement in the United States. The first woman who ever spoke in public to a mixed audience was an African American woman named Maria W. Stewart. She believed her tongue was moved by God, and used her speeches to deconstruct everything people believed in at the time, including the authority of St. Paul. She said, “St. Paul declared that it was a shame for a woman to speak in public . . . yet if he knew of our wrongs and deprivations, I presume he would make no objection to our pleading in public for our rights.” She brought that intersectional perspective that recognizes the interlinked nature of women, race, and class oppression, which is the core of real feminism. SF

Which female musicians would you put in the Hall of Fame of space?

AP I would include June Tyson, Sun Ra’s alter ego, who, through her voice, body, and dance, conveyed the idea of space as a place of freedom. I would also put Alice Coltrane, Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, Billie Holiday, and Fontella Bass. Many of these women fought for their rights in a male, white, and racist industry. Fontella Bass fought for thirty years to get the rights to her own work. SF How do you foresee the present and future feminist approaches in your field and how does it inform your current work? AP Alice Walker explains that we are living in the best and in the worst of times. We are living in a time of destruction, war, and ecological disaster, experiencing the

Figure 4.6.2 Mary Church Terrell, Harriet Tubman, Charlotte Maxeke. Photographic remix: Anna Piva. Video still from Earth & Sky, 2022. Archival images source and credits: Harriet Tubman portrait by Lindsley, Harvey B., c. 1871–6, printed c. 1895–1910, courtesy of the Library of Congress. Mary Church Terrell photograph, unknown author, unknown date, LC-USZ62-54722 courtesy of the Library of Congress. A young Charlotte Maxeke, courtesy of South African History online

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late-stages effects of capitalism on our existence. At the same time, we are living in the best of all times because we can develop the awareness and the knowledge to take a position. Octavia Butler said that there is no predictable future but many different visions of the future, and it’s up to us to envisage them and turn them into reality. Today, with the increased availability of archival materials, we can go deep into archives and question the authorities that created them. We can reshape them, create alternative temporalities, and uncover minor, forgotten, or suppressed histories. Through art and sound making, we can generate non-linear connections and new dimensions to archival materials. We have the tools needed to correct major errors of the past. The recorded history of feminism in the United States began in 1832 with an African American woman, Maria W. Stewart. It continued with Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Mary Church Terrell, Anna J. Cooper and many others. African American women have been there from the beginning, they are the pioneers of intersectional feminism, and they influenced many subsequent generations of women, like Angela Davis and the Combahee Women Collective in the 1970s. As Angela Davis pointed out in Women, Race and Class, the error was made at the beginning of the feminist movement, which was intertwined with the abolitionist movement. In 1848 the Seneca convention—the first women’s convention—was organized by abolitionists and no black women were invited. There was a complete disregard for the pioneering role they had in shaping the feminist movement. This major failure in understanding the importance of an integrated movement was carried through from the abolitionist movement into the feminist movement, and it has plagued the movement until today. The experience of African American women is unique, and their perspective is very relevant today. There are echoes from their stories that we need to resound. We also have to remember the pioneering work of other women worldwide during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, from Tarabai Shinde in India to Charlotte Maxeke in South Africa. The influence and possible connections between their writings and activism and marginal histories of revolutionary and liberation movements today was the object of my recent work, Common Ground (2022). I used photography, sound design, video, and digital technology and merged archival and original materials to create a space of dialogue and produce alternative herstories. Developing personal stories, finding ways to tell your side, is a political and feminist act. This is what bell hooks described as “talking back”: you are taking charge of your own history by recounting it in a certain way. We must ensure that feminism is intersectional in action and not just in words. There are several examples of women taking charge despite the limitations of the time with a faith and an understanding that their work will be rediscovered. That time is now.

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Part Five

Space Feminisms and Art Gallery

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5.1 Space Artworks—an Introduction Nahum and Annick Bureaud

Today’s space sector is male-dominated in its astronautical, astronomical, and commercial aspects. What’s more, art is a male-dominated sector. For women, spacerelated art seems to be a double sentence. If we consider the period that starts after the Second World War as the beginning of the Space Age, with 1957 as a landmark, it is striking to witness that there were very few, if any, artworks by women in this field, with some exception in astronomy paintings. There is a difference between women’s work being shadowed or ignored and almost no women’s works in space-related art for many years. Why? Why was no woman using satellites to create images on the Earth, such as Tom Van Sant (1980) or Pierre Comte (1989)? Why was no woman building a sculpture to fly in space, as did Joseph McShane (1984) or Arthur Woods (several projects, one flown in 1992)? Women started to take the stage in the 1990s. Kitsou Dubois’ first parabolic flight was in 1990 and her first choreography Gravité Zéro was created in 1994 (see Figures 5.2.1 and 5.2.2) The twenty-first century has seen more and more women and previously invisibilized people propose creations of all kinds, natures, and aesthetics. Selecting only ten artworks for this section of the book has, luckily, become an uneasy task in 2023. There is no obvious and direct correlation between the gender and identity of an artist and the artwork being feminist or with a feminist approach. What is a feminist artwork in space-related art? The contents of this section may deal with the place and role of women and underrepresented people in space activities, as they may embody a different approach to those activities themselves, or a different vision of human presence on and outside the Earth. Sometimes the content of the artwork is an explicit statement or relates to a specific issue or includes a critical approach. At other times, the very existence of the artwork is in itself a statement. Recall that the naming of celestial bodies, locations, places, and remarkable features on them falls under the responsibility of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Bettina Forget’s works Women With Impact and One Small Step (see Figure 5.6.1) directly and explicitly address the domination of men’s names for the craters on the Moon, where only thirty-two of 1,578 catalogued craters are named after women. Interestingly, the IAU decided in 1979 to give only women’s names to locations on Venus. This led Lily Hibberd to start the Venus series of paintings reflecting on both the 145

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Figure 5.1.1 Venus: Sappho Patera, Lily Hibberd, oil on board, 55cm diameter, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist. See Plate Section 2

planet and the selected females, real women as well as goddesses. This naming decision for Venus, together with the lack of women’s names on other planets and celestial bodies, reinforces the cliché and tale about Venus that is considered “feminine.” The Moon is already the host of two artworks (Moon Museum, 1969; The Fallen Astronaut, 1971) and more are coming. The Moon is also the subject of many works by artists such as Liliane Lijn (see Figure 5.7.1) who, very poetically, explores its associated feminine principles and gender consideration, the Moon being feminine in some languages and masculine in others, one including the other in English. In her project titled moonmeme, Lijn initially proposed writing on the Moon from Earth using a laser beam, which she instead turned into an installation on Earth, based on the same principle. Today, the space sector is witnessing the participation of various private companies that aim to provide an alternative to national space agencies and to develop space technologies more quickly under market principles. In 2021, Blue Origin launched a rocket that shocked critics around the world, not because of the technological feat but

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because of its resemblance to a penis. In May 2023, we witnessed the first attempt by SpaceX to launch the Starship, a super-heavy launch vehicle. The reigning principle of space exploration in the Cold War years—“mine is bigger than yours”—has now arrived at a super-billionaires’ space contest. Engineers argue that the rockets’ phallic shapes are not intentional, but rather due to aerodynamic and technical reasons. Defying gravity, crossing the atmosphere, and reaching orbit after burning thousands of pounds of fuel per second is a violent act. It is humanity’s muscle flexing at its best on a cosmic scale. As a comment on this, Sylvie Fleury’s artwork Venus Rocket is an ironic and humorous project toward the phallic launchers with soft, floppy material that cannot stand straight. Recently, a series of rejection letters by NASA has surfaced. These letters informed women that they didn’t have a chance to go to the Moon in the Apollo missions since there were no plans to involve women in space. Artists tackle this problematic culture in original and clever ways, such as Aleksandra Mir re-enacting the Moon landing with an all-female crew in her work First Woman on the Moon (1999) (see Figure 5.5.1) or Empress Stah’s glamorous, with a burlesque flavor, critical and provocative performances. An aerial performer with a cabaret background, Stah took part in a parabolic flight in 2011 wearing a military green jumpsuit and a headdress of golden leaves. She created, among others, the show Empress Stah in Space for the 2012 SPILL Festival of Performance (see Figures 5.11.1 and 5.11.2). With these types of art projects, we are witnessing persistent and bold attempts to challenge the prevailing macho culture of outer space exploration. Projects such as launching artworks into space, in orbit and beyond, or to the International Space Station are monumental artistic endeavors. They require a considerable amount of funding, but most importantly, political access to expensive and large-scale technologies. Most of the artists who have managed to undertake such projects are men and the projects tend to be individual. In contrast, we can find a subtrend of collective endeavors, under the leadership of arts organizations or selforganizing groups of artists, that are putting together such ambitious art projects. These groups are taking into consideration a more inclusive and diverse selection of artists with men, women, and LGBTQ+ (e.g., Moon Gallery, MIT Space Initiative, MIT Media Lab Space Enabled group). It is noteworthy that male artists have also created critical works about this maledominated field. For example, Joe Davis with Poetica Vaginal (1986) recorded the contractions of a female orgasm and transmitted them toward the stars from Millstone Radar at MIT’s Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts. This work was, so to speak, an “answer” to the plaques on the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes launched in 1972 and 1973 that showed sketches of a man and a woman, the woman’s genitalia, contrary to the man’s, not being drawn. Earthlings, whether they are humans, other animals or plants, or any living creatures (perhaps with the exception of tardigrade and some bacteria), are absolutely not suited to life in extraterrestrial space (or not yet), neither physically nor psychologically. Space agencies propose countermeasures to these risks. However, these processes are mostly internal. They are not often willing to share publicly the real difficulties and dangers that humans are facing in this demanding and extreme environment. This is partially

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due to the fact that it could reveal private information about astronauts which could identify them, given that there have been so few of them, particularly women. The archetypal astronaut is skilled, strong, healthy, and stable: a “quiet hero”—not one with superpowers, but still exceptional because they are perfectly balanced and good in everything (or almost). It was even more so in 1990, and the reality of bodies in space was even more concealed, when Kitsou Dubois started her projects around the experience of weightlessness for dance purposes. The very fact that a young female choreographer participated in parabolic flights with a space agency as an official experiment was in itself a feminist act. Dubois approached the weightless body not from the perspective of a fit athletic one, but from an alternative comprehension of muscles, body mechanics, and the circulation of the movements throughout the body. Her experiment layered both scientific knowledge and an aesthetics goal. In her dance and research, Kitsou Dubois confronts the dominant vision of the astronaut body as well as the dominant vision of the dancer or circus performer body. The focus is no longer on strength. Opening to and welcoming weakness and vulnerability are very much needed to propose other ways of being outside of our planet, to move beyond concepts of conquest and appropriation. With them come humility and openness to other wants of being. For his piece Singular Oscillations (2008–9), Bradley Pitts experienced weightlessness in the Russian zero-gravity training plane: nude, eyes closed, and ears blocked. By focusing on the sensory perceptions, with the explicit goal to explore the gap between objective measurements and subjective experience, Pitts highlighted the fragility of the human body in this environment, the necessity of trust in others, and the utter reliance on the life-support system that is the (space) vessel. Emotions must be stable or at least controlled in space. But they can’t be ignored. In Olfactory Time Capsule for Earthly Memories (2017) (see Figure 5.10.1), Ani Liu highlights the olfactory sense and its relations to deep emotions, as Marcel Proust told us, a vision of humans rooted in the primitive animal in us, the one longing for “home” and the loved ones, far away from the humanoid in its artificial shell. Similarly, Carrie Paterson created the Homesickness Kit (2013), a device that stores various scents from Earth for space travelers to use as a remedy for homesickness. Space has been the domain of extreme scientific and technological experimentation. However, it is also a culturally conservative field due to its dependence on national politics. This has created a culture where having conversations about perspectives away from heteronormativity has become extremely difficult. Recall that in the 1960s, the United States was launching its first astronauts while gay people in the United States faced widespread discrimination and persecution, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement. Similarly, being gay in the Soviet Union was considered a criminal offense. In today’s Russia, we observe renewed hostilities and attacks on LGBTQ+ groups. Sally Ride (see Figure 2.4.1), the first US woman to travel to space as an astronaut, did not publicly come out as gay during her lifetime. Her posthumous acknowledgment as a lesbian astronaut made her the first known LGBTQ+ astronaut in NASA’s history. Today, we know of several lesbian astronauts, but there has not been a single confirmed case of a gay astronaut, let alone a transgender one. This is perhaps one of the most

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interesting topics being addressed by artists engaged in space. Pioneering artists such as Frank Pietronigro did several works in parabolic fights that included a “dance” in microgravity with the rainbow and the US flags; Adriana Knouf in TX-1 (2020) sent samples of her hormone replacement medications sealed in polyester resin pearls aboard the International Space Station with the MIT Space Initiative. Queering space is an exciting area of research because it deepens themes of alterity and otherness in the most extreme environment we know. Being queer in outer space is important not only for representation and diversity, but for putting in motion new ways to be in and theorize about the world and the cosmos. Queerness invites us to be suspicious of binary concepts and to thoroughly examine the language and vocabulary as carriers of culture. Can we really talk about Earth (us) and space (everything else)? Is Earth’s atmosphere a more fluid substance in contrast to the geopolitical Kármán line that conventionally divides Earth and space? Can we reframe our understanding of supernovae as blossoming events instead of violent explosions? Queer theory around space-related art is something we should be attentive to in the years to come. The space sector as a whole needs to change its narratives and culture if it is going to be relevant to the rest of society. Although it does not often well-receive them, it is important to create an environment where critical ideas can be openly stated. Some artists and cultural players have opened to alternative visions and narratives; as the number of artists working in this intersection grows, we look forward to seeing more bold works tackling these issues and creating new imaginaries for space activities and our relationship with the cosmos.

5.2 Kitsou Dubois: Analogies and Traversées

Figure 5.2.1 First parabolic flight of the choreographer Kitsou Dubois in 1990 aboard the 0G. Caravelle. © Ki Productions

Analogies Analogies was a dance performance created in 2004 at la Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, France. Inspired by the behavior of matter in microgravity, the piece aimed to disturb humans’ relationship with verticality. With the help of the CNES Space Observatory, I toured laboratories and met researchers who observed and did experiments in the behavior of fluids and liquids in parabolic flight, which highlighted the circulation of matter from one state to another in the absence of gravity. I collaborated with the Institute of Fluid Mechanics of Toulouse and the Atomic Energy Commission of Pessac. 150

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Figure 5.2.2 Kitsou Dubois, creation during parabolic flight, 2009. Photo: Loïc Parent. © Kitsou Dubois and Loïc Parent, 2009. See Plate Section 1

Figure 5.2.3 Kitsou Dubois, Analogies (2004), Grande Halle de la Villette Paris, with Laura de Nercy and Bertrand Lombard. Photo: Quentin Bertoux. © Kitsou Dubois and Quentin Bertoux, 2004

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Analogies, for both performers and spectators, underlined that everything circulates all the time, and that bodies and gazes cannot land or settle either vertically or horizontally. The general rhythm of the performance is based on transformations of matter from one state of equilibrium to another, evoking the passage of water from a gaseous state to a liquid state.

Traversées Traversées was a dance performance created in 2009 at the Manège, in Reims, France, which tells the story of what topples and what we do with it, of the thousand ways of building ourselves out of balance in a protean environment. How are supports built in a fluid, even liquid world? Trained circus performers and dancers wielded their own mobile apparatus (a wheel, a stick, a suspended bar), each device evoking elements on which we rely here below, but which remain fleeting. Each performer tested their apparatus in the water, adapting their breathing and discovering alternative ways to organize their supports. Sensors delivered a wealth of information that helped the performer’s ability to listen and respond through movements. These experiences meet again in parabolic flights where the absence of fall allowed the performers to release tensions and discover another musculature. Exploring these environments nurtured the development of a gesture on earth that balanced the weight of gravity with the lightness of the imagination.

5.3 Frank Pietronigro: Astronaut Steffany

Queer culture is its own cosmology, contributing to the evolution of space travel, the arts, the humanities, and cultural expression in outer space. Astronaut Steffany vicariously represents lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and intersex (LGBTQI+) peoples from around the world who proudly symbolize the contributions of queer culture to space exploration. Drag queens already operate in outer space without having stepped one high-heel off our home planet. Steffany inspires a future in which film studios on Mars create full-length motion pictures such as Drag Queer Storytelling to Little Green People on the Red Planet or Astronaut Steffany, the Queen of Outer Space. Queer culture is a radical acceptance of society’s Others and their Otherness, suggesting how humans might contemplate extraterrestrials and foster greater equality and justice for all. Such acceptance of the queer outsider, be we artists, space scientists, or engineers, will happen as we move towards seeing ourselves in the other. The power of inclusion, identification with the other, love, courtesy, and the learning of the other’s language and customs will enrich our lives by expanding upon the scope of space love and intimacy. This will be accelerated as queer cultures are sewn into the fabric of space culture. Let’s envision that when we meet other universal species, we greet them with a spirit of openness and hospitality. Of course, the best way to ensure this is to embrace the richness of our shared diversity, here and now on our home planet Earth.

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Figure 5.3.1 Astronaut Steffany, digital composite, Frank Pietronigro, 2013. © Frank Pietronigro. See Plate Section 1

5.4 Larissa Sansour: A Space Exodus

Figure 5.4.1 A Space Exodus, film still, 5’, Larissa Sansour, 2009. © Larissa Sansour, 2009

In her 2009 5-minute short film A Space Exodus, Palestinian visual artist Larissa Sansour appropriates the 1969 US lunar landing. Passing off this monumental achievement as the accomplishment of a single Palestinian woman, played by Sansour herself, the figure plants her national flag on the lunar surface. She paraphrases astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous words, “That’s one small step for a Palestinian, one giant leap for mankind.” The keffiyeh pattern that adorns the traditional headdresses and is often associated with the Palestinian resistance is here engraved into the soles of her Moon boots. Sansour’s low-gravity footsteps leave political markings in the lunar soil, claiming the Moon as a new homeland for a people whose terrestrial homeland 155

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Figure 5.4.2 A Space Exodus, film still, 5’, Larissa Sansour, 2009. © Larissa Sansour, 2009. See Plate Section 1

has yet to be recognized. The film highlights how the Palestinian people perpetually see the territory designated as their future state steadily decimated by internationally condemned Israeli land grabs. Further Arabic signifiers such as the embroidery on the sleeve and the curl of her boot complete Sansour’s symbolically charged space suit. Sansour adopts the language of science fiction, adding Arabic chords to Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, eternalized by Stanley Kubrick in his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In A Space Exodus, we don’t see Palestinians reduced to merely the subjects of grim documentary; instead, Sansour’s science fiction approach becomes a tool of empowerment, shifting the modes of representation, gaze, and analysis. By performing this dual appropriation, Sansour reclaims agency as an artist, a woman, and a Palestinian, just as she reinserts Palestinians into historical time, granting visibility, legitimacy, and statehood to a people so long ejected from history and stripped of their chronology. In the film’s final moments, the lonely Palestinaut sees her accomplishment compromised by real-life politics and mobility restrictions, losing her connection to the mission control centre in Jerusalem and drifting off into space.

