Fascinating website of photographs found undeveloped in old cameras - [Link - westfordcomp.com]

Camera c 1947.

(Thanks again to Sam (Schillace) for this link.)

The touring exhibition of the wonderful photographs of Edward Burtynsky reaches the Cantor Arts Center today and runs till September 18.

Nickel tailings #30 - Sudbury, Ontario

Like Gursky, [Link] Burtynsky works in large format - the pictures are up to 5 feet across. His subjects are envrionmental impacts. Great holes in the ground like open cast mines and quarries, Wasted landscapes - his series of rivers running blood red polluted with toxic mineral waste is extraordinary. Landfill sites - urban mines as he calls them. Sites of epic industrial spectacle - the beach shipbreakers of Bangladesh, oil refineries.

There is plenty of environmental politics here. As well as simply awesome pictures of huge holes in the ground.

Susan Cameron, Phil Dhingra, Annie Wyman, Erica Simmons, Bill Rathje and myself have started an accompanying web site exploring what we see as the contemporary sublime in Burtynsky’s archaeography - [Link] We are using Mark Roseman’s fabulous software ProjectForum - the same social software that we have enthusiastically adopted in the Metamedia Lab at Stanford.

Burtynsky at Stanford

PS the exhibition ended in September - an archive of the site will be available soon.

A new blog devoted to remix and sampling - Media trips

Here’s an entry of theirs from October 20 -

Check out the newly posted projects at the recently launched online exhibition Digital Recycling at The Stunned Net Art Open 2004, where one person’s trash is another’s treasure trove:

What’s more, you can participate by uploading or downloading all kinds of files, images, music, texts. My favorite tagline? The Dump is The Message:

Digitalrecycling aims to build a community of people who use discarded information as their medium. Users may log on to the “digitalrecycling operating system” and either upload or download their own or other peoples’ digital trash. “The point is not to deny privacy, but to rethink property.”

Thanks to Troels (Myrup) for spotting this one.

Following up his guest blogging on exo-garbology [Link] [Link], Bill has put me on to this piece issued by AP today - “Orbiting space station is like a cluttered attic”

CANAVERAL, Fla. - There’s no space in the space station. So a few weeks ago, the two astronauts who live there tossed out some useless junk, like so many old hubcaps for the trash heap.

Only this stuff floated away in space.

And the throwing-away - done during a recent spacewalk - was done cautiously so that the discarded antenna covers and expired pump panel didn’t become deadly boomerangs.

Such is life in space, post-Columbia.

With no garbage pickup by shuttles for nearly two years, the international space station is looking more and more like a cluttered attic.

“Room limited,” is how the affable astronaut Mike Fincke describes it.

The problem is, shuttle deliveries and pickups won’t resume until spring, and that’s if NASA is lucky. A barrage of hurricanes and their devastating blow to NASA’s launch site may well delay the next shuttle flight, by Discovery.

So the stuff will keep piling up and up.

“It’s at the point where we have to figure out a way to handle it. You can’t just wish it away. The garbage man isn’t coming tomorrow to take everything away for you,” says astronaut Kenneth Bowersox, who was the space station’s skipper when shuttle Columbia went down.

Astronaut Michael Foale, another former space station commander, says even more important than what Discovery brings on that first flight will be what it takes away.

“It’s essential that when that first shuttle comes up, before they do anything, is they start to clear out the items that we need to deliver back to Earth on the shuttle,” Foale says.

During Foale’s six-month station stay, which ended in April, the overcrowding slowed him down and began to affect his work.

“It’s limiting our efficiency maybe by a percent or two, as we have to move some items out of the way when we get to a panel behind it,” Foale says.

“But we are nowhere near as critical as I thought we were on space station Mir,” adds the former Mir resident.

NASA takes little comfort in the fact that the 6-year-old space station isn’t as dingy or messy as Russia’s Mir, which tumbled from the sky in 2001 after 15 years of operation. The whole point, from the very beginning, was to avoid a pigpen in orbit. Yet here NASA is, on the verge of creating a mirror image of Mir.

