Episode 06: Space Archaeology with Dr. Justin Walsh

What is Space Archaeology? Join Emily and Alexa as they speak with Dr. Justin Walsh of the ISS Archaeological Project about what doing archaeology in space really entails, what cultural and engineering insights we can gain from it, and what the future of this field looks like with the impending decommissioning of the ISS.

The Art Astra Podcast is nominated for a Women in Podcasting Award! Listen to the episode to learn how to support the show and cast your vote by visiting womeninpodcasting.net/art-astra-podcast.

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Music credit: "Space" by Music_Unlimited

Show Notes:

• ISS Archaeology 

  • Dr. Justin St. P. Walsh (Twitter/X, Bluesky) 

  • Associate Professor Alice Gorman - Flinders University (Twitter/X, Bluesky) 

• Space archaeology (for real) & associated pre-print article The Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment (SQuARE) on the International Space Station, Report 1  

• What Could Space Archaeologists Tell Us about Astronaut Culture? 

• Dr. Beth O’Leary | New Mexico State University 

• Lunar Legacy Project 

• Archaeology and Heritage of the Human Movement into Space | SpringerLink 

• Human Factors in Long-Duration Spaceflight | The National Academies Press

• Undocumented Migration Project 

• Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut by Samantha Cristoforetti 

• NOAA scientists link exotic metal particles in the upper atmosphere to rockets, satellites

• About HAER - Heritage Documentation Programs (U.S. National Park Service)

• Artemis Accords - NASA  

• NASA's Recommendations to Space-Faring Entities: How to Protect and Preserve the Historic and Scientific Value of U.S. Government Lunar Artifacts 

• Vote for us in the Women in Podcasting Awards! 🎉🎙️

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Transcript:

Emily

Welcome back to the Art Astra podcast! I’m Emily Olsen 

Alexa

And I’m Alexa Erdogan

Emily

And today we’re exploring space archaeology! But first, we have an exciting update. As you may have noticed in the cover art for our show on whatever platform you’re listening, we have a small silver badge. That is because we are nominated for a Women in Podcasting award. We are so excited. Thank you everyone supporting us thus far. 

Alexa

The Women in Podcasting Awards are in a people’s choice format. We've been nominated in the Arts & Design category. You can support the show by voting for us at https://womeninpodcasting.net/art-astra-podcast/. The link will also be on our website, on our instagram and facebook pages, and linked in the transcript for this episode! Voting is open until October 1st, 2024. Please vote if you like the show and the topics we've been covering so far, please spread the word about our show to your friends, colleagues, …strangers on the street.

Emily

You know, on your normal commute through the town square.

[laughter]

To clarify and answer some questions we’ve been fielding so far: you do not have to be a woman to vote, voting is free but you can only vote once, and you should only vote for one show. According to the FAQs for the Awards, voting for multiple shows across categories splits up your vote. 

If you have any other questions, we recommend checking out the official FAQ page of the Women in Podcasting Awards. Thank you again everyone for supporting our show! 

Alexa

Now, let’s explore space archaeology! 

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[interlude music] 

Emily

Today we have an incredible guest with us, Doctor Justin Walsh.

Doctor Justin Walsh is an archaeologist whose research areas include intercultural contact, identity construction, the protection of cultural heritage and the archaeology of human activity in space. Doctor Walsh is the only archaeologist ever to have presented a paper at the biennial Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) meetings, to have given talks to chapters of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and to organize panels at the International Astronautical Congress and Global Space Exploration conferences.

His space archaeology publications concern the need for an international protocol to protect heritage in space and the increasing ephemerality of satellites in low Earth orbit and the consequences of that for future archaeological study of human activity in space.

Together with Doctor Alice Gorman, who is recognized as one of the world's foremost scholars in the cutting edge field of space archaeology and is a global leader in public engagement in the history and archaeology of space exploration, they lead the ISS archaeological project ISSAP.  Just this year they were both selected to be part of the Explorers Club 50 class of 2024, recognizing remarkable explorers, changing the world, and extending the meaning of exploration.

Doctor Walsh, it's an incredible honor to be able to borrow some of your time here today and to speak with you about your work and the field of space archaeology. Welcome to the show! 

Alexa

Welcome!

Dr. Justin Walsh

Thank you so much. It's great to be here and especially to be on a podcast that brings these concepts of art and space together. I think it's so important. I'm not not just an archaeologist, I'm an art historian, and I teach in a Department of Arts. So I think this is really fantastic. I'm excited to be here.

Alexa

Awesome. We're so glad to have you. Yeah. And speaking of, you know, right off the bat, the intersection between fields. The term “space archaeology” is a really interesting one, right? Because many people might be familiar with the fields of space studies and archaeology as separate entities, but the combination of the two for space archaeology is a new and interesting field for a lot of people. So, could you give us a bit of a primer on what exactly that field entails?

Dr. Justin Walsh

Absolutely. I mean it's a great question and I I know that every time I talk about this, people are like ‘what are you talking about? You… how can you do archaeology in space, on space  or even on, you know, cultures that we exist in today, right?’ That seems very strange to people.

So if we take a step back, first of all, archaeology. Everybody you know knows that we study things that happened in the past. And typically, of course, in the very distant past, my work has primarily been in the ancient Mediterranean in Italy, and in Spain. In Jordan, as well, I've worked there. So people thousands of years ago – that's what people think of when we talk about archaeology. But actually, what archaeology really is, is a discipline that tries to understand simply how humans adapt to the context that they're in and to each other. So that means to the environment or to the climate or to their society or societies, and adapting and dealing with one another.

And the fact is that archaeologists use a particular kind of evidence more than any other to answer the questions about those adaptations, and that evidence is what we call material culture.