5.5 Aleksandra Mir: First Woman on the Moon

Figure 5.5.1 First Woman on the Moon, Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands, 1999. © Aleksandra Mir. All rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2023. See Plate Section 1

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Aleksandra Mir’s First Woman on the Moon (1999) challenges the male-dominated Apollo missions on their 30th anniversary with a ten-hour-long performance. Created in the Netherlands, the event featured a group of women reenacting the Moon landings on sandy dunes, standing on the surface of the Moon. Mir encouraged TV stations and the press to cover the reenactment as a historical event. This art project reimagines history, questioning why women have been largely excluded from the story of space exploration. By presenting an alternative vision of the Moon landing events, First Woman on the Moon encourages critical examination of the issues that women experience in the space sector.

5.6 Bettina Forget: Women With Impact / One Small Step

Figure 5.6.1 Women With Impact / One Small Step, Bettina Forget. © Bettina Forget

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The Moon is a man’s world. Out of 1,578 catalogued and named craters on the Moon, only thirty-three are named after women.1 This number matters, because the naming of a place is a significant cultural act of ownership. As writer and activist Lucy Lippard notes, “naming is, with mapping and photography, the way we image (and imagine) communal history and identity.”2 To highlight this gender imbalance, I created two connected art projects. Women With Impact is a series of drawings of Moon craters that are named after women. The drawings are accompanied by 3D prints of each crater. This threedimensional representation of the craters is a visual metaphor for absence. A crater is essentially a void, a hollow in the regolith. This void echoes the underrepresentation of women in the current scientific canon. The void also speaks to its opposite: each crater is a result of an impact, a shattering of the calm surface. One Small Step builds on these themes, inverting the concave crater shape into a convex crater stamp. This stamp is integrated into a shoe sole that allows the wearer to create Moon craters while walking. The project invites prominent women in astronomy to wear one of the crater-soles and perform a meditative walk here on Earth. The piece’s title One Small Step references Neil Armstrong’s famous words “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” While Armstrong’s use of the term mankind was intended to include women, to date only men have walked on the Moon. The project’s title refers to the exclusion of women in the Apollo program and to the slow progress that is being made in addressing gender equity in the space sciences today.

Notes 1 International Astronomical Union Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature, Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature: https:// planetarynames.wr.usgs. gov (accessed 11 October 2020). 2 Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multi-centered Society (New York: New Press, 1977).

5.7 Liliane Lijn: moonmeme

Figure 5.7.1 moonmeme, 1992—ongoing, interactive digital real-time program HESHE voice chant and Lunar Tales, edition of 25, Liliane Lijn. Liliane would like to thank Richard Wilding, Andi Studer, António Cidadão, Tom Ruen, Bernard Comrie, and John Campbell Brown for their invaluable assistance in creating this work. © Liliane Lijn

moonmeme is an homage to the feminine principle of transformation and renewal held sacred for millennia and traditionally represented by the Moon’s recurring monthly cycles, which culminate at the Full Moon. Interweaving science, myth, art, and language, moonmeme proposes to use the Moon as a living canvas. Using an astronomical program, moonmeme tracks the real Moon’s phase. The lunar image is updated every 26 hours and 13 minutes, augmented 161

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with a layer of monosyllabic poetry. Lijn projects the single word SHE, one of poetic and mythic significance, across the Moon in letters large enough to be seen from Earth. Gradually, over the course of the 29.5-day lunation period, the word morphs, revealing that HE is contained within SHE and SHE emerges from HE. moonmeme is a multifaceted work in constant evolution. In one version of the project’s current phase, a monitor displays a large image of the Moon as it would appear in the sky on the day of viewing. The viewer is invited to type in their name and birthdate, which is filed chronologically with the other birth data moonmeme has received to date. They are then presented with their lunar portrait, which is an image of the Moon with SHE or HE projected upon its surface, depending on the lunar phase at the time of their birth. Within 20 seconds, the interwoven “gendered” lunar cycles for the first six months of their lives appear on screen, morphing into a view of the totality of lunar portraits so far, accompanied by lunar sound and tales illustrating the connection between the Moon and the feminine. The individual’s perception is thereby led to undergo a shift in viewpoint: from one of seeing oneself as a unique cosmic phenomenon to one of seeing oneself as being but a small part of a much broader pattern.

5.8 Ale de la Puente: An Infinite and . . . el primer deseo (the first wish/desire)

Figure 5.8.1 An Infinite, 2015, video still, 02’22” HD 9:16 silent video. Ale de la Puente. © Ale de la Puente (MX). See Plate Section 1

We see time as an arrow, although our sense of its passing depends on various phenomenological states. This perception of time is altered in a zero-gravity environment. There, a one-minute hourglass will remain frozen in a dynamic eternity— an instant of no apparent duration. Time’s momentum seems to be contained in a directionless flow. 163

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My intervention, An Infinite, conceived within the framework of “Matters of Gravity,” a 2014 collaboration between nine artists and a scientist that explored the concept of gravity—its impact and its absence—explored the shifting nature of time within various gravitational contexts during a parabolic flight aboard a zero-gravity airplane, the Ilyushin 76 MDK, at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Moscow, Russia. During the flight, there was an impression that our lives were in infinite free-fall in space and time. A certain degree of poetic insight is required to conceive time outside of its perpetual linear rhythm, which contains us and keeps us from losing ourselves in the timeless whisper of the void beyond Earth. In 1516, a comet blazed across the sky over what is now known as the Mexico City valley. Legend foretold that the advent of such a comet would be an omen of treachery heralding the downfall of the mighty Aztec Empire. At the very least, it can be seen as a marker for the unexpected encounter between two vastly different cultures. In 2016, five hundred years later, a helicopter criss-crossed the very same valley dangling half a ton of pyrotechnics below it with the aim of setting off a series of fireworks in a timed, choreographed sequence. Pyrotechnics technicians, engineers, astronomers, pilots, and others collaborated to perform an artificial astronomical event. For a full 40 minutes, dancing lights drew a surprised public’s gaze towards the canopy of clouds lit from below. The comet lit up their eyes with a message for our time: not a prophecy, but a call to fix our gaze on the same point in the sky amid a bitterly divided political climate. The comet symbolizing a wish for deeper human understanding through the communal act of reading the skies together.

Figure 5.8.2 . . . el primer deseo (the first wish/desire), 2016. © Ale de la Puente (MX). See Plate Section 1

5.9 Constanza Piña Pardo [Corazón de Robota]: Khipu // Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer

Figure 5.9.1 Khipu // Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer, Constanza Piña Pardo [Corazón de Robota]. Direction and concept: Constanza Piña Pardo. Realization: Melissa Aguilar, Ana Cervantes, Ana Ortiz, Daniela Sofia Main Reyes, Constanza Piña Pardo

The Inca khipu were pre-Hispanic textile devices that served to record information, storing data coded as knots on strings made of textiles including cotton and camelid fiber. Fashioned from various organic materials such as stones, wool, vegetable fibers, ceramic, seeds, the khipu can be likened to pre-Hispanic ecological computers. These computer systems extend to include the human body itself (users’ fingers and toes encoding the information and their brains processing it). They are instruments of transcendental, cosmic significance for the transmission of Native wisdom. 165

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Figure 5.9.2 Khipu // Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer, Constanza Piña Pardo [Corazón de Robota], image Florian Voggeneder photo_arselectronica. Direction and concept: Constanza Piña Pardo. Realization: Melissa Aguilar, Ana Cervantes, Ana Ortiz, Daniela Sofia Main Reyes, Constanza Piña Pardo. See Plate Section 1

This piece is an open-source textile computer based on the manufacture of an astronomical khipu. The installation consists of a 6 meters diameter antenna composed of 180 ropes. Each rope was hand-spun from a blend of copper wire and alpaca wool. The ropes are connected to an electronic circuit that amplifies and sonifies electromagnetic frequencies present onsite. The piece was elaborated by a group of five women within the scope of an experimental creation laboratory entitled “Textile Computing and Spectrum Sonification” in order to study the signs of the traditional Inca khipu and the analogies between this system of knots and our current binary coding system. The data encoded into this khipu includes the spectral classification of the main stars of the Boötes constellation at the zenith (mid-sky) during the time of the open laboratory. This project provides a visual and auditory interpretation of the technology, wisdom, and history of our ancestors, meant to express how the universe is governed by harmonious numerical proportions. What we are hearing is thus the amplification of inaudible Space, the voices of specters visiting the void, a celestial score, the music of the spheres: the voice of silence.

5.10 Ani Liu: Olfactory Time Capsule for Earthly Memories

Figure 5.10.1 Olfactory Time Capsule for Earthly Memories, scents of earth encapsulated in long-releasing polymers. 3D prints of scent amulet, glass, aluminum, 1” x 1” 2”, 5” x .5” x 1.5”, 2017, Ani Liu. Credit: Steve Boxall, for the photos aboard the shuttle in zero gravity. All other photos courtesy of the artist. With support from MIT Space Initiative and International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF)

In a future in which some of us might embark on a one-way trip into space, how might we experience sensory modalities of memory beyond digital captures? In addition to the terabytes of data that we are sure to bring on this long journey, what other forms of communication and connection might we invent for an extraterrestrial future? This project consists of a sensory token for astronauts that contains the unique scent of three memories of Earth: that of a loved one, that of a home, such as the smell of a favorite armchair, and that of a natural resource, such as the smell of dirt. Chemically, the fragrances are embedded in a special polymer designed to contain and release the scents over a long period of time. Through a dial, the user can choose to program and relive one of three Earth experiences through an immersive olfactive experience. 167

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Olfaction has been shown to have strong ties to emotion and memory. Smell is also tied to mental health, as we see a correlation between anosmic patients (those who have lost their sense of smell) and higher rates of depression. Due to practical limitations, astronauts often have limited access to a wide range of smells in space. What if we could widen their olfactory experience during space expeditions? As an emotional time capsule, this project is akin to the Voyager Golden Record that recorded sounds and sights of life on Earth, but here, for precious smells. An exploration in the use of science for emotional ends, this project investigates alternative biological and perceptual modalities of communication and memory through olfaction.

5.11 Empress Stah Power: Empress Stah in Space and Stargasm

Figure 5.11.1 Empress Stah in Space. Empress Stah Power. Photo © Manuel Vason

Empress Stah in Space was conceived in 2006 upon the discovery of the pioneering work by the Arts Catalyst aboard parabolic zero gravity flights. Emboldened by the improbability, Empress Stah set her sights as far as they could reach and embarked on an artistic journey to make a performance in outer space. The journey shares its name with a solo show commissioned by the Pacitti Company for the SPILL Festival of Performance and funded by the Arts Council England, in 2011, the same year that Empress Stah first experienced weightlessness aboard a parabolic flight with the Zero Gravity Corporation. Set at the edge of chaos, the show’s non-linear narrative was transcribed through trance and writing sessions between Empress Stah and the show’s director, seminal 169

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Figure 5.11.2 Stargasm, Empress Stah Power. Photo: Clive Holland. See Plate Section 1

body artist Ron Athey, which took place at the disused RAF Bentwaters in Suffolk, the site of the biggest purported UFO/military incident in Europe. Stargasm is an aerial circus act performed with laser beams emitting from Empress Stah’s uranus. The conception and invention of the laser butt plug can be traced directly to a failed funding application to the Wellcome Trust to charter a zero-gravity flight with the Russian Space Agency and make a 3D film of Empress Stah and cult rock star Peaches floating and crashing around inside the plane. Peaches went on to write the track “Light in Places” for Empress Stah’s Stargasm, upon being given the words Iconoclasm and Stargasm, which had beamed down via Ron Athey at Bentwaters on the day we spent channeling the unknowable mysteries. Empress Stah is a genre-defying performance artist who fuses sublime aerial artistry with provocative and thought-provoking performances.

Part Six

Space Feminisms, Architecture, and Design

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6.1 Building for Space: In Conversation with LIQUIFER (Barbara Imhof, Waltraut Hoheneder, and René Waclavicek)

LIQUIFER is an Austria-based transdisciplinary group of experts committed to innovative research and product development with both space and terrestrial applications. At their studio, architecture, science, and technology coalesce in the creation of concepts, scenarios, prototypes, systems, and products for living and working on Earth and in space. Space Feminisms editorial team engages with three members of the LIQUIFER team, Barbara Imhof, René Waclavicek, and Waltraut Hoheneder, on the relations between gender and space architecture. SF

Space Feminisms editorial team

BI

Barbara Imhof

WH Waltraut Hoheneder RW

René Waclavicek

Figure 6.1.1 SHEE habitat in the folding process. © SHEE Consortium. LIQUIFER. Photo: Bruno Stubenrauch, 2015

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Figure 6.1.2 SHEE habitat in Rio Tinto as part of Project Moonwalk. © Moonwalk Consortium. LIQUIFER. Photo: Bruno Stubenrauch, 2016. See Plate Section 2

SF What is the point of departure of space architecture in your creative process: survivability, habitability, community, or communality? How do you integrate the human dimension? BI Architecture is about creating a space where all living creatures can live, interact, and thrive. Space architecture is mainly about creating a habitable space for humans in an extreme environment. Recently, there have been emerging new thoughts on building reactive systems, bioreactors, or living architectures and to include not only humans, but other kinds of species like plants. The design constraints in space are harsh, and we must focus on the essential needs of humans first. WH The duration of the space exploration mission determines the design. We are focused on survivability now, but if you think about long-term space missions on Mars, over years or generations, it will be much more about habitability. RW Currently, we are establishing a place where people can survive. Our work is highly dominated by the machinery necessary to keep people alive. Habitability in spaceflight is different from habitability in a terrestrial environment. Space architecture is an exciting avenue for design because we are at the forefront of transforming a hostile environment into one that’s habitable for human beings. BI Space architecture is about establishing a combination of living and technological systems. We have to think of both the spaceship and the house as biospheres. That is how we have to imagine it. Our process is also about what humans need to live. One is the point of survival (e.g., oxygen, water, food, air, and pressure), the other is about being able to live in a good and productive way so that we do not kill each other or

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become mad. We must be able to not only function, but also to live and interact with each other. It is about ergonomics and about how humans are social creatures. We need spaces to retreat to, and private spaces where one can be in their own room. Virginia Woolf already wrote about a room of her own to live and be productive. And we need space for social gathering. SF LIQUIFER has developed projects for space and for Antarctica. How did you negotiate both extreme environments? WH In Antarctica, you are cut off from support and resupply for several months in winter. In space, resupply is one of the major topics. The International Space Station (ISS) is easier to resupply, but future settlements on the Moon and Mars will need to be much more self-sufficient. Another issue is the sensory deprivation that people experience in extreme environments. In a favorable environment on Earth, we go outside whenever we feel like it and enjoy a multitude of sensory stimuli that enrich our lives. In the extreme environment of Antarctica, you can only go outside if you are heavily dressed, similar to wearing a spacesuit in outer space. RW Both environments are extreme in a way that they are hostile and remote. The difference lies in the quality of the hostility, in its severeness. In Antarctica, if a window breaks, you can fix it. Worst case, you do not go into that room anymore. If a window breaks in space, you die. BI Antarctica is an excellent simulation analogue. It’s the closest you can come to space on Earth. Practically, Antarctica is more remote than the ISS. For example, you are better connected to other parts of Earth or to mission control from the ISS than you are from Antarctica. I suspect that if you get sick you could get to an emergency infrastructure faster from the ISS than from Antarctica. SF What are the constraints and opportunities you face when designing for environments with different gravity conditions? RW For us architects, the micro-gravity environment is exciting not only because it’s exotic, but also because we are pushed to think beyond square meters and being bound to one surface. In a room on Earth, you are surrounded by six different surfaces, each having a dedicated function. The ground is for walking; the walls are surfaces that separate rooms and where you can hang objects; the ceiling builds the floor for the next level; and the roof protects you from weather. In a zero-G environment, those functions are no longer that strict. You can use the ceiling as you use the floor and the walls on Earth. Everything acquires a different relation. On Earth, you want to have a preferred direction, such as where the light comes from to determine where you want to work, and to avoid looking directly at the Sun. In zero-G, you can break out of this way of orientation and consider novel situations or configurations that would not be possible in on Earth. WH It involves a different way of moving through space. In zero- or micro-gravity, with a little push, you are moving, or you are pulling yourself forward. The goal is to

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steady yourself; you have to find constraints to fix your body. This is akin to diving, which is why diving simulations have proved instrumental in learning how to move in zero-gravity environments. BI From an architectural perspective, one must learn everything anew. On Earth, we move on an x–y surface. Stairs take us up one floor; we sit on chairs; we go to bed and lie on a surface. In zero gravity, none of that can be taken for granted. There are no stairs, no chairs. There are tables, but they may be inclined surfaces for better visibility to what is on the table and every object must be fixed so that it does not float away. Moving and controlling the body and finding orientation must be trained and practiced. When we move in zero gravity we do not see our feet; they are always behind. We need to develop a different awareness of the space we move in. In zero gravity, we start from a position of motion with a goal of reaching stillness, whereas on Earth, we start from a position of stillness and make the effort of going into motion. That inversion has an implication on furniture design, too. Our architecture training does not apply to zero-G or micro-gravity environments, making it a fantastic space to think anew through three dimensions. SF In addition to the constraints of radiation and dust in space, what are the differences between designing for the Moon and for Earth? BI The Moon has one-sixth the gravity of the Earth while Mars has one-third. We plan interiors for the Moon similarly as we do for Earth, but, in reality, we have no clue if the embodied experience there is closer to zero-G or to one-G. We have knowledge about living in micro-gravity from the ISS, but no data from actually living on the Moon. RW You may have seen the pictures of the lunar astronauts hopping around on the lunar surface. We were first convinced that this was an effect of the reduced gravity until we learned that it is also because of the architecture of their space suits. The suits constrain the astronauts’ range of motion and impact the way they move along the lunar surface. The first outpost on the Moon will teach us about the impact of living long-term in reduced gravity. SF

Where does the visual vernacular of outer space habitat designs come from?