“We’re in a constrained situation right now,” observes Suzan Voss, manager of NASA’s cargo integration office. “But it’s still a safe situation.”

Columbia’s catastrophic plunge from the sky on Feb. 1, 2003, grounded the shuttle fleet and halted all space station construction.

The Russian Space Agency has been sending manned capsules and supply ships to the station. The cargo carriers have provided backup stores of precious oxygen that have come in handy during the repeated breakdowns of the station’s main oxygen generator, a vexing problem that eventually could force an evacuation. But the Russian spacecraft can hold, at most, only a third of what the shuttle can carry and they are not exactly frequent fliers.

Little can be returned to Earth in the capsules besides the astronauts themselves, and the cargo ships are cut loose and incinerated in the atmosphere. So only trash goes into the carriers before undocking - empty food containers, dirty clothes, aluminum toilet cartridges full of solid waste.

During the Mir years, cosmonauts routinely dumped things overboard in bags. International accords frown on that now; the objects could become dangerous pieces of space junk.

The Russians made sure that wouldn’t happen during September’s spacewalk. The discarded antenna covers already have fallen harmlessly out of orbit, for instance, and the pump panel should plunge through the atmosphere in flames by year’s end.

“Now if we were just desperate, that might be something that was done,” Bowersox says, referring to large-scale dumping. “But we’re not near that.”

Among the bigger items taking up valuable space on the station until shuttles soar again: racks holding science experiments; broken exercise equipment and other machines; worn-out spacewalking suits; and more than a dozen rendezvous and docking devices in need of an engineering face-lift by the Russian Space Agency, which can no longer afford to keep making or buying new parts.

Among the smaller items: undeveloped rolls of IMAX film, tucked between water bags to protect against radiation; astronauts’ personal belongings, like Bowersox’s shirts with his crew insignia and the ugly slime-colored tie he wore when he needed cheering up; and duffel bags that once served as suitcases.

Everyone has had to be “very inventive” in making use of any so-called empty space, Voss says.

It’s akin to organizing a jammed clothes closet, says station operations manager Mark Geyer, whose 11-year-old daughter’s closet recently got a makeover with modular shelves and drawers.

“The only difference is you can’t go to Home Depot and find the stuff. You’ve got to use what you have on board,” Geyer says. “But the team has done a great job in looking in places that we wouldn’t normally have examined.”

As Bowersox sees it, the problem predates the Columbia accident.

“If you look at how this is happening, it’s not because we all want a lot of clothes or we all want a lot of extra food up there or because we’re being sloppy,” says Bowersox, who now serves as director of NASA’s flight crew operations.

“It’s because we want a bunch of spare parts up there. We’ve got extra suits. We’ve got extra parts to repair the components outside the station, all these things that we’re trying to pack aboard for contingency. And from the very beginning, we’ve kind of pushed it to the limit of what we wanted the crew to have to live with.”

Many NASA officials, Bowersox included, wonder what will happen when the three remaining space shuttles are retired around 2010 to make way for President Bush’s envisioned moon shots, and the station has to depend solely on unmanned supply ships. None of these vessels will be able to carry up all that a shuttle can, nor can they return anything to Earth.

Spare parts will have to be stockpiled on board, and that means even more crowding unless equipment can be kept outdoors or some kind of storage room can be launched and attached.

For their part, Fincke and cosmonaut Gennady Padalka are trying to tidy the place for their replacements, who are due to arrive in just over a week.

Fincke would love to toss out more, but as he told Mission Control back in June: “Always, always, always feel free to come back and say ‘No, that is the most valuable thing on the planet, we can’t throw it away.”‘

Bowersox acknowledges that a neat freak would be, well, freaking out aboard the space station. But he adds with a laugh: “From what I’ve been seeing, the folks they’ve been sending up there, we don’t really have a problem.”

