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When France established the Centre Spatial Guyanais in the 1960s, they wanted the town layout to break down class and race divisions in this very diverse community, promote egalitarian social relations. From my hazy memory of the archives - #drspacejunk101
This involved designing streets around central plazas to form neighbourhoods where members of all communities would live together and get along. There were very good intentions! #villespatiale #drspacejunk101
In the town map, you can see some closed loop shapes at a few locations - I think these may be part of this design. Another part of the idea was to get rid of slum areas where locals, slave descendents and Indigenous people lived. #drspacejunk101
How could you have a Space Age space town with poverty and inequality? You see what I mean about the utopian ideas - how could we imagine futuristic paradises in space when the rockets were launched from flawed terrestrial urban hells? #drspacejunk101
So did it work? Sadly not - the town of Kourou remained very socially and racially stratified. The new designs were not continued as the town expanded. #drspacejunk101
I wrote about my experiences in Kourou in this article in 2007: 'La terre et l'espace: Rockets, prisons, protests and heritage in Australia and French Guiana', Archaeologies, 3(2), pp. 153–168 #drspacejunk101
This article is behind academic paywalls (sorry) but perhaps I'll tweet some screenshots from it tomorrow. #drspacejunk101
Today I'll leave you with a spacey cocktail recipe - Ti-punch, my tropical tipple of choice when I was working in the CSG archives. Ooh @clareawright and @YvesRees might like this too! Stay well and say hi to the Moon for me! http://zoharesque.blogspot.com/2005/04/ti-punch.html?m=1#drspacejunk101
Good morning class! I hope everyone is safe and well. Any questions about anything before we continue? Any ideas for Twitter-based assessment for our space archaeology course? If not, I'll just decide .... #drspacejunk101
We've been looking at three space towns, White Sands, Woomera and Kourou as part of our module on terrestrial space sites. Today I want to finish up with Kourou and move on - so much to cover yet! #drspacejunk101
This article compares the parallel histories of Woomera and Kourou, as well as telling part of the story of my visit to Kourou in 2005. Let me know if you can't download it - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226048453_La_Terre_et_l'Espace_Rockets_Prisons_Protests_and_Heritage_in_Australia_and_French_Guiana #drspacejunk101
A few points to make. Space launch sites are often located in places of low population as rockets tend to explode and crash. But why do these places have low populations? Because they have been decimated by colonialism. #drspacejunk101
Places with low population are also good for locating prisons, concentration camps, nuclear test sites and nuclear waste dumps. Rocket launch sites are associated with all of these across several countries. #drspacejunk101
Rocket launch sites have often been the location of protests - eg Cape Canaveral, Woomera, Kourou. If space exploration is a universal human urge, why do these protests even happen? #drspacejunk101
Rocket launch sites are embedded in communities and landscapes (as you'll see in the Kourou article). Let's consider the concept of the cultural landscape further, as it's a key concept for orbital debris too. #drspacejunk101
This might take a while as I'm going to get up now for my morning croissant. In the meantime, here's a video which shows you more about how rockets are integrated and the landscape of the Centre Spatial Guyanais. #drspacejunk101
Cultural landscapes are a kind of heuristic device, a unit of analysis, and a philosophy of the relationship between nature and culture and the present and the past. Very simple but powerful concept, as the best ones often are. #drspacejunk101
Diversion: thanks to @EricsElectrons who pointed me to the Jet magazine for coverage of African-American protests against Apollo 11. You can read the 31 July 1969 issue of Jet here: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=ozgDAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_all_issues_r&cad=1
A NASA history account of the Apollo 11 protests is here: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/ch4.htm . And if you saw the incredibly moving 2018 film First Man about Neil Armstrong, you will have seen a recreation of Gil Scott Heron's Whitey on the Moon #drspacejunk101
