President Kennedy ended his 1962 speech at Rice University, the one made famous by the line “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” with a kind of justification for that decision:
Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.” Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
In one way, the President was prescient in his invocation of an attempt to do something predictably perilous that ended in death. Over the last sixty years, space travel has claimed thirty lives and has released a truly incalculable amount of carbon into the atmosphere. Not to mention the billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to the upward venture, money that largely went to aerospace and defense contractors, that could have been otherwise allocated. From our vantage, living on a heating planet, subject to condescending lectures about what government should or should not provide to its citizens, facing an uncertain future in which a handful of freak billionaires hold our lives in the palms of their tiny hands, I think it is reasonable for us to require a better answer to the question of “why should we go to space?” than “because it is there.”
This is one of the many critical questions which animate space anthropologist Savannah Mandel’s recently published work Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration. Mandel, like myself and many of our readers, has had a longtime love of outer space, its countless wonders and immeasurable expanse, and an interest in the things humans have chosen to do up there. And, like myself and many of our readers, that love has faced some challenges as more and more attention is given to the cost, in time, treasure, and toxicity, of human space travel. To paraphrase a question posed by Hannah Arendt in her own critique of humanity’s interest in outer space, we now must think what we are doing up there.
This is the challenge Mandel takes up in her book, which also narrates critical (and at times, extremely relatable) issues in anthropology (what it is, who it is for, who gets to be an ‘anthropologist’), politics (who decides what we do up there and for what reason), and the critique of colonialism and capitalism (who foots the many bills incurred by human space flight). Hardly a mere exercise in tomato-throwing, Mandel offers a path towards improving our relationship with outer space in such a way as to improve our relationships with each other here on the ground, if we manage to find the will to live up to her “Caretaker’s Demand,” which:
asks us to wait, to care, to repair, and to conserve. It doesn’t ask us to never go to outer space or to let go of those goals entirely. It seeks a reprioritization of values and a patience from its followers. A recognition that humans are not ready to settle outer space currently, and that motivations are presently and have historically been misplaced. It acknowledges that before we settle outer space, planet Earth and its global population must reach a point of stability with no tipping point in sight. So that nobody has to feel guilty for leaving anybody behind, and the population that chooses to stay, rather than go—when the time comes—is a population who has never imagined that the grass is greener and is making the decision to stay themselves.
I had a chance to chat with Mandel about her book, which is now on sale from the Chicago Review Press:
Connor: One thing that really resonated with me, as someone who also deeply loves space, was your narration of coming to approach the tough realities of our relationship with space. To start us off, I would love to hear more about what it felt like to approach space in this way, if there was any kind of emotional arc to your journey?
Savannah: It felt very intimate. In a way it felt almost journalistic, like I was returning to my field notes as if I was putting together pieces of a puzzle. And that was part of it, because I think that I had struggled to do that. I had completed this body of research for my master’s degree and had gone on to write shorter form pieces related to space ethics, but I had never sat down and put it all together to form a true argument. So, when I approached this project, and was finally working on it, it felt like I was finally seeing the narrative arc for the first time. I think sometimes that’s how fieldwork works. You’re in the field, and then years later you see things that you don’t see upon immediately leaving the field. So, to first answer that question, I’d say the journey was a process of piecing together a greater puzzle of research and fieldwork, and it was also a personal, intimate journey of understanding my role and my positionality within that research.
C: Yeah, and I know, this is an ironic question, coming from someone who just asked you to do exactly this, but sometimes I find that people, when they study something that’s so close to them, there’s like an impetus to disclose so much of yourself as a scholar, as an author, etc. And I think that’s particularly true for anthropologists who are a fixture of the story that they’re telling. How do you feel about having to narrate this emotional journey that you’re having in addition to making this political and scholarly argument?
S: I felt with Ground Control it was really important to show the reader how I got to the point that I did, because I want readers to understand it from a very human perspective of, “I once loved space, the way I’m sure you do, and now I look at space exploration completely differently.” I wanted to really put myself in the story in that kind of autoethnographic way, in that personal way, because I wanted readers to be able to understand the journey from my perspective.
