PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROJECT by Justin St. P. Walsh

tionnaires and interviews could not. Latina mothers told interviewers that they always made their own baby food, while their refuse showed a similar number of store-bought jars of baby food as other households. The point of this example is not to criticize anyone for how they choose to feed their children (or what they choose to say to researchers!), but simply to show how the desire of research subjects to construct a positive public identity for themselves can come into conflict with researchers’ need for accurate information. Sometimes, people are simply unwilling or unable to articulate the reasons motivating their actions. Archaeology provides a different perspective by looking at the items people use and the spaces they inhabit. By looking at these aspects of culture—what kinds of things and spaces are used, how, when, and by whom—we can trace out the features and boundaries of human societies.

My colleague, Alice Gorman, and I have been interested in the material culture associated with human activity in space for well over a decade. We’re following in the footsteps of Beth O’Leary, who carried out the first archaeological study of a human habitat in space with her Lunar Legacy Project from 1999-2002. O’Leary documented the 106 items left behind at the Apollo 11 landing site, Tranquility Base, by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. These objects and the surrounding moonscape are clear evidence for the “Apollo culture” and the activities of two of its members over a 21.5-hour period. Of course, O’Leary was not able to go to the Moon to study her site, as she might have gone to the Yukon to do terrestrial archaeology. She relied instead on NASA historic documentation to compile her list of objects. Together with M. Wayne Donaldson and Lisa Westwood, she was able to use her list to convince the states of California and New Mexico to assign the objects left at Tranquility Base protected status as a historic monument.

The inability to visit cultural sites in space is a critical obstacle to archaeologists’ work there, an obstacle that persists to this day. In fact, no space agency allows social scientists to become astronauts. Alice and I felt that this policy was shortsighted. Agencies that are planning long-duration missions on space stations, or to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, need the insights into human space societies and cultures that social scientists are uniquely positioned to give. So we started developing the International Space Station Archaeological Project in 2015, and we received a twoyear grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2018 to carry out our work (not enough to afford the $55 million trip to ISS advertised by Axiom Space in 2020, unfortunately).

As we started to think about how we could actually study life on ISS without actually going there, photography emerged as a clear answer. The photos by Roland Miller and Paolo Nespoli in this volume show how all aspects of the crew experience are visible: work, leisure, exercise, eating, looking out of the windows, rest. The walls of the various modules are covered with equipment, cables, handholds, white storage bags, cameras, laptops, experiment racks, bungee cords, and Velcro patches. There are also toy spacecraft and stuffed animals, signs (“Speed limit: 17,000 mph”), photographs of deceased colleagues and friends making a small memorial, mission patches and stickers, and other assorted items, like a geocaching tag. Some walls have graffiti, either crew/visitor signatures or other text, such as one commemorating the installation of the Japanese Kibo module. There’s even a work called “Space2,” by noted street artist Invader—a mosaic of tiles resembling an 8-bit red space invader from the 1970s video game, with a blue quarter-circle at the upper left, probably representing Earth—placed on the hatch of the ESA Columbus module. In other words, life on ISS goes far beyond merely carrying out experiments and playing with floating food and drink. The cultural landscape of the International Space Station is every bit as rich as any terrestrial context an archaeologist might want to study.

Luckily for us, NASA has been archiving thousands of photos taken by crew over the last 20 years. Even better, these images are all “born-digital,” meaning that they include metadata such as the date and time when each one was made. This means that we can easily track changes in the space station over time. Some of the photos are available publicly, on NASA websites and the agency’s Flickr accounts. We were able to download 7,000 of these for use as a preliminary dataset (though the fact that these were preselected by NASA Public Affairs to release for the pur-

poses of promoting the agency meant that they were not ideal for a full analysis).

For our pilot study, we focused on photos of the aft wall of the Russian Zvezda module, where crew live, eat, exercise, and work. This wall has become a major focus of attention, attracting flags, mission patches, toys, religious items (an Orthodox cross, several painted icons showing saints and the Mother of God, a New Testament, a painting of Russian Orthodoxy’s most important church), pictures of wooded landscapes, and photographs of Russian space heroes from the Soviet period: cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, spaceflight theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and space agency director Sergei Korolev. We documented more than 75 different items placed on display between 2000 and 2014. Most interestingly, the items changed over time and were moved to different positions on the wall by different crews. Since 2017, no religious items have been visible on this wall, although publicly released images of other parts of Zvezda show that they have been on view elsewhere. Our research has shown that there may be a correlation between moments of nationalism in Russia, such as during that country’s conflicts with Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, and especially high levels of display of religious items. In any event, the response of one of our research liaisons at NASA indicated the significance of our approach: “I’ve been looking at that wall for 20 years. I knew there were things up there. But I didn’t know what they were, or that they changed.”