By which we mean, you know, the objects that surround us, the built spaces that we inhabit. That's the primary kind of evidence that archaeologists use. We certainly use, you know, chemistry and other kinds of evidence. But material culture is really at the heart of it. So anywhere where there is material culture, it's evidence for human adaptation. And that means that anytime, any place that humans have existed in, including the present, is absolutely inbounds for us. It's absolutely legitimate for us to be studying it. So that's that's why we can use our techniques and our perspectives to try and understand how humans have acted in space. That's a very unusual context.

Dr. Justin Walsh

For us to try and inhabit, obviously because we are not evolutionarily adapted for it, obviously we would dive very quickly if we were exposed directly to it. So we have to come up with all of these technologies and in fact, all of this material culture to allow us to engage with space.

So that's our evidence in general, just in the most basic terms, space archaeology. If I could define it in a sentence, the study of the material culture of human activity in space or human activity on Earth that's directed at space. And so that means that not only are sites like Tranquility base or, you know, the tracks of the various rovers on Mars, or the probes that are in interstellar space: Voyager, Pioneer probes. Those are also all legitimate for our study to the extent that we can observe them, right. But also what's here on Earth? So launch facilities like Cape Canaveral or Baikonur. The places where space technology is developed and built, those are places. Or, a site that I've actually engaged with quite a bit in the last couple of years, for example, the Arecibo radio telescope, right, which was one of the most significant pieces of radio astronomy equipment ever built. Obviously, it went out of service in 2020 when its instrumentation platform collapsed onto the 305 meter dish there, but it’s historically significant. It allowed humans to interact with and understand the cosmos, and so it would count as space archaeology as well.

Alexa 

That's an interesting point. I hadn't realized that, for example, launch facilities here on Earth, the things that are enabling us to participate and interact with another environment could also technically be part of that whole field of study, but it makes sense in retrospect, and when you explain it that way.

Dr. Justin Walsh

Sure. I mean you as a satellite engineer, your office could be space archaeology, right?

Alexa

That's cool. [laugh]

Dr. Justin Walsh

And so like, if we look at Tranquility base for example, I mean and and and let me take a step back, this is... this is how I started to think about it. Was Tranquility Base – People were only there for like 22 hours or something like that, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. They were only there for not even a day. But they left all those objects behind, some of them on purpose, some of them not on purpose. Some of them just kind of, not even by accident, but just sort of in an ad hoc way. So all of that material that was left behind there would absolutely be archaeological evidence that we could use not only in a forensic sense to understand what activities are carried out there, but also to understand the technological culture, the engineering culture and also the political culture that developed those objects and sent them to the location and left them there.

Right? So the fact that it was within the context of the Cold War and this competition with the Soviet Union, that would be something, you know. Why does…why does the lower half of the lunar module that's still there have a plaque on it that's signed by somebody named Richard Nixon. Right? Why is there this flag there? I mean, we don't know the state of the flag actually. Why is that object there that was and that was intended to be left there? And there are other objects that were not intended to be left there, like urine and feces containers. And the boot covers from the space suits that they used on their EVA's those were thrown out the door at the last minute, because NASA said, “Hey, you took all these rock samples on board and nobody's ever tried to lift off of the Moon before. So throw everything out the door that you're not going to need.” Right? So that wasn't even planned. But that's just like, whatever we don't need goes out the door. It's at the foot of the lunar module. And we could go back and examine that.

Alexa

Those fun little did they know when they were tossing things out to make room for rocks that they would be making history and space archaeology.

Dr Justin Walsh

You know, in archaeology we even have this term, the toss zone or the mid right? So like the idea of people sitting around a campfire and they're eating food, you know, even like hunter gatherer style communities, they're eating food and they, you know, they they finish what they eat and they throw it over their shoulder. 

Alexa

Oh really?

Dr Justin Walsh

And there's a pile of trash there behind them. And that's archaeological gold. That's that's something that archaeologists have been studying for a century. And we, you know, the toss zone, right, gives us a sense of the activities that happen. Well, there's a toss zone at the bottom of the ladder of the lunar module. I have to give credit where credit is due. By the way, this is not my idea. This belongs to Beth O’Leary, who was actually the first space archaeologist. She's recently retired from New Mexico State University, but she studied Tranquility Base specifically to figure out what had been left behind.  And she and her team of graduate students discovered 106 objects were left behind. Nobody actually knew how many objects were left that they were able to nail it down. 106 objects were left there, and she figured out the story and designated that area “toss zone.”

Emily

How were they able to figure out how many objects were there?

Dr Justin Walsh

They went through all the documentary evidence. Nobody. The thing was not. I mean, it's not like it was a secret. It was just nobody had cared enough to pay attention and document as heritage, let's say what there was there and so as a heritage question isn't thinking about like how would you protect what's left behind. Well first you have to know what's left behind.

I think it is. And so going through all the records of what went and what came back.

They figured this out 106 objects which then led to those objects being listed by the state of California, first of all, and later by other states as historic objects that have, at least nominally, have protection from the state of California and also more recently from New Mexico, New York, Washington, Hawaii, all of those states have have added objects from Tranquility Base to their list. I mean, this doesn't have any real force because of international law surrounding space activity, but it's a kind of a recognition of how important that scientific heritage is to those particular states. And she led the way on that.

Emily

That's so cool. We'll be sure to link to her work in our show notes for the website as well, but I was thinking too, because it's like some of the some of the objects that have come up for auction by astronauts from Gemini, Apollo and Mercury missions, there are a couple of objects that have been marked to jettison that the astronauts did keep that we know from the storage lists, were also supposed to be jettisoned.

Dr Justin Walsh

Yes, absolutely.