RW The shape is dominated by accounting for pressure differences between different spaces. The lunar habitat and the space stations are designed around how to handle interior pressure. Radiation protection is another factor that influences the shape of the shielding. BI It looks as if we were going back to older structures like caves. We have to protect ourselves from radiation because there is no atmosphere on the Moon. There is a vacuum that implies a constant micro-meteorite shower. We need around two to three meters of thickness of heavy materials to protect humans or life in general. That can be done with lunar soil, which is abundant. We may be able to use lava tubes, but we know too little about living on the Moon to create protected habitation areas within them.

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RW The surface architecture concepts we often see consist of two forms. The inner component is a kind of a bladder or a bubble-shaped pressure envelope. The other is the shielding structure, which is often a dome structure. SF At your studio, how do you envision alternative design and architectural forms? BI The typology of a house on Earth consists of the cube and the roof. In space, the core topology equivalent to the terrestrial one is the cylinder. That shape is easier and less expensive to produce than a sphere which is the most ideal pressure vessel shape. The rocket payloads are also cylinders. With the advent of inflatables, we can think of other dimensions and shapes apart from the transport rockets. We can create toroids and elliptical shapes. WH Our “SHEE” habitat presents a typology of deployable shells that are connected and sealed to create a pressure vessel. This is a typology to increase the size of the habitat after transport in the rocket. SF On Earth, habitats are designed for six-foot-tall men, from cabinet heights to cars. In zero-G, there is no such thing as being tall or short; one can grab things anywhere. But are there specific gender-based constraints that would apply in space environments? RW NASA’s System Integration Standards officially requires a specific ergonomic baseline: designers and engineers must account for both the “5th percentile Japanese female” and the “95th percentile American male.” We are confronted with the lack of space and the need to squeeze people into a crew quarter. It is more challenging to fit a six-foot-tall man into a crew quarter than a small woman. In terms of user interfaces, your height will have an impact whether you are tall or short. BI As architects, we must think about users. Design is about accommodating all kinds of people. If you have a wide range of users, the architecture cannot be biased. Differences are related to the body, and not necessarily to gender. If you are a dancer, you have a different sense of how your body relates to space and how to achieve a certain position. To my knowledge, apart from Kitsou Dubois who experimented with choreographies in parabolic flights, there is no record of experiments on space stations with an astronaut with a dance background. The challenge of diversity of mindsets of each crew in space is cultural rather than gender-based. Engineering mindsets may bind people together more strongly than national ones. WH It is more interesting to think in terms of multifunctional space, which is not necessarily gender-related. The ISS is a cultural model because astronauts must cope with the stress of working together in an isolated place. In such confined space, giving each crew member a cabin is a big challenge. In our “SHEE” project, we created separate crewquarters with a curtain, and we develop versions of deployable crewquarters.

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SF Can you tell us about the SHEE habitat? Did you have any feminist considerations when naming it? BI It is a man who came up with the name when we were trying to find an acronym. It has inspired a lot of female and male artists and curators, including Juliana Cerceira Leite, Margarethe Jahrmann, Julian Charriere, and Nadim Samman. WH When the SHEE habitat is deployed, the wording “SHEE” runs across the exterior, but because the exterior is split in shell segments, when they move, the “S” gets hidden and “SHEE” becomes “HE.” RW It is not a secret that women in the aerospace industry are underrepresented. The problem is not the discrimination from inside of the industry but the fact that young girls do not consider that path. Our “SHEE” project can inspire women to choose that career. SF Do you notice parallels between underrepresentation in the space sector and in architecture? BI Being a mostly female-owned company is a rare thing in the space business and space architecture, which is a field that does not really exist. These two non-existing things come together in our company. The older generation is not particularly against it, but they don’t always take our work seriously. Because space is exotic, they are curious even if they do not know what to do with it. The need for integrating minorities and females has created a pressure for change, which we use to our advantage. SF Does LIQUIFER practice a feminist architecture? How is the greater acceptance and integration of women into male spaces and the propelling of disintegration of gender, and how does that shift affect your work? BI I try to do everything from a feminist perspective. It is an emancipatory challenge for men, for women, for LGBTQ+ people, for people from different geographies—for everybody. It starts with a consciousness of language that can be translated into specific behaviors and thinking about inclusion. Feminist architecture is not about designing only for a specific group. It is about being responsive to the heterogeneity of a crew and conscious of using the correct language.

6.2 Sleeping Bags to Sex Den: Bedrooms in Space Eleanor S. Armstrong and Akvilė Terminaitė

In this text, we explore the “bed”1 and the semiotics of sleeping arrangements in current space living and speculative future environments in outer space. We explore how the current arrangement of an isolated space and solo sleeping in outer space living indicates that these spaces have the purpose of rest and recuperation over all else, drawing on militarized and extreme environment arrangements for rest. We then consider two imaginaries of sleeping in space in the existing design literature, the “Banal Motel” (Figure 6.2.1) and the “Cosmic Erotic” (Figure 6.2.2; Plate 2), and take a brief romp through the kinds of lives and relations of intimacy, care, consent, and pleasure they construct. Where the domestic environment as a whole has historically been a feminized place, the bedroom and kitchen have been the most aligned with this reading of the home. Thus, we bring queer feminist2 perspectives to this analysis, engaging with both real practice and imagined futures of living in space.

Sleeping on the Space Station Even in the early moments of sending humans to space, remaining there for longer than a handful of hours meant considering how people would sleep in space. Currently, people on space stations get their rest in sleeping bags closed off inside small sleeping vestibules specially designed for the space environment. Replicas, images, objects and anecdotes about sleeping are popular fare in science communication about outer space, appearing in displays such as the Life in Orbit section at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum,3 on social media posts, and popular books.4 Looking into the history of sleeping equipment in space, we can see other imagings too. For example, early conceptions by Galina Balashova for the Mir Station in the 1970s saw proposals of soft, checked furnishings for beds and colored walls to indicate up and down within the bedroom module.5 The longer history of sleeping bags traces the needs for warmth of nomadic communities, ranging from the steppes of Central Asia and the tundra of the Arctic. When patented in the UK in 1876 by Pryce Pryce-Jones, the sleeping bag was brought into capitalist production networks, and, as documented by Rowan Bailey and Claire Barber,6 quickly made its way into the military and colonial machinery of Empire, 179

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Figure 6.2.1 Illustrated collage of space habitats we characterize as the “Banal Motel.” Here we have remixed images to demonstrate elements of the muted color palette, and organic-inspired industrially produced artifacts and architectures. These highlight outer space as a space for visitors over and above as a place to live. Illustration by Akvilė Terminaitė © The Artist

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Figure 6.2.2 Collage of space habitats we describe as “Cosmic Erotic.” Illustrations here draw on the brightly colored, pneumatic Space Age (1960s onwards) designs to indulge an image of the future in outer space that is textured and sexualized—captured here through an illustration vernacular. This vernacular plays on ideas of sexualized intimacy as central ideal to be valued in designing living spaces. Illustration by Akvilė Terminaitė © The Artist. See Plate Section 2

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mobilized in the Australian outback, at Congolese missionary posts, and in Russian army supplies. During the Second World War, the US Military escalated their manufacture and distribution in military kits. Military funds were investing into research to specialize sleeping bags for different climates, which were subsequently distributed to military personnel with specific instructions for how to use and maintain the sleeping bag in these environments. As part of this lineage, the sleeping bag on the ISS is specially designed for on-orbit sleeping specifically in relation to the spatial arrangement and zero-gravity encountered by astronauts. Recent innovations and improvements to the sleeping arrangements on the ISS as documented by Brandon Maryatt7 tackle changing inner liners of the sleeping bag that allow for greater flexibility on personal preference for warmth and movement. The sleeping bags on the ISS are used within a larger context of the cabin, which maps, conceptually, onto the idea of a terrestrial bedroom8. Currently the place used for sleeping in the home, many “bedrooms” around the world are shaped by the exporting of twentieth-century modernist Western bedroom templates (bed, solid walls, a door, a couple or individual sleeping there – elements which have been taken to the ISS). However, sleeping arrangements are always socially and culturally contingent in their uses, furnishings, and occupation. Traditional Korean domestic spaces (which are still used although less popular since the 1970s) are organized to have an anbang (master bedroom) which operates as the women’s and children’s space during the day and only at night becomes the bedroom for the married couple. Here, the priority is multiple uses of a space through different periods of the day rather than a space reserved for only one activity. Rather than having a bedroom for sex (as is the expectation of Western heteronormative couples), gay men’s sex lives in the UK in the mid-twentieth century were frequently lived out in public spaces through cottaging, cruising when the taking of partners home was a criminal offense. This arrangement demonstrates that subverting what is acceptable behavior in the bedroom is socially and legally constructed. It is not that the bedroom is “the place for sex” but, instead, that it is the place for specific types of acceptable, heteronormative, sex. Finally, sleeping in dormitories—in hostels, boarding schools, military bunks, kids’ camps, or medical contexts—sees the normalization of many people sleeping in the same space, challenging ideas of how many people should occupy a bedroom. Each of these demonstrate that plural formulations of “sleeping” and “being” in a bedroom can exist at the same time depending on social and cultural contexts. Against this we can see it is not a certainty that the concept of how and where people should sleep on the space station would emerge as it has done for the US scientists, engineers, and astronauts. The seven pods on the station are small, and sparse. In addition to being used for sleeping, these crew quarters are used for “working, holding private medical or family conferences, changing clothes, and personal downtime.”9 As documented in Scott Kelly’s children’s book Goodnight Astronaut,10 these share similar properties to sleeping in other extreme environments including tents, treehouses, ice caves, bunk beds of military service on a submarine, and underwater habitats. The astronaut protagonist eventually makes it to space, narrating “Now it’s my turn / to live in space for a whole year. / I learn to sleep in a bag, / hanging on the wall.”11 The invocation of “hanging” as a very different sleeping orientation to the norm of lying in a bed, purposefully

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emphasizing an overall motif of the book that rejects normative Earthly sleeping arrangements, stating at the start of the book that “Beds are boring”12 and nothing compared to the adventure of sleeping in space for Kelly as an astronaut. Boring though they may be, beds, sleeping equipment, and bedrooms tell us about the intended uses, users, and practices. Taking a phenomenological approach to beds in outer space, that reads social attitudes to particular events and activities taking place in beds based on their material culture,13 we ask: what is the meaning of the sleeping arrangement and sleeping space in space? What is the subjectivity created by these sleeping arrangements and who are the users? While it retains the ideas of privacy for sleeping14 and personal decoration, the phenomenology of these utilitarian and emphatically solo spaces discard the emphasis on (often coupled, often heterosexual) intimacy that is common in the Western bedroom, preventing both intrapersonal intimacy as the spaces are physically too small for multiple persons as well as sexualized intimacy. This is neither a place for sex, nor a place for platonic intimacies of companionship. Thus, we argue, the materiality of the room and sleeping bag direct us to understand them as for rest and recuperation. However, there is a quality of possibility, of dreaminess, to outer space that pluralizes the poetics of sleeping, fucking, or otherwise being together intimate and caring in space. How, then, could we imagine them otherwise?

The Banal Motel Bedroom Dominated by neutral colors (beige, white, gray, black), large windows, cool lighting, and soft curves (see Figure 6.2.1), what we describe as the “Banal Motel” genre of space bedrooms present a vision of life, and particularly places to sleep, in space with limited color palettes and without customization. Banality, while often characterized by unoriginality and boringness, can also take the valence of the familiar in the context of outer space. In Cosmic Heterotopia Ersi Ioannidou argues that these interiors create “an obvilous aesthetic disjunction between the exterior of the starship—perfectly futuristic and unique—and its interior—a mélange of quotations somehow banal in their familiarity”15 which is specifically used to resist making homes in outer space, drawing instead on the design vernacular of the hotel to create a place in space for temporary visitors that Ioannidou theorizes as a Foucauldian heterotopia or “place without place.” Moreover, Ioannidou argues, this banality “seeks to indicate that the journey to another place is now commonplace; it does not anymore require the ‘machine-like’ interiors of a space exploration mission.”16 If greenery does appear in these comic heterotopias, “nature is neither wild nor destructive . . . [it is] disruptive in a benign way,”17 suggesting it too is tamed and cultivated, as in a greenhouse, hotel lobby, or house plant. These Banal Motel interiors are intended as “anywheres” that are not homes or domestic spaces of outer space futures but rather transitory spaces, akin to the terrestrial hotel. As Ioannidou argues, “if this is the future, it is extraordinarily banal,”18 precisely to ensure that the space habitat is legible, familiar, and specifically not-extraordinary to the viewer of the image, who, in the case of speculative design proposals for outer space, is often a financial investor or otherwise buying into the project. This move from the

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technological sleeping bag with its militarized connotations to the motel evokes the expansion of capitalist-consumerist society to space. It is precisely through its references to the current tourism infrastructure in the imagining of outer space that commercialization of space is made possible. It is not just that these rooms are specifically not domestic, but that they are deliberately referencing a place that people are transient in. This Banal Motel trope tells us of the anticipated user: they are a visitor to the room. This is not a home, but often a hotel or cruise ship, or a mode of transport from one place to another. Space, through the design vernacular of the Banal Motel, is not to be lived but to be visited. Often, the people in these images are alone. These are not spaces for families—even when larger, expanded visions are created they lack toys, play infrastructure, high chairs, cots or children’s beds—they are for adult visitors to come and go. These spaces also imply a labor force who maintain the space—cleaning, changing sheets—who are not the users but who underpin visitors to these cosmic heterotopias. In Space Settlements, Richard Johnson and Charles Holbrow draw together the existing research on the needs of human habitation in space in 1977. These early designers particularly hoped to avoid these design tropes, and argued that space habitats “must avoid motel banality”19 to be liveable in the long term. While their call to allow the habitat to be customized such that “finishing and details can be left to the choice of the colonists [sic] themselves”20 has been heeded on the ISS, where astronauts can take personal mementos and objects to decorate their space, the idea of challenging the banality and artificiality of the space habitat through “the presence of live, growing things such as vegetation for eating or for decoration, children playing and exhibiting the chaos of youth, or animals such as pets or livestock”21 for long-term living has not yet been realized in either low Earth orbit living or these visions of the future. This creation of personalized “place” through chaos and long-term community was important,22 and is totally subverted in the seeming embrace of the “placelessness” of outer space anticipated in the Banal Motel. For example, publicity images of SpaceX habitats on Mars offered a vision of a settlement without communal spaces, meeting places, or opportunities to create connections. This vision retains the individualized way that sleeping and rest is currently conceptualized and elides intimacy, communal living and care, even if it replaces the technological emphasis on the ISS currently with a capitalist-tourism banality.

The Cosmic Erotic Bedroom There are other ways that bedrooms in space have been imagined.23 We draw inspiration from fictionalized images such a campaign by hotels.com or Space Age (1960s-–1980s) visions of the future, which include brightly colored, inflatable-influenced shapes, imagining rich textures, pneumatic objects, and visible technology (see Figure 6.2.2; Plate 2). While the departure from the technological sleeping bag of the current era of sleeping in space is also present here, it takes place differently. These rooms echo Sean Topham’s theorizing of the Space Age home that is: dimly lit by pools of artificial light: it is not a family home but a bachelor pad or sex-den for young couples. The bed is the focus – a place of relaxation and sexual

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nourishment. In the space age, the idealized image of domestic bliss was subverted from a wholesome family home into a high-tech pleasure capsule.24

Purposefully resisting the 1950s vision of the heteronormative, suburban domestic home of Euroamerica; the Space Age home of the 1960s, as characterized by the interiors of designers Panton and Colombo, “emphasized recreation and site the bed at the core of the home . . . The atmosphere is seductive and charged with eroticism.”25 Objects, furniture, and decor are modular, sometimes inflatable, and often create a playful and relaxed atmosphere; fabricated from plastics and aluminum in industrial production into organic-inspired forms; lightweight with embedded technology, visuals and unusual sounds. Such settings, with the bed as the central object in the room, are laden phenomenologically with ideas of individualism and self-indulgence. These designs typifying the emerging bachelor lifestyle of the 1960s that rejected a heteronormative nuclear family structure. Pulling through the individualism of current arrangement for sleeping in space in a very different way, these visions emphasize instead sexual, physical intimacy that is focused inwards to those in the bed. Additionally, domestication is resisted differently to the invocation of tourism in the Banal Motel; we argue instead indulging in what Paul Preciado calls the postdomestic. It is not that the human in the setting is a visitor, a tourist to outer space—these interiors can be phenomenologically read as invitations to long-term living—but instead that the space is no longer the domestic bedroom of yore. Archetypal of this kind of room and bed is perhaps the Playboy bed and bedroom of the Playboy Mansion, where the once-domestic, rest-oriented bedroom space is “no longer synonymous with sleep, the bed becomes a topos of never-ending, mediated waking. Likewise, the body lying on the Playboy bed was no longer an inert, passive organism, but an active, ultra-connected conductor producing and experiencing his surrounding environment.”26 The postdomestic transgresses the boundary of publicity and privacy, as writ large in the Playboy bed,27 which Preciado argues creates a porous boundary between the public–private through its multiple uses, users, and embedded technological systems. Living in space on the ISS already disrupts the public–private divide through dependency on the machine, ground control, and colleagues, embedding the human in space within the total system28 of the spacecraft. As a habitation, we can understand the ISS as already post-domestic in it ultraconnectness of the individuals living there. Thus, the Cosmic Erotic offers a reimagining of relations in space, creates space for imagining intimacy. It suggests, as Space Age design had done before, “an abundance of leisure time and casual sex as entertaining diversion”;29 it has the potential to be “radically undoing the married couple sexual-spatial arrangement”30 in ways that are perhaps already at play in the lives of astronauts on the ISS today.

Conclusion This chapter acts as a call to employing queer feminist perspectives in thinking through lives in space. What histories do we draw with us into the placelessness of space? How

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do the movements of ideas of bedrooms and sleeping arrangements between space and Earth testify to our terrestrial imaginaries bringing Earth to space? We have unpacked the construction of two genres we have described as the Banal Motel and the Cosmic Erotic through semiotic readings. Both genres prioritize the individual, albeit in different ways. This individualism remains a call to imagine new futures that see space as a place where community is centrally designed into spaces. In our contribution to Cosmos as a Journal,31 we worked to “hack” and subvert the use of elements of the ISS in service of erotic futures. Whilst we took the expanded erotic of Audre Lorde, the life-force energy and sensual knowledge,32 and imagined hugs and human touch as an important undervalued and under theorized component of living in space, we also imagined a queer-kink informed use of the ties that currently hold back objects on the space station to tie astronauts up for intimacy as protection against microgravity.33 All these formulations allow us to think more about the places people sleep in space and are imagined to occupy in design fictions. We conclude that grappling with the intimacies that are anticipated in space—through domestic, postdomestic, or the nondomestic tourism—we can learn more about the anticipated modes of living and being in outer space.