With our funding from the Australian Research Council running through 2021, we are preparing to study all of the photos NASA has archived, including ones not available to the public. We have hired Amir Kanan Kashefi, a database engineer, to help us build a container for the data that will be extracted from the photos: the people, items, and spaces present in each image. Testing has shown that manually entering such data could take hours per photo. We’re automating the process by collaborating with Erik Linstead, a computer scientist at Chapman University who is an expert in artificial intelligence for image recognition. He and his students are developing algorithms for recognizing crew members, the various items onboard ISS, and the identifiable features of each module. The algorithms will tag the images, and the tags will be placed in our database where we can analyze them. In a relatively short period of time, we will be able to answer important questions, such as how groupings of crew members change over time; how astronauts personalize public spaces; and how crew members use tools for new purposes, or change their behaviors to suit the available tools, in a microgravity environment for which humans are not evolutionarily adapted. We will be able to track whether certain spaces are gendered, and whether one national group or another occupies particular modules more than would be expected—as well as whether those phenomena persisted over time, or changed as the station and its crew expanded.

Our use of photography to document the cultural landscape of the International Space Station also opens up new possibilities for other archaeological projects on Earth. Scholars can use this technique to examine any remote, dangerous, or otherwise challenging site of human occupation, such as an Antarctic research station. One especially promising site that would be impossible for archaeologists to study directly is the summit of Mt. Everest. But practically every person who has summitted Everest since Norgay and Hillary first did it in 1953 has taken a selfie there. Often the peak is visible (with the various items left behind by mountaineers, from equipment, to mementos, to flags, to trash) in the background. Archaeologists could collect these images, and since we also know when each person made them, we can put them in order to track changes to the summit over time.

NASA and the other ISS partner space agencies wanted all the tens of thousands of photographs taken by ISS’s visitors and inhabitants for two reasons: to check on astronauts’ work on experiments, and to help them promote their activities in space to the tax-paying public. Our work shows they can have other unexpected uses—and the collaboration of Roland Miller and Paolo Nespoli shows yet another way that photos of a space station can function: as art. To date, no professional artists have traveled to space, but the images in this volume show that the eye of the artist can reveal new insights into how humans adapt to life in microgravity. Miller and Nespoli’s work hopefully will lead space agencies to give greater priority to the perspectives offered by other disciplines, such as the social sciences and the arts.

I N F L A T A B L E I M A G I N A R I E S AND THE GOODYEAR SPACE STATION

by Jeffrey S. Nesbit

The experimental space module known as Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) arrived on the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday, April 10, 2016. The pressurized and almost entirely empty volume is made of flexible fabric enabling an expanded bladder to stretch over four meters in length and three meters in diameter. However, this is not the first inflatable structure for space exploration of its kind. In 1959, just one year after NASA was established, Goodyear released an advertisement for its ongoing research activities as related to space exploration. Entitled “Expandable Structures: Another prime capability of Goodyear Aircraft,” the accompanied illustrations demonstrate the notable tire company’s continued interest in imagining future living in space. 1 With a successful tire company as its primary source of profit, Goodyear intriguingly designed its space station as an expandable torus-shaped structure rotating in space, oddly similar to the inflatable rubber tire. This essay describes the prehistory of the International Space Station. The Goodyear Space Station proposes a future living in space incorporated with its associations here on Earth—a cultural imaginary based on inflatable artifacts and forms residing deep within early American culture, politics, and aesthetics.

The Goodyear Aircraft Corporation, a subsidiary of the widely known tire company, began experimenting with orbital space station design well before the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). But to understand how such a company became involved with the design of an inflatable aerospace station, it is critical to acknowledge the company’s involvement in early inflatable structures—particularly, Goodyear’s progressive contribution to the design and research for transportation on the land and in the air.

Prior to Goodyear’s interests and research activities developing its aerospace prototypes, the Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation was originally comprised of American and German investments. The Goodyear company had already been well-versed in the construction of large blimps and early zeppelins with German engineers by the end of World War I. As conflict moving into World War II increased, the company split and formed the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation. As early as 1939, the newly formed and exclusively American-owned company quickly began receiving commissions and federal contracts for the construction of aircrafts, specifically aircraft frames and rigid ships. Not surprisingly, these interests from leading figures in the United States administration opened up opportunities in unique ways for manufacturing companies across the country. With a significant surplus of rubber after the war, Goodyear was willing to spend resources on imagining a future in space.

In 1954, under President Eisenhower’s administration, the Interstate and Defense Highway System Advisory committee was formed. In 1956, one year before Sputnik and just two years before the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act was enacted. This is relevant for two important reasons. The defense highway system and the space launch complex, both forms of national infrastructure, were direct responses to geopolitics and desired military strategies and also represented a deeply cultural attitude about the rise of the automobile in postwar America. They both enabled the construction of architectural and infrastructural features projecting national politics. One connects a publicly accessible transportation system across the continent, while the other supports highly secretive advancements in scientific tech