On her book Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth
Cover Interview of June 24, 2018
The wide angle
I was a graduate student at Rice University in Houston Texas
when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead as it was returning to
Earth. I watched communities in and around Houston go into grief and shock, and
I tracked news from NASA as it grounded its fleet and investigated the
accident. This compelled me to seek an understanding of the complex hidden
worlds of spacefaring. I ended up going into places that have been prohibited to outsiders, and spending time with people who are trying to create the
connections, separations, and artificial environments that keep living things
alive in spaces beyond Earth.
So, what are spaceflight-based ways of thinking and
building? I was curious about spaceflight’s most quotidian and far-out
environmental systems work. My book begins with underwater “space analog”
training missions that draw the sea and outer space together. It goes into
space biomedicine networks, where astronauts are managed as one among other
systemic parts of a larger mission system. I examine how spacesuit and space
habitat design problems force engineers and architects to challenge cultural ideas
about the “natural” boundaries between bodies and spaces. I end by examining
how new attempts to manage “space weather” (asteroids, solar radiation) extends
global economic and environmental politics beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
In NASA, every kind of thing, from a human body to a
spacecraft to a galaxy is described as a system within a broader system. The
spaces that matter to keeping humans alive in space, like the tiny space
between one cell and another, or the incomprehensible expanses of galactic and
intergalactic space, are understood to be environments.
In this way, spaceflight systems work has both a conceptual
and political impact: it authoritatively universalizes a way of thinking about
relations and spaces. The book calls attention to Western cultural conceits about
human exceptionalism and boundaries, and also to the ways that spaceflight programs
in and out of the U.S. produce new ways to the relational interdependence of
living and nonliving things.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The wide angle
I was a graduate student at Rice University in Houston Texas when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead as it was returning to Earth. I watched communities in and around Houston go into grief and shock, and I tracked news from NASA as it grounded its fleet and investigated the accident. This compelled me to seek an understanding of the complex hidden worlds of spacefaring. I ended up going into places that have been prohibited to outsiders, and spending time with people who are trying to create the connections, separations, and artificial environments that keep living things alive in spaces beyond Earth.
So, what are spaceflight-based ways of thinking and building? I was curious about spaceflight’s most quotidian and far-out environmental systems work. My book begins with underwater “space analog” training missions that draw the sea and outer space together. It goes into space biomedicine networks, where astronauts are managed as one among other systemic parts of a larger mission system. I examine how spacesuit and space habitat design problems force engineers and architects to challenge cultural ideas about the “natural” boundaries between bodies and spaces. I end by examining how new attempts to manage “space weather” (asteroids, solar radiation) extends global economic and environmental politics beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
In NASA, every kind of thing, from a human body to a spacecraft to a galaxy is described as a system within a broader system. The spaces that matter to keeping humans alive in space, like the tiny space between one cell and another, or the incomprehensible expanses of galactic and intergalactic space, are understood to be environments.
In this way, spaceflight systems work has both a conceptual and political impact: it authoritatively universalizes a way of thinking about relations and spaces. The book calls attention to Western cultural conceits about human exceptionalism and boundaries, and also to the ways that spaceflight programs in and out of the U.S. produce new ways to the relational interdependence of living and nonliving things.