[Link] [Link]

from Steve (Newman)

Sam thought you would be interested in this:

Slashdot — this was their summary:

What would you do if you found someone’s digital media card from their camera in your taxi? One such individual has decided to provide the world with 227 days of entertainment. I Found Some Of Your Life will post a photo a day and accompanying fictional narrative for the next 227 days using the photos found on a digital media card left in a cab.

Is it pure genius or pure evil? Who cares? Just be thankful they’re not your photos.

[Link - with comments]

another image of the abandoned apartment in San Jose

[Link] [Link] [Link] [Link]

Some years ago back in Lampeter Julian Thomas and I used to talk about something we called the archaeological imagination. We were close to a host of superb human geographers in the next corridor who were reshaping their field (Chris Philo, Ulf Stroymeyer, Catherine Nash, Ian Cook, Tim Cresswell, Hester Parr, Miles Ogborn, Joe Painter, Paul Cloke and more) and one of their colleagues, Derek Gregory (British Columbia, Vancouver) was publishing his book called Geographical Imaginations. Like some other archaeologists, we saw very strong connections between geography and archaeology. And of course we were all very familiar with Wright Mills’s Sociological Imagination from 1959.

(Have a look at the 2002 meetings of the Association of American Geographers - [Link] [Link] [Link])

The notion of an archaeological imagination has become well established - a hard fought success for us. It appears as a main theme in Clive Gamble’s excellent book from Routledge - Archaeology: The Basics.

So what is the archaeological imagination?

The point is a simple one - archaeology is not just an academic discipline producing knowledge of the past. Archaeology is part of a range of values, aspirations, desires, dreams, attitudes, stories that share an archaeological character. Ideas that digging deeply into something establishes authenticity; a fascination with ruin and morbidity; locating senses of identity in remains of the past; connecting collection with place in the pursuit of historical meaning; notions of the sacred aura of the artifact; attitudes towards garbage and leftovers; the uncanny sense of presence found in material remains; stories of deep origin, and the cyclical rise and fall of cultures.

The archaeological imagination takes us into the heart of the modern condition and its relationship with the past.

From Alain Schnapp’s Discovery of the Past

David Lowenthal had gathered a fascinating compendium in his 1985 book The Past is a Foreign Country.

Julian has done a great job of exploring some of the philosphical aspects of the archaeological imagination, particularly in his studies of Heidegger [Link], and now in his new and first rate book on archaeology and modernity - [Link] Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Chris Tilley have explored the archaeological imagination wonderfully in their excavations at Leskernick. There is much more - Ruth Tringham’s work out of Berkeley, Carmel Schrire in her research in South Africa. Gavin Lucas is pursuing the archaeological imagination in his fieldwork, and Ian Hodder here at Stanford has always been a great and active supporter of projects that pursue the edges of the archaeological. Cornelius Holtorf, another great colleague of mine at Lampeter, now in Sweden, is about to round off so much of this work with his fabulous forthcoming book on archaeology and popular culture.

And me? Well, since ReConstructing Archaeology, written with Chris Tilley back in the 80s, I have been plotting my own track through matters archaeological. From Adorno and Horkheimer’s ruined histories, Benjamin’s fragmented re-collections, to recent explorations at Stanford with Bill Rathje and David Platt [Link] I have always thought that my 1991 Experiencing the Past, seen by many as a heinous attack on the foundations of archaeological knowledge, was actually a useful summary of the archaeological imagination. Mike Pearson clarified a lot of my thinking on what we saw as a critical romanticism and poetics at the heart of the archaeological project in our Theatre/Archaeology [Link] [Link]. The remains of all this interest are scattered through this blog and my website, never mind numerous articles, books and conference sessions.

I am sounding defensive. Feeling a need to set the record straight. Why?

I got sent an invitation to a book launch in London for Jennifer Wallace’s recently published Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination. The book is not yet out in the US. I ordered a copy from the UK and read it this evening.