I meant to tweet some more about cultural landscapes but forgot! Better sign off....stay safe daytime folks, sleep well nighttime folks, and say hi to the Moon for me! #drspacejunk101
Good morning class! It's Sunday morning in Australia and I'm still in bed. We left yesterday about to explore cultural landscapes a bit further, as this concept is very relevant to both Earth and Space. #drspacejunk101
This is a good outline of cultural landscapes. I'll leave you to read it while I get my breakfast under way. https://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/research_groups/cult_landscapes/definition.html #drspacejunk101
Also please contemplate this Apollo artefact courtesy of @People_Of_Space https://twitter.com/People_Of_Space/status/1246537376673017861?s=19 #drspacejunk101
Sorry class, I kind of trickled out yesterday. Hard to stay motivated in isolation! So back to some space archaeology today....We were talking about cultural landscapes. One thing they do is force you to think of all time periods as equal. #drspacejunk101
The landscape you see is the result of all the things that happened to it/on it, up to the present. So you can't arbitrarily exclude things and assume, for example, the 19th C stuff is more important that the 21st C stuff. #drspacejunk101
A cultural landscape is the result of the combined work of human and natural processes - but humans alter natural processes by their activities. So it's not just nature x culture: the distinctions break down. #drspacejunk101
At White Sands, Woomera and Kourou, the landscapes we walk through have been shaped by Indigenous, and colonial occupation as well as the Space Age. It's not in the past, it's right there on the surface. #drspacejunk101
There are implications for heritage management: cultural value may lie in the conflicts and dissonances embodied in the landscape. The juxtaposition of different elements, seemingly unrelated, within it, can in itself be significant. #drspacejunk101
There's a really common trope in the space world: 'from Stone Age to Space Age'. (See this blog post for more http://zoharesque.blogspot.com/2019/12/stone-age-to-space-age-in-1960s-and-70s.html?m=1). In a cultural landscape, the 'stone age' can't be neatly confined to the past and forgotten. #drspacejunk101
I should add, forgotten along with the people who ARE STILL THERE! In fact Australian Aboriginal conceptions of country were influential in the World Heritage Committee's adoption of cultural landscapes, through the work of Isobel McBryde #drspacejunk101
This abstract describes McBryde's influence on cultural landscapes: https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=662598274547457;res=IELAPA and here is a bit more about her life: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_McBryde #drspacejunk101
I find cultural landscapes a very useful way to look at space sites both on and off Earth so this will come up again! I have argued that the entire solar system is a cultural landscape.... #drspacejunk101
But of course a problem with the cultural landscape concept is that it still tends to be anthropocentric in the way it's applied. Particularly when we look at the solar system or cosmos, this starts to seem a bit - well perhaps hubristic? #drspacejunk101
Now we're venturing into environmental ethics territory and believe me these are big questions in space! One of the questions revolves around how much agency or autonomy we accord to planetary environments e.g. 'nature'. #drspacejunk101
We could do a whole other course on space ethics so I won't go further into this today - though obviously there are intersections with how we look at the archaeology and heritage of space exploration. #drspacejunk101
It's time for my morning croissant so I'm going to get up and leave you with some homework - for me too, as I haven't read this yet, but it looks interesting. #drspacejunk101 Stay safe and say hi to the Moon for me! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5767241/
Good morning class! I have no croissants left *small tear*. But I have good news for nascent space archaeologists - the Council for British Archaeology have made all their publications free so get to downloading! https://twitter.com/archaeologyuk/status/1247090449673846784?s=19 #drspacejunk101
We are currently in Module 2, on terrestrial space sites, in our Twitter course on space archaeology. Look at the hashtag #drspacejunk101 to catch up!
