Description
In their summary for UNIDIR’s Addressing Nuclear Risks of Outer Space Activity for the United Nations General Assembly (2022), moderator Almudena Azcárate Ortega stated that it was vital for international space policy communities to have a greater understanding of the processes of space surveillance. Describing activities that manage the orbits of thousands of spacecraft, which provide vital services that sustain life on Earth, as a “black-box” that few outside this specialist area know how it works, nor have a sense of its history.
For this presentation we will describe our work building the Fylingdales Archive, an online archive that makes public the operational history of RAF Fylingdales. Fylingdales is an early warning and space surveillance radar that sits on the edge of the North York Moors, which for over 60 years has tracked between 70% and 90% of all objects in Low Earth Orbit. During this time, individual engineers and UK-US service personnel have gathered 1000s of photographs, pieces of equipment, manuals, paper records and magazines that represent a vivid social history of space operations on Fylingdales Moor.
We will describe how the Fylingdales Archive has emerged from a unique collaboration with RAF Fylingdales. Through this collaboration we innovated creative practice and post-qualitative research methods, which challenge conventional approaches to security studies and Astropolitics. We argue that space security environments are also places of lived human experiences, which form crucial (but over looked) parts of the “black-boxed” space surveillance assemblage.
To do this we will highlight how local opposition to the demolition of the original “golfballs” at Fylingdales delayed compliance with the ABM treaty. How a Middlesborough photographer had the most privileged view of RAF Fylingdales’s construction than anyone else in the US or British Governments. And how the operation of RAF Fylingdales is deeply entwined with the release of records by ABBA, Lou Reed and David Bowie. Finally, we show how the Fylingdales Archive has been adopted by United Kingdom Space Command to represent their own service history.
Biographies: Dr Michael Mulvihill and Chloë Barker are Co-Investigators on Arts and Humanities Research Council project Turning Fylingdales Inside Out: making practice visible at the UK’s ballistic missile early warning and space monitoring station (AH/S013067/1) in School of Geography Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University.
Keywords: Space Survellance, Early Warning, Space Threat, Astropolitics, Low Earth Orbit