It is a good read. Covers the themes I have just outlined in a lively way with lots of references to literature and some history of archaeology. She has clearly come across our work - Hodder, Rathje, Tilley and myself get mention in the section on further reading, and sometimes in the main text. One side of me is delighted that our work has reached beyond archaeology.

But for the most part Jennifer has chosen to ignore twenty years of analysis of the archaeological imagination, the archaeological condition.

I wonder why.

Maybe because her book is a literary reading of “the archaeological imagination”. Yet she liberally discusses archaeological history (totally omitting Alain Schnapp’s marvellous and standard book Discovery of the Past), excavations, and what she sees as current trends in the discipline.

Maybe she just hasn’t done her homework, reading what has come before her.

Maybe her publisher, Duckworth, didn’t want footnotes or bibliography - they often look to a cross-over market between academic research and broader interest.

Maybe it doesn’t matter - it’s only the ideas that count. Cornelius is always telling me to lighten up.

Am I getting to be an old reactionary shouting out the standards of scholarship? That you should always recognize the work of others. Perhaps I would simply have celebrated the book’s effort to cross disciplines - a very difficult task - if it wasn’t for an email sent round my department by Maud Gleason recently. She was calling for standards of citation and referencing to be reasserted and upheld in academia, because, like many, she is witnessing a growth in selective, thin and downright false citation - saying (or rather not saying) where your ideas have come from. The matter is really not one of standards for the sake of standards. Maud got me thinking about academic community.

Shoddy research and scholarship often hides behind the publisher’s desire to have a clean read without all the distraction of saying where your ideas come from. The pressure upon academics to deliver publication is considerable and I am suspicious that a lot of what Jennifer discusses is too familiar to be the result of convergent thinking - her coming from literary studies and the reception of classical heritage. And it does look good to appear to be the one with the insight to pull together the big picture.

There is a profound danger in the celebration of the individual that this sloppy work represents. This is what bothers me. The intellectual freedoms of academia depend upon us being a group of colleagues with standards, and principally standards that refuse to have our efforts divided. Say where your ideas come from because linking them with others makes them stronger and lends them impact. Plagiarism is a threat becasue it divides; it hides the connections between people and their ideas. (Though I am not accusing Jennifer of plagiarism.) All too many people want to promote division and dissent because it weakens the power of ideas to change - ideas become simply the possession or opinion of one detached academic.

Jennifer Wallace - you should have connected your work with the efforts of others that you clearly know of. Because these are not just entertaining stories. They go to the heart of the contemporary world’s sense of history, of identity, of direction. They matter.

The power of independent research and criticism lies not in the abilities of an individual, but in the collective effort, collegiality, and democracy, the community of scholarship that alone can give force.

How about that for an enlightenment ideal!

A couple of recent entries have been on the connections that run through garbage, science fiction, space exploration and archaeology. [Link] [Link]

Here is more from

Bill (Rathje) on exo-garbology

- connections with the pioneering spirit of exploration, and memorabilia. A piece of his from 1999.

On June 17 this year (1999), Air Force trackers of “space junk” alerted NASA that a spent Russian booster rocket was headed straight for the International Space Station. By sheer luck alone, the huge relic missed blowing the ISS to smithereens by only five miles.

My first thoughts were, “how in tune with recent human history it is that our garbage should come back to haunt us”. Then, I couldn’t help but dream of an exo-garbology - meaning the study of space junk created by “intelligent life” [and I use “intelligent” with some misgivings] - to help humans learn from past garbage mistakes.

But are earthlings conducting the first “exo-garbology”? Perhaps not. As recently as August 1996, a NASA team examined a potato-sized chunk of Mars. They tentatively concluded that it might contain signs of life. While the evidence was only a few specks that resembled fossilized microbes, the announcement led bookmakers in London to raise the odds of “intelligent life” somewhere in our universe.

If there are currently exo-garbologists on other planets, I wonder what they make of our first venturings into their realm. As any earthling knows, what most defines our humanness is our indefatigable urge to create garbage - the bounty from which archaeologists learn about human lifeways. Consider what an Indiana Jones from another planet would know about us.