C: That makes sense. But there’s also, like, a tough thing that happens, which your book narrates, when we start to piece apart the things that we love, it ends up being an incredibly productive exercise, but it can also be incredibly painful. Sometimes, I think like, do historians have to do that? Do other scholars have to do this in order to locate themselves in their work?
S: You’re right, I feel like it was a lot. Plus, I think you also have a sense of embarrassment – a self-consciousness — like, was it right for me to include my own story in my research? Even though it’s very common in our field to write in first person narrative, I think you look back on it and think, should I put so much myself in this story?
C: I really like it when ethnographies go into the first person, when they almost read like literary nonfiction instead of academic. How did your publisher and editor approach this aspect of your work?
S: Oh, they loved it. That was one of the things that attracted a lot of publishers to the book in general, its readability. Honestly, the editing phases went smoothly, we agreed on most things.
C: I would love to hear you talk a bit about how you fit your interests into the various academic fields in which you’ve worked, how and if you needed to justify its relevance?
S: Yeah, I suppose I can firmly say that most people didn’t know about space anthropology at the time, but this was almost 10 years ago. I think Janet Vertesi’s work was either just coming out or just being done, which brought a lot more attention to the field. So, space anthropology was really just emerging in the early 2010s, even though there were already some inklings of it around. After Seeing Like a Rover or Debbora Battaglia’s ET Culture, there’s this little group that came out and started doing ethnographies of space companies. The term itself, “space anthropology,” is complicated. In STS we would say that these things become true proper fields when they become institutionalized through documents, books, journals, right? We don’t yet have a journal of space anthropology. Maybe there will be one in the near future, I could see that happening. Now I even have undergrads reaching out to me asking how they can become a space anthropologist, and I have to explain to them, you have to become an anthropologist first and then just research space!
C: Did your mentors have specific questions about your field site? You talk in the book about how you felt it was difficult to research space without being there, but you seemed to have managed it!
S: I think it was just a difference in how we thought about field sites. But there were definitely times I thought it was impossible to research space, because how do you research something that you can’t go to and conduct field work? Or how do you conduct research when it might be very difficult to contact the participants? Sure, you could do an ethnography of astronauts, but it would probably be very difficult to contact them because they are akin to celebrities. I think that was one reason why it felt like it was so not feasible, was because it seemed like there was only one correct way to conduct field work.
C: Related to that, I wonder if you had a similar experience as I did going into these scientific spaces for a project like this, which was a little weird and difficult. How did you fare?
S: I’m not good at math and physics or anything like that, I never took college level astronomy. I did get a lot of, I guess you could say prejudice for being a social scientist. Being in a space surrounded by space scientists and explaining my research to them, they’re often just like, “Oh, that’s so cool. So how do you turn that into actual research?”
[Laughs]
And then you’re insulted but they have no idea they’ve insulted you. You’re probably one of the few anthropologist or social scientists they’ve ever talked to in their entire life. More often than not, they needed my research explained to them and for me to explain why it mattered. I ended up having to find a bunch of examples of anthropological projects that had pragmatic, concrete effects on policy and law to use as explanations. In the second half of the book, where I’m not working in the desert anymore but I’m actually working in the space industry, I think my research made a bit more sense to the policy folks and the government relations people and the BD development people and the marketing people. But still, I think a lot of them were just like, trying to understand where I fit in. Do you fit into government relations? Do you fit into marketing? Do you fit into business development?
C: And it probably didn’t help that both of these environments were heavily male-dominated spaces, right?
S: Well, I mean, there’s a whole chapter on sexism in the book. The space industry is massively white male dominated. I mean, when I was at Spaceport America, I think there were probably out of, say, a population of 100 workers, there were maybe five women? I mean, everyone was really nice out there, like it was definitely fine and a great experience, but just not a lot of women. Then when I went to DC, it was very similar especially in in the executive positions. You do not have a lot of women. I once had a female friend in the industry, she said to me, “When you’re sitting in meetings, you should count. Count how many women, count how many people of color, like, if you know, count how many people who are LGBTQ.” After that, I became so much more conscious of it. Like I would just sit there and think “wow, there’s one woman in this room, one person of color, that’s it.” It was really eye opening.
