This is about visiting the Indian Deep Space Network this week. The huge white dishes follow the moon every day, East to West. While we were there, a movie was streaming down, live, of the surface of the moon. It took me a while to realise that it was live. I didn’t know what to think of it, how to watch it, take it in. It was on a computer screen, a gradual sweep of the Fore, Aft and Nadir cameras. Very spectacular encounters can happen in the world, but still your brain, my brain, may only think of them as ordinary and incidental.
Everything is brand new and its all working fantastically. The engineers are incredible and completely understated in describing what they have done there, created cutting edge technology for India, built it from scratch, with breathtaking speed. They are generous with their time and explanations, hospitable and friendly. Just a handful of men, speaking Telegu, liking their work.
I want to say something that strikes me about this visit, because the last thirty two metre dish I visited was in Goonhilly in Cornwall, UK. There the engineers were fighting to stop the demolition of the sixty four dishes on the site. In 1962, the first dish was built as a ground station for Telstar and it received the first live transatlantic message. It had been the brand new future then. I wanted to say something about this, but luckily nobody was listening to my foreigner voice. I didn’t really want to say it as a dire prediction, just that I was struck by the timescales of the future and this as a renewal of energy. I suppose I was trying to make a connection where there wasn’t one. I suppose I thought these engineers might be interested in the stories of the retired and redundant engineers in Cornwall, but in the future, histories don’t repeat. I felt really proud of them and pleased that they were making everything themselves and keeping a disconnect with the past. Glad that nobody listened to me, because, what was I thinking, I find it impossible to think about the future. I’m thinking of a time when these men have stories to tell of what it was like in the beginning and why the dishes need to be preserved. I suppose, its not that I’m seeing the future of the Deep Space Network in the Goonhilly Satellite Station, its that I’m seeing the past of the Goonhilly engineers in the wonderful people I met last week at ISTRAC.
It seems a long time after the event to be writing back my thoughts!
I wanted to make sure at some point I had fed back to you and people who took part, where the ideas came from and why I wanted to collaborate on the storytelling event we did together. Also to find out from you, what people thought, which will help me think about how to develop. I do apologise for sending such a long email to everyone! but lots of people were involved.
The idea came originally from the time I spent at the Space Science Lab, UC Berkeley as Visiting Fellow, where, to understand what was happening at the Lab, I would spend my days chatting to people and recording the conversations. I was interested in finding out the connections between people and spacecraft, so I would ask “which spacecraft are in your head”, and from these lists, generated a kind of cloud of connections between people in that building and spacecraft. Like MSSL, the UC Berkeley Lab is a distinctive building, on the top of the ridge, looking out onto Golden Gate Bridge and amazing sunsets.
From the recordings, I wrote up a book of the stories people had told me about their spacecraft and re-edited the stories around themes, one was about lost spacecraft, for instance.
At MSSL I wanted to do a similar mapping, but I’d started to go to storytelling events and was thinking about the conversations as stories belonging to an oral tradition. Stories I was listening to were about grand themes of humanity, told through comedy or allegory. It seemed to me that the stories of the spacecraft were also about these overriding themes of the universe and our place in it and that there should be ways for them to be absorbed into a contemporary and grass roots oral culture.
In the face of the complexity of spacecraft and space science, I’ve been struck by how well the human voice demystifies. Actually, how good the people I spoke to at MSSL, were at explaining to me what they do and always believing I could understand. I don’t have a science background, everything I know has come through conversations! I noticed too, that the descriptions people gave me always created strong images in my head and changed my imagined environment. The spacecraft create markers in otherwise, for me, undefined space and they become mental markers that help me imagine distance and the profusion of particle interaction happening throughout the solar system and beyond.
Satellite Stories was about sharing this experience with more people and bringing listeners and ’storytellers’ together. Particularly, when you work very intensely in a place, you often don’t get that chance at an overview. So my hope was it would be an event for people at MSSL to see what it is you do, as much as for people from outside. I also wanted to create strong memories for people. Many cultures use techniques of attaching information to place and architecture in order to remember better ( such as Aboriginal songlines and Roman orators). That was part of the impetus for using the house and gardens and using sunset and lanterns to transform the spaces. Also, habits form and we get use to presenting in the same kinds of contexts - lecture rooms with power point. It was brilliant that you were willing to try this out and I wanted to tap into the performance and improvisation skills that you all seem to have naturally because you are so involved in your work and so use to presenting.