Appropriately, the Earth is surrounded by orbital flotsam. But unlike the hordes of miniature moons neatly aligned into rings around Jupiter and Saturn, according to Nicholas Johnson (Scientific American, 1998), Earth’s hanger’s-on “resemble angry bees around a beehive, seeming to move randomly in all directions.” When you look at their numbers, you can almost hear them buzz.

First, there are about 10,000 “resident space objects” — only five percent of which were functioning spacecraft in 1997. Spent artifacts include some 1,500 empty upper-stage rockets, a myriad explosive bolts, leftover after separation from their payload, lens caps jettisoned from sensitive instruments, and a glove lost by US astronaut Edward White during a 1965 spacewalk.

Of course, although it is not often mentioned, there is real ?garbage?. During its first decade in orbit, for example, more than 200 objects drifted away from the Mir Space Station, most appropriately hooded in garbage bags.

But the greatest source of significant-sized space litter is approximately 150 satellites that have blown up or fallen apart, leaving a trail of 7,000 fragments large enough (more than 10 centimeters in any one dimension) to be tracked from Earth. To make matters even messier, NASA estimates that there are another 400,000 space artifacts too small for us to detect, as well as one million small flakes of paint and other tiny specks of fast-flying debris. No wonder that space shuttle windows have been replaced with growing frequency during the past decade.

But perhaps most surprising, in 1990, the surface of a recovered satellite that had been in orbit for six years was found to be speckled with urine and fecal material — another discard from Russian and American space missions.

To some of us on Earth, this gaggle of space junk may sound like a laughing matter — that is, unless you were in the outback of Australia when the remains of the 100 ton Skylab, our first space station, survived re-entry into the atmosphere and crashed there in 1979. Or unless you’d imagine what would have happened if the rocket shell had hit or even just grazed the Space Station! Then you’d know why understanding the causes and trajectories of space junk is important to humanity’s future in space. That is the reason the Air Force and NASA have their own brand of exo-garbologists tracking and modeling the future of our space orphans.

By now, extraterrestrial exo-garbologists must have some theories about why we continually shoot ourselves in the foot with our castoffs. Perhaps they have reasoned that this kind of faux pas occurs because of one of the most consistent human-artifact relationships: whenever we humans try something new, we throw everything material we can at it to make our attempt successful. The result is a tremendous accumulation of leftover junk.

In fact, frontiers - whether physical or theoretical - are junk magnets of immense proportions. That’s because we tend only to worry about the success of our immediate goal - settling an “untamed” land, “conquering” Mt. Everest or Mt. McKinley, “harnessing” nuclear power as an energy source - and not about cleaning up the mess we leave behind.

American pioneers abandoned so much of what they originally loaded onto their wagons that professional scavengers regularly followed the Trails West to glean the leavings. Organizations friendly to the environments of both Mt. Everest and Mt. McKinley have recently become concerned about oxygen bottles, climbing equipment, camping gear - left behind in massive fields of eyesores. And who can forget our nuclear waste dilemma - tons of radioactive material without any disposal plan in place. As a result, today, many of the storage containers of older wastes are too degraded to move safely even if there were a place to put them.

Space exploration has obviously been no different.

So now earthlings are stuck with two kinds of non-functioning space artifacts - those in the heavens and those used on or brought back to earth.

Those on the earth are not such a problem. The main reason is that most, if not all, humans seem to have an uncontrollable desire to collect, and for decades people have been acquiring space memorabilia. The intensity of private collectors is documented by two massive Sotheby’s auctions, held in 1993 and 1996, of Russian space artifacts, much of it “looted” from the old Soviet Union. But even the monetary value of space artifacts pales beside the educational and emotional potential of items that have been out in space and come back.

In the US, besides the government’s Smithsonian and various NASA museums, there other public contenders for these treasures, such as the Cosmosphere in the city of Hutchinson, Kansas. Such organizations save never-used, but deteriorating, backup spacecraft from neglect and landfills.