Notes 1 In this text we group the bedroom and the sleeping space – along with their posthuman occupants, the bed or sleeping bag – as a cluster of objects that are a single site of feminist inquiry in this text. 2 Cyd Cipolla et al., Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader (University of Washington Press, 2017), 3. 3 (Ottawa, Canada) 4 Canadian Space Agency, “This is how astronauts tuck themselves in”. 5 Philipp Meuser, Galina Balashova: Architect of the Soviet Space Programme (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2015). 6 Rowan Bailey and Claire Barber, ‘The Sleeping-Bag Landscape’, Craft + Design Enquiry: Issue 7, 2015, 2015, https://doi.org/10.22459/CDE.07.2015.04. 7 Brandon W. Maryatt, ‘Improvements to On-Orbit Sleeping Accommodations’ (International Conference on Environmental Systems, Boston, MA, 2019), https://ntrs. nasa.gov/citations/20190027189. 8 Leah V. Aronowsky, ‘Of Astronauts and Algae’, Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (1 November 2017): 359–77, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4215343. 9 Brandon Maryatt, Michael van Wie, and Toni Clark, ‘Recommendations for Next Generation Crew Quarters’, 8 July 2018, https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/handle/2346/74104,1. 10 Scott Kelly, Goodnight, Astronaut (Penguin, 2021). 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Drawing on Paul B. Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics, First paperback printing (New York: Zone Books, 2019), 147. Preciado uses wider architectural ideas of phenomenology that seeks to understand the world through careful descriptions and engagement the “things” within architecture. See, for example, Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New

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15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

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Tradition, 5., rev.enlarged ed, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1938-1939 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Pr, 2008). Although, it should be noted that if there are more astronauts than sleeping spaces on the ISS, they are able to attach their sleeping bags to any fixed surface in the station, see Brendan Byrne, ‘International Space Station Is About To Get Crowded, And It’s Running Out Of Beds’, NPR, 22 April 2021, sec. Space, https://www.npr. org/2021/04/22/989607677/international-space-station-about-to-get-crowded-andits-running-out-of-beds. Ersi Ioannidou, ‘Cosmic Heterotopia: Banality and Disjunction in the Interiors of “Passengers’ ”, ed. Pat Kirkham and Sarah A. Lichtman (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 319. Ibid, 321. Ibid, 328. Ersi Ioannidou, ‘Cosmic Heterotopias’ (Ethnographies of Outer Space: Methodological Opportunities and Experiments, University of Trento, 1 September 2022). Richard D. Johnson, Charles Holbrow, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Space Settlements: A Design Study (aIc Books, 2015), 24. Ibid. Ibid. Lisa Messeri, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, 2016). See, for example, Casper, this book. Sean Topham, Where’s My Space Age! (Munich ; New York: Prestel Pub, 2003), 112. Ibid, 111. Ibid, 146. It is perhaps not entirely unrelated that this is not the only entanglement of Playboy in outer space. On Apollo 12 (1967), a photo of DeDe Lind’s was stowed on the capsule that circled the Moon and came up for auction from Richard Gordon at RR Auctions in 2011; and further Playmates were included in Al Bean’s Cuff Checklist, digitized copies of which can be found on the NASA History site (https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/ a12/cuff12.html). The idea of space as being for the bachelor and astronaut as a Playboy have a long history. Valerie Olson, Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth (U of Minnesota Press, 2018). Topham, Where’s my space age!, 84. Preciado, Pornotopia, 142. Armstrong & Terminatė, “Intimacies with/in the Space Station”. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2007). Afterall, in hooking up the sleeping bags to the walls of the sleep pods, we are tying folks up in the bedroom in outer space already . . .

Bibliography Armstrong, Eleanor S, and Akvilė Terminatė. ‘Intimacies with(in) the Space Station’. Cosmos As a Journal, no. 2 (2021): 56–67. Aronowsky, Leah V. ‘Of Astronauts and Algae’. Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (1 November 2017): 359–77. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4215343.

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Bailey, Rowan, and Claire Barber. ‘The Sleeping-Bag Landscape’. Craft + Design Enquiry: Issue 7, 2015, 2015. https://doi.org/10.22459/CDE.07.2015.04. Byrne, Brendan. ‘International Space Station Is About To Get Crowded, And It’s Running Out Of Beds’. NPR, 22 April 2021, sec. Space. https://www.npr. org/2021/04/22/989607677/international-space-station-about-to-get-crowded-and-itsrunning-out-of-beds. Canadian Space Agency. ‘This Is How Astronauts Tuck Themselves in for a Good Night’s Sleep in Space. Careful, Though! In Space, the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) That Astronauts Expel Could Form a Bubble around Their Head’. Instagram, 5 July 2021. https://www. instagram.com/reel/CQ8pBsEnch0/. Cipolla, Cyd, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Willey. Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader. University of Washington Press, 2017. Giedion, Sigfried. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. 5., rev. Enlarged ed. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1938–1939. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Pr, 2008. Ioannidou, Ersi. ‘Cosmic Heterotopia: Banality and Disjunction in the Interiors of “Passengers” ’, edited by Pat Kirkham and Sarah A. Lichtman, 319–34. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/44126/. Ioannidou, Ersi. ‘Cosmic Heterotopias’. Presented at the Ethnographies of Outer Space: Methodological Opportunities and Experiments, University of Trento, 1 September 2022. Johnson, Richard D., Charles Holbrow, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Space Settlements: A Design Study. aIc Books, 2015. Kelly, Scott. Goodnight, Astronaut. Penguin, 2021. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2007. Maryatt, Brandon W. ‘Improvements to On-Orbit Sleeping Accommodations’. Boston, MA, 2019. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20190027189. Maryatt, Brandon, Michael van Wie, and Toni Clark. ‘Recommendations for Next Generation Crew Quarters’, 8 July 2018. https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/handle/2346/74104. Messeri, Lisa. Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds. Duke University Press, 2016. Meuser, Philipp. Galina Balashova: Architect of the Soviet Space Programme. Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2015. Olson, Valerie. Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth. U of Minnesota Press, 2018. Preciado, Paul B. Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics. First paperback printing. New York: Zone Books, 2019. Topham, Sean. Where’s My Space Age! Munich ; New York: Prestel Pub, 2003.

6.3 Could Commercializing Space Travel Influence Inequities Female Astronauts Face with Personal Protective Equipment? Susan L. Sokolowski

PPE Inequities for Women Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) defines personal protective equipment (PPE) as specialized clothing or equipment worn to minimize exposure to hazards that can cause serious injury and illness. Items can include coats, vests, pants, coveralls, flight suits, hard hats, safety goggles/glasses, ear plugs/muffs, respirators, gloves, and footwear. Hazards can include chemicals, radioactivity, fire, electricity, biological and other physical threats.1 In the field of PPE research, design, and development, the needs of women are desperately overlooked, and safety and inclusivity are forfeited. For example, in the firefighting industry between 2010 and 2014, women experienced on average 1,260 injuries on the fireground each year.2 Many of these injuries involve ill-fitting PPE (coats, pants, boots, and gloves).3 Researchers have reported through interviews and surveys with female firefighters many issues of not having PPE: it is not available in enough small sizes, relevant product lengths, circumferences, and does not include appropriate placement of details such as pockets and suspenders.4 In the healthcare industry, despite methods developed by OSHA to ensure a good N95 respirator fit, researchers have documented discrepancies for women.5 Regli et al. (2021) found respirator fit-pass rates differed between males and females by 95 percent and 85 percent, respectively.6 For female military personnel, the development of body armor has only been focused on male soldiers; research conducted by Coltman et al. found 68 percent of women surveyed reported wearing ill-fitting body armor, which was associated with increased musculoskeletal pain and discomfort, along with pain at the shoulders, abdomen, and hips.7 These examples demonstrate just some of the inequalities women who require PPE face to do their jobs, where they cannot perform to their maximum potential and safely. Female astronauts share similar challenges. In 2019, Ann McClain and Christina Koch were scheduled to conduct a spacewalk outside the International Space Station 189

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(ISS)—the first all-female one in history. However, McClain was switched out with a male astronaut because of “spacesuit availability.”8 When investigating the situation, it was uncovered that NASA had budget constraints and smaller space suits had not been a priority dating back to 2006.9 How can it be possible for female astronauts, like firefighters, healthcare practitioners, and military personnel, to have an equitable shot at performing all duties in space, the same as their male contemporaries, without properly fitting PPE?

History of Women in Space Only 11 percent of the total astronaut population from the 1960s to time of writing is female.10 Despite low numbers, however, women have been elbowing themselves into the space industry since the early 1960s. The first group of space-seeking women, dubbed the Mercury 13, trained and tested to become astronauts through a privately funded program led by Dr. William Randolph Lovelace. However, the operation was eventually shut down because the Mercury 13 were women, even though many of them outperformed their male counterparts.11 Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova did become the first woman to go to space in 1963,12 and since then, only sixty-nine more women (at time of writing) have traveled to space. These women represent a wide range of countries including France, Italy, South Korea, the UK, Canada, China, Japan, the Soviet Union/Russia, and the United States.13 Currently, there is an incentive to add more women to the space program. NASA’s 2021 astronaut class included four women out of the ten selected,14 and their Artemis 3 program where astronauts will land on the moon in 2025/2026 has pledged that the crew will include a woman and a person of color.15 Because of this endeavor, NASA announced it will require new space suits to be engineered to fit a broad range of body types, from women in the 5th percentile to men in the 95th percentile. Recently, the development contract for these suits was awarded to Axiom, a commercial manufacturer, in a departure from NASA’s historically in-house process.16

Space PPE When people think of space PPE, they usually recall the white pressurized extravehicular activity (EVA) suit which serves as a life-support system for the astronaut while they are working outside of the space station. The EVA suit is also the most controversial item of space PPE, because if it does not fit properly, the astronaut cannot leave the space station to work—which is what happened in 2019, when McClain was bumped out of the spacewalk.17 Without the EVA suit, astronauts cannot survive on their own, as the space environment lacks air pressure and gravity, fluctuates between extreme temperatures (120ºC to -120ºC), emits powerful radiation, atomic oxygen, has flying micrometeoroids and space debris.18 The suit works through a complex system of parts, including a liquid cooling suit, a hard upper torso, gloves, a lower torso unit that includes boots, life support and communications systems, and a pressurized

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helmet.19 These inter-reliable parts also have to be sized to fit a wide range of body shapes for rotating flight crews. This can be quite a design challenge, because PPE for outer space is currently developed by organizations that lack empathy for diverse female body shapes and sizes.20 There are other overlooked items of PPE related to outer space exploration that need consideration when outfitting women. During launch and entry into space, each astronaut wears an intravehicular activity (IVA) ensemble. This includes a partial pressurization suit with a parachute and communications systems, a helmet, gloves, and boots.The ensemble has multiple uses. It is worn during take-off and descent to manage blood flow and to prevent unconsciousness. The IVA also protects the astronauts should they need to parachute out of the shuttle over water in an emergency situation.21 While in orbit, astronauts are outfitted in flame-retardant flight suits, zippered jackets, trousers, sleep shorts, shirts, slippers, and underwear. Many of these items have specialized pockets for carrying pens, pencils, data books, glasses, pocketknife, and scissors.22

Commercializing the Space Industry and Star Harbor Academy Over the last twenty years there has been a behavioral shift from government agencies managing the space industry to the inclusion of private companies (e.g., Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, Space X, Star Harbor). Space commercialization includes the research, design and development of PPE. What could be the impact of the growth of these commercial entities to improve design inequities for women, for space PPE? Recently the Star Harbor Academy, a 53-acre academy with plans to open in 2026 in Colorado, USA, invited me to explore the notion of “space for all” through the development of a design brief.23 The brief defined the goals, attributes, and overall creative direction for new trainee uniforms. Star Harbor will be a training facility for commercial, academic, and government-based space tourists and scientists to experience microgravity flights, take workforce and leadership courses, develop spaceflight curricula, and conduct research (see Figure 6.3.1).24 Long term, more extensive facilities will include neutral buoyancy, a high-gravity centrifuge, land-based/

Figure 6.3.1 Concept rendering of Star Harbor Academy. © Star Harbor Academy

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underwater habitats, hypobaric and hyperbaric chambers, simulation labs, and a human performance center. Star Harbor has the potential to service anyone interested in learning about the space industry and travel. How could they research, design, and develop a more inclusive space PPE?

How to Design Space PPE for All Star Harbor’s product creation team would develop and implement a design process to ensure that female astronauts could equitably perform all duties in space safely, the same as their male contemporaries. LaBat and Sokolowski’s three-stage design process (1999) could serve as a model, outlining 1) problem definition and research, 2) creative exploration, and 3) implementation.25 The team would need to have had previous experience developing high-performance PPE products for women. The lack of women in PPE product teams, including outer space PPE, has resulted in women being unsatisfied, unable to participate, or injured because of poorly created products. Empathy and emotional connection are critical in the design process. The team should first identify existing problems to solve with the new product so that it is suitable for any potential wearer. Designers should interview and survey Star Harbor trainees to understand aspirations, functional and psychological needs of the new product to meet durability and safety standards. In the PPE industry, there is a lack of diverse and appropriate anthropometric data. Many databases are male-specific or activity-specific (e.g., military personnel). The design team would need to perform an anthropometric study to collects diverse body measurements, both statically and dynamically, to understand how new products should be sized and fitted. In specific, the designers would take into account specific measures like the under-bust circumference or hip circumference at specified distances from the waist crease to define the stomach and buttocks regions appropriately, which are key areas of sizing and fit concerns for women. Once the background research is conducted and the problems to solve are identified, a product brief is created. The brief serves as the “design contract” for the team to ideate new concepts for stage two of the design process: creative exploration. It would include a clear description of user and their needs, product silhouette(s) (e.g., pant, jumpsuit, jacket), functional details (e.g., center front zipper, mobility gussets, durability zones, ventilation), sizes, color palette, and materials/trim technologies. Through the creative exploration stage, the team would sketch, create 3D models, and physically prototype to execute ideas inspired by the product brief. Reviews from stakeholders like Star Harbor and potential users would generate feedback, further creative exploration, and sampling. A “sample size” of the selected design(s) would be fit and wear tested. The team would incorporate anthropometric data into patterns drafts and incorporate specified material zones (e.g., stretch versus non-stretch) to accommodate dynamic motion and body shape variety. Next, the team would fit the product to, say, a Star Harbor trainee, instead of a fashion model from an agency, to ensure accuracy. Team members would look for visible signs of material strain or excess. This iterative process would continue until design approval. After a

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small production run, a user would wear a product for a period of time to evaluate its long-term comfort, wear and tear, and environmental relevance. Next, the team would create a range of sizes that would correspond to appropriate anthropometric data. At stage three of the design process, implementation, the team would line up production, negotiate costs, order materials, and check quality standards. This stage ends once the produced product arrives to the user. To design inclusive space PPE for women is a complex and timely process. In all, this process could take several years to accomplish, especially if the anthropometric data needs to be collected from scratch. Product creation teams must consider the users’ and clients’ functional and aesthetic needs, at the same time ensuring that the product is safe and of the right quality and price. The design field can support these requirements by training people to do this technical work and involve more female designers. The commercial space industries, through entities such as the Star Harbor Academy, can embrace inclusivity by championing projects like the “space for all” trainee uniform and hiring inclusive-minded teams to create products for women.

Notes 1 United States Department of Labor. “Personal protective equipment,” Occupational Safety and Health Administration, n.d., Available online: https://www.osha.gov/ personal-protective-equipment 2 Campbell, Richard B. (2017), “Patterns of female firefighter injuries on the fireground.” National Fire Protection Association, Data and Analytics Division. 3 Hollerbach, Brittany S., Katie M. Heinrich, Walker SC Poston, C. Keith Haddock, Ainslie K. Kehler, and Sara A. Jahnke. (2017), “Current female firefighters’ perceptions, attitudes, and experiences with injury.” International Fire Service Journal of Leadership and Management 11: 41. 4 Sokolowski, Susan L., Linsey Griffin, Yingying Wu, Ellen McKinney, Kristen Morris, and Christine Bettencourt. (2022), “Examination of current US female firefighting personal protective equipment (PPE) sizing and fitting process challenges: an opportunity to improve safety.” Fashion and Textiles 9, no. 1: 1–26. 5 Sokolowski, Susan. L., Jacob Searcy, Daniel Calabrese, and Yu Zou. (2021), “Exemplar 3D faces and N95 pleated mask measurement comparison by sex and race.” Proceedings of 3DBODY.TECH 2020 – 12th International Conference and Exhibition on 3D Body Scanning and Processing Technologies, Lugano, Switzerland, #40. 6 Regli, Adrian, Priya Thalayasingam, Emily Bell, Aine Sommerfield, and Britta S. von Ungern-Sternberg. “More than half of front-line healthcare workers unknowingly used an N95/P2 mask without adequate airborne protection: An audit in a tertiary institution.” Anaesthesia and Intensive Care 49, no. 5: 404–411. 7 Coltman, Celeste. E., Julie R. Steele, Wayne A. Spratford, and Richard H. Molloy. (2020), “Are female soldiers satisfied with the fit and function of body armour?” Applied Ergonomics 89: 103197. 8 Schwartz, M. (2019), “NASA scraps first all-female spacewalk for want of a mediumsize spacesuit,” NPR, 29 March. Available online: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/26/ 706779637/nasa-scraps-first-all-female-spacewalk-for-want-of-a-medium-sizedspacesuit.

