Of Astronauts and Algae

Abstract

This article uses the history of an unrealized technology to rethink conventional accounts of American spaceflight that cast the space cabin as the ultimate expression of human’s capacity to technologically master their environments. Drawing on archival and published sources, I detail the history of the bioregenerative life-support system, a system in which simple organisms—most commonly algae—would inhabit the spacecraft and, through a series of interspecies symbioses, maintain cabin conditions and sustain astronaut life. By homing in on the maintenance practices of the system and taking seriously the kinds of interspecies possibilities they would have engendered, this account does the work of recovering how the history of American spaceflight as we know it today was not at all inevi- table, and in fact it could well have been a thoroughly multispecies affair. At the same time, by offering an exaggerated example of the ways astronauts during space travel were (and are) in reality wholly reliant upon a host of technical systems for survival, the bioregenera- tive system points to the ways that this history not only could have been otherwise but was otherwise: the human in outer space is always already a problem of safely delivering a threatened body through an altogether inimical environment and back again. The mainte- nance practices of spacecraft life-support systems, real or imagined, thus afford occasion to recover a new layer of historical relations that, in turn, provide a frame through which to re- signify the meaning of the space cabin in the history of American spaceflight: from an em- blem