Most distressing about the junk still in space is how it affects our space future. Sadly, because of orbit speeds of 20,000 feet per second, both mammoth and miniscule space junk are currently the most serious threat to the safety of the International Space Station and its future occupants, even with the potential of new “bumpers” which use several layers to shatter and slow any projectile.

If we look at all the Earth-generated debris in space as a great metaphor for the profligate discard practices of humanity, there seem to be a few lessons:

We - Americans, Russians, and all other space entrepreneurs - created all our gizmos with little thought about disposal. What else is new? Lesson 1: Whether designing a new clamshell for burgers or the next flight to Mars, it is only responsible to plan for disposal during invention.

Our collection-mania for space objects is still far from satiated. Lesson 2: There will be gold out there for whoever figures out how to recapture, renovate, reuse and recycle the garbage we have already wrought.

The first and so far only man-made object to leave our solar system to sail among the stars is a little Pioneer 11 robot-spacecraft that was launched in December 1974 and spectacularly fulfilled its task of exploring Jupiter and Saturn. On its side is a plaque designed by the late Carl Sagan that shows a woman and a man, plus the location of the sun in relation to several prominent stars, and Earth?s status as the third planet out. In the vacuum of space, the little messenger will last essentially forever, though its electronics have long since died. The idea is that someday some space-faring civilization might stumble across Pioneer 11 and know that life exists on this small, blue planet.

How fitting that our first emissary to the stars is our trash.

Postscript: And the reason to clean up our space may be more than astronaut safety and money. One vision of the form that intelligent life on other planets might take was the summer 1997 movie Independence Day. Light-years from the cute and lovable E.T., Independence Day aliens were mad as hell at the human race. The question the movie really didn’t explain was the source of the grudge against Earthlings. After reviewing how much garbage we’ve left in space, I think I know the answer.

Yesterday Bill (Rathje) commented on space junk. [Link]

I asked him to say more about garbage and archaeology in space.

He reminded me of something that was in a recent article of ours (Michael Shanks, William Rathje and David Platt, “The perfume of garbage: modernity and the archaeological” - last issue of the journal Modernism/Modernity, June 2004).

Exo-archaeology. Mars Landform or lost city? The alternate view: true believers find alien architecture everywhere on the Red Planet. The five-sided “D&M pyramid” at 40.7? N, 10? W is said to be the heart of a buried Martian metropolis. The “explanation” for its irregular shape: an ancient nuclear war.

Image - James Porter. Caption from Wired August 2004

Two articles published in 2002 by archaeologists about “exo-archaeology” - the archaeology of outer space. What they addressed said a great deal about they way archaeologists and most fellow humans view garbage here on Earth.

It was something of a shock to find out that in an article entitled “The Case for Exo-Archaeology”, Vicky A. Walsh wrote that the mission of exo-archaeology was to “evaluate distant worlds for signs of intelligent life” (was this taken from a Star Trek script - Jen-Luc Picard is a keen amateur archaeologist). The author never mentioned the issue of how to identify alien garbage or, for that matter, our garbage, which is the most prolific sign of our “intelligent” life in space . . . and on Earth!

Even more unexpected was the paper by Greg Fewer, called “Towards an LSMR and MSMR (Lunar and Martian Sites & Monuments Records): Recording the Planetary Spacecraft, Landing Sites as Archaeological Monuments of the Future” - in fact, the title says it all.

Yes, of course, let’s record landing sites for posterity. But what about the myriad threats to our future spacecraft from the voluminous hurtling junk discarded from our past ventures? And it is not just us and the Russians anymore. At the end of September 2003, Europeans launched their first unmanned spacecraft to the moon. China’s program is not far behind, and more space cowboys - and space tourists, like U.S. businessman Dennis Tito who reportedly paid the Russians $20 million for a ride to the international space station and back in 2001 - are sure to follow.