C: Related, I can’t help but think that the “caretakers demand” perspective that you’re bringing to the book, one of the reasons why it is not a more common position in the industry is a consequence of several factors, and gender and racial makeup might be part of that. What do you think are the existing roadblocks to achieving the kinds of things outlined in the last chapter of the book?
S: I think, when you have this lack of diversity of voices who are offering their perspectives in the space industry, that’s always going to impact things. This is why I think there needs to be some kind of representation for the common man, almost like having a jury of peers to adjudicate on space issues.
C: Like The Ministry for the Future, which you gesture to in the book as a kind of solution.
S: I love the idea of a Ministry for the Future, but in the same vein I would love it if there was also jury duty for space, just to include a wider range of planetary perspectives. Issues of perspective are always going to be tied to political administrations, because decisions about space are always going to be swayed by who’s in power at the time, not just in our country, but in other countries. And how do you ensure that the decisions that are made are then maintained over the next few generations?
C: On that topic, you talk a good bit about various aerospace contractors in the book, and have had some experiences working with or around them. Are they the answer to the consistency problem? Obviously not a good answer, but something that might stabilize the government’s changing priorities?
S: We still see the most money for space coming from the government, so I’d probably say the government still has the most amount of power. It might shift, because the commercial space industry does have a huge amount of power, obviously. And they’re doing a huge amount of work. But I think for now, it still remains in the hands of whoever has the most money put towards space. I remember being in the space industry at the change of administrations from Obama to Trump. Overnight, the interests changed from Mars to the Moon, in this almost Orwellian reorientation. All the companies were changing their plans and changing their mindset, just because of what the President said.
C: You know, I don’t want to be some kind of like startup capitalist mouthpiece obviously, but reading the book, you see all Big Space names, Blue Origin, SpaceX, but also Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and so on. But I also saw a lot of references to companies I’ve never heard of. Could this burgeoning startup sector challenge the influence of the aerospace industry?
S: In the end, all startups want money, right? But there are plenty of little space startups that have good goals, that aim to conduct space business while also improving racial and gender diversity or advocating for environmental concerns. But I think that what I’d like to see is more engagement and collaboration between global companies, and also more engagement and collaboration between people who are not in the space industry at all. Normal people having conversations about our activities in space.
C: Right, of course, there are other interests in space besides American ones.
S: Yes, and within the space industry there is a lot of antagonism between the countries, especially between America, Russia and China. There was a lot of xenophobia, there was a lot of antagonism. A lot of concern about who is going where first and who is controlling space. This was prevalent during the rise of the Space Force as well. I really wish that there was collaboration between these prominent space leaders, and not just the major ones, but India, the ESA, Japan and Korea, et cetera.
C: And it seems like the government’s position, the industry’s position, is that the moon is the field where these questions of space dominance—ground control—will be played out?
S: There are a lot of concerns over who’s going to get to the moon first, again. Mostly because even landing a rover entitles you to some amount of territory—anyone else trying to land a rover has to give yours a certain amount of space so as not to endanger the existing rover or the new rover. So just landing a robotic presence on the moon is a territorial claim.
C: I mean, in a lot of ways, this all sounds just of silly? Like a bad Twitter joke about rabid colonialism having nowhere left to go but the moon. I guess Mars was the same, but we had to lower our expectations a bit. And I think that you’d agree that proposed moon travel, considering the resource expense, is more than a little mind boggling.
S: I mean, I wouldn’t go to the moon. I don’t think I need to go to the moon. As cool as it is. I think that we could send more rovers robots there, although at this point, I don’t know. What more could we learn on the moon? As a scientific proposition, it does not make much sense to me, which is why the colonialism here really stands out. Personally, I’d be more interested in sending more probes out to interstellar space.
C: Now that’s an adventure. Hopefully, one day, we’ll be in a position in which doing so would be a net positive. Since that is a bit of a hopeful note, we can end here. Is there any last word you’d like to share with our readers?
S: I want people to stay grounded. We have a better vantage on our activities in space when we remember that we’re still standing on the Earth.