Emily

And to be able to do that kind of detective work remotely through going through those archives and the stowage lists and all of the documentation is just such a neat idea.

Dr Justin Walsh

Well, this gets a little bit into the barriers to space archaeology, right? I mean, so archaeologists typically, you know, if I want to study the ancient Iberians and Romans in Spain, I have to go to the site in the South of Spain called Costello, and I have to put a hole in the ground, and I have to be present as that hole is being excavated or participate in digging it, and change my strategy as we make discoveries. So we're gonna dig it this way. Now, we have to take it this way ‘cause we found that thing there. How we take notes, what we take notes about what we recover, etc. And obviously we can't go to space, right? This is our problem. Not only, you know, do we not have the money to go to space, to pay Axiom $55 million or whatever they're charging now for two weeks on the ISS, but also all of the space agencies have said that social scientists like archaeologists are not eligible to apply to become professional astronauts, so there's no room for us at the moment in space. I mean, I should say JAXA in its last recruitment did allow people who didn't have a natural science or engineering background to apply, but then they chose a geologist and a medical doctor. So it's never happened, and we might as well just say it's not open to us, and so therefore we have to come up with these other methods or I like to say we kind of creatively reimagine archaeological techniques to be able to deploy them, to understand what's going on in space for the moment at least, that's what we have to do.

Emily

That makes sense. We were talking recently about Apollo 17 in one of our previous episodes. And what's so interesting to me is of all of the astronauts who have ever been to the Moon, only one of them was a formal scientist, and it was geology. So.

Dr Justin Walsh

Yep, absolutely.

Emily

Hopefully we'll be expanding that roster in the future,

Dr. Justin Walsh

That would be nice! 

[laughter]

 but as we've kind of, yeah, we've kind of touched on it, but could you tell us a little bit more about the ISS Archaeological Project, and the main goals, and what led to its inception?

Dr Justin Walsh

Yeah. So it actually  it comes right out of what I was just saying. So I got interested in space archaeology in around 2008 when I had a student ask in a cultural heritage class I was teaching, “Is stuff in space heritage?”

That had never occurred to me before, but as soon as she asked, I thought about Tranquility Base and I said, “Oh my God, yes, absolutely. Go write your term paper on that.” And she did. She wrote a great paper and discovered some really interesting information which, including the, you know, the international nature of space and the inability, in other words, of any country to protect heritage and space. That kind of got me going, but I started also to meet other people like Beth O'Leary, and like Alice Gorman, and P.J. Capelotti– people who had already been working in this area for a while and they were all very well, maybe not Alice so much, but PJ and and Beth were really focused on heritage and heritage protection. Because it seemed like we that was what we could do, you know? We could start to talk about how to protect this stuff before we went there and messed it up. 

And the impracticality of doing archaeology in the traditional way meant that we kind of like it just became this theoretical question, which is why I wrote the article that you mentioned in the introduction that was about deorbiting satellites. You know, there's this idea that satellites have to be deorbited within 25 years of going out of service. And so they won't exist as a record in Low Earth Orbit. I mean, I understand why that is. It's an important thing. You can't keep putting stuff up there, There’s limited room. 

But some of those things may actually be historically significant, and we might actually want to preserve them for the future. In other words, it's kind of like a one-size-fits-all policy, but not all things are created equal. So I was trying to raise some of those issues in that article, even while I really wanted to think about how could we really do archaeology in space.

And not just in the sense of cataloging what objects were at a site, but understanding their significance, their meaning, what their collection or distribution and different patterns might tell us about how people live or work in space. And two things happen. They both happened in November of 2015.

First was that NASA advertised for its next cohort of astronauts or astronaut candidates.

And I… as you know, Emily, I'm a little too online. 

[Emily and Alexa laugh]

So I was following following NASA on Twitter, and I saw the announcement, I decided I'd check it out. Not because I want to be an astronaut just out of pure curiosity. And I found that the restrictions in there stated.

That if you had a bachelor's degree in the natural sciences, or in engineering, or medicine. You could apply if you were eligible but even if you had a PhD in a certain adjacent fields, you were non qualified and and there's a list of those things. They're like, these are like the sciences, but they're not the sciences that we care about.

And one part said the social sciences (anthropology comma geography, comma archaeology) And I went, “What? What is that about?” Why are they so… First of all, how are we even on their radar? How are…What did an archaeologist ever do to NASA that they were so sure that they needed to list us explicitly?

[laughter]

And then I thought, you know, but, but also how are they so sure that we don't have anything to offer them? I was aware, of course, that already they're thinking about these long three-year missions to Mars. You know, if you're putting people in a spacecraft for that long, you ought to want to know something about their…the society and culture that they create in that spacecraft. 

What we actually later found out there's an amazing quote in a 1972 National Academy of Sciences report called “Human Factors in Long Duration Space Flight.” The quote is that “a spacecraft is a micro society in a mini world.” And that's incredibly inspirational to us – this idea that that's what we're talking about, that when you have this group of people, any group of people– you got more than one person, you have a society. So how do they structure that society, right? They structure it through culture. OK, so, what is actually going on there? Well, how do we understand that in the space context in a three-year mission, or a five-year mission, whatever it is? Because you're not going to have the same kind of mission success if you're not dealing with that. And frankly, NASA had never really bothered to study it. Or any of the other space agencies. I'm gonna say NASA a lot, but I'm really talking in general about the space industry.

So that was kind of something that was egging me on. And at the same time, a book was published by a colleague named Jason de Leon, who won a MacArthur Prize for this work he had created, that was called The Undocumented Migration Project. And Jason was an archaeologist who had started studying prehistoric Mexican cultures – Olmec, in fact, really early on, and gotten more interested in the people he was working alongside in the South of Mexico than in the people he was ostensibly researching.  In their stories and their families and, you know, the impact of migration to the United States and stuff like that. So he created an archaeological and anthropological project that would study the lived experience of those people who crossed the Sonoram Desert. 

