The Astronautical discourse in an English primary school during the Principia ESA mission: A critical analysis

Abstract

ESA and the UK Space Agency have gone to considerable efforts to promote the Principia mission of Astronaut Tim Peake to school children in the United Kingdom. This paper describes a “Space Day” at an English primary school where, with the consent of the Head Teacher and Class Teachers, children aged around 10 or 11 years old received a modified presentation of the standard Principia presentation, and responded with drawings and written personal statements addressing the question “I want/do not want to be an Astronaut because …”. Accepting the validity of these ephemeral items as an expression of epistemology, these statements and drawings were subjected to a content analysis. In a further process of Critical Grounded Theory the key groupings were compared with established characteristic domains in space exploration (e.g. explorer or advocate). A construct found to be helpful is Foucault's concept of a “heterotopia”, which is discussed in reference to installations of space technology and especially the orbiting space stations. The conclusion looks forward to further application of heterotopia to the popular perception of space travel.

Introduction

The significance of space travel and exploration in mass and popular culture has been expressed in a cultural shorthand as a “Space Race” between two nations or systems. The expression was first coined as an ideological opposition between the planned economy of the Soviet Union and the capitalist system of the United States, but it is now applied to competition between India and China, or more broadly, as an “Indo-Pacific Space Race” (a term used by Ref. [26]). Similarly, the term Astropolitik has been applied ([10]; criticised by Macdonald [19]) to a competition or race between nations to gain ascendancy over the other in the control of land related to orbital parameters of space vehicles and space-based technology and weaponry that may have some strategic value in any aggressive conflict between them.

At the outset, the context stands aside from Gorman's [15, p. 164] description: “the dominant interpretation of space material has been what I call the Space Race model”. She challenges this model and proposes that it masks “the really interesting questions about space technology” (ibid, p165). In this dominant interpretation, references also abound to the “Right Stuff” of which astronauts are said to be made.

Alternatives to this are given by challenges from feminist narratives (e.g Refs. [6], [25]) and the contribution of home and family [18]. But this culture of space exploration might also be understood, and the polemic tested, by the empirical recording of expression and views.

Ormrod [22, p. 119] describes empirically three main themes of fantasy found in what he calls “the pro-space movement”:

• “Trips, often into the Earth's orbit, in which the activist experiences the pleasure of floating around in zero gravity”.

• “Seeing the Earth from space as a unified (and in many accounts insignificant) whole

• “Fantasies about the development and settlement of other planets, the Moon and asteroids”.

Although these factors can be sought in the account of the data given below, the study does not assume a stance either in favour of or against space travel.

As a step towards this aim of revisiting the discourse that exists, this study offers a critical analysis of the discourse expressed by young school students in England. It records the outcome in text and image of a “Space Day” prepared at a primary school run by a Local Authority in England attended by Year 4/5 school students (aged 10–11 years old), at the mid-point of ESA's Principia mission to the International Space Station.¹ A “Space Day” is an educational event in a school which sits at the culmination of teaching about the solar system and space exploration, often with an encouragement of learning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

In preparing this analysis, the paper adopts a critical methodology as a theoretical perspective grounded in some categories which are applied to the nature of space travel. The “Space Day” event is then considered as a gallery in which the material studied here is shown.² Written and visual data obtained are reported and discussed by reference to the grounded categories, and the data are studied again through a process of retroduction.

The methodology allows for a preliminary model to be prepared, then as statements are assigned to this preliminary model, insights allow re-coding and new categories and relationships shown.

Finally, in its base in England and the Principia mission, which employed an astronaut of British national origin, the study offers a particular insight into the discourse by reference to country and age. This is relevant to the British and European agencies sponsoring space travel from England as well as to the educational authorities there. More generally, the exercise as a whole contributes to preparation for a critical analysis of discourse about human space travel, which can be drawn upon in future work.

On arrival to the classroom one January morning the rear of the classroom showed traces of previous work done about astronomy and space travel, in that a display board had been made showing pictures of planets and stars, and statements in “speech bubbles” were shown. Books selected on this theme were available for the school students to borrow, and there was a large poster showing the solar system.

