Book Description

This volume explores the meaning of space artifacts, both as products of particular historical settings and as windows for understanding technological and cultural change. Seven contributors, most of whom are museum curators, address these challenges through the history of particular artifacts, highlighting differences and commonalities across technologies, institutions, professional communities, projects and geographical contexts. The essays sample the broad range of space activity--from launch vehicles to satellites and space capsules, from military to commercial and scientific purposes. They include an exploration of the Black Arrow rocket project in Britain, the European Launcher Development Organization, the Apollo 204 spacecraft in the United States, the Iridium commercial global satellite communications system, the Soviet space program, and rocket recovery in Australia. What stories can space artifacts tell? What kinds of information and experiences might real objects convey that images and representations do not? Do they speak for themselves, or do they represent a dense sediment of human agency, culture and technology needing interpretation by experts? And, more particularly, in what ways do space artifacts originating in Cold War culture pose historiographic questions and issues that do not arise from artifacts with other histories? Questions such as these speak to the Artifacts series' purpose: To explore the overlapping interests of museums and historians of science and technology in understanding artifacts, as well as presenting that understanding to scholarly and general publics. This series is sponsored by the Science Museum in London, UK, the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, US--three of the world's great repositories of material heritage in the history of technology.