To complicate matters further, ask yourself: What kinds of garbage have other space travelers in other parts of our galaxy and beyond discarded that are now hazards to our space travelers? If we are dedicated to continuing the exploration of space, can we continue to ignore such questions? The report from the committee that investigated the tragic Discovery burnup called for a complete revamping of the safety culture at NASA. Perhaps it is also time to look at NASA’s “garbage culture”, or lack of it.

Bill Rathje on space junk

I have been trawling eBay for the last month or so looking for old camera equipment for my Metamedia Lab - part of our explorations of media metarialities - getting away from the notion that new media are somehow immaterial data.

Came across an item that I had forgotten - # 3819626634 (ended Jun-10-04 07:06:10 PDT) - Lunar Spacecraft Project. Bids (starting at $6.2 million) invited for a commercial lunar spaceflight - crashing 10kg of cargo into the moon’s surface.

OK - a publicity stunt that did grab some media attention for the Nevada company. (Sponsorship from Final Frontier Jerky - Beefjerky.com - slogan - “50000 years ago mankind made meat into jerky. Between prehistory and the stars.”) And there was a suggestion that this would be a spectacular way of scattering someone’s ashes.

Adding to the littering of space.

Archaeologists specialize in the study of garbage. And Bill Rathje is the father of garbology. Garbage past, present and future. I asked him to comment.

The 1902 French satire A Trip to the Moon (a classic by Georges Melies) ends with one world’s best known cinematic images. The 14 minute short doesn’t show humanity directly shooting itself in the foot; instead, it shows astronomers building a humongous cannon and shooting a rocket ship at the smiling “woman in the moon”. The film ends with the disturbing image of the now-useless rocket lodged in the moon’s left eye as the face around it writhes in shock and pain.

What was outlandish fantasy at the turn of the century became fact in less than sixty years. In the late 1950s, both the former Soviet Union and the United States successfully launched a series of “impact” missions that crashed “probes” into the lunar surface and created the some of the first space litter.

Despite our hard-won acumen in satellite and manned space flight technologies, we have continued to smash probes into the moon. As recently as July 31, 1999, the 354 pound Lunar Prospector hit the moon’s surface going 3,800 mph to see how large a plume of dust and vapor it would kick up (It was hoped that the height and content of the plume would provide evidence of water on the moon, but no plume was sighted.)

Not to be outdone, space novice China recently announced that within five years it will launch its own “moon probe” satellite. That may seem to be adding less debris to the lunar surface, but after a few months or years in orbit, China?s probe will become useless space litter and eventually follow the familiar impact trajectory.

The European Space Agency sent a similar probe to the moon in September 2003, while dropping off two communication satellites along the way.

But litter on and around the moon is only a tiny fraction of the problem of human-made litter in space. As any archaeologist can tell you, every creature marks new territory in its own special way — humans do their marking with litter, items that no longer serve a purpose to those who put them there.

“Marking” litter is currently an especially acute problem in space. When we earthlings began our space exploration, we followed an age-old tradition. Pioneers and explorers have always done whatever it takes to get there the first time and have given little or no thought to what they leave behind or no thought at all to cleaning up after themselves. Note that the Mars record to date is that two out of every three lander missions have produced nothing but space junk!

All of us have been indoctrinated to believe that litter of any kind should be avoided, prevented, or cleaned up. In our hearts, we all know that’s true. Appropriately, while l was writing this piece, I was attending an awards banquet of the New Jersey Clean Communities Council, where litter is taken very seriously and litter cleanups abound.

And so it should be. Litter is a sign of a lack of concern that goes far beyond environmental indifference, and its presence continually instigates and reinforces such attitudes. In fact, Professor Malcolm Sparrow, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Management, has argued that “grime” is linked to “crime” - grime being a kind of usual suspect that tells anyone in the vicinity that other types of crime are tolerated.

When, however, standard roadside litter is compared to the discard of official EPA hazardous wastes - lead-acid car batteries or industrial canisters full of used solvents or nuclear wastes - many of us also believe that the litter we’re used to seeing takes a secondary place.