Before a presentation, the sides of the classroom, and the front area occupied by the teacher, which the students faced, was modified by adding to the walls a selection of planetary posters provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) at Open Days at ESTEC, and a very large poster of Tim Peake and the Principia mission, including the mission logo, which had been downloaded from the website of the United Kingdom Space Agency and the European Space Agency.³

Up to about fifty students attended a presentation downloaded from this website. The presentation was modified as permission was given on the site to do so (“Please feel free to use and adapt the slides as you wish. Don't feel you have to get through them all!”) The modifications included references to amateur satellites and included this author's own pictures and resources, including a time exposure photograph of the transit of the International Space Station at dusk, and a demonstration of voice relay by radio through a 1:1 model satellite, known by its small and regular dimensions as a “Cubesat”, using a hand held co-axial dual polarised VHF/UHF satellite antenna known to the ham radio community as an “Arrow” antenna, and photographs broadcast over ham radio from the Mir space station and the International Space Station between 1998 and 2016, taken from the author's website.⁴ The photographs in this instance had been recorded in and transmitted from the space vessel.

In the concluding minutes of the lesson the students asked their own questions. In reply the presentation drew on materials referenced in the Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) sheet from the Principia website, including videos of how hair is washed and the toilet used in space. They also asked original questions such as the recycling and consumption of drinking water, and eating chocolate in space.

After a mid-morning break two classes returned to address a question: “I want to be an astronaut because …” or “I don't want to be an Astronaut because …. ” Some students declared “I'm in the middle” and wrote accordingly. School students could choose which of the three to address. Data was made available from two classes. Each student produced a short essay; in the one class this was generally less than a page of A4 in handwriting, and in the other class this was written on the cut-out format of an astronaut. The students of the first enumerated class also drew pictures following their essay and free expression was encouraged. At the conclusion of the morning all school students were thanked and told that their work was appreciated and would be taken away and shown to people in the space community who would find it interesting. Teachers later gave the school children some authentic gifts about space exploration (promotional stickers and badges which had been gathered previously at ESA's open days at ESTEC).

This paper seeks a theoretical approach to the epistemology of space exploration that can embrace text and image produced by children, and move forward with it to gain insight into human space exploration as it is perceived in any society. To do this requires a diversity of source material and a broad epistemology. Michel Foucault [12] distinguishes a philosophy of general truth, for which we can consider the equivalence of texts from a Derridian school and a school of critical theory. The approach permitted by Jacques Derrida encourages the validity of ephemeral text and image, and is distinct from that of Jürgen Habermas, representing the Frankfurt School, where critical thought provides what Foucault calls “an ontology of the present” (ibid) that is the specificity that comes from techniques of analysis. Habermas [17, pp. 13–34] is scathing about general texts and prefers a structure of analysis within cultural studies as well as in science. This distinction between Derrida and Habermas is important, because on the one hand we can allow general observations of texts and images, and on the other offer simultaneously a structured, critical analysis.

This application of critical analysis stands above the disciplines of science, culture, or art, but values them equally as analytical disciplines, and allows a composite relationship of discourse between actors to be understood. The overall study may extend to making a contribution to a new and developing “discursive formation” of Astrosociology, one of whose sub-studies is the relation of human space travel to “Terrestrial Spacefaring Societies” [24].

In contrast, the French Structuralist School, notably Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, break completely with Marxism and describe studies of this human discourse in a way that allows all forms of communication and expression. To Derrida we owe a metaphysics of ontology and epistemology which permit the understanding of thought behind the word, and therefore the use of ephemeral materials as a valid text, including of course (by reference to his eponymous oeuvre) post cards [9]. Derrida notably writes in a literary-philosophical style about truth and falsehood in communication beyond the script. Such post cards and postal ephemera have been used directly to illuminate written and machine-produced communication, falsehood and the ideophonetic Chinese script [30].

Although, like Derrida, his writing can be rather dense and opaque to read, especially in translation, Foucault draws upon a literary-philosophical heritage [29], and in many ways acts a bridge between the two ontologies. In defining Structuralism, Foucault wrote: [13, p. 22] that it was “the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other – that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration.”

In his early work, Foucault [11, p. 41] went some way towards critical analysis. He considered that:

“Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, [such] a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation [emphasis original]thus avoiding words that are already overladen with conditions and consequences, and in any case inadequate to the task of designating such a dispersion, such as ‘science’, ‘ideology’, ‘theory’ or ‘domain of objectivity’.”

As he elaborates in The Order of Things, within the present-day episteme or paradigm the word is interposed between self and object [29] so the act of carrying out a categorisation – an act to differentiate – is an action to point a name at an object. At large is the issue of how to point and what the target of the pointing should be.

In relation to politics, he deduces [11, p. 214] that “One would try to show whether the political behaviour of a society, a group or a class is not shot through with a particular, describable, discursive practice.” Habermas discerns a process of deliberation in his “deliberative democracy”. But Foucault seeks to reveal the structure of “power-knowledge formations” [16, pp. 205–208].