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9 Greenfieldboyce, N. (2006),“When it comes to the spacewalk, size matters,” NPR, 15 December. Available online: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=6627320 10 UN Affairs. (2021), “Only around 1 in 5 space industry workers are women,” United Nations, 4 October. Available online: https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/10/1102082 11 Krishna, S. (2020), “The Mercury 13: The women who could have been NASA’s first female astronauts,” Space.com, 24 July. Available online: https://www.space.com/ mercury-13.html 12 Smithsonian. “Valentina Tereshkova: Cosmonaut,” National Air and Space Museum, n.d., Available online: https://airandspace.si.edu/people/historical-figure/valentinatereshkova 13 Astronauts & Cosmonauts. (2022), “Astronaut/Cosmonaut Statistics,” 28 November. Available online: https://www.worldspaceflight.com/bios/stats.php 14 Space Center Houston. (2021), “NASA’s New Astronaut Class Announced,” 7 December. Available online: https://spacecenter.org/nasas-new-astronaut-classannounced/ 15 Stuart, C. “Artemis 1: The first step in returning astronauts to the moon,” Space.com, n.d., https://www.space.com/artemis-1-going-back-to-the-moon 16 Davenport, C. (2022), “NASA awards contracts to build new spacesuits: The contracts for suits that could be worn in orbit or on the lunar surface went to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace,” Washington Post, 1 June. Available online: https://www. washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/01/nasa-spacesuit-contracts/ 17 Sokolowski, S. L. (2019), “Female astronauts: How performance products like space suits and bras are designed to pave the way for women’s accomplishments,” The Conversation, 5 April. Available on: https://theconversation.com/female-astronautshow-performance-products-like-space-suits-and-bras-are-designed-to-pave-the-wayfor-womens-accomplishments-114346 18 Finckenor, M. M. and Kim K. de Groh. (2015), “A researchers guide to: International Space Station space environmental effects,” NASA, 15 March. Available on: https:// www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/NP-2015-03-015-JSC_Space_Environment-ISSMini-Book-2015-508.pdf 19 Mahoney, E. (2019), “Spacewalk spacesuit basics,” NASA, 4 October. Available on: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/spacewalk-spacesuit-basics 20 Sokolowski, S. L. (2019), “Female astronauts: How performance products like space suits and bras are designed to pave the way for women’s accomplishments,” The Conversation, 5 April. Available on: https://theconversation.com/female-astronautshow-performance-products-like-space-suits-and-bras-are-designed-to-pave-the-wayfor-womens-accomplishments-114346 21 Thomas, K. S., and Harold J. McMann. (2006), “US spacesuits,” New York: Springer. 22 Astronauts & Cosmonauts. (2022), “Astronaut/Cosmonaut Statistics,” 28 November. Available online: https://www.worldspaceflight.com/bios/stats.php 23 Star Harbor Academy. (2022), Available online: http://starharboracademy.com. 24 Mitchell, B. (2022), “Star Harbor plans world’s first training facility for space tourists,” Blooloop, 19 May. Available online: https://blooloop.com/technology/news/starharbor-commercial-spaceflight-training-facility/ 25 LaBat, Karen L., and Susan L. Sokolowski. (1999), “A three-stage design process applied to an industry-university textile product design project.” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 17, no. 1: 11–20.

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References Astronauts & Cosmonauts. (2022), “Astronaut/Cosmonaut Statistics,” 28 November. Available online: https://www.worldspaceflight.com/bios/stats.php Campbell, Richard B. (2017), “Patterns of female firefighter injuries on the fireground.” National Fire Protection Association, Data and Analytics Division. Coltman, Celeste. E., Julie R. Steele, Wayne A. Spratford, and Richard H. Molloy. (2020), “Are female soldiers satisfied with the fit and function of body armour?” Applied Ergonomics 89: 103197. Greenfieldboyce, N. (2006), “When it comes to the spacewalk, size matters,” NPR, 15 December. Available online: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=6627320 Hollerbach, Brittany S., Katie M. Heinrich, Walker SC Poston, C. Keith Haddock, Ainslie K. Kehler, and Sara A. Jahnke. (2017), “Current female firefighters’ perceptions, attitudes, and experiences with injury.” International Fire Service Journal of Leadership and Management 11: 41. LaBat, Karen L., and Susan L. Sokolowski. (1999), “A three-stage design process applied to an industry-university textile product design project.” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 17, no. 1: 11–20. Mitchell, B. (2022), “Star Harbor plans world’s first training facility for space tourists,” Blooloop, 19 May. Available online: https://blooloop.com/technology/news/star-harborcommercial-spaceflight-training-facility/ Regli, Adrian, Priya Thalayasingam, Emily Bell, Aine Sommerfield, and Britta S. von Ungern-Sternberg. “More than half of front-line healthcare workers unknowingly used an N95/P2 mask without adequate airborne protection: An audit in a tertiary institution.” Anaesthesia and Intensive Care 49, no. 5: 404–411. Schwartz, M. (2019), “NASA scraps first all-female spacewalk for want of a medium-size spacesuit,” NPR, 29 March. Available online: https://www.npr. org/2019/03/26/706779637/nasa-scraps-first-all-female-spacewalk-for-want-of-amedium-sized-spacesuit. Smithsonian. “Valentina Tereshkova: Cosmonaut,” National Air and Space Museum, n.d., Available online: https://airandspace.si.edu/people/historical-figure/valentinatereshkova. Sokolowski, Susan. L., Jacob Searcy, Daniel Calabrese, and Yu Zou. (2021), “Exemplar 3D faces and N95 pleated mask measurement comparison by sex and race.” Proceedings of 3DBODY.TECH 2020 – 12th International Conference and Exhibition on 3D Body Scanning and Processing Technologies, Lugano, Switzerland, #40. Sokolowski, Susan L., Linsey Griffin, Yingying Wu, Ellen McKinney, Kristen Morris, and Christine Bettencourt. (2022), “Examination of current US female firefighting personal protective equipment (PPE) sizing and fitting process challenges: an opportunity to improve safety.” Fashion and Textiles 9, no. 1: 1–26. Star Harbor Academy. (2022), Available on: http://starharboracademy.com. UN Affairs. (2021), “Only around 1 in 5 space industry workers are women,” United Nations, 4 October. Available online: https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/10/1102082 United States Department of Labor. “Personal protective equipment,” Occupational Safety and Health Administration, n.d., Available online: https://www.osha.gov/personalprotective-equipment.

6.4 Going to Space with Universal Design: Why Space Travel Isn’t Accessible and Why It Should Be Sheri Wells-Jensen and Angelica Esquivel

Would you like to go to space? Tickets are available. And you actually have several live options. If you have a lot of money (specifically, if you have around US$250,000) you can purchase a reserve ticket for a ride on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket or on one of the other new, similarly priced commercial companies. For this small fortune, you will receive the 11-minute ride of your lifetime, culminating in three minutes in zero gravity during which you can hang weightlessly in the cabin and gaze through a giant window at the beautiful blue Earth shining up at you out of the blackness of space. If you have a lot more money and a lot more time for some pretty intense training, you could purchase a week on the International Space Station, rubbing your weightless elbows with real live astronauts and watching through a 360-degree cupula while the Earth spins below you. For even more money, you could charter and command your own space vessel, and orbit the Earth for a few days with a few friends doing pretty much whatever you like. Or, if you have no money at all, but extraordinary amounts of luck, you might apply to Space for Humanity’s citizen astronaut program and visit space for free. In all these cases, though, there is something beyond money and luck that could prevent some of you from going. If you are among the 20 percent of Earthlings who have a disability of any significant kind, the doors to space remain closed. To keep things simple, we generally assume the definition of disability used in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990: “Any mental or physical impairment that impacts activities of daily life or a history or record of such impairment.” While it’s possible to find fault with this definition, it does have the advantage of clarity and keeps us aligned with others doing similar work. One such like-minded agency is the European Space Agency (ESA), which has just chosen its first disabled astronaut candidate, Paralympian Dr. John McFall, who has a right leg prosthesis. It is worth noting, however, that Dr. McFall joins the astronaut candidate class as part of a special feasibility project, and there is no promise that he will ever go to space. While this is a move in the right direction, it’s not the victory we could have hoped for. 196

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There are three reasons why there has yet to be a disabled astronaut, and Dr. McFall faces all three of them: one cultural, one physical, and one that we can banish. The first barrier to disabled people in space is the familiar one: the relentless onslaught of misinformation and low expectations that have been dogging disabled people for millennia. (If you do not believe there is still rampant discrimination and disregard for disabled people in the twenty-first century, there is little we can say here to convince you otherwise. If you are curious about this, you might try reading some of the excellent works written by disabled people: Godin, Leland, Pinto, Silverman, Tausig, and these historical accounts: Schweik, Nielsen (see Bibliography at the end of this chapter).) The second reason appears reasonable and fair at first but rapidly gives way under some inspection. This is the impression that disabled people are frail and would be a danger to themselves (and possibly others) in a space environment. This is fair enough (if true): not even the most ardent capitalist wants to run a business that regularly, quickly, and very publicly kills its own customers. In “Medical Guidelines for Space Passengers II,” the Space Passenger Task Force investigated the parameters under which space tourists could fly and determined that if your heart, spine, and brain can withstand the G-forces associated with lift-off and reentry, you could go. Space is still dangerous, and there are some medical conditions that zero gravity can exacerbate, and a medical consultation is wise in all cases, but the mere existence of a disability need not be disqualifying. Given this, space companies began working out “functional requirements” for the safety of their customers. To use your US$250,000 seat aboard Blue Origin, for example, you must (presumably in addition to having the requisite heart, spine, and brain stability) also be able to: ●

● ● ● ●

Climb the height of the launch tower in 90 seconds (it’s about seven flights of stairs). Walk across uneven surfaces (containing more stairs). Fasten and unfasten five-point seat harnesses in less than 15 seconds. Understand and obey spoken instructions in English. Sit strapped in place for 40–90 minutes without getting up or needing to use the bathroom. (There are no restrooms onboard!)

Although these are called functional requirements and seem to refer to the needed abilities of the potential crew members, they don’t reliably reflect the companies’ requirements. For example, the first author, who is fully blind, can easily do all these things, but there is no indication that any space company will sell a ticket to a blind traveler. More to the point, these functional requirements are more about the built environment (over which we do have control) than they are about people. For example, the first requirement could be rewritten as: “One of the difficulties with our space capsule is that we have built flights of stairs.” If the tower had an elevator, or if the launch pad were on a platform seven flights of stairs below the surface of the ground instead of above, climbing stairs would not be necessary. In other words, the stair-climb requirement is in place because of the choice to build stairs. There is nothing about space flight itself that makes a 90-second dash up seven flights at all necessary

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This brings us to reason three, which we believe could be the determining factor. Space is a new place. Within the actual physical requirements imposed by engineering and the laws of physics, we can build our rockets and our habitats any way we want, designing them with space-specific access needs built in literally from the ground up. And we will do this, as soon as we know more precisely what those are. AstroAccess is a group of space professionals, academics, students, engineers, and artists on the front line of making space accessible. In cooperation with the Zero G corporation, they have to date sent disabled researchers on six separate zero-G parabolic flights to study what would be needed by disabled astronauts. Here are some of their initial findings about how to build the space station of the future. Anything that is worth doing, is worth doing in more than one way. Without gravity holding them usefully against the seat of a chair, astronauts have learned to hook a toe on a handy foothold to keep them in position in front of a workstation. If your legs are paralyzed or if you have no legs, the omnipresent footholds can be interspersed with Velcro patches or magnets which can attach to an astronaut’s hip or shoulder. Although we could dispense with the regulation wide doorways needed by wheelchair users on Earth, hatches should be operated remotely, by voice control and by latches which are easy to grasp and move. All controls for system operations, onboard experiments or anything else should be adjustable in multiple ways: by voice, via button controls, or through physical controls which can be moved without a great deal of strength. Communication can be via multichannels—there is no need to rely on audio communication only. Messages, especially emergency messages, should be audible, readable, and relayed in sign language. Warning lights, in addition to warning sounds, signal emergencies. Emergency alert noises must be loud enough to wake the crew, but not so long and continuous as to impede spoken communication. In a situation where the lighting fails, or when visibility is impaired by smoke or other debris in the cabin, means of navigation without vision becomes crucial. Walls of the environment can contain information. The second AA flight tested a set of tiles which, at a touch, convey information such as distance and direction to the nearest exits, and location of emergency gear. The “language” used on these tiles is productive, meaning the symbols used can be combined in novel ways to convey information about the configuration of any room. With only minimal training, a person can gather almost instantly by touch all the information about the built environment that the sighted person gains by piece by piece by glancing around. Overall, the environment should be constructed so as to avoid the possibility of crew or visitors colliding with essential gear or controls. Recessed panels and experiments placed inside modules could eliminate accidental injury or damage to equipment. If all these modifications seem like good ideas for everyone, that is exactly the point. The principle of universal design reminds us that modifications such as curb cuts, increased lighting, and visual as well as audible alarms benefit everyone, making the environment safer and more convenient for everyone. Our findings also align with the theory of intersectionality put forth by scholar and theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. Intersectionality is a term used to define the complex oppression faced by those who have multiple marginalized identities. History has shown us how basing scientific studies around only one demographic, usually

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able-bodied cisgendered white men, leaves gaps in the research. One example of this is how research around heart disease has mostly focused on cisgendered men, resulting in a lack of awareness in the ways that heart attack symptoms present in cisgendered women. That is why it is important to have astronauts who have disabilities, astronauts of color, queer astronauts, and so on. It not only allows more people to experience the wonder of space travel, but it also leads to better, more accurate research. In the end, lack of access is a choice. As we build the future, we can and should build it for everyone.

Bibliography Ansari, Anousheh, and Homer Hickam. My Dream of Stars: From Daughter of Iran to Space Pioneer. St. Martin’s Press, 2011. Betz. “Six Ways to Buy A Ticket to Space in 2021.” Discover Magazine, August 26, 2020. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/six-ways-to-buy-a-ticket-to-spacein-2021. Boyle, Alan. “Here’s What It’ll Be like to Ride on Jeff Bezos’ Suborbital Blue Origin Spaceship.” GeekWire, January 28, 2017. https://www.geekwire.com/2017/riding-jeffbezos-blue-origin-new-shepard/. Clark, John Lee. How to Communicate: Poems. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. New York: New Press, 2019. Dutfield, Scott, and Vicky Stein. “Inspiration4: The First All-Civilian Spaceflight on SpaceX Dragon.” Space.com, January 5, 2022. https://www.space.com/inspiration4-spacex.html. Garriott, Richard, and David Fisher. Explore/Create: My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark. Harper Collins, 2017. Giardina, E. G. “Heart Disease in Women.” International Journal of Fertility and Women’s Medicine 45, no. 6 (2000): 350–57. Godin, M. Leona. There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness. First edition. New York: Pantheon Books, 2021. Hadfield, Chris. An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything. Little, Brown, 2013. Leland, Andrew. The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. New York: Penguin Press, 2023. Leland, Andrew. “The Right Stuff,” n.d. https://radiolab.org/podcast/right-stuff. Nielsen, Kim E. A Disability History of the United States. Revisioning American History. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012. Pinto, Jo Elizabeth. Daddy Won’t Let Mom Drive the Car: True Tales of Parenting in the Dark. Independently published, 2019. Rayman, Russell B., Melchor J. Antuñano, Mitchell A. Garber, John D. Hastings, Petra A. Illig, Jon L. Jordan, Roger F. Landry, et al. “Medical Guidelines for Space Passengers--II.” Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine 73, no. 11 (November 2002): 1132–34. Schweik, Susan M. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. NYU Press, 2009. Silverman, Arielle. Just Human: The Quest for Disability Wisdom, Respect, and Inclusion. Edited by Ann Narcisian Videan. Disability Wisdom Publishing, 2021. Stroker, Ali, and Stacy Davidowitz. The Chance to Fly. Abrams, 2021.

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Taussig, Rebekah. Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body. HarperCollins, 2020. Vaughan, C. Edwin. “People-First Language: An Unholy Crusade.” Braille Monitor 52, no. 3 (March 2009). https://nfb.org/sites/default/files/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm09/ bm0903/bm090309.htm. Wells-Jensen, Sheri. “The Case for Disabled Astronauts.” Scientific American, May 30, 2018. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-case-for-disabled-astronauts/. Wells-Jensen, S. (2023), forthcoming chapter in a book edited by James Schwartz.

6.5 In Conversation with Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian is an uncategorizable creative force who creates multidimensional experiential projects at the intersection of film, science, tech, theater, politics, arts, and design. Among her diverse, improbable, and unfailingly impressive achievements are the creation of the University of the Underground, the foundation of NASA’s International Space Orchestra, and collaborations with the likes of Noam Chomsky, Pussy Riot, Massive Attack, and Kid Cudi. In 2022, Nelly launched “Tour De Moon,” a lunar-inspired cavalcade of creativity encompassing live events and immersive experiences across the UK. SF

Space Feminisms editorial team

NBHS Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian SF Your work has glittery and girly flavors that seem to create a contrast with your involvement with the seriousness of the space sector. How do you reconcile this? NBHS As a non-binary person, I do not want to label myself as girly, but I do like glitter. The goal of my work is to design experiences that allow the public to access the sublime in science; because of the elitism that prevails in fields such as physics and quantum physics, it is important to bring as many people as possible into scientific debates and anything that has to do with conversations around the future of humanity. My work aims to create a sensitive momentum with and within the sciences. In Shiny Gold (2022), for example, I explore various scales and sources of energy in the universe but also on Earth—uranium, fungus, bacteria, the sun, deep sea creatures, etc.—and I put them all at the same level using an inflatable structure. This is key to the way I work, developing experiences in which we bring together ecosystems so that each discipline is not seen in a silo but as a part of a whole. Recently, I started exploring playful ways to make my work more popular and accessible, that is, integrating references from the music industry or from pop culture—for example, making use of the horror genre or others. In the past decade, I was afraid of going into popular culture and freely embracing it. Now, my motto is “The more people involved, the better.” There is no shame in making one’s work accessible. I have been looking at Hollywood movies and the machinery of big tech to translate my work into a methodology that brings in a wider audience. 201

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Figure 6.5.1 Shiny Gold, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian. Photo: Vinciane Lebrun. Production: Gaîté lyrique. See Plate Section 2

Interestingly, some people who were supportive of my work ten years ago no longer recognize it. I was interviewed by a philosopher about my exhibition at Gaîté lyrique in Paris who criticized it, saying it used to have several complex layers, and that it was now about people taking pictures and posting them on Instagram. I told myself, “If this is what people want to do, that is great.” I am not here to control what people want to think or how they want to interact with the work. The work is glittery because it can create a public forum. SF Your work mixes the playful and the absurd. How would you describe this relation? NBHS That amalgamation is part of the mechanics to make the work accessible. Many elements come from music and film entertainment industries. Humor has always been at the core of my work because it can bring people into a space where they can question but also feel uncomfortable; they enter a space of doubt because they are unclear whether it is dark humor or not. When I offer dystopian visions like in The Other Volcano (2010), in which viewers experience the explosion of a volcano in their living room, I offer them a space to interrogate the future of entertainment. Humor is a fantastic space because it generates something akin to the psychological phenomenon described as the “uncanny valley.” The uncanny valley occurs when humans encounter androids, artificial agents, or objects that are only slightly overly familiar. Humans transition from a feeling of joy to one of recognition where they realize that something is not completely right, and they start being critical. I seek to reach this phenomenon with humor. My projects are structured as theatrical plays with several acts. I expect members of the public to stay within the space for a certain amount of time to test out momentum.