But what happens to this view when items common in refuse and litter - such as french fries or plastic bags - get frozen solid and hit you or anything else at a speed of 20,000 feet per second! If you are traveling in the same direction at the same speed, the litter will just float along side; but if you are going at some other angle, and especially if you are moving in the opposite direction, it could shoot right through you! OUCH !

Forty years ago, in 1964, just seven years after basket ball-sized Spudnik became the first human-made object to be shot into Earth orbit, James White wrote “Deadly Litter”. White used this science fiction short story to illustrate how, in his view, within 150 years human-made space junk would become exactly that deadly litter! - and littering in space would become the “dirtiest crime in the books”.

My prescience is so far best exemplified by a chunk of an exploded Ariane rocket that hit a French satellite in 1996 and reduced the orbiter to space junk smithereens. White was clearly writing in the far-sighted mode of A Trip to the Moon, but as prescient as he was, he may have underestimated the incredible threat that supersonic speed space litter will pose in just the next few decades.

At this point, the US and the Russians may have become successful enough to be concerned about not creating more space junk, but what about the new kids on the block trying to prove themselves? The lunar and other space programs of the European Space Agency and China are the major new entrants at present, but there are still more in the wings.

As if this isn’t enough, space, especially around Earth, as endless as it seems, is being rapidly populated by entrepreneurs: Celestis launches satellites carrying “cremains” (cremated remains of earthlings, the first sent into orbit from the Canary Islands on April 21, 1997) [Link: Taphophilia]; French scientist Jean-Marc Philippe created non-profit KEO to orbit a UNESCO-approved 220 lb. “time capsule” satellite around Earth for 50,000 years [Link: “Saving the now for later”]; and, of course, the X Prize competition (encouraged by the multi-million dollar price tags that the mega-rich have been willing to pay to become space tourists) offers $10 million to the first private company to launch a passenger vehicle into low orbit [X-Prize latest press release August 5 2004]. Who with a spirit of adventure could resist such a challenge?

No wonder Sergei Kulik, head of the international division of the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, said in 2001, “In the middle of the century the contamination may be so big that a kind of a cascade effect could appear, a collision between the space debris particles creating more and more (collisions).” That could eventually mean, he told Reuters, “there will be no possibility of flying in space at all.” [Link]

What space junk and all its hazards point to is the importance of breaking the intimate and age-old relationship between exploration and litter. Teaching ourselves and our children to think about litter WHEN WE MAKE PLANS and BEFORE we do anything is one of the most important lessons for all of us to learn. If we had followed that simple strategy in just the recent past, we might not have generated all of the difficult-to-recycle packaging we have, and, even more importantly, all of the nuclear waste we don’t want but can’t find any acceptable place to bury, and even worry about moving because of corroding containers even if we could find an acceptable burial locale.

Just a few months ago, I was sure that the space junk situation couldn’t get any worse. Silly me.

As Michael has just said, In May of this year, Orbital Development of Carson City, Nevada initiated its “MoonCrash Project”. The company will provide a lunar spacecraft that can be packed with 22 pounds of whatever any client paying $6 million desires. A Russian aerospace contractor’s commercial launch vehicle will lob the craft and cargo to the moon where it will crash hopefully somewhere near where the client wants.

Gregory Nemitz, president of Orbital Development, said, “The MoonCrash Project would probably be attractive to some bored rich guy, who is tired of playing with his radio-controlled model airplanes.” Then he added that no one should worry about litter because, after all, the moon is only a large expanse of vacant rock anyway. Until I read this news release, I didn’t realize how engrained our “right” and “need” to litter are.

Whao! Surely, the Woman in the Moon must be writhing once again!

Believe it or not, I believe that Mr. Nemitz and MoonCrash should be brought to the attention of as many people as possible. There is nothing better than an attitude like Mr. Nemitz’s and a project like MoonCrash to dramatize the critical need to fund both litter abatement and full-fledged environmental education programs in our schools!

Connections: archaeology, junk, remains (human and other), senses of the future (real and fantastical).