Around 17 years ago, back in December of 2002, I was fortunate enough to jag a media visit to witness the launch of the New Skies NSS-6 satellite from Kourou in French Guiana. It’s where the European Space Agency has its spaceport and where Arianespace does most of its launches from. There are a few standout memories for me, notably that the sound and feel of the launch is just as impressive as the visual aspect, and that it afforded a trip to Devil’s Island, where I could see the actual cell that held “Papillon”, the famous escapee who went on to write a best selling autobiographical novel of his experiences in the French penal colony.

While much of the rest of the experience has faded into memory, I’m always reminded of that time through a model of a truck carrying a replica Arianespace rocket that I picked up in a gift shop in downtown Kourou. I’ve nurtured that rocket memento across four continents and out of the grasping hands of two small boys who are now large teenagers. It’s one of the very few items I’ve held on to during the intervening 17 years and I’ve often wondered why I was particularly sentimental about that truck and rocket combination, which others would have passed off as a child’s toy. But after reading Alice Gorman’s book on space archaeology – Dr Space Junk vs The Universe – I now realise the behaviour wasn’t a strange as I suspected. As she notes, from the start of the Cold War people have been moulding everything from food and drink to toys and playparks into rockets to mark our fascination with space. These items are all part of the world views shaped by space technology and are among a range of things that space archaeologists, like Dr Gorman, can investigate.

Many Space & Satellite AU readers will be familiar with Gorman and her work, but for those that aren’t she is a trained archaeologist, with enough dirt under the finger nails at dig sites to earn her chops in the field. How she came to be one of the foremost experts in the burgeoning field of space archaeology sets the scene early in the book. It’s a fascinating story in its own right, but the short version is she had an epiphany on the balcony of an old Queenslander while nursing a beer and looking up at the stars (and satellites). And we can be thankful she did otherwise she might never have got to writing this fascinating account of Australia’s early space history and why it’s important to preserve our space heritage, both down on earth and up in the skies.

I like to consider myself reasonably knowledgeable on Australia’s early space endeavours, particularly the activities at Woomera, our role in tracking a whole range of space missions, and the media event that was the re-entry of Skylab into outback Australia. But there’s so much more and Gorman tells it in a way that relays the history but also pushes her narrative of the importance of preserving these events and technologies so that others can make sense of them in the future.

For example, I had no idea about the Dust Detector Experiment, part of wider scientific experiment that had been conceived by Australian scientist Brian O’Brien when he was professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. It went on a number of Apollo missions to the Moon in the 1960s and was still providing data until 1977. That tiny device allowed O’Brien and his research assistants to learn the impacts of dust on the Moon and continues to provide evidence that can guide how humans might build infrastructure on the Moon as well as how they can protect lunar heritage sites abraded by dust storms.

Another eye-opening account covers the efforts of a group of “backyard” amateur scientists in Melbourne in the 1960s who built their own satellite – Australis Oscar 5 – which is still circling the Earth almost 50 years since it was launched in 1970. Not only did they build the satellite, they also built their own tracking station on the roof of the old physics building at Melbourne Uni using old car parts, second-hand electric motors and pieces of an air-conditioning plant.

“When it is possible to study orbital hardware from space, these home-made satellites will stand out from the thousands of slick commercial, military and scientific satellites by their appearance. Project OSCAR initiated a tradition of volunteer, international space co-operation that continues to this day,” she notes in the book

Of course the Oscar 5 is just part of a growing stream of old satellites and assorted space junk that is filling our skies and will be visible from central Queensland verandahs on a clear night over a cold beer. It’s an issue that is starting to occupy the minds of governments around the world and Gorman also devotes space to the topic in the book. Her position is, not surprisingly, informed by her archaeologist training and she would like to see some of the more significant satellites remain in space if there is no risk involved. As she notes, heritage management is now a routine part of any terrestrial industry or development and the space industry should be no different.

“If we’re going to make decisions about what to destroy, let’s do it from an informed position. We need to know which objects do have cultural significance in orbit, from local, national and global perspectives. And we need to understand how their changing orbits may relate to collision risks.”

I’ve only scratched the surface of  Dr Space Junk vs The Universe, but if it sounds appealing in this brief synopsis, rest assured it’s a riveting read that is both expertly written and entertaining. There’s also a great “Conversations” interview with Dr Gorman by the ABC’s Richard Fidler somewhere out there in podcast-land if you want an appetiser. The book itself is available for purchase online at NewSouth Books for $29.99.

Geoff Long (this appears in Space & Satellite AU)