Whilst text and image are permitted in this study, a mere catalogue of gathered data amounts to little more than an ordering of description. To extract predictive meaning, capable of generalisation, requires a structured, critical analysis. Belfrage and Hauf [3] tackle this dilemma of expression by promoting “Critical Grounded Theory” (CGT) to evaluate and understand the data. In this method, a theory is developed having been grounded in an initial categorisation, refined by an iteration through the data, then returned in a process of retroduction to a further iteration of the data. This process is empirical in its source data and grounded in established theory, but progresses the analysis to a further level.

A central feature of this study is that participants are asked to consider both the arguments for and against their fantasy participation on space travel. The study is therefore not grounded in terms of a stance for or against the proposal, but seeks to stimulate a discourse about it, by asking the participants to consider themselves travelling in space.

As a preliminary and dispassionate grounding, the study seeks to locate participants within a key set of categories of humans who travel in space, as provided by Parkinson [23]. He considers that the rationales of those humans who participate can be grouped into six: Explorers, Adventurers, Colonizers, Merchants, Profiteers and Technologists. The participants are being asked to consider themselves as adopting one of these roles, whose rationales are summarised in Table 1 below:

These categories of data serve this study as a preliminary ordering of the texts and drawings produced by the school students. The continuous nature of the re-ordering allows for further categories of discourse to be added.

To this preliminary data set is added what Foucault called a “heterotopia”, which can be thought of as a place defined not by location but by function and direction; he gives the examples of a cemetery, a ship, or a honeymoon [13]. As an example, consider the a Japanese legend of the Edo period depicted on a scroll, the Ise Monogatari [21, p. 35], the scrolled image at the end of Episode 9, read as it unfolds from right to left, shows first the ferryman (without whom the boat cannot move) with his oar at the rear of the boat, then the commanding person who had commissioned him, followed by the rest of the party looking in the direction of travel, and only then the birds whose novelty depicts a stage in the legend. Thus, an embedded (political) power structure can be discerned in the heterotopia which takes the form of a ship.

Essentially the heterotopia is the location of a variety of activities around a common defining purpose. Such heterotopias may also be found in space exploration, and the concept of a ship as a heterotopia is applied in particular to a space vehicle in motion.

MacRae [20] “explores the potential of the heterotopia as a way to point us to think differently about children's art making.” She considers explicitly that because a heterotopia is neither representative nor interpretative but stands in its own right, there is no requirement to perform an action of representation or interpretation of a child's art object.

Similarly, to consider the International Space Station (or the Tiangong space station) as a heterotopia allows it to be a ship in motion operating under its own rules, while it has a political expression as well as a spatial one in any particular moment. A travelling heterotopia has a distinct and special property.

In an alternative description, the joint operation of the American “Mars Explorer Rovers” on the surface of Mars and their earthbound control centre is described [7, p. 224] as an “exploration system”, in which a sociotechnical system [31] places technical actions within a setting of human social relations. The setting may contain “distributed meetings”. However, this description lacks the dimension of embedded power.

Foucault's embedding of power within nodes of a network [11, p. 25/6] can also be applied here. Redfield [28, p. 807] considers that Outer Space is comprised of “far-flung, shifting networks”. To extend this description, the architecture of space exploration comprises locations on Earth and in Outer Space which are nodes on a network, a term not restricted to those networks explicit in telecommunications (telecommunications stations on earth and satellites in orbits around the solar system), but including sites and installations of space research set aside from local communities, their location on Earth or in orbit around it being chosen as an expression of this network.

The European Space Agency's control centre at Kourou, identical by its function to other control centres all over the world, might be considered as one of Augés “Non-Places” [1]. Identified by Redfield from its picture post card [27, p. 252], the control centre at Kourou is located within a région of France, French Guiana, under the political control and military protection of its nation state; and is in a specific location because of its astro-geographical function (launches into the Atlantic Ocean). It is useful to consider Kourou, and places like it, as a heterotopia related to space travel.

Gorman [15, pp. 163–4] notes that “From 1936 to 2006, a body of material culture related to the exploration of space has grown both on Earth and in space. These sites and objects include rocket ranges and launch facilities, research, development and manufacture sites, and ground stations on Earth; space stations; satellites, upper rocket stages and debris in earth orbit; lunar landing sites and lunar orbiting material; and satellites, probes and landers on and around nearly every other body in the solar system”. Her work refers to, in particular, the rocket range built after World War II in Woomera, Australia, and its consideration within the context of de-colonialisation and coterminous “Conquest of Space” (ibid, p166). Redfield also notes “colonial processes at work in the growth of the space industry” [28, p. 157].