Somebody pointed out to me after the event that it had been about the experiences that the technology brings to people. I thought this was very perceptive. There was such richness in the descriptions of making, launching, travel to launch sites, the experiences brought to you of environments in space and the beautiful environment you work in and what it feels like to commit to long term, ambitious, fragile and innovative technologies. They are narratives that I don’t think are included in ‘Science’ I’m not sure are really acknowledged outside of the field because there are still not enough interdisciplinary studies, so this has become a new focus for me: documenting the human stories of technology.
Many more people contributed to the development of the event than took part and along the way there were many fantastic moments that I wish more people had witnessed, such as Cluster opps explaining the orbits with so much dynamic discussion and diagrams, or Roy telling me about the thinking spaces of the garden. I’m hoping I can put together at least one podcast that can encapsulate the range of voices I recorded and the amazing discoveries I made through so many wonderful conversations.
Tonight the terracotta tiles on the house outside my balcony look like they have a frost. It’s the moonlight. The moon is full and impossibly bright tonight. Today I read about its craters full of glass and the sparklies in the sand and the rays of glass beads.
I’d never heard before that the moon is full of glass. No wonder it shines.
Can we think through a new imagination? What is the imagination of India, what is the imagination of science. What does science stand for in the face of nomadic and marginalised imaginations? Is imagination about conjuring an aura and where do these exist, where are they allowed to exist? What are knowledge societies? Are they the ones that deny the rights to imagination?
Maybe the word ’science’ is the biggest problem. It has formality. There isn’t much love there, it can sometimes seem.
Its very evident when you go to a talk that many of the problems being talked about could be solved if everyone would just make their way out of the auditorium and into the garden.
There is of course so much humanity, humility, assurance, attachment, any number of things, like plants in a forest, in this word, science, it’s whether the stories are told or not and different stories grow in different places.
There is no treaty banning weapons in Space. What there is, in the Outer Space Treaty, is a ban on using nuclear weapons on celestial bodies.
The weapons that can be used against spacecraft are on the earth. We are in the National Institute for Advanced Studies in Bangalore and Dr Subrata Goshroy is over from MIT to talk about “Debunking the Rationale for Weaponsisation of Space”. The Starfish Prime nuclear test in 1962 caused a blackout in Honolulu from the electromagnetic pulse. It was a high altitude test and it destroyed three orbiting satellites, damaging thirteen, resulting in the PARTIAL TEST BAN TREATY in 1963 followed by the OUTER SPACE TREATY in 1967 and in 1972 the ANTI BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY, which were all to stop testing in space.
Subrata witnessed what was described as a ‘vulnerability’ test at White Sands, New Mexico. An infra red laser was pointed at a satellite, “Misti”, to saturate the camera. It wasn’t even a very powerful laser, the high energy laser, “Miracle” wasn’t working that day, but that one could have done permanent damage. In 1983, Reagan was pushing the Star Wars programme - lasers, brilliant pebbles, brilliant eyes and sending the message that it would not be restrained by the ABM Treaty.
With the Gulf War and Balkan Wars, there was a paradigm shift in the way the war was fought: remotely, using bandwidth, GPS, video, predators…but this revealed a vulnerability, the Americans did not want face to face combat and casualties, which made the Achilles heal of their plan the technology, the networks, the satellites.
Men talk well about weapons and there was good discussion, opinion and knowledge. I wondered whether mining for resources on celestial bodies could be seen as equally destructive as nuclear tests. There is a central problem with the Treaties which is there are no weapons in Space, the weapons are on the Earth and nothing is addressing this. The MOON TREATY has not been ratified. It talks of the resources on the Moon being the ‘common heritage of mankind’, which is open to interpretation. Obama has not talked about Space weapons, there has been no policy announcement, but its likely that his policies would not be as aggressive as in the past.
Then they mentioned Rebecca Johnstone from the Acronym Institute . I didn’t think I was hearing properly, but I looked it up today . They work on Disarmament policies, helping people, nations, the world with disarmament processes, including the Space arms issue.
I asked what individuals could do, in the face of something that feels so big. Rebecca Johnstone and Jonathon MacDowell, who publishes Jonathon’s Space Report and keeps up an ongoing verification and information process are people who make some difference. They allow other people to make progress. Subrata said it was a long haul, “we try to write and speak…in the US the issue is how you get to educate people in Congress.”
The students at Srishti talk about the moon they saw a couple of weeks ago when they were on separate field trips in different parts of India. Guitar by Yashas.