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Figure 6.5.2 The Other Volcano, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian. Photo: Nick Ballon

In Shiny Gold, visitors can jump into a pool of balls and have fun, find themselves talking to mushrooms, or staring at a gigantic intestine or a squid. My work brings audiences through these phases of excitement, playfulness, and weirdness so that they question what they are experiencing. These are the ideal conditions to build critical thinking and change, which are fundamental goals of my work. SF You often refer to “total bombardment” to explain your work. Can you explain how that concept drives your creative process? NBHS In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt predicted that technological tools would lead to the extinction of humanity. She explained that scientific organizations are built around two groups: the Homo fabers, “those who think,” the leaders, and the “animal laborans,” the makers. What could lead to the extinction of humanity is the way that these institutions don’t allow for critical thinking and a big part of it is visible in the power structures you can find in the organigrams of such institution, where, as Arendt posits, there is a delineation between the thinkers and the makers without the possibility of an encounter between the two. For example Code D–Directorate is always separated by Code S–Science, on one side the manager and on the other the makers, which does not support the plurality of thinking or critical thinking. Instead, everything is reflected ideologically from the leadership down to the makers. Following Arendt, my work interrogates organigrams. I learn the organigrams of every organization I work with. I design events that activate conversations between the Homo fabers and the animal laborans. I also mobilize theater techniques from Antonin Artaud and Augusto Boal. The theater of Artaud promotes an idea of plays as a complete overload of the senses, that is, the total bombardment. The idea is to look at a project from a plurality of angles. Concretely, it can mean showing up unannounced in someone’s office or emailing

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someone with several emails to get them to make the project happen. The total bombardment is akin to resilience; it requires staying long-term in a specific location to ensure that the complexity of the organization does not become a barrier to the realization of the projects. It is crucial to keep pushing on, to behave like a proper parasite to sustain a level of pressure to guarantee the realization of the project. SF How do you make the connection between your critical theory approach, your feminist approach, and your commitment to the International Astronautical Federation? NBHS My family has a complex history of immigration and relationships with nation-states. I was born in France to an Algerian father and Armenian mother. I was raised with both the Algerian independence and the Armenian genocide. As a result, I do not believe in nation-states. Borders should not exist the way they have been defined on maps by governments. The current political models that prevail, whether the democracy as we practice it or the various systems of dictatorship that we know of, are not useful to move forward as we explore space and ourselves. The current visions developed for space lack innovation and creativity. To creatively intervene in the space sector, we must start with decolonial, post-human, post-nation-state, and post-capitalist frameworks. I am particularly excited about Paul B. Preciado’s idea of the reunion between gender and technology in the creation of a new form of human that envisions permanent transformation. Ecofeminism, which includes non-binary and queer feminism, also provides us with original ways to rethink human relationships by taking inspiration from stones, matter, and bacteria. These are useful frameworks to help us define politics in the next 100 years. We have an opportunity to look at other planets not as a replication of what we currently have on Earth with nation-states but as space to explore new ideas and concepts. What if we think of borders on maps as dependent upon the light, texture, or color that we find in a given territory? We have people who offer groundbreaking ways of thinking, and the problem is that many of them are not at the International Astronautical Federation (IAF). We give platforms to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk at the IAF but we should give it to the Global Majority, people who have experienced oppression and who are able to offer alternative decolonial counternarratives. There is growing criticism about the need to explore space, not just with regards to Musk’s fantasy to exploit Mars, but also in relation to scientific missions such as probes to Mars. People are starting to question the necessity of such endeavors, marking a significant shift from the excitement and dreamlike quality once associated with space exploration. I am at the IAF to bring critical thinking to the space sector, to build committees and technical sessions in a way that the space industry understands the pressing issues I just discussed; there is an opportunity to change things, even if it takes time. SF

Who are your allies in the space sector and why?

NBHS My first time at the IAF, I had impostor syndrome. I felt I should not be there. I wondered, how could I add to this field? That was one reason I was able to finish my

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PhD. I knew that these people would not talk or listen to me if I did not have a doctorate. I felt that with a doctorate my views would be heard. I also knew that I did not have the luxury, time, or financial privilege to only hang out in meetings without seeing any concrete change, so I started being more vocal. This might come as a surprise, but actually, my training in boxing was useful to force me to engage but also to try and be diplomatic. Initially, the “Space Culture” session was called “Critical Thinking in Space,” but the committee suggested renaming it “Space Culture” since they did not understand “critical thinking.” This was a good learning curve for me, as the reason why it ended up being called “Space Culture” is also because I didn’t plan for this session at the committee where I should have been able to explain what was critical thinking to engineers and scientists. And so because they didn’t understand the phrase “critical thinking” I had to accept to remove it from the title, but I kept it in the session’s definition. I was better prepared to implement the “Decolonial Space” session and informed all my allies beforehand. I got every single woman and non-binary person in the room to support me. When I presented the proposal, all my allies were there. Over time I learned how to deliver my point effectively without wasting too much energy. It’s important to land your punch and be vocal, but also to be efficient. Despite feeling deflated at times, I remain optimistic and am still eager to put together new proposals. In the past, IAF committees had titles like “Colonization of Mars.” The former IAF director, Pascal Ehrenfreund has removed “colonization” and replaced it with “Mars Exploration.” SF How has your work with SETI influenced your approach to space? NBHS The search for extraterrestrial intelligence provided me with a landscape to understand how ecosystems are connected, but also the scales of things. When you study how dolphins or whales communicate you might learn valuable assets and methodologies that might inform how we should research intelligent signals from outer space. I started working at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) in 2012 when Jill Tarter, one of the co-founders with Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, was the chair. She opened my eyes to the fact that humans are microscopic and that we do not exist at the scale of the universe. She also explained that there might be civilizations out there that will be extinct by the time we receive a signal from them. To receive that signal or know which interval to tune into, we can study how animals communicate with each other. This way, we can understand communication references and use them as a methodology to tune our telescopes. This kind of elasticity of the mind is fantastic and it would not be possible without the space sector, which is why we need to keep developing work in space. It is necessary for humanity to understand that we are not the center of the world. It is necessary for us to not exist in our little bubble. It’s maybe less immediate and less urgent than resolving the issue of climate change, but for us to keep existing, we need to understand that we are part of an ecosystem. To make audiences understand this, I need to have them understand that there are planets that look similar to ours, and that they potentially have other inhabitants. I need them to understand the basics of quantum physics as well as the fact that the universe is in a permanent state of expansion.

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Humanity needs to understand that dark matter and dark energy are characters of our ecosystem. SF There is a Barbie created in your image. What are your thoughts on astronaut Barbies such as Samantha Cristoforetti being marketed to inspire young girls to pursue careers in engineering and space exploration? NBHS The Barbie came about when I was consulting at Mattel’s design department on the team that put together the “I Can Be” series. The astronaut Barbie created in my image was a gift from Mattel. They were already understanding that the Barbie figure and the doll they had initially designed was not representative of the world’s plurality and that it was not right for them to maintain that kind of imagery. I am excited to see that toy companies like Mattel and Lego who have a monopoly on popular culture and representation for kids are going in that direction. We can argue about how dolls are linked to gender studies and the exploration of kids’ sexuality, but dolls have existed since the age of the Neanderthal. We have found dolls already back, so we did not need Mattel to have kids play with dolls. It is not a question of the existence of these dolls, because they participate in how we humans produce knowledge. It is about the representations they foster and making sure that they reflect the world that we live in. It is interesting to think about how a plastic doll stays the same while we, humans, constantly change. The important thing is that these dolls are starting to reflect a more diverse range of people and careers, which is exciting. The message is not that every kid should become an engineer or an astronaut, but that they should be able to see themselves represented in all types of careers and pursue what they want to do. Representation matters in popular culture and media, and it can have a powerful impact on shaping our aspirations and self-perceptions.

6.6 Space Architecture for the Last of Us: Reflections on Off-World Planetary Construction Melodie Yashar

Figure 6.6.1 Lunar Surface Construction. © ICON

Figure 6.6.2 Lunar Landing Pad Study. © ICON

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Figure 6.6.3 Mars Surface Panorama. © ICON

I. Omitting and Avoiding the Lunar Master Plan Future life on the Moon and subsequently Mars will likely begin as small “base camps” for short-term and temporary expeditions, which over time will expand into small international settlements with shared infrastructure and resources. The Moon is roughly the size of Africa, and certain resources are localized within key areas of interest near the poles. The future of how international organizations and governmental bodies will coordinate access to resources—such as water, minerals, and so-called peaks of eternal light (craters at just the right latitude with constant access to sunlight)— remains an open question. International agreements and codes of conduct will be of utmost importance, and only a few terrestrial examples could potentially serve as precedents for how to coordinate international norms, customs, and laws. In May 2022, NASA published an initial list of Moon to Mars (M2M) Objectives as a means of scoping the future trajectory of research and technology development for multinational infrastructures in lunar orbit, on the lunar surface, and eventually on Mars.1 In their own words, the objectives-based approach focuses on the “big picture,” or the “what” and “why” of NASA’s commitment to deep space exploration, prior to determining the “how,” or the capabilities necessary to accomplish these goals. Specifically, the objectives serve as a “blueprint” for NASA’s investments in deep space exploration, which will ultimately support a permanent human presence on the Moon. After soliciting general feedback on the objectives from individuals, businesses, academic institutions, and international space agencies, NASA published an update to the initial draft in September 2022; the list addressed research gaps and additional needed capabilities in multidisciplinary science, transportation and habitation, lunar and Martian infrastructure and operations.2 While the objectives thematically address significant values and goals for NASA’s trajectory and overall scope for lunar surface development, notably absent from the revised objectives is any mention of the need for a cohesive master plan, or a broad operational scope for planning and siting infrastructure for lunar development. In fact, nowhere in the objectives are the topics of land or development usage ever discussed. The M2M Objectives, while well-intentioned, perpetuate a model in which technology development tasks and capabilities development associated with frontier mentalities outweigh an environmental consciousness of preservation, care, or respect. An implicit discourse related to that of resource utilization is that of land utilization, as well as property rights for commercial entities. Clearly much remains to be decided and

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determined relative to land use, property rights and regulation for future lunar development in both private and public sectors; but instead of addressing these gaps, the consistent response from space-industry leaders and professionals focusing on low technology readiness-level projects and programs is “we’ll worry about that later.”3 In architectural practice and discourse, master planning is an essential activity for achieving sustainable, equitable, and resilient developments that address the needs of diverse communities and stakeholders. By planning ahead, master planning helps optimize the efficient allocation of resources to avoid costly infrastructure-scale errors that are difficult to recover from. From the perspective of the space architect, a current trend shared by NASA and other practitioners is to resort to a site-agnostic as well as a user-agnostic strategy as a starting point for designing resilient space architecture and infrastructure on the lunar surface. Because we do not yet know where our first landing site will be at the South Pole, we cannot identify an accurate site for which to design a structure or begin building an initial lunar base. The approach has therefore been to adopt a site-agnostic strategy—design it universally so it can work anywhere and for any user—as a means of driving development forward. Nonetheless, both research and commercial organizations continue to investigate site-specific concepts of operation relative to high-value in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) activities, such as those seeking to mine the Moon for precious metals, waterice, and over the long term, manufacture rocket propellant on the lunar surface. Within the lunar development context, not all landing sites are created equal. Commercially, we are witnessing a new space race to claim access to valuable landing sites and research locations at the South Pole. Physical resources such as sub-surface water ice are in locations near the poles, and certain orbital configurations can be more or less strategic for maintaining a stationary position. Rights to physical resources, to construct and operate structures, to maintain access to particular areas, and, of course, privatization will inevitably spark conflict.

II: Problematic Design Methodologies: Blank-slate Development Although the Moon is unclaimed territory, it is not a “blank slate.” It has been studied, mapped, and explored for decades by scientists, and it has profound cultural significance for many communities. To disregard this history and view the Moon as a resource for exploitation is to perpetuate oppressive patterns that have plagued our world for far too long. In terrestrial urban planning and development, site-agnostic strategies perpetuating the myth of “blank slate” development run rampant. The idea belies the reality that every site has a pre-existing context and history, including environmental, social, cultural, and economic factors that shape its current state and future potential. Even seemingly undeveloped or uninhabited sites have a complex ecosystem and geological history to be taken into consideration within the space architect’s practice. Antarctica may be the closest analogous domain to “blank slate” surface development on Earth, where base planning and land use may offer valuable lessons in international governance, sustainable resource management, and environmental conservation. Antarctica is the only continent without an indigenous population, yet it is literally

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“blanketed” with land use claims from numerous nations.4 While there are no permanent human settlements in Antarctica, the continent is still subject to international governance and environmental regulations, which have a significant impact on any development that may occur. The current state of geopolitics, land use, and acquisition on the Moon remains contested precisely due to the lack of an international treaty or agreement governing the ownership or administration of lunar territories or regions. As a cornerstone international agreement governing space development activities on planetary surfaces, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits nations from claiming sovereignty over celestial bodies, including the Moon. However, given the treaty was written prior to the recent rise in commercial space activities, it makes no mention of private ownership by non-governmental entities and leaves room for disputes and legal challenges. In 2015, the United States passed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which carefully states that it does not represent a claim of “sovereignty, or sovereign or exclusive rights of jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body,” but it does specifically assert that a US citizen engaged in resource extraction “shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell it according to applicable law.”5 A future lunar commercial ecosystem is forecasted and predicated through this language, which has already alleged that a frontier mentality that encourages private entities to be the first to claim, own, and profit from indigenous land is inherent to the future of lunar surface development. NASA’s push to subcontract technology development to the private sector through commercial contracts promotes competitive advantages associated with the spirit of entrepreneurship, in which risk-taking is an accepted and often necessary means of generating returns. Getting there first is not only an incentive for the private sector but also one that is encouraged and supported by US interests. Put differently, what is commercially-driven is also aligned with matters of nationalistic alliance and defense.6 The mid-twentieth-century space race was driven by Cold War politics and the desire to demonstrate national superiority. While we may have moved beyond this particular context, the notion that we must “beat” other countries or private companies to be the first to establish a lunar presence perpetuates a culture of competition that is not necessarily conducive to collaboration or collective problem solving. In contrast to historical examples of static or fixed lunar master plans, there is now an urgent need for a development logic for emerging morphologies of lunar base planning. A development logic that is inherently morphological and time-based (4D) ensures establishment of a parametric framework enabling an infinite number of potential iterations and solutions that respond to constantly shifting needs and interests. A parametric development model and framework for lunar infrastructural development can account for changing priorities, needs, and interests in real time. A parametric and data-driven framework enables preemptive solutions at the infrastructural scale that account for, recognize, and ameliorate the needs and interests of multiple surface construction and development stakeholders in ways that are informed, intelligent, and anticipatory of future growth and development at an urban scale, while ensuring adaptability and resilience expectations and standards are also met.

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If we are to assume that key infrastructure elements—landing pads, roads, and utilities such as communication and power lines—will be shared on the lunar surface, then it stands to reason that the development of shared requirements for such infrastructure is not only essential but can only be derived through active dialogue within a diverse and inclusive knowledge community of actors contributing to their development and evolution. Who exactly will these structures be designed for? What precisely can we anticipate regarding the architecture’s standards, guidelines, and regulations? From an urban development perspective, areas for discussion include open questions regarding program and activity adjacency studies, safety keep-out zones, topographical and geological surface requirements for infrastructural development, protected areas for science and research, and more. However, perspectives celebrating the vision of a fixed, finalized, and fully realized master plan that has delivered infrastructure on the lunar surface fail to recognize that people and the knowledge systems they maintain and represent are also a form of infrastructure; the knowledge systems of communities that may engage and participate in urban development discourses likewise play an essential role in the early stages of development for a lunar community.

III. Conclusion: A Different Path Towards Surface Development In the next decade, construction robotics will enable habitats and other types of civic infrastructure to be built autonomously on the surface of the Moon and Mars prior to a crew’s arrival. Additive manufacturing using local, in-situ regolith is a leading strategy for the construction of Martian and lunar structures. Instead of launching construction materials or habitat components from Earth, we’ll simply use the regolith indigenous to the planet to 3D-print a wide range of structural geometries on demand—a strategy more akin to using local resources to “live off the land,” so to speak.7 Autonomous machines such as 3D-printers are well suited to inhospitable environments like space. With additive manufacturing, we are no longer limited to assembling hardware, materials, or pre-built enclosures that are manufactured and launched from Earth. Terrestrially, we have precedent for service providers and design-builders delivering development-scale or community-scale automated construction projects. Large-scale automated additive construction is a disruptive technology capable of delivering housing and other building typologies at production scales never before witnessed in traditional construction practices.8 Automated construction technologies enable the rapid redevelopment and creation of new communities and urban centers while also enabling opportunities for ground-up solutions addressing warranted social, ecological, and economic solutions for the respective communities. Adopting similar data-driven approaches to urban and master planning at the lunar South Pole may enable new opportunities and added-value for infrastructural development. The notion of decentralized, open-source autonomous construction is disruptive not only for groundbreaking project opportunities for multiple stakeholders, but it also enables greater potential for inclusive participation by empowering communities to actively participate in design and construction processes. By promoting collaboration,

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knowledge-sharing, and a sense of ownership, these activities can result in more resilient, sustainable, and innovative communities and built environments, as well as more agile and responsive construction processes that are better able to adapt to changing circumstances and needs. These activities are not necessarily centered around a single authority or organization but may involve the collaboration of individuals and groups with diverse skills and resources. Together, these approaches can empower communities to actively participate in the design and construction of their built environment, promoting a sense of ownership, collaboration, and innovation. Additionally, decentralized autonomous construction may facilitate new possibilities and ideas for shared infrastructure that prioritize community ownership and control, ensuring that infrastructure is designed and managed to meet the needs and interests of all community members. I implore our communities to investigate time-based morphological approaches to base planning and infrastructure development so as not to predict who will be the first on the Moon, but rather to account for and honor whoever may be the last, those who may be forgotten and misrepresented, who may need to determine ways of coordinating and collaborating with others who may not see a need, for representing the last who are given the final choice (if any) in land use. New computationally intensive tools, such as machine learning (ML), are enabling 4D (3D + time) building information modeling (BIM) workflows and simulations of future development contexts in terrestrial civil engineering and urban planning. ML algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data, learn patterns and correlations, and make predictions based on that analysis. When applied to BIM, ML algorithms can improve the accuracy and efficiency of modeling, visualization, and simulation of urban environments and partake in predictive modeling of future trends in density, land and energy use as a means of optimizing and simulating countless iterations of urban planning decisions. Call on me to represent the unrepresented—the space agencies, the startups, the minorities shrinking beneath the shadows of the behemoths of aerospace industry giants—to account for the open, shared spaces still unoccupied, still unsettled, and still laden with potential. Instead of the first, I call upon space architects, technology developers, and researchers to consider tools and means for designing for the last on the Moon, supporting technologies and frameworks that foresee, know, and ensure that all entities, organizations, groups, and agencies have been accounted for.

