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