We arrived in Tilda in a hysterical panic. The local train was jam packed and we had thirteen people plus luggage to get off in thirty seconds. The plan was to throw the luggage out of the window onto the track. The friendly man who said abstract things was helping us pile up the seats by the window with the bags, pulling in other people to push and drag. All our group were asking questions and volunteering to stand on the tracks, telling me we only had thrity seconds. A young lad sat up high looked at me “30 seconds” he says, yes, thanks I know, are you sure we have to panic? Other people had their own crises. A man appeared from round the corner, pushing against the flow of us trying to start our exit, with a very old, fragile man in a dhoti. The younger man was definitely panicking, he shouted non stop, looking intensely concerned. Some people moved and some people didn’t. It was looking like the old man was going to go high up on the bunk with the young lad. I don’t remember what happened, but I knew I was going to the platform, not the tracks. The train stopped and we all pushed. I waited with a couple of the girls and we looked through the windows to see if it had all gone to plan. Then we heard the sound of another train. There were three tracks at the station. I hoped the train would appear at the furthest, but it didn’t and it was fast. We few on the platform tried to imagine and not imagine what it was like to be down on the tracks with all our luggage in between two moving trains. A few seconds later all was well.
In the craziness of our arrival, we hadn’t seen two men in white shirts, landscapes of calm, our new hosts, activists from the Ekta Parishad NGO, Arun and Arun. The next morning, sitting in a circle on the floor, they began their story. It started when three of them decided to try to do something about the Dacoit problem. They made an ashram in the forest, were badly beaten up by the Dacoits and told to leave or be killed, but they stayed and people became intrigued by them. They started to have dialogues, much talking. The Dacoits surrendered, some going to prison for twenty years, they surrendered knowing that. The three were Gandhians, they wanted to empower the impoverished and find non-violent solutions to disputes. To start the process of helping they ran youth camps to find leaders who could help local people solve their own problems. Ekta Parishad emerged as a movement in 1990, concerned with land issues and matters of livelihood and respect. There is a grain bank that people can draw on in hard times, or for a wedding to take place and give rice back later. Tilda is known as the ‘rice bowl of India’ and it was deep into harvest time for the whole of our visit. Lines of women in the brightest saris in distant grey-yellow paddy.
Janadesh is People Power. It is the name for the march from Gwalior to Delhi that happened in October 2007. 25 000 people walked and the journey took a month. They were protesting the Forest Act that had them evicted from their forest land in the hills. The Act protected animals and trees, but not people. Shikari Baiga told us their story. He is twenty six and the first evictions had happened before he was born. They had been told they would be compensated, given other land, but this still hadn’t happened.
I didn’t record the first part of what Shikari told us. I didn’t realise we would get out of the jeep, sit down with the people of the village Hajariya Khero, watchful, dignified, generous and be told of their continual evictions. Until 2002 they were highly oppressed by forest officials. They use to do shifting cultivation in the forest. The forest officials use to come and demand money from them or crops in order to continue farming, so they were always scared of anyone who looked urban. It took a long time for Ekta Parishad to be trusted by them. Arun talked about sleeping by the pigs in the village in the early days, to win trust. Then the stories unfurled of the intense corruption and dishonesty with which they have been treated. This community had been identified for funds to develop the community. There was money for two hundred and fifty bore wells were to be dug. Only twenty four were made, the rest of the money has disappeared, into the pockets of officials. There is government money to encourage the Baiga to use hospitals and clinics, they are supposed to be paid for attendance, but none of the money reaches the Baiga. It is all creamed off.
When Janadesh reached Delhi, the marchers sat outside government to wait to hear if their demands would be met. After eight hours, the minister for agriculture came out and said yes. A new Forest Act was written. Anyone who had been on their land from before 2005 would be allowed to stay. These Baiga had been here for that long. They have a document to prove it, but actually the act says that documents are not needed. The word of an elder in the village is enough proof. It is a year later and nothing has happened. In Delhi they were told they would have their land in thirty days. They are still waiting for the official visit to establish their land rights. Its terrible to hear their new-found confidence and voice having to fight against so much systemic official inhumanity.
The march took two years to plan. They had volunteers along the way at each camp with cooks and medical teams. They were split into groups of 25, each with a leader and they were part of a group of a thousand, split into two groups of five hundred, split into groups of one hundred, split into the groups of twenty five, so the organisation and communication where structured and workable.