Notes 1 “Moon to Mars Objectives” (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, September), 25 Sep 2022, https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/ m2m-objectives-exec-summary.pdf. 2 Cheryl Warner and Grey Hautaluoma, “NASA Releases Revised Moon to Mars Objectives,” Text, NASA, September 8, 2022, http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/ nasa-s-stakeholder-collaborations-help-inform-moon-to-mars-planning. 3 Erika Nesvold, Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space (MIT Press, 2023), vii. 4 Nesvold, Off-Earth, 54.

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5 United States Congress, “US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, Public Law 114–90,” November 25, 2015, https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ90/ PLAW-114publ90.pdf. 6 Debbie Becher, “Making New Worlds,” n.d., https://makingnewworlds. com/2017/11/29/ep-03-who-owns-mars/. 7 Building a human settlement on the Moon or Mars within our lifetimes requires that we critically rethink the economics of launching everything we need to live in space using rocket transportation from Earth, as it remains prohibitively expensive to send thousands of tons of construction material into space; a primary argument in favor of regolith-based ISRU activities. 8 Michael Fiske et al., “The Disruptive Technology That Is Additive Construction: System Development Lessons Learned for Terrestrial and Planetary Applications,” in 2018 AIAA SPACE and Astronautics Forum and Exposition, AIAA SPACE Forum (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2018), https://doi.org/ 10.2514/6.2018-5127.

References Becher, Debbie. “Making New Worlds,” n.d. https://makingnewworlds.com/2017/11/29/ ep-03-who-owns-mars/. Fiske, Michael, Jennifer E. Edmunson, Edward Weite, John C. Fikes, Mallory Johnston, Robert P. Mueller, and Behrokh Khoshnevis. “The Disruptive Technology That Is Additive Construction: System Development Lessons Learned for Terrestrial and Planetary Applications.” In 2018 AIAA SPACE and Astronautics Forum and Exposition. AIAA SPACE Forum. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2018-5127. “Moon to Mars Objectives.” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, September. 25 Sep 2022. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/m2m-objectives-execsummary.pdf. Nesvold, Erika. Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space. MIT Press, 2023. United States Congress. “US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, Public Law 114–90,” November 25, 2015. https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ90/PLAW114publ90.pdf. Warner, Cheryl, and Grey Hautaluoma. “NASA Releases Revised Moon to Mars Objectives.” Text. NASA, September 8, 2022. http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/ nasa-s-stakeholder-collaborations-help-inform-moon-to-mars-planning.

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Part Seven

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7.1 NASA Rejection Letters

Figure 7.1.1 Image of Linda Halpern’s letter with her address redacted. Image: National Air and Space Museum Archives, NASM-9A12464. NASA

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Figure 7.1.2 A letter sent from NASA in 1962 regarding application to be an astronaut / Reddit. NASA

7.2 Mercury 13

Figure 7.2.1 Seven members of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees in 1995. Photo: NASA. See Plate Section 2

The Mercury 13 was a group of thirteen women, all experienced pilots with exceptional qualifications, who underwent physiological and psychological testing in the early 1960s as part of the Mercury space program. The program’s purpose was to send astronauts into space. Dr. William Randolph Lovelace, a NASA consultant, put the women through rigorous testing that was similar to the evaluations for the male astronauts. Despite the statistical data that demonstrated the women possessed equal, if not superior, capacity to their male counterparts, admission of women to the program was rapidly shelved by NASA because of their gender; the Mercury program at that time only accepted male astronauts.

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7.3 Hazel Fellows Sews Playtex’s Apollo 11 Spacesuit

Figure 7.3.1 Hazel Fellows sewing a space suit. NASA, courtesy National Air and Space Museum Archives. Smithsonian

Hazel Fellows, an employee of the International Latex Corp. (ILC) plant in Dover, Delaware, sews together pieces of the Apollo A7L space suit. Playtex, the iconic bra-maker that then owned ILC, applied latex girdle and brassiere technologies to astronauts’ space suits for the Apollo lunar missions. Fellows’ work here illustrates the many women and non-white people whose often-invisible labor materialized NASA’s triumphs in the Space Age—ones that idolized white, American male astronauts.

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7.4 La Porte des Mondes (Serge Samyn) and Androgynous Peripheral Assembly System (Vladimir Syromiatnikov)

Figure 7.4.1 La Porte des Mondes, Serge Samyn, Place Syromiatnikov, Saint-Denis, Reunion Island. Photo: François-Dubois. Image: Courtesy of Guy Pignolet. See Plate Section 2

Space Infrastructures and Kinship The docking system developed for the joint US–Soviet Apollo–Soyouz program exemplifies how sexist biases materialized in the infrastructures that enable space travel. Traditional docking systems during the Cold War were “male/female,” an engineering term to describe corresponding parts, explicitly referencing human genitalia. Because neither nation wanted to embody the female part of the assembly of the proposed docking system, Vladimir Syromiatnikov, an engineer of Soviet and Russian origin, resolved the question in 1975. His Androgynous Peripheral Assembly System, as it is sometimes called, is deployed in the form of petals. “La Porte des Mondes” is a commemorative monument imagined by the artist Serge Samyn, in SaintDenis, Reunion Island. 221

7.5 Pickering’s Harem at Harvard Observatory

Figure 7.5.1 Women Astronomical Computers at the Harvard Observatory (n.d.). Courtesy of the Harvard College Observatory

Beginning in the late nineeteenth century, for four decades Edward Pickering of Harvard Observatory employed women “computers” to perform the (often tedious) work of astronomy: cataloging data, comparing photographic plates, and doing clerical work for around 25 cents an hour. These women were collectively known by the sexist, orientalist moniker “Pickering’s Harem.” Many of these women’s names are lost to time. Annie Jump Cannon, however, worked at the observatory while at Radcliffe College, and formulated a revolutionary spectral classification system used to this day. Cannon’s colleague Henrietta Swan Leavitt realized that the relationship between variable stars measured cosmic distances.

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7.6 First Detection of a Pulsar by Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Figure 7.6.1 HWSH 1/1 Pulsar charts, August and November 1967. Courtesy Hewish family. Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge

In 1967, 24-year-old PhD student Jocelyn Bell was at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory outside Cambridge, UK, and, poring over her data, noticed something unexpected: extremely regular pulses emitting from the same point in the sky. They were pulsars, identified later as neutron stars whose rotation emits energetic particles at periodic intervals, like a beam from a lighthouse. The detection further substantiated Einstein’s theories of relativity. The 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish and radio astronomer Martin Ryle.

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7.7 From Barbarella to Barbie and Back Annick Bureaud

Barbarella and Barbie are two icons from the 1960s, a period when women in Western societies started to question their status and role. Mattel released the Barbie doll in 1959. Jean-Claude Forest drew Barbarella in 1962. She gained her worldwide popularity in 1968 with Roger Vadim’s film starring Jane Fonda, adapted from the comics. Both were challenging the rules, exhibiting a “sexy” representation of the female body and an active working woman. Barbie highlighted an alternative in the doll kingdom. It is not a proxy baby or a child to teach young girls to become good mothers but an aspirational adult role model. This model is also a “model” in the fashion industry’s sense of the word. No matter what career your Barbie is embracing, it comes in only one shape, embodying the perfect beauty for a female according to the emerging (white Western) canons: tall, impossibly slender, with big boobs and long (very long) legs. Barbarella brought the comics genre out of the domain of children to one targeted to adults. She can be seen strolling the galaxy half-naked, piloting spacecraft, having sex in all kinds of situations with men but also women and even with humanoid robots. She is a sex symbol according to the dominant taste of the time—thin, athletic, and blonde, with a well-endowed chest and butt. Later, in Le Semble-Lune in 1977, she has a child, a boy, who is equally taken care of by his father, Barbarella’s partner. The first Barbie astronaut appeared in 1965, two years after Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space, but eighteen years before NASA flew Sally Ride on the Challenger space shuttle in 1983. Mattel released other generic Barbie astronauts throughout the years including African American ones. In 2019, it included astronauts in its Inspiring Women series with Sally Ride, followed in 2021 by Russian Anna Kikina1 and in 2022 by Italian Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency (ESA). Barbarella comics nowadays could be interpreted as a typical example of the male gaze over-eroticizing the female body. Whereas Barbie is said to be promoting role models for girls to enter STEM careers. Consider the Ride and Cristoforetti Barbies: their bodies have not changed much since the 1960s. Thin, tall, long (very long) legs.2 Astronauts today show much more diversity than in the early days. Neither men nor women are prevented from accessing outer space because of their children. Why is it then that the narrative surrounding 224

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Figure 7.7.1 Barbarella (cover), Le Miroir aux Tempêtes, Editions L’Echo des Savannes, Albin-Michel, Paris, 1982. Private collection. See Plate Section 1

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Figure 7.7.2 Barbie astronauts, Left: NASA astronaut Sally Ride; right: ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. Private collection. Photo: Annick Bureaud

male astronauts centers around their skills and accomplishments, while the narrative around women is largely about their identity? Think of the hubbub over NASA’s infamous all-women spacewalk in 2019. Do little girls need to play with dolls to be drawn toward scientific careers but boys can use other toys for the same result? Why is there no famous astronaut Ken doll? Barbarella is independent, adventurous, has a keen sense of humor, masters her sexuality, gets things done, solves problems, and is a mother to boot. She is a paradoxical, ambiguous, rich, and complex character. Who would you like to be?

Notes 1 Kikina’s doll was not for sale but was designed to serve as a gift for the Yuri Gagarin 60th anniversary flight celebration. 2 Though Cristoforetti seems less skinny.

Part Eight

Epilogue

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Feminists In [Space] Réka Patrícia Gál

This book is an exercise in cultivating feminist spaces, and cultivating space for feminism. Contemporary popular cultural discussions around feminism often frame the struggle against the patriarchy as starting with the question of representation, and the solution as filling spaces with women. “Women in X.” Women in tech. Women in science. Women in [space]. Such an approach implies simultaneously (1) that these spaces have been previously devoid of women, which can lead to bioessentialist reasoning about inherent differences in the interests of different genders, and (2) that feminism is about about “women” as a homogenizable group, which bears with it the danger of universalizing white, middle-class, Euroamerican perspectives. This volume subverts this perspective by instead engaging with feminism as a way of unsettling the structures that produce uneven differential experiences of gender, sexuality, labour, knowledge in space. Space Feminisms here signals possibilities. It is about presenting the many ways that the traditional understanding of space exploration as a US and Soviet military-focused field, which privileges masculinist, ableist, and white perspectives, has only been made possible through an active exclusion and invisibilization of large groups of people who have been engaging with space otherwise. This book engages with thinkers and dreamers who see the vastness of space as full of possibilities not for the expansion of capitalist and nationalist necropolitical interests, but exactly as ways of nurturing the life of people and more-than-humans who are exploited by these systems on Earth. Space Feminisms cultivates feminist engagements with space not only through the subject matter of its pieces, but as a method and a political statement. It is about challenging and expanding the list of knowledges that are considered as being able to provide genuine theoretical and material insights into the future space exploration. Through this expansion of perspectives, the works in this collection are able to demonstrate that a joy of traveling, of traversing boundaries, of engaging with space as a whole, need not inherently replicate colonial power structures. It can instead mean the resurrection of the rituals of various Indigenous nations, it can evoke trans joy, highlight black feminist resistances of white patriarchal gender norms, or catalyze queer feminist ruminations on architecture. The possibilities are endless. The work is never finished. And this is good. Space Feminisms is an invitation to think, resist, hope, and build—together. In contributing 229

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to the list of already existing feminist engagements with space, my hope is that this major publication will inspire and engender further collaboration and critique with thinkers and creators of space around the world. What can we learn from the manifold human engagements with space around the world, across genres and fields, and throughout history? How do we mobilize and build capacity around the perspectives of those who have previously been relegated to the margins of space travel? How does designing for, living in, and working in the radical difference of space environments help highlight implicit assumptions about human and non-human experiences on Earth? And how can space infrastructures and technologies be designed to account for the variety and messiness of human bodies, rather than reproduce normative patriarchal-ableist ideas about how bodies should operate?

Index Locators in italics refer to illustrations A Space Exodus 155, 156 accessibility (inaccessible) 121, 209 activism, political 139, 141 African American women 7, 141 Afrofuturism 138 agencies, governmental 191 agreements, international 208, 210 algorithms 212 Allen, Paula Gunn 120 amenorrhea 59 American perspectivism 130 Analogies 150–2 ancestors 166 ancestrofuturism 130–1, 132–3 Great Return of the Tupinanbá mantle 131–2 Patxôhã language 131 Androgynous Peripheral Assembly System 7 Anthropocene 41 anxieties 43 Apollo missions 147, 160 appearance 6 appropriation 156 architecture, space 173–4, 229 archives 140, 141 Arendt, Hannah 43, 203 Arkestra collective 6–7 art see space exploration, 1990s and 2000s Artaud, Antonin 203 Artemis missions 3, 60–2, 190 artifacts 46 artificial intelligence (AI) 109 Arts Catalyst 99, 100, 102 artworks, space 145–9 astreroids 109–10 AstroAccess 198 astrobotany 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37 Astrofica 78

Astronaut Steffany 153, 154 astronauts 43, 44, 47 women 58 astronomie au feminim, L’ 6 astronomy 6, 136, 222 art gallery 145, 160 humanities and social sciences 31, 37 astrophysics 31, 136 atmospheric aspiration 19–20 audiences 44, 45, 205 autopoiesis, Black Femme 24–5 babies 60 see also reproduction Balashova, Galina 179 Barbarella 224 Barbarella 225 Barbie 206, 224, 226 Barteneva, Nadezhda 33 Bass, Fontella 140 Beck, Julie 59 Becker, Nanobah 125, 127 becomings 23, 133 bedrooms banal motel 180, 183–4 cosmic erotic 181, 184–5 see also sleeping behaviors 76, 182 being (becoming) 23–4 Bell Burnell, Jocelyn 5, 223 belonging, sense of 133 Bezos, Jeff 54–5, 204 Biocultural Creatures 24 biology 31 Bischell, Christine 8 Black Lives Matter demonstration 139 Black Planetary Feminism 17–18 Butler and Gaia 20–1 Butler-Gaia relations 18–19

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exhale 26 Lovelock, Margulis, and Gaia 19–20 narrative breaths 21–3 sustained breaths 24–5 transformational breaths 23–4 black women 56, 229 blood 58–9 Blue Origin 146 Boal, Augusto 203 body snatching 25 Boeing 79–80 borders 78, 113, 204 see also boundaries Boucher, Marie-Pier 11 Boulanger, Nadia 139 boundaries 44, 78, 82, 229 see also borders Brandis, Agnes, Meyer 11, 102 Brazil see ancestrofuturism breathing (breath) 26 see also Black Planetary Feminism Bryld, Mette 42 building information modelling (BIM) 212 Butler, Octavia E. 10, 18–19, 20–1, 24, 26, 140 Canada Aviation and Space Museum 179 Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman 117–18, 119, 121, 122 canupa iŋyan quarry 121–2 capacity building 42, 232 capitalism 41, 74, 111, 140, 229 care 41–3, 49, 127 sowing futures 46–8 troublesome space 43–6 carvings 118 see also sculptures Cassini probe 48 celestial bodies, naming 145, 160 ceremonies 121 Chambers, Becky 106 children (kids) 57, 206 chimerism 25 choreography 99 Chritoforetti, Samantha 224 Clark, Bruce 19 climate change 121 Clynes, Manfred 106 code words 36, 37

codes of conduct 208 Cold War 7, 43, 74–5, 147, 210, 221 collaboration 100, 211, 230 collage of space habitats banal motel 180 cosmic erotic 181 Collins, Alyssa 6 collisions 49 colonization (decolonization) 100–1, 112, 120, 133, 204, 229 reproduction 60, 62 Coltman, C.E. 189 Coltrane, Alice 139, 140 comets 164 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (2015) 210 commercialization of space 73–4 Common Ground 141 communication 205 communities 133, 209, 212 companies, private 146, 191 computers, human 57 confederation 120 conferences 34, 76, 100 conflicts 44 connection 23–4, 25 planetary 21 conservation, environmental 209 construction 111 construction, off-world planetary 207, 211–12 lunar master plan 208–9 problematic design methodologies 209–11 contamination 48, 107 control 42, 45, 47, 48, 49 Cooper, Anna J. 141 cooperation 44 corn 125, 127 Cornum, Lou 125, 127 Cosmic Heterotopia 183 cosmonauts 43 Cosmos as a Journal 186 Couzins, Richard 101 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 198 crop 33 cultures 46, 63, 118, 133, 147, 148 western supremacy 120–1 work 77

Index Cuthand, T.J. 125–6, 127 cybernetics 20, 21 cyborgs 106 Darchiya, Shota Petrovitch 33 DART probe 46 data 33, 79, 129, 137, 192, 211–12 Lijn 162 Pardo 165–6 Davis, Angela 141 Davis, Joe 147 debris 45, 101 decolonization, outer space see 6th World, The; colonization (decolonization) deep listening 138–9 deep space exploration 208 deep time 138–9 deforestation 132 dehumanization 22 Deleuze, Gilles 4 Deloria, Vine, Jr. 121 democracy 119, 122 depression 168 design 230 universal 196–9 desires 43 developing countries 76 developments 209 diagramming (diagrams) 4 Dialectics of Nature 34–6 diplomacy 122 disability 196–9 disasters, space 44 discrimination 7, 56, 148 diversity 75, 103–4, 149, 177, 224 reproduction 55, 59, 61–2 dolls 206 domestic spaces 182 domination 100 Douglas, Angela 108 Dubois, Kitsou 99, 145, 148 Analogies 150–2 Traversées 152 Earth environment 176 Earth2Orbit 80 Earthseed 18 ecofeminism 204 ecological destruction 121, 128

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ecological disasters 140 economic inequality 121 ecosystems 205, 206, 209 education 78, 131 emancipation 132 embargoes, US 80 emotions 148, 168 empowerment 75 Empress Stah in Space 149, 169–70 engineering 73–4 Enlightenment 24 enslavement 22 entertainment 202 entrepreneurship 210 environmental degradation 103 environmental feminism 103 environmental impacts 101 environmental preservation 208 environments 30, 33, 147, 212, 230 extreme 175–6 hostile 42 space 46 equality 78, 117, 119 equity 62 Equity Action Plan 62 Esferas da Insurreição 130 Eshun, Kodwo 101 European Space Agency (ESA) 99–100, 196, 224 exhibitions 132 expectations 43 exploitation 100–1, 103, 119, 209 exploration 48 exports 75 expropriation 119 extraterrestrial intelligence 205 extravehicular activity (EVA) suits 190 Falling Star Women see Canupa Iƞyan: Falling Star Woman families 22 fascism 138 fatherhood 57 Fedchenko, Olga Alexandrovna 33 federalism 120 feedback systems 131, 192, 208 female bodies 54 Fesenkov, Vasily Grigorievich 34, 35 fiction, speculative 62

