NASA History Listserv Readers:
Please join us on Wednesday May 20, 2020, noon Eastern time, for a very topical virtual brown bag talk entitled “A
Push-Button Astronaut: Isolation, Confinement, and Vigilance
in Pre-NASA Spaceflight Simulations” by Jordan Bimm, a postdoctoral fellow in the sociology department at Princeton University. His full abstract is below.
This brown bag talk will be held over WebEx at bit.ly/3fEsRpw . The meeting
number (access code) is 909 957 324 and the meeting password is sPNnwKM*392, or you may join by phone at 929-251-9612. Please contact
Nadine Andreassen with any logistical questions.
Hope you join us next Wednesday and enjoy this interesting talk. Take care and stay healthy.
-Steve Garber
Historians often locate the origin of the astronaut in the highly trained test-pilots selected for NASA's Project Mercury. This talk considers an older, less familiar version of the astronaut fleshed
out in a simulated spaceflight at the USAF School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) in February 1958. In this inaugural week-long test, a young Airman lived sealed inside a tiny cramped mock-up of a spacecraft out of contact with the outside world. This version of
the astronaut was not modelled after a pilot. Here, the astronaut was a lower-skilled passive systems monitor, similar to other push-button soldiers of the early Cold War. Shaped by mental hazards of isolation and confinement, this proto-astronaut’s defining
virtue was eternal vigilance, rather than active control.
Stephen Garber
NASA History Division
Office of Communications
NASA Headquarters
Room 5P25
Washington, DC 20546
202-358-0385
http://history.nasa.gov
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