From the little we glean, these are people whose brains are wired to the present and to honesty and community. There is barely any litter here, really unusual for India and an astounding contrast to the non-tribal village we stay in that night. It can’t just be poverty, you see that they are not attached to consumer goods, I don’t really want to know their culture, its for them. We arrived at 3.30 in the afternoon and they had been waiting for us since 10 am. It is harvest time so this is not light, but nothing is expressed to us. The whole village cooks for us. They welcome us and thank us for giving our support and they clap us. Its really touching and we see the gulf of our inadequate generosity. Our group is very shy. I wish we could be more expressive of our outrage. We’re not studying them, we’re with them. Apoorva thanks them for being open to our visit. I say I want to thank them for telling their story and that I’m sorry these things happened to them. This is translated, although later I hear there is no Hindi word for sorry.
The Indian government has said it wants to eradicate poverty by 2015. Ekta Parishad has a plan to return to Delhi in 2012 to see how they are doing and we are invited to join.
There’s another part to this. We are in Chhattisgarh during the elections and there had been some talk that it might not be good for us to be there at this time. In the jeep, Arun tells us this. The Naxals essentially want justice for the tribals and marginalised, but they have become a guerrilla force using violence. An anti-Naxal movement formed, Salwa Judum, against violence. The government organised a march so that tribals could show they were against the violence, but when the people left their homes to go on the march, the Naxals said that if they went back, they would be killed. So these people instead went to refugee camps set up by the government. They are very bad places with forty thousand people. I think he said that was three years ago and they are still there. The government armed the tribals as a way of dealing with the Naxals. They said, unless you fight the Naxals we will assume you are pro-Naxal. So they had no choice and Salwa Judum also became violent. The present BJP party is not supportive of Ekta Parishad because they think they are Naxals, as they believe also in helping the impoversished, even though non-violence is the absolute core of the movement. Previously they had a good dialogue with the Congress party.
Stars are bright in the village at night and the International Space Station passes overhead. At about ten o’clock the Karma begins. Its a dance with drums and all kinds of percussion and its all about flirting. The women only are invited from another village. The men drum in the middle, three women stand outside this circle singing back and forth to the men and outside of this, the stepping lines of women or men. If a woman is in the forest, a man might sing to her, and she might sing back and if their singing flirtation is good they may decide to marry.
R: Well I’m a career changer, I’m a late career changer, I worked in the city got made redundant, went to a specialist horticulture college and there was a postcard up on the board, gardening wanted, so I came here, but they only wanted someone for five weeks, so I did it for five weeks cos they thought they were having a camera crew in to take some film so they wanted somewhere that someone could stand in front so it would look nice cos everywhere was a mess, it was terrible, I said I’d be self employed after this contract, that was four and a half, 4 and three quarter years ago,
-So it suited you?
R: Yes, it suited me very well and its a beautiful place to be, isn’t it, how many places do you ever work where, I use to work in the city, you don’t get views like this in the city
-Its extraordinary every time I look, I’m sure you look at it so many times
R: I’ve been coming here three days a week for four and a half years and it still makes me say ‘wow’ every time I see it,
-Do you have favourite places in the gardens?
R: Yes, without a doubt, the top of the swimming pool in that little wood that we call Ariel woods..there’s a path runs across the top and you look up into the woods there into what’s called the pet’s cemetery. That’s a definite favourite spot. There’s a real aura about that place. And There’s a sort of bent bough in the tree circle and I sit in there and have a cup of tea in there, there’s a bow that goes just above the ground and its just the right height for tea drinking,
-Do the scientists know..?
R: No, no, that’s my hole for tea drinking I’m not sharing that one…
-I was asking them where they went, if there are places they go to think, because there’s a lot of thinking going on,
R: I feel that’s my contribution, that I’m hopefully providing them with somewhere that feels good to sit or ponder or walk. It doesn’t matter in the grounds where you go, there are either places to sit, or places to walk. Where the ground’s rough, then I’ve cut paths through it and I feel that’s how I’m able to make a contribution.
Cosmo-Skymed orbit at 90 degrees from each other. Four, as a constellation, polar orbiting, in a square, a cross, like target hairs, like a windmill. Sometimes they can be brought together as two pairs of satellites, 150 kilometers apart, at 20 degrees from each other and maybe this is to do with them becoming eyes, on either side of the earth, revolving, like skating partners.
They use radar, the four beams, the HH, the VV, the VH and the HV. So its one more than RadarSat 2 which has the HH, the VV and the VH but then its times four. Four eyes.
They are Italian too. I gave out my cards at the International Astronautical Congress. They say “love” “loss” “gold” and “swimming”. Riccardo took “love and “loss”. He looked sad, but I think he was glad that I’d remembered what is at the heart of things. He needed to write his name on one and he gave it back to me. I don’t know which one it was, “love” or “loss”, it seemed too personal, I didn’t want to turn the card over to find out.
