Plans: Envisioning the Future in Space

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Neal
Keyword(s):  
Space Station ◽  
Political Support ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Human Spaceflight ◽  
Blue Ribbon ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
The Future

The sixth chapter, “Plans: Envisioning the Future in Space,” surveys the episodic effort to redefine the purpose and chart the course of future human spaceflight beyond the space station. It examines the effort by presidents, NASA planners, and blue-ribbon commissions to present energizing ideas and images--to generate a new imaginary--for expanding (or curbing) the human presence in space. These exercises in charting a way into the future typically failed, in part because they were ineffectively framed for consensus or political support. The current spaceflight imaginary puts humans on the moon again, or on Mars, or visiting an asteroid at some unspecified time.

Space Station: Campaigning for a Permanent Human Presence in Space

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Neal
Keyword(s):  
Space Shuttle ◽  
Space Station ◽  
Human Spaceflight ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
The Face ◽  
Actual Configuration ◽  
Permanent Presence

Chapter 5, “Space Station: Campaigning for a Permanent Human Presence in Space,” transitions from the space shuttle as the focus of U.S. human spaceflight to NASA’s push for a permanent space station from the 1980s into the new century. The space station became the new icon for justifying humans living and working off the planet. The focus here is the constant effort to shape and reshape both the rationale for the station and its actual configuration in the face of mounting opposition. Two phrases served to reshape the meaning of spaceflight once a space station claimed the agenda: “the next logical step” and “a permanent presence in space.”

China's space station will pay political dividend

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Space Station ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Human Spaceflight ◽  
Private Space ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Apollo Mission ◽  
The One ◽  
Moon Landing ◽  
New Phase

Subject China's human spaceflight programme. Significance China’s human spaceflight programme has advanced steadily, with seemingly unwavering political support. It is now ready to begin a new phase: construction of a permanent crewed space station. Impacts Institutions in other countries will benefit from opportunities to use China’s space station. Beijing’s consistent political commitment to human spaceflight may make other governments see it as a more reliable partner than Washington. China’s space station may compete with US private space stations for business from non-US clients. China has no public timeline for a human moon landing, but is putting the necessary elements in place. A Chinese crewed moon programme would likely be designed to be sustainable, unlike the one-off Apollo mission.

Memory: Preserving Meaning

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Neal
Keyword(s):  
International Space Station ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Space Station ◽  
Human Spaceflight ◽  
International Space ◽  
Commercial Space ◽  
The Past ◽  
Constructive Dialogue ◽  
The Future ◽  
Space Transportation

The last chapter, “Memory: Preserving Meaning,” considers what the end of the shuttle era meant. With the orbiters retired to museums, the International Space Station assembled, the astronaut corps dwindled, the future-oriented Constellation program canceled, and NASA’s Orion spacecraft and industry’s commercial space transportation still under development in 2016, the future of U.S. human spaceflight was uncertain. Prospects for new human spaceflight rationales are unsettled, but museums that preserve the relics of the shuttle era are busy shaping public memory and the meaning of the past. Might there be some constructive dialogue between future planners and past explainers?

Space Medicine Propelling Earth-Based Medicine for the Advantage of Human on Earth – A Vision Beyond 2020

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kris See
Keyword(s):  
International Space Station ◽  
Good Condition ◽  
Space Station ◽  
Gear Up ◽  
Space Medicine ◽  
International Space ◽  
The Future ◽  
Based Medicine

What will be the future of medicine a decade from now? What difficulties related with preventing, detecting, and treating diseases will have been unraveled? How will space medicine make an impact?. Today as compared to previously, it is the role of space medicine to gear up astronauts sufficiently for their missions and also to maintain their health in good condition. Moreover, the exclusive and new environmental surroundings existing in space continuously propose prospects to validate theories and assumptions established by earth-based medicine and recognize likely mistakes and disparities, as we have been observing approximately more than a decade with outcomes for example, from the International Space Station.

The future of human spaceflight

2001 ◽  
Vol 49 (3-10) ◽  
pp. 495-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
M Reichert
Keyword(s):  
Human Spaceflight ◽  
The Future

Waste

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-150
Author(s):  
Marissa K. López
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Nuclear Waste ◽  
South Texas ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Future ◽  
Similar Disease

Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of the mass graves of unidentified immigrants discovered in South Texas in 2014. How, confronted with these decayed, dismembered border bodies, can literature and art move us beyond horror into a more just tomorrow? To answer, the author turns to two Chicanx science fiction novels: Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) and Pita and Sánchez’s Lunar Braceros (2009). Morales’s novel begins in colonial Mexico with a tale of La Mona, an unidentified plague similar to AIDS, and ends in a Los Angeles of the future, now known as LAMEX, beset by a similar disease curable only by the infusion of blood from “pure” Mexicans and threatened by waves of trash, which have taken on the characteristics of an animated organism, rolling in from the Pacific. Lunar Braceros, about nuclear waste workers of the future living on the moon, presents trash as a similarly transformative threat. Both novels offer conflicted visions of the human body as simultaneously of and apart from the land, a vulnerable but powerful catalyzing agent for change. The author frames this chapter with analyses of works in Mexican Canadian digital installation artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architecture series.

Things to Come

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Marks
Keyword(s):  
Operating System ◽  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Environmental Stress ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Space Station ◽  
Political Control ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come ◽  
Near Future ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter deals with of recent novels and films that project forward into the near future, suggesting where surveillance might be heading. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, surveillance is figured into a future world of interplanetary environmentalism, in protecting planets and helping to monitor the ‘rewilding’ of an environmentally devastated Earth. Neill Blomkamp’s film Elysium fashions another Earth under environmental stress, patrolled by stringent surveillance operatives and systems that also screen the put-upon inhabitants from the eponymous eutopian space station literally and metaphorically above them. The film concentrates on the utopian urges of that population in their endeavour to overcome oppressive monitoring and receive medical treatment reserved for those on Elysium. Dave Eggers conjures up an apparently eutopian hi-tech company, The Circle, in his novel of the same name, representing how new technologies manipulate data and images for economic, social and political control. Spike Jonze’s film Her explores the relationship between surveillance and intimacy through the interaction between a human and an operating system. As with Eggers’ The Circle, Her investigates how data confuses definitions of identities as it allows for the fusion of surveillance and intimacy. These novels and films suggest some of the ways in which new forms of surveillance promise or threaten to fashion the worlds of the future. As with all such texts, they suggest options and present narratives and characters that enable readers and viewers to think and act so that the future approximates the eutopian rather than the dystopian.

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