He came up with all kinds of great techniques or, again, reimagining techniques.

And the thing that he did that just like, completely floored me and led to everything else, was that he gave disposable cameras to migrants on the Mexico side of the border. And he retrieved those cameras from them on the US side of the border. And the photographs that they took allowed him to see what he otherwise could not observe.

And I thought to myself, “they've been doing this the whole time in space photographs.” Like, he's using these photographs to understand the experience, and he wasn't using it quite so much to document material culture, but simply to see what the landscape these people were in and the kinds of things that they had to overcome. But I realized that you can use photography to capture material culture and then to document it as data.

And I also…. thinking about ISS in particular, you know, already at that time would be 15 years of continuous occupation. Obviously now we're up to 23 years of continuous occupation, that the habitation of ISS started in November of 2000, right when digital photography started.

And so there were first of all many, many more images of life in this space habitat than of any previous project. And they had metadata that gave the time and the date when those images remained. So you can put them in order and you could see change over time. So there are thousands, if not millions of these images that NASA has. If you could take each one in order and identify very easily because it's a very self-contained small site where the photo was taken, who is in the image. Again, a very small population, all of whom are very well known and all of the objects that are associated with them in that location at that moment and put it into a database, you can start to chart out the entire arc of associations and behaviors and adaptations over the long arc of habitation of the space station.

And that it would provide a completely different window on what was happening than say the self-reported experiences as the crew. I mean we're, I mean, not to say that they say the wrong things or anything like that. But we are all fallible witnesses to our own lives, right? And if a crew member has a six-month-long mission and I say, “What happened during that mission?” They're going to tell me about like maybe 5 or 10 experiences that they had. But they won't be able to tell me everything that happened every day in a particular location or that they worked on or whatever, that's fine. That's normal. That's human, right?  But what we're able to do by using the photography is open up a different way of thinking about what's happening in the space station and observing it and thinking about what it means in the long term. And in the short term. 

So the idea was photography first of all, and I reached out to Alice when I had this idea. And I said, “Do you wanna collaborate on this?” And she said “Yes, absolutely.” And we started thinking about different ways we could approach that. And in the second e-mail I ever sent her, one of the things that was “maybe we can get the crew to do something for us?” and that actually turned into something that we'll probably talk about that in a bit.

Emily

That's so, so cool. And such a brilliant way to think about it, too, because we've also talked about, with the passing of William Anders and Frank Borman last year and just the human-taken photography versus robot photography that we've had in the past and I had never connected before that the advent of the ISS also corresponded with digital photography.

Dr. Justin Walsh

Luckily for us, yeah. And so we could also, you know, we could use the photographs from any mission, you know, to do this kind of thing. But the ISS is so rich. That's that's the thing. There's so much of that.

In digital photography and also other kinds of documentation like the database of all the things that were sent to the space station,you know,  the crew reports and another set of documents have been very useful are the about, let's say, three out of every four days NASA has put out what they call their On Orbit Daily status reports, which is kind of a summary of the activities that have happened on the space station and we've used them for some of our work as well, it's been very helpful. In fact, unfortunately, they just discontinued them last week. Their budget cuts at NASA, I assume it has something to do with that, but they just… They just, finally after… We have actually archived all of them since 2009. So we have 15 years of them, almost, but we don't have the ones before that, and we don't have any more coming out in the future, which is too bad.

Emily 

Adjacent to that, and then also, you've mentioned that the ISS has been operating for 23 years. With it soon-to-be retirement,  I'm sure this question has come up a lot for you and been on your minds: how do you see the efforts of the ISS Archaeological Project evolving as the space station runs its course?

Dr. Justin Walsh

So initially I guess I would say what we were trying to do were some kind of pilot studies that would show the viability of the approach. And so we looked at phenomena like crew-created visual displays, especially on the Russian side. There's a very elaborate visual display that's located on the aft wall of the service module called Zvezda that has changed over time but has been there right from the very beginning of habitation and still exists, so that's just a phenomenon that's really incredible. We were able to use photography to kind of say, like, what objects are there and how have they changed and are there specific associations between this part of the display and the kinds of objects that are placed there, like photographs of Soviet space heroes as opposed to this other area where there are a lot of religious objects like a gold Orthodox cross and some some painted icons and things like that. That was kind of the early stuff – kind of just trying to get a handle on how to deal with the photographs as a source of data.

More recently, in fact, actually a study that I'm writing a draft of right now with some student collaborators has been to try and understand the facilities and their usage on the ISS. That is to say, you know, all of the equipment that's used for any kind of science on the ISS. That's everything from freezers and refrigerators to furnaces,  centrifuges, glove boxes, you name it. Anything that they've used for science at all, and even the exercise equipment is actually considered part of that. So those are used constantly every day.

But we were using those reports, those daily reports, as our evidence. So every time that got mentioned on a day, “OK, that got used.” The reason why that came up for us was that we were talking to some of the commercial LEO destinations, companies or consortia that are, you know, designing the next generation of space stations. And one of them said, “would you be able to to tell us about that?” Because they want to know for the future, you know, “what do we need to have on our space station that our customers are going to want? What's most likely, how many of each kind of thing do we need?”  

But from an archaeological perspective, that's also a question that is really interesting to us because we always want to know how are different parts of the site being used, right?  What kinds of activities are most common? What kinds are least common? How do those trends change overtime? So there's kind of an alignment there with trying to think about how we can have an impact on improving life and space habitats in the future. And then as you say, there's the heritage angle, right? We are definitely also creating a kind of record of what ISS has been like. 

