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Before Apollo reached the Moon, there was Ranger. And it did not land, it crashed.
From 1959-65, NASA's Ranger program was tasked with delivering images of the lunar surface for the upcoming astronaut missions. However, it was only after six failures that Rangers VII-IX finally delivered what NASA needed. With its success, it became the first spacecraft to land on a planetary body. This talk delves into the implications of an Earth-based entity-the Ranger spacecraft & its microbial hitchhikers-crashing into an extraterrestrial planetary environment of unknown composition. To advise on this interplanetary encounter-one that could violate NASA's stringent restrictions of biological exchange from one planetary body to another-a cadre of NASA scientists, US Army Biological Laboratories, & various commercial corporations were called upon. What emerged from their meeting was a reconfiguration of biopower on an interplanetary scale, in which bios was expanded to potentially include non-Earthly life.
Burton makes space for Ranger's other impacts, involving interplanetary multispecies relations, neoliberal geontopower logics, & prestige politics. The 1960s rendering of life into categories of purity & contagion-earthly & extraterrestrial-simultaneously made possible de-centering Earth itself, with material & affective consequences. What becomes of humans, of biology from Earth, when Ranger's immediate success & the future of NASA lunar operations hinges on institutional requirements to eliminate all animate terran life on the spacecraft? The Ranger program's history provides insights into our current outer space moment, as NASA prepares for the return of human's physical presence to the Moon.
Event Speaker
Dana Burton, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research
Event Information
Contact historyofscience@nyu.edu with any questions about in-person attendance & scienceandsociety@columbia.edu with any other questions.
This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.
Sponsoring Organizations:
Columbia University in the City of New York
NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
The New York Academy of Medicine
The New York Academy of Sciences
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