After looking at the space towns associated with rocket launch sites in the US, Australia and French Guiana, today I want to move on to another important site type: the spacecraft tracking station. My case study is Nigeria. #drspacejunk101
Today might be a bit slow-moving so keep watching the hashtag for updates. Specifically, I want to talk about the 1956 Microlock station and the Kano tracking station for Mercury and Gemini in Nigeria. I've long wanted to do more research on them. #drspacejunk101
Basics first. What is a tracking station? It's an essential part of any space mission - we have to know where spacecraft are, and talk to them. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/amp/english/tracking-station #drspacejunk101
To get an idea of how a tracking station works, you could do worse than watch The Dish. Be aware, however, that there is a lot of fudging in this film for the sake of the plot - Honeysuckle Creek caught the Apollo 11 broadcast footage. #drspacejunk101
While only a few countries have launch capability, most have tracking stations, earth stations, and other antennas for communicating with spacecraft. Tracking stations are a very common terrestrial space site with a wide global distribution. #drspacejunk101
Quiz time! If I call something a multi-segment site, what do I mean? #drspacejunk101
Well not much more about tracking stations today so we'll continue in the morning. In the meantime the marvellous @emelaarghh has compiled a list of the daily threads - thank you! (Don't forget to say hi to the Moon for me....) https://twitter.com/emelaarghh/status/1247438712142618625?s=19 #drspacejunk101
Good morning class! Hope you are all well. There are no more croissants in this house but due to a mix-up with the supermarket delivery, there are chocolate hot cross buns. So today: tracking stations. #drspacejunk101
Remember that as archaeologists, we're primarily interested in the material culture and change over time, but this is a multidisciplinary game so all evidence is relevant! #drspacejunk101
There is a tendency for the familiar 'Space Race' narrative about Cold War competition between the US and USSR to drown out all other stories; and if you don't speak Russian, this means US space history dominates. #drspacejunk101
But there are so many other stories out there, and I think it's important to tell them. So today we're going to look at Nigeria's role in space exploration since the 1950s through a couple of interesting places. #drspacejunk101
What do you imagine when you think of an antenna? Is it 'rabbit ears' television antenna, like Uncle Martin the Martian had? Or rooftop TV antennas? (These are called Yagis by the way). Perhaps it's the familiar dish type, like Parkes or Jodrell Bank. #drspacejunk101
Today, it's dish antennas everywhere, but in the early space age, when people were trying to work out how to track satellites, there was a much greater diversity of types. One of these was the Microlock system. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/explorer/antenna.html #drspacejunk101
Satellites defy national boundaries in their passage around Earth, and to communicate with them, you need antennas at large distances apart. The US had to negotiate with many nations to place ground stations in the right location. #drspacejunk101
Not everywhere was happy to host these installations; and even if the government of a country agreed, there were often grass roots or local protests about it. This was about geopolitics. #drspacejunk101
Next time you hear someone say that some space thing was 100% a US achievement (remember the hooha about the flag in the film First Man?), it's almost certainly not. Tracking stations are a great example of this. #drspacejunk101
This excellent chapter from NASA History explains satellite tracking and data acquisition. It mentions Microlock briefly. https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4012/vol3/ch6.htm #drspacejunk101
The Microlock tracking system was devised by JPL for the Explorer satellite program in the 1950s. It was an interferometer, and was mobile: it could be slung on the back of a truck and moved about. #drspacejunk101
JPL installed Microlock antennas in California, Florida, Singapore and Ibadan, Nigeria. Ibadan is the capital of the state of Oyo, and the third largest city in Nigeria. In the 1950s, Nigeria was a British protectorate. #drspacejunk101
My Twitter froze for a while there! Back in operation now. #drspacejunk101
Let's get a feel for the city of Ibadan. Here's what you could do there if you visit as a tourist. (Sometime in the future). https://theculturetrip.com/africa/nigeria/articles/the-best-things-to-see-and-do-in-ibadan-nigeria/ #drspacejunk101
To bring this back to archaeology and heritage, place is important. Sites aren't just the physical objects that you find there. It's the relationship between the objects, and the objects and the environment. #drspacejunk101
Just incidentally, this chocolate hot cross bun is wrong. Need to send out for traditional ones. #drspacejunk101
This might be time for a brief excursion into archaeological theory: the application of phenomenology (not popular at the moment by the way). This originated from archaeologists wandering around Neolithic standing stones while actually stoned. #drspacejunk101
That's a bit of an unfair characterisation, but not entirely inaccurate! But I'll leave it there for today as I must get to work. Tomorrow: more on Microlock, and more phenomenology. Thanks everyone, and say hi to the Moon for me! #drspacejunk101