And it's, you know, I think on personal level… I think it's terribly unfortunate that we can't figure out a way to preserve it. One piece of trivia that I always like to tell people about when we talk about this issue is that in the very first environmental impact report for what was then known as Space Station Freedom in like 1990 or ‘91, the proposal actually said that end of life was going to consist of as many shuttle flights as it took to take each module apart and bring it back. That would have been amazing.

But it also would probably cost like a billion dollars per flight, and I think somebody realized that and in the second environmental impact statement. They simply said, “We're going to deorbit it.”

And that's obviously still the plan. So that's too bad or boosting it too high orbit or, you know, taking a module off of it and attaching it to one of the commercial destinations. And I think the Axiom station would be a great candidate for this, since Axiom Station is going to be built on to the ISS first, before it then becomes free, flying on its own. So why doesn't it take a module with it?  It already knows how to be attached to it.

But you know that's… I don't get to make those decisions, but I think that would be amazing as a museum, right, that people could visit. But, just in general, digesting all of the data that we have is creating a kind of documentary record of what the space station was like. There are other ways in which I've been thinking about the Post-ISS phase.

I have been collaborating with some of the curators at the Air and Space Museum to think about what objects they might try and get returned. Obviously, it's limited at the moment by the dimensions of the cargo Dragon, and competing with the scientific samples and other things the space agencies actually want to bring back, but if we could get, for example, the galley table? Cool.  I think that would be a really nice object that's evocative and could tell a story because it's like “this is the hearth of the space station.” This is where the crew spent a lot of social time. And not only that, but my understanding of that table (I have to do more research on this). My understanding of that table is that it's created by the crew. Like it didn't actually exist before they decided to put one together. So that's kind of an amazing thing. And so that says something about the crew having some autonomy over their living quarters.

I should say living. I mean, there's no boundary between their living quarters and the work quarters. So this is them kind of adding that to it, just like the Russian crew is adding this visual display to their side of things.

I've gotten very interested lately in thinking about the sensory experience of being on ISS and how that could be preserved because ISS is the first permanent space habitat. I mean “permanent” in the sense that it has been continuously inhabited.

For people of my generation, we easily remember times when there was not always somebody in space. For folks of your age, that might not be so easy to remember. I mean, since 2000, right? So coming up on 24 years here, so that's extraordinary. Certainly, my students have no recollection, not even... No, they didn't exist.

So, that's an extraordinary thing, and it deserves to be recognized and preserved, if possible, also because people are going to live in different ways in future space habitats. So, what is the sound of ISS? We know it's incredibly loud. Actually, this white noise that's kind of like being on a jet aircraft. But instead of the 10 hours or whatever it takes you to get to Europe from the US, they're there for six months or a year and they can't escape it, so they earplugs a lot of the time. That's an aspect of their lived experience that needs to be recognized.

If we take that a step further in the social side of things, what about what is the impact of that noise on privacy? That's the…it's actually been measured with decibel meters, where the lab parts of the space station are the quiet parts. So we know that.

But how far away from somebody else do you need to be to have a private conversation with your friends and family? Or with a colleague in the spacecraft? You know, having privacy and having confidence and being able to confide in someone is actually something we completely take for granted on Earth, and we don't understand, Samantha Cristoforetti wrote about this in her memoir. She says everybody's kind of on the honor system because of the way the radio channels are set up.

So you're communicating with your family, and you know you easily could be overheard and you just have to hope that you're not. That's not an easy way to live, but that's what it means to live on ISS, so that's sound.  

One aspect even more interesting, perhaps, is smell. Because ISS famously, or we could say notoriously, has a smell, because the folks up there can't wash. And they have to exercise two to three hours a day, and they have to wear their clothes for two weeks at a time, and then throw them away and there's the trash that only gets thrown out every so often.

Plus, there's the latrines, which are, you know, sort of functional. They're not perfect by any means. So you have this intense odor. And I know what it smells like because I've been there when they opened the cargo transfer bags coming off of the Dragon. It's like this kind of, and I'm not the first say this– it’s like a locker room smell. I also think it's like a kind of doctor's office smell: antiseptic, sour. Anyway, so like, that's gross. It's not… it's not nice.

I have a feeling that they become deadened to it very quickly. The way like… you know, you realize you didn't take the garbage out and you should have because you didn't notice it until you came back into the house, right? That kind of thing that they lose the ability to perceive fairly rapidly and it's just part of the environment, but probably future space habitats won't all smell like that, let's hope. And I think it's going to be really useful for people in the future to have some idea of what it meant to have that be just your kind of latent environment surrounding you.

And so I've been talking to some folks about how we can sample and recreate that smell. So that people can experience it, not only because that's a key element of being in the space station, but also because the sense of smell is the one that is linked directly to memory through the amygdala. So this is why when you smell something that you loved when you were a child, you smell it now, like instantly takes you back to that moment vividly, right?  Like Proust, as well, right? The Madeleine. But the idea is that smell is so integral to me, that I think it would be a wonderful thing to be able to recreate that.

So that's kind of… there are lots of different ways of thinking about preserving ISS, not just the objects, but what else about ISS can we preserve?

Alexa

I think that's fantastic – that like, multi-sensory approach to preservation. It's funny. A friend of mine was actually… We were both, like, fantasizing about this the other day: if we could only, like if we only had the resources to either keep the ISS in a place where, like conjunction with other satellites wouldn't be too much of an issue, or my friend suggested I fondly remember him suggesting it, like boosting it to the moon, and then we can just like softly land it there and keep it open as a museum, I would love that if that was feasible.

If I had all the money in the world and that was feasible to do, just imagine being able to walk through the ISS on the moon or like bounce, I guess, through it, but you would still be losing some of those things that you mentioned like smell and sound and all these other things, they would still be lost in some way.

