CONTENTS

 

 

 

Join Us This Thursday for the Next Presentation in Our Seminar Series

 

 

Tracking NASA in Mexico: How Empalme-Guaymas Bridged Space Technology, Power, and Diplomacy

Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta

Universidad de Guadalajara

 

Thursday, April 17, 2:00 pm EDT / 1:00 pm CDT / 11:00 am PDT on Teams (link below)


What can a single tracking station in northern Mexico reveal about NASA's role as an instrument of Cold-War science diplomacy? This talk explores space diplomacy through the Empalme-Guaymas tracking station, strategically positioned in NASA's Manned Space Flight Network for Project Mercury. By critically analyzing the complex interactions between NASA, the Mexican government, scientific caudillos, and local populations, the research interrogates the nuanced regional, hemispheric, and global power dynamics embedded in the small tracking station. It shows how different institutions, collectives and individuals negotiated, questioned, and shaped space diplomacy during the first years of space exploration. Drawing from newspaper archives, interviews, films, and other publications, the study unpacks a rich microhistory of space diplomacy—revealing that it was far more than a technical exchange between national institutions, but a complex process characterized by social unrest, rumors, and fears, as well as love and celebration.


Gloria Maritza Gómez Revuelta (PhD in History, El Colegio de México) researches the histories of outer space and geophysics in Mexico and the broader Third World during the Cold War. She is a lecturer at Universidad de Guadalajara, where she hosts the science and technology podcast Cosas de Sapiens. Her work has received support by, among other institutions, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Freie Universität Berlin, and the Science History Institute. She is a member of the Science, Technology and Diplomacy Committee of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.

 

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May 1: Hugo Palmarola Presents on “NASA in Chile”

 

NASA in Chile: Technology and Branding of the Main NASA Station in Latin America during the Cold War

Hugo Palmarola

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

 

Thursday, May 1, 2:00 pm EDT / 1:00 pm CDT / 11:00 am PDT on Teams (link below)


Hugo Palmarola’s interdisciplinary research explores the role of NASA stations in Chile during the most critical period of the space race and the Cold War. The analysis delves into the technological and geopolitical factors that elevated NASA’s presence in Chile to the status of the primary NASA station in Latin America. This station played a pivotal role in completing the deployment of “the fence,” a term referring to the line crossing the American continent from north to south, passing through the United States, Cuba, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile. Its purpose was to capture the orbit of the first satellites launched by the United States in the western meridian. Additionally, this research scrutinizes the impact of graphic design and NASA’s visual culture in shaping a brand image and scientific imagery. These visual elements played a crucial role in