“Our Window on the World”: Life in the Orbital Heterotopia of the International Space Station (2017 Sacknoff Prize Winner) (original) (raw)

“Our Window on the World”: Life in the Orbital Heterotopia of the International Space Station (2017 Sacknoff Prize Winner)

Winner of the 2017 Sacknoff Prize for Space History from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) Aerospace Special Interest Group (Albatross) and Quest: The History of Spaceflight: https://www.spacehistory101.com/Sacknoff\_Prize\_for\_Space\_History\_s/1824.htm Since the earliest days of spaceflight, a range of actors—philosophers, scientists, engineers, lawyers, politicians, and “the rest of us”—have connected the view of Earth from outer space, often called the “world picture,” with “thinking globally.” In doing so, these actors have related space activities to new kinds of political and existential meaning. Historical, anthropological, and sociological studies of these perspectives usefully deconstruct the influence of colonialism, politics, social order, and culture on the world picture, suggesting that its so-called global thinking is not so global after all. Notably, Benjamin Lazier (2011) and Jordan Bimm (2014) historicize views about observing Earth from outer space, mainly as intellectual, politicized developments among philosophers and early spacefarers. In Lazier’s account, the world picture is flat, not merely a philosophical but an actual “enframing”—literally, a picture of Earth from space. But for astronauts and the engineers who design their vessels, the view of Earth from outer space occurs not within a two-dimensional frame but a physical space, which I tentatively call a “world space.” This approach inverts the object of study in discourses on the world picture from the impersonal “Whole Earth” to the space in which actors encounter it. I ask: How do the historical contingencies and sociological networks of spacecraft design influence astronaut experiences of viewing Earth from outer space and their “global thinking” or lack thereof? I offer an historical and a sociological account of design, architecture, and bodies in one of the most unique sites of the International Space Station (ISS), the Cupola, often referred to as “our window on the world.” I argue that the Cupola and ISS are what Michel Foucault would call “heterotopias.” This concept presents a politically-charged, unorthodox lens through which to study such spaces. The heterotopia enriches scholarship on the world picture, providing a language by which to highlight flows of power in the Cupola and ISS. First, I review and critique studies on space, place, outer space, and thinking globally, using the heterotopia to intervene in these discourses. I then reveal various kinds of heterotopias related to life in the Cupola that highlight control and resistance to it. I show that the Cupola was designed and operates to order life and technological practices within and beyond its space, but that it also induces experiences that contest this spatial order. Although the Cupola may not create a “sense of place,” as Lazier might suggest and as Lisa Messeri claims of planetary scientists’ encounters with other worlds , it partly rejects its own spatial order by eroding astronauts’ global thinking and subverting its function as a technology that disciplines astronaut life. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I would like to express the utmost gratitude to Richard Staley for his invaluable and continuing insights and guidance during and after the writing of my M.Phil. Dissertation at Cambridge, from which this article is adapted. I must also thank Charissa Varma, Marwa Elshakry, Peter Dickens, Jordan Bimm, and Jeremy Kessler for their generous feedback and for various discussions that stimulated the development of the piece. I am further indebted to Mary Brazelton, Josh Nall, Simon Schaffer, Asif Siddiqi, Matthew Hersch, and Eleni Panagiotarakou for conversations on and offline that extended the reach of my research.