Dr. Justin Walsh

It's not.. It's not going to last forever and it's kind of amazing that it's lasted this long, right? Certainly parts that are failing. We've heard about air leaks. And things like that. So there's some question about its viability long term, but I think most people have talked about raising it to an altitude of like 6000 kilometers, much more stable long term orbit. But the cost of developing the vehicles that would do that, I mean, they're already talking about a billion dollars just to push it down. That's what the contract is for SpaceX to develop to, to iterate Dragon so that it could push ISS down into the atmosphere, so it breaks up. And by the way, another just maybe trivia, you know: there's only been one space station that has been purposely disoriented, deorbited, and that was Mir. 

Every other space station has just fallen. So we got Skylab landing in Australia. And Salyut 7 landed in northern Argentina. Luckily, nobody was hit by either of those. The others have fallen into ocean areas.

And I think, you know, the idea of deorbiting a 450 ton space station, hoping that it all burns up, but knowing that it's not all gonna burn up and some of it's gonna fall into the ocean.

And if you work in satellites, this is something you should be thinking about is like, “what is the long term liability of continually throwing things into the Pacific Ocean? Especially when they're toxic, right?” Either the fuel or power source or whatever it is, right? I mean, so the current plans are all about “How do we stop human life and property from being at risk?”

But what about all the other forms of life, or just the ocean as a system, right? The thing about Mir was they had, I think it was like a progress vehicle to serve as kind of to direct it into the atmosphere. The burn was too long and too strong and it actually landed 3000 kilometers short of where it was supposed to. So it didn't actually hit where it was supposed to, but it still landed in the Pacific Ocean.

So the only time anybody's ever tried to do this, It didn't work right. And ISS is 4 1/2 times larger than Mir. And, you know, also think about these things burning up. I mean, the Columbia – the trail of debris stretched from like Nevada to Louisiana. And that was a little bit smaller mass-wise than Mir. 

So it's not even just like “will it land on that point? What is the long trail that it will create?”

And that's something I hope that they give a lot of thought to. I'm not so sure that that's happening. But I mean end of operations is something I think we all need to think a lot harder about with this 25 year rule that NOAA has just come out with a study last September/October, saying we can now we now have detectable amounts of heavy metals in the atmosphere from all of the objects that have been deorbited. Not great.

But that's… you could do archaeology of the upper atmosphere now, studying those traces.

Alexa

Yeah, I remember when those studies were first coming out, and it was kind of a “hindsight is 2020” where they were starting to detect some of these compounds in the atmosphere. And they're like, “Oh, yeah, I guess.” It does make sense for burning up a lot of things and our use of space because we're putting up so many satellites, and taking so many of them down is increasing exponentially. I guess it makes sense.

Dr. Justin Walsh

Yeah, I don't know about this “hindsight 2020” so much as wishful thinking. 

Alexa

Yeah, that's a better way, I think.

Dr. Justin Walsh

Yeah, like out of sight, out of mind kind of thing, like, oh, it goes in the atmosphere, it burns up and that's it. Problem solved.

[laughter]

Alexa

But not so much. Yeah.

Dr. Justin Walsh

But nothing really goes away. Ever. So yeah, that's a different story, but yeah.I mean it would be great… Hubble, I also would really like to see Hubble be boosted because it's hard to think of, you know, another astronomical instrument that has had such a profound impact on, you know, the public's understanding of the universe and also the scientific understanding of the universe. But it’s not clear that there's any political will to spend money developing the technology that is necessary to do it. I mean, they even… they put a soft –  what they call the soft capturing on the end of Hubble in the last mission, but then they stopped using the shuttle, which was the only vehicle could that could grab onto it.

Alexa

Yeah, it's unfortunate in many ways.

Dr. Justin Walsh

I'm being Debbie Downer now. Sorry.

[laughter]

Alexa

It's OK, it's… it's the reality. I mean, aside from just the ISS.

Where do you see the future of the field of space archaeology going in the, you know, in the future you were talking about the really great integration between space archaeology and future engineering, which is something I had never thought about before. But that makes sense how studying how we are currently utilizing these things as a culture and as a people is going to inform design for future space stations, but in addition to that you know, where do you see space archaeology moving forward?

Dr. Justin Walsh

First, I would say that that transit from point A, the archaeological research to point B, the impact on future designs is unrealized as yet right? I mean, that's our hope, that's what a motivating concern for us is to be able to make people's lives in space happier, more productive. Whatever you want to call it. And so we hope that that happens there. You know, what I'm really hoping for ultimately, is that we're going to have a new generation of space archaeologists who started out that way.

So I started out as a classical archaeologist, especially studying the Greeks and the Greeks’ interaction with other cultures around the Mediterranean. Alice started out doing lithic studies so so Paleolithic artifacts in Australia and came to space. I'm really excited to see how students who start out by thinking about space culture, where they go with it. I could say for my own part, obviously there's so much more work to be done on ISS. We have the first publication of our results from the experiment we did on the space station in ‘22. That's coming out, but we've got. at least two more of those articles to do the facilities article that I mentioned a few minutes ago.

The heritage stuff that I described, I'm also, you know, thinking about how we can use archaeology to make a case for space as an environment that we should be respecting. So, if I unpack that a little bit, you know there are all these ideas about going to the moon and exploiting water, and helium 3 and platinum or  rare earths. All these resources that we think maybe if not abundant, at least present there. 

And, you know, there's this kind of… that's a real motivation behind the new space phenomenon, right? It's like, we can solve a lot of our problems on Earth if we go to the Moon or we go to asteroids and we exploit those resources, we extract those resources without thinking about the fact that these are environments just like the environments that we've already damaged or destroyed here on Earth, whose impacts, you know we're now having…we're now having to pay that bill. So, how can we use archaeology to start to get people to think about these places differently? Well, heritage is one way.

By saying like, “if we take the Tranquility Base site seriously, we're not just going to say we protect the objects, but we're gonna protect the the moonscape there where the footprints are.” Those are currently not. Nothing can protect them and not even like the kind of the say so of California or the other states because no government can have any sovereignty or jurisdiction over any territory in space, so nobody could protect those footprints. 

Somebody could go there and like, dig up the outline of a footprint and bring that back and then put it on eBay, that kind of thing and nobody could stop them. Absolutely nobody could stop it, and I think that if we think about heritage as a thing that we like and want to respect and preserve, and that could be associated with the landscape, then maybe we can attribute other values to it. 

Thinking about Mars as well, you may recall that in 2022, a year after it landed, Perseverance Rover passed by the site of its own back shell and parachute impact, and from about 500 meters took a photograph of it. When I saw that image, I immediately called, emailed to everybody I could at JPL and said, “You've got to send Ingenuity, you've got to send Ingenuity ‘cause you've got this helicopter and you can fly over and document it as a heritage site. This is your chance!” 

And they wrote back, “Well. Heritage, schmeritage. We're interested in doing what you're saying for an engineering autopsy because we want to see how the equipment performed.” It's like, fine, great. Whatever it is, it solves my problem too. And they did it. They took an amazing series of images of that parachute and the back shell in the landscape there and that is the best… they’re like 8 cell phone camera resolution images, but you could even stitch them together as a 3D model using photogrammetry to really be able to put yourself a bit in that territory and experience it. But additionally, It's a document that will now last until the next time that somebody else ever goes back. They're either using robots or, you know, personally as a human going to visit that site. And so we could compare what happened to that site between 2022 and whenever that happens. That's really useful and good. 

In addition, I am collaborating with the state archaeologist of Colorado and also of California and have had discussions with the two manufacturers of those objects. The backshell was Lockheed Martin. The parachute was developed by a company here in California and Orange County. I've been talking to them and saying what I want to do is develop what's called a Historic American Engineering Record, what heritage people call a HAER. H-A-E-R, HAER Record. So the HAER is one of a series of templates put out by the National Park Service that is an official way of documenting important objects or buildings or landscapes around America or that were developed by Americans.

And so I'm going to make a Historic American Engineering Record for the back shell and the parachute of Perseverance because they're well documented in their current location in a way that we don't have for other sites in space.

I can get… I can get a number for a record for the back shell for Colorado because Lockheed Martin built it there, and I can get the parachute for JPL and the company that built the parachute here in California from the State Office of Historic Resources in California and put together that documentation into this template, submit it to the Park Service. They know that this is coming and they're very interested in it.

If they accept it, then it will be submitted as a record to the Library of Congress and that would be the first time that any heritage off of the Earth would have been documented according to federal standards. And the point of that is not just to be like, “ohh look, heritage on Mars!” We've documented it, but also to say that Mars is a place where we have heritage and it should be valued. And it is valued according to the US federal government, which is hopefully we'll have accepted this record officially, and it starts a conversation about how we value these places that are not on the Earth.

Also, you know, like how do we think about Low Earth Orbit? How do we think about, you know, the oldest object that is still in orbit, which is the Vanguard satellite launched in 1958? Do we leave it there? Do we bring it back, right? It's in a stable orbit. It's not going anywhere. We know exactly where it is. We can track it. But it could tell a story here on Earth. And it could tell us, and it could also direct people's attention to the problems of lower Earth orbit right now.

Anyway, these are things that I think about for the future. Arecibo Radio Telescope is another great example, right? How can we preserve that, following the collapse of the instrumentation platform? Those are a couple of the sites that I’m working on and in addition to the ISS project, but any site that's on Earth that is associated with space, anything that's in space right now, all of that is stuff that current or future colleagues could look at, investigate, try to understand, tell stories with. And I hope that they do.

Alexa

That's fascinating, as you're talking about all these different things, too. It reminded me of, you know, some of the efforts that current companies are making to minimize space debris in… like in Low Earth Orbit, for instance, and starting that conversation, like you said about heritage and what should we leave behind, what should we keep. You know, if these vehicles are out there picking up pieces of space debris, should they be touching some of the more historic satellites or should they be leaving them there? You know, should they be repurposing them into junk for other things or how should they be treated?

Dr Justin Walsh

This is a conversation that absolutely has to be had and hasn't been had yet, but it's really important. And even I remember Aerospace Corporation was experimenting with what they called “design for demise.” They were trying to figure out how they could build a spacecraft for Low Earth orbit that would completely disintegrate, guaranteed completely disintegrate, because of the materials that they were made from in the heat of reentry.

I mean, it doesn't mean that some of it wouldn't be still in the upper atmosphere as we discussed a second ago, but that was so to completely eliminate risk to the ocean, to the land, et cetera. What are the implications of that for highly significant missions? Could you build a Hubble, Hubble 2, or a JWST out of these materials? And if you did, how would we preserve it for the future? That's not a thing that people who are designing spacecraft think about.

Emily

I remember a few years ago. I don't know if it got traction, but there was a nonprofit that was trying to get Tranquility Base to be recognized as a UNESCO heritage site. But even when that was happening, they were acknowledging that there wasn't any sort of enforcement infrastructure in place to protect it with that certification. 

Dr. Justin Walsh

Right. That… that's I believe you're talking about For All Moonkind…

Emily

Yeah.