Gorman [14] compares Kourou with Woomera, built in the gibber desert from 1947 as a rocket range for the testing of rockets and the launch of satellites to the North West from a purpose-built settlement of the same name.

On Earthbound nodes, and in future extra-terrestrial communities, the political power in the function of the node, which defines the heterotopia, is embedded in the Range or Control Centre which is the node on the Outer Space network, and to the colony or garrison town which accompanies it in a separate, familiar process of colonisation.

Both Kourou and Woomera have factors in common: they house activities around a common purpose; they are chosen in reference to astronomical significance; they act as a node on a purposed network; they have a distinct identity on that network different from its physical location; and they can be considered as an expression of colonialist imperatives leading to the displacement of the local populations.

A heterotopia, then, is a useful concept in describing the architecture and archaeology of space exploration. The data model in N'Vivo would allow for the expression of the CNES control centre at Kourou [27] as both a heterotopia and as a political astro-geographical astro-political asset. Additionally, if according to [8]; “one can consider the Moon as a heterotopic space” (and a fortiori a lunar cemetery, as she describes) in that “it is the principal light in the night sky, visible from every location on the planet [Earth] and shared within cultural imaginations”, by these criteria of function, one could also include those planets and stars (including the Sun) visible to the naked eye.

Bennett [4] offers the term “gallery” and by so doing draws attention to the arena in which the event was held. In examining this arena, which was the school classroom and its visual context, the different authority and roles of attendees, and the formal procedures of learning activity within this “gallery” are noted.

This critical analysis commenced with the categories of persons and the heterotopia defined above, and statements and components of drawings made by students were assigned to them. The focus of the critical analysis was, properly, the discourse, and not the individual student.

A discourse of statements or complete phrases was identified in essays submitted by the two classes. Using the software package for qualitative data analysis N'vivo, a grounded data model was prepared as shown in Fig. 1 below. The model is designed to reference data from other studies and not all categories were appropriate to this study.

In addition, some new categories became evident while coding, and in the retroduction process statements were re-coded as the analysis continued. These new categories included “Fame”, “My Family” and “Country”, etc.

Typical statements or phrases attributed to each category are summarised below (the statements have not been corrected to Standard English). In the accompanying presentation the contributing images are emphasised.

It should be noted that some statements are coded to more than one category.

After an iterative process of coding, the results of the discovered discourse are summarised in Table 2 below. This shows the data category and one or more texts that have been coded to this category, and which represent either a number of similar expressions or which, in the author's judgement, illuminate another facet of the discourse.

Some school students produced drawings and they are reproduced in full or part form below in Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4, Fig. 5, Fig. 6, Fig. 7, Fig. 8, with an accompanying commentary.

In Fig. 2 the artist has drawn a Planet Earth in the two colours of blue (sea) and green (land) which have been made explicit by the Apollo 8 “Earthrise” photograph. In this image, continents are defined and named, giving a presumed location to the space craft overhead.

Beaver [2] refers to the gain of a global perspective and worldview by such space-based imagery as” the Overview Effect”. He considers that the space-induced shift in worldview enhances planetary awareness and assists the move to seek solutions to our concerns for the future of the world.

Although the International Space Station is in orbit around the earth, the majority of experiments, and all visual windows, face the surface of the Earth, limiting the prospect of viewing stars and planets. Astronaut Tim Peake confirmed this by radio in an Amateur radio contact with the ISS (ARISS) contact on 18 April 2016, in reply to “We see the wonderful time lapse images of the ISS orbiting the Earth, but what I like looking at are the stars and making out the constellations. Do you do any astronomical research on the ISS?”

Here the artist has chosen to define the ISS as a stream of rectangles with hard corners seen against a backdrop of black space and blue earth. An alternative choice might have been the circular and softer edges of the living quarters and modules which comprise the bulk of the spaceship.

Here the artist is anchoring a harsh, rectangular ISS against the Earth below. Although there is no specific location given to the Earth, and in the drawing it is not coloured except in black and white, the ISS is not travelling alone through space, but flies by reference to the Earth behind it.

In Fig. 6 the ISS is a heterotopia anchored to the Astronaut who is labelled “Tim”, and flies next to, but not above, the Earth.

The national origin of the astronaut is acknowledged in this and other drawings by a reference to the national flag on his shoulder.

In two drawings or fact sheets school students gave the facts about space travel as they understood them (spelling as original). Here, it is not true that a woman went to the Moon in 1992, although students treat the statement as if it were true.