234 films 6, 8–9, 31, 56, 101–2 femininist and indigiqueer 124–8 Sansour 155–6 financial returns 42 First Astrobotanist, The 31 First Woman on the Moon 147, 157, 158 Fisher, Anna Lee 57 Fleury, Sylvia 147 Forget, Bettina 145 Women With Impact / One Small Step 159–60 freedom 21–3, 63 Frost, Samantha 24 funding 147 futures, prospective 48 futurism 138 Fyodorov, Nikolai 100 Gaia hypothesis 19–20, 20–1, 26 gender 8, 21, 54–5, 173, 204, 229 art and culture 119, 121, 127 art gallery 145–6, 160 Artemis missions 60–2 design constraints 177 floating fluids and alien babies 58–60 reinscribing space 62–3 shifting language 55–6 you’ve come a long way, baby! 56–8 see also space exploration, 1990s and 2000s geopolitics 74, 210 Golovnina, Yulia 33 Goodnight Astronaut 182 governance 119, 121, 209–10 government 120 gravity 164 Gravity 102 Greta, Moore 61 Griffin, Joanna 102 guidelines 107 Gumbs, Alexis Pauline 17, 18 habitats, designs 176–7 Haraway, Donna 41–2, 49 Hayoun-Stépanian, Nelly Ben 201–6 Hibbert, Lily 145 Hidden Figures 56

Index histories 101, 141 oral 121 Hoheneder, Waltraut 173–8 Holbrow, Charles 184 Holiday, Billie 140 homeostasis 23 Homesickness Kit 148 hooks, bell 141 Hubble Telescope 47 Hui, Yuk 133 human computers 57 Human Condition, The 203 human lifetimes 107 humanity 21–3 humility 148 identities 76, 101, 103, 145 images (imagery) 109, 112, 184 Imhof, Barbara 173–8 immigration 204 Imperial College of Science, technology and Medicine 99 Impey, Chris 60 importation 48 imposter syndrome 77–8, 204 in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) 209 inclusivity 59, 62, 63, 78, 178 India 80, 102 Indian Space research Organization (ISRO) 80 Indian with a Camera, The 126 Indigenous nations 229 Indigenous women 57, 132 indigiqueer 127, 128 Indigenous peoples 117, 118–19 see also ancestrofuturism inequalities 128 see also space travel, commercial Infinite, An 163 information, privatization of 111 infrastructure 211, 212, 221, 230 inscription 54 insects 110 institutions 58 interconnectedness 35, 120 interests, national and private 42 International Astronomical Federation (IAF) 204–5

Index International Astronomical Union (IAU) 145 International Communication Union 48 International Space Station (ISS) 45, 122, 182 intersectionality 101, 141, 198–9 interspecies 23 intravehicular activity (IVA) suits 191 Ioannidou, Ersi 183 Jackson, Mary 57 Jain, V. 59 James Webb Telescope 76 Jemison, Mae 56 Johnson, Katherine 5, 56 Johnson, Richard 184 JustSpace Alliance 78, 79 Kazlova, Kapitolina Ivanovna 32 Kelly, Scott 182 Kember, Sarah 10 Khipu // Electrotextil Pre-Hispanic Computer 165–6 kids see children (kids) Kikina, Anna 56, 224 kinship 221 Kline, Nathan 106 Knouf, Adriana 149 knowledge 131, 1353 140, 229 Dakota 119 Indigenous peoples 121 production 3, 10 sharing 111, 212 traditional 127 Koch, Christina 58, 59, 61, 62, 189 Krinov, Yevgeny Leonidovich 31 Kruschev, Nikita 56 Kuiper, Gerard 36 Kutyreva, Anna Prokofyevna 29–30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37 ‘La Porte des Mondes’ 221 labour 229 land use 209, 210 landing sites 209 language 6–7, 77, 100, 178, 198 humanities and social sciences 55–6, 62 Patxôhã 131

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Data Science fellowship program 79 launches, illicit 48 leadership 119 legal principles 42 legends 118, 164 legitimacy 156 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) 62, 112, 127, 147–9, 178 letters, rejection 147 application 218 Linda Halpern 217 lichen, Martian 112–13 Life in the Universe 34 Lijn, Liliane 146, 161–2 Lima, Tânia Stolze 130 Lincoln, Abbey 140 Lippard, Lucy 160 LIQUIFER 173–8 listening 137–8, 139–9 Liu, Ani 150, 167–8 Llinares, Dario 7, 8 logo, Artemis 61 Lorde, Audre 186 Lovelace, William Randolph 190 Lovelock, John 18, 19, 20 lunar landing pad design 207 lunar master plan 208–9 lunar surface construction 207 Lykke, Nina 42 Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich 35 Lysenkoism 30, 34, 35, 37 machine learning (ML) 212 machines, autonomous 211 Makeba, Miriam 140 Malaysian space program 79 Mann, Nicole Aanapu 57–8, 119, 122 mantles, Tupinanbá 131–2 marginalization 6, 10, 76, 77, 103, 107 Margolis, Emily 55 Margulis, Lynn 18, 19–20 Mariner 4 36 Mars 125 Mars, life on see spectral legacies Mars Operation (1956) 35 Mars surface panorama 208

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236 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 11 materiality 133 materials, construction 211 matriarchy, tribal 119–20 Maxeke, Charlotte 140, 141 McClain, Anne 59, 189–90 McFall, John 196–7 meanings, cultural 63 media 4, 6, 8, 45, 47 see also social media Meir, Jessica 58, 59 conversation 81–5 memory 133, 168 men, obsolescence of 60 menstruation 58–9, 62 Mercury 13 program 6, 8, 190, 219 Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) 78 #MeToo 103 Michurin, Ivan 30 microbes 48 microgravity 136, 15, 175–6 microorganisms 47–8 migration 78, 125, 127 militarization 74 military, US 182 minorities 117, 178 Mir, Aleksandra 102, 147 First Woman on the Moon 157–8 Mission Cradle 3 missions, space 36, 47 misunderstandings 75 Mitakuye Oyasin 120, 121–2 modelling 212 Modesta, Viktoria 9 Mohanty, Susmita 71, 73, 74, 75, 79–80 Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility, The 102–3 Moon, the 146, 176 Moon to Mars (M2M) 208 moonmeme 146, 161–2 Moonshadow 108 Moore, Lisa Jean 60 motherhood 6, 57 music 168 see also Piva, Anna Musk, Elon 126, 204 mythologies 101

Index National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 44–5, 46, 58, 147, 190, 210 Control Center 46 National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) 99, 150 nationalism 8, 229 Native Americans 58 Navajo Nation 125 Nazé, Yaël 6 Ndaba, Jessie 71–2, 73–4, 75, 77, 78, 79 Nelson, Bill 62 neocolonialism 111 networks 45 NewSpace 76 non-humans 21, 23, 44, 107 ‘now’ (present time)? 47 obligations, international 48 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) 189 Okorafor, Nnedi 18 Olfactory Time Capsule for Earthly Memories 148, 167, 168 Oliveros, Pauline 137 Oman-Reagan, Michael 56 One Small Step 145, 159, 160 Oparin, Aleksandr 30 open access 111 openness 45, 148 opportunities 75–6 Opportunity probe 47 organizations 110 organizations, animal protection and rights 44 Other Volcano, The 202, 203 otherness 149 Othman, Mazlan 72, 76–7, 77–8, 79 Otolith Group 101 Outer Space Treaty, UN (1967) 44, 48, 210 ownership 212 ownership, private 210 Pamir Biological Station 33 Pamir Mountains 33, 34 panspermia 106, 107, 113 para-astronaut program 76 Pardo, Constanze Piña 165–6 Paterson, Carrie 148

Index patterns 162 peace 118 Peaches 170 people 8–11 personal protective equipment (PPE) see space travel, commercial photosynthesis 33–4 Pickering’s harem 222 Pietronigro, Frank 149 Astronaut Steffany 153–4 pilgrimages 121 pipes, ceremonial 121 Pitts, Bradley 148 Piva, Anna 135–41 planetary bodies 108 planets 8–11 plants, alien 30–4, 33 playfulness 202 Poetica Vaginal 147 politics 10, 148, 204 pollution 101 popular culture 5 possession 131 post capitalism 204 post-humans 204 power 4, 8–11, 21, 49, 77 art and culture 102–3, 119–20, 133 practices, spiritual 127 Preciado, Paul 185, 204 precipitation 33 Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda 18 pressure, atmospheric 33 primer deseo, el 164 Principles for Ethical Care and Use of Animals (1996) 44 privatization 6 probes, space 36 propaganda 31 property rights 208–9 protocols 119 Proust, Marcel 148 public interest 45 Puente, Ale de la 163–4 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria 4 pulsar detection, first 223 pyrotechnics 164 queer culture 108–10, 127, 149, 229 queer theory 103

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Ra, Sun 140 see also Tyson, June racism 76, 120, 121 reality 133 Reclamation 125–6 recording 5–8 Regli, A. 189 regulation 24, 75 atmospheric 20 environmental 210 rejection letters 6 see also letters, rejection relations, Butler-Gaia 18–19 relics 109, 132 religion 139 rendering 5–8 renewal 161 representation, women’s 8 reproduction 6, 24–5, 62 floating fluids and alien babies 58–60 research 75 resilience 204, 212 resistance 25 Resnick, Judith 57 resources 208, 209 Ride, Sally 6, 56, 57, 58–9, 148, 224 Right Stuff Wrong Sex 6 rights 119 risks 49 rituals 131, 132, 229 rivalries 43 Roberts, Matana 139 robotics 211 role models 76–7 Rolnik, Suely 130 Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, The 120 Sagar, Anjalika 101 Salova, Galina 31 samples, plant 33 Samyn, Serge 7 Sansour, Larissa 155–6 Satellite Stories 102 satellites 43, 44, 45, 48, 79, 145 Saturnian Queen of the Sun Ra Arkestra 7

238 schools 78 science 73–4 science and technology 43 Scott-Heron, Gil 6 sculptures 102 see also carvings Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) 205 Second World War 29, 43, 145, 182 seeds 33 self-control 24 separation 101 settlements, Martian 71–3 sex see gender sexuality 229 SHEE habitat 173, 174, 178 Sherr, Lynn 56 Shinde, Tarabai 141 Shiny Gold 201, 202, 203 Shtaude, Nina Mikalovna 31 sigils 109 Silko, Leslie Marmon 126 Sillen, Lars Gunner 19 Simone, Nina 140 Singular Oscillations 148 Sinton, William 36 6th World, The 127–8 6th World, The 124–5 Skybox Imaging 80 sleeping 179, 182–3, 185–6 banal motel bedroom 183–4 cosmic erotic bedroom 184–5 smell 168 smuggling 47 social media 179 societies 43 Sojourner 2020 117 Sokolova, Vera Semyonovna 31, 37 solar sail 110–11 sound see Piva, Anna Soviet Union 56, 148 see also spectral legacies Space Age 47, 145, 184–5 space agencies 146–7 space exploration 1990s and 2000s 99–104 see also MOONSHADOW; TX-2 MOONSHADOW Space for Humanity 196

Index Space Passenger Task Force 197 space race 36, 43 Space Settlements 184 space suits 82, 83, 103, 175, 190 EVA and IVA 190–1 sewing 220 space tourists 197 space travel 54, 196–9 space travel, commercial history of women in space 190 PPE for all 192–3 PPE inequalities for women 189–90 space PPE 190–1 Star Harbor Academy 191–2 spacecraft 36, 44, 110 spaceflight 43, 55 spacesuits see space suits spacewalks 61, 82, 85, 91, 189–90, 226 spacewalks, all-women 3, 8, 59, 75, 83 SpaceX 117, 147 Falcon 9 exploding 42 spectrographs 30–4 spectral legacies 29–30 Dialectics of Nature 34–6 making plants alien 30–4 orbital planes 36–7 sperm 59–60 Sperm Counts 60 Spivak, Nova 47 Sputnik 43 Stah, Empress 147, 169–70 stakeholders 209, 210 Star Harbor Academy 191–2 Stargasm 170 status 6 Stewart, Mary W. 139–40 storytelling 3, 102 Stott, Nicole 4 conversation 91, 91–5 startups 77 Stuart, Jill 72–3, 74–5, 77, 78, 79 subjugation 101 SumbandilaSat 79 support teams 45 supremacy, Western cultural 120–1

Index surveillance 45 sustainability 212 Swarm Technologies 48 symbiosis 25 Syromyatnikov, Vladimir 7 Technical Activities Committee of the International Astronautical Federation (ITACCUS) 102 technologies 203–4, 208–11, 230 art and culture 101, 127, 131, 146–7 humanities and social sciences 42, 44–5, 54, 60 Technoshamanism Festival 131 temperatures, soil surface 33 Tereshkova, Valentina Vladimirovna 36, 55, 56, 101, 190, 224 terminology 55 see also language terraforming 106 Terrall, Mary Church 140, 141 Tikhov, Gavriil Adrianovich 29–30, 31, 33, 34, 35 time 163–4 cosmic 107 deep 138–9 Timiryazev, Kliment 30, 34 To Be Taught, If Fortunate 106 tokenism 75 Topham, Sean 184–5 Topping, Audrey R. 8 tourists, space 197 trading, illegal 48 traditions 130 trances 131 transfeminism 103 transformations 161 transnational feminism 103 transparency 45 Transsexual Action Organization (TAO) 108–9 traumas 125 Traversées 152 treaties 122 Troitskaya, O. V. 34, 35 trolling 79 Trump, Donald 55 trust 148

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Truth, Sojourner 141 Tubman, Harriet 140, 141 Tupinanbá, Glicéria 131, 132 ‘two-spirit’ 127 TX-2 MOONSHADOW Mars lichen 112–35 mission requirements 106–8 queer 108–10 solar sail 110–11 Tyson, June 6, 140 Ujica, Andrei 8–9 ultraconnectedness 185 Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals 17 United Nations (UN) 48 United States of America (United States) 36, 56, 139, 141, 148, 210 Constitution 120 values, cultural 42 Vaughan, Dorothy 56–7 Vavilov, Nikolai 33 Venus Rocket 147 Venus series 145–6 Victor, Fee 139 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 130 Vostok 6 mission 56 Voyager Golden Record 168 vulnerability 148 Waclavicek, René 173–8 Wakata, Koichi 58 Walker, Alice 140 Walkowicz, Lucianne 72–4, 76–9 waste 45, 48 weakness 148 weapons 111 Webb, Claire 11 weightlessness 99, 148 Weitekamp, Margaret 6 welfare 44 Whitehead, Joshua 127–8 whiteness 76 Wicahnpi Hinhpayawin see Canupa Iƞyan: Falling Star Woman Wild Seed 21–3, 26 women, history in space 190 Women With Impact 145, 159, 160

240 womenhood 6, 17 women’s bodies 58 women’s rights movements 139 women’s work 111 Wooldridge, Dean 21 wohˇpe wakan 117–19 Mitakuye Oyasin 121–2 tribal matriarchal foundations 119–20 unravelling western cultural supremacy 120–1

Index work culture 77 workforces 76 NASA 54 Wotring, V. E. 59 writing 5–8 Wynter, Sylvia 18 Yi, Soyeon 7, 86 conversation 87–92 Zero G 198

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Plate 1 Kitsou Dubois, creation during parabolic flight, 2009. Photo: Loïc Parent.

Plate 2 Stargasm, Empress Stah Power. Photo: Clive Holland.

Plate 3 Astronaut Steffany, digital composite, Frank Pietronigro, 2013.

Plate 4 Space Suit Testing, Astronaut Training Method No. XIII, Moon Goose Colony, video still, 2011. The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility by Agnes Meyer-Brandis was commissioned by the Arts Catalyst and FACT, in partnership with Pollinaria. The Moon Goose Colony, P1 is a Pollinaria project by Agnes Meyer-Brandis.

Plate 4a Workshop of the Lunar Migration Bird Facility / MIT Training Center: V – Flying Lessons. Agnes Meyer-Brandis.

Plate 5 An Infinite, 2015, Ale de la Puente. Video still, 02′22″ HD 9:16 silent video.

Plate 6 . . . el primer deseo (the first wish/desire), 2016, Ale de la Puente.

Plate 6a Khipu // Electrotextile Pre-Hispanic Computer, Constanza Piña Pardo [Corazón de Robota], image Florian Voggeneder photo_arselectronica.

Plate 7 Canupa Iŋyan: Falling Star Woman through a lens, 2020, courtesy of Erin Genia.

Plate 8 First Woman on the Moon, Aleksandra Mir, Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands, 1999.

Plate 8a A Space Exodus, film still, 5’, Larissa Sansour, 2009.

Plate 1 Wild Seed (cover), by Octavia E. Butler © 1988.

Plate 2 June Tyson, Saturnian Queen of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Album Sleeve. Jon Hunt, the June Tyson Estate and Sun Ra, LLC.

Plate 2a Mercury 13, seven members of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees in 1995.

Plate 3 Viktoria Modesta wears a custom prosthesis and flight suit during the Horizon 2022 flight.

Plate 3a Venus: Sappho Patera, Lily Hibberd, oil on board, 55cm diameter, 2022.

Plate 4 Barbarella (cover), Le Miroir aux Tempêtes, Editions L’Echo des Savannes, Albin-Michel, Paris, 1982.

Plate 5 Astronaut Jessica Meir.

Plate 5a Astronaut Soyeon Yi.

Plate 5b Astronaut Nicole Stott.

Plate 5c The first American woman to fly in space, Sally Ride, beaming as she floats in low Earth orbit during STS-7, 1983.

Plate 6 SHEE habitat in Rio Tinto as part of Project Moonwalk. LIQUIFER.

Plate 6a Shiny Gold, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian. Photo: Vinciane Lebrun. Production: Gaîté Lyrique.

Plate 7 Collage of space habitats described as “Cosmic Erotic.” Illustrations here draw on the brightly colored, pneumatic Space Age (1960s onwards) designs to indulge an image of the future in outer space that is textured and sexualized—captured here through an illustration vernacular. This vernacular plays on ideas of sexualized intimacy as central ideal to be valued in designing living spaces. Illustration by Akvilė Terminaitė © The Artist.

Plate 8 La Porte des Mondes, Serge Samyn, Place Syromiatnikov, Saint-Denis, Reunion Island. Photo: François-Dubois. Image: Courtesy of Guy Pignolet.

Plate 8a Jocelyn Bell working at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO) in Cambridge in 1967, courtesy of MRAO.