Dr. Justin Walsh

…which is led by a Lawyer. And certain of my colleagues were asked, (I mean, I was also asked, but I declined), asked to serve on an Advisory Board of that group. And I think that the legal side of things won out over the heritage professional side of things. And so I'm personally skeptical about that organization and its degree of expertise in these issues at the moment. But they have… there's no doubt that they've been a leader. They've been very prominent publicly and, you know, ultimately advocating for the protection of these sites is important. That For All Moonkind is also there, their attitude is “let's protect those sites so that we can develop the rest of the Moon.”

Emily

Ah.

Dr. Justin Walsh

And so that's…That was why I declined to be a part of it. But if some protections happen, I mean so NASA put out a white paper in 2011, that was guidelines to space faring entities about approach to lunar historic lunar sites. And Beth, actually Beth O’Leary, participated in the writing of that. So there's like NASA has requested with no legal force at all, but has requested a “keep out” zone around Apollo 11 and Apollo 17, and has designated kind of circle boundaries around the other Apollo modules, but don't say it's not like a hard “keep out.”

We actually know, in fact, that the zone should probably be much further away, given how far we now know that lunar regolith travels when it's hit by rocket exhaust, that you probably have to land over the lunar horizon from the site that you want to visit. That would be the only safe way to do it.

So you know, we don't even know how to operate safely on the moon, yet.

If you remember the Google Lunar X prize competition, they were actually incentivizing their teams to land within 500 meters of a previous landing site. They didn't say whether you know Ranger, Apollo, Surveyor, or anything else that's on the Moon. But a previous landing site, and that they would give a team an extra $1,000,000 and they actually called this the Heritage bonus prize.

And my student who wrote that term paper that I told you about back in 2008, she discovered this cause it was a year after that, that prize was announced and we were so concerned about this that we jointly wrote an op-ed saying that the Heritage bonus ought to be withdrawn because it was incentivizing teams to get close. And these teams that had shoestring budgets, no experience, had never tried to do this…You know, NASA has trouble doing it. And look what happened. Beresheet was one of the competitors. Hakudo was one of the competitors. They crashed as they were within 1000 meters of the surface, they got all that way and then they crashed 1000 meters away. 

This was actually what we were worried about. A catastrophic near success where they actually crashed into a site. Luckily, those two teams did not target a site, but that was what we were worried about, and it's actually what happened so we need to be much, much, much more careful and more thoughtful about planning missions that get anywhere near these sites.

That would be my…hopefully my warning to anybody who's thinking about it. I mean,  that's all I can do is warn but..

Emily

Yeah.

Dr. Justin Walsh

Until we have an international protocol that says this stuff can be protected and this is how it's protected, which hopefully someday that'll happen.

Emily

Hopefully, definitely soon, especially with… I would imagine with all of the international protocols that they have to develop around the later Artemis missions, but we will see with it will be really interesting to see what happens. 

Dr. Justin Walsh

Now, with China, for example, or Russia or any of the other groups that don't want anything to do with Artemis, that's the problem. That's the problem with the Artemis Accords.

Emily

Yep.

Dr. Justin Walsh

Yes.

Emily

You've mentioned future colleagues a couple times as we've been talking. Do you have any advice for people interested in this field, or interested in entering this field of space archaeology?

Dr. Justin Walsh

Yeah, I think the main thing would be, “Be creative.” Because the doors are not open to us, right? So even when we had a payload on the space station and so we were working directly with NASA and we were sponsored by the ISS National Lab to do our experiment. There were things that we asked for that we didn't get access to, like the actual crew timeline of activities, so that we would have a better sense of what was actually happening in a given day on the space station. So we turned to the on-orbit status reports, which are like, a summary of that, a very, very basic summary of that as our next best because it was public. Really think about what is the evidence that's available and how can it be used to answer questions that are interesting to you, and what are the questions that it can answer, right? As open minded as you possibly can be, because given that the doors are not open and funding is not even limited, it's basically nonexistent. You're going to have to be imaginative to do this at the moment, hopefully that will change in the future. But at the moment that's what I would say. Just really, really like sky’s the limit. What can you do with the limited stuff that's available to you?

Emily

Thank you so, so much. And also because  we're trying to be very mindful of your time, we could keep talking about this for ages.But another question we have for you is: where can people find you online? We'll make sure to list and link the scholarship that you've referenced in our notes. As you've mentioned, both of us are very online. But where can people find you on various platforms?

Dr. Justin Walsh

Yeah. So I'm less frequently on Twitter these days, but I am at @JSTPWALSH, JSTP Walsh, on Twitter and also on Blue Sky where I'm kind of a little bit more active these days. We also have a Twitter account for the project.That is @ISSarchaeology.

And we have a website with a blog. The blog doesn't get updated that often, but it's like when we have big announcements, we put a story there. So that's issarchaeology.org.

And those would be kind of the main ways I would say to follow us. Yeah, there's also on the website, there's also a news page which collects all of the stories. And I'll put this podcast on there when it gets released as well. But yeah, so if you want to look back at all the coverage that we've received for the various things we've done. You can check that out there too.

Emily

Perfect. Thank you so, so much for speaking with us today!

Dr. Justin Walsh

That was all my all my pleasure. Thank you. Really enjoyed it! 

—

[Outro Music, “Space” by Music Unlimited] 

Emily

Thank you so much for listening to this episode! We hope you enjoyed learning more about space archaeology. 

Alexa

After you check out the ISS Archaeological Project and all the incredible work Justin and Alice are doing, feel free to hop on over to socials and check out the Art Astra Podcast if you haven't already. We're on Instagram, Twitter or X, BlueSky, and Facebook @artastrapodcast.

Emily

If you like what you hear, please share our show with friends, colleagues, go full town crier, and vote for us in the Women in Podcasting Awards, anytime now through October 1st. 

Emily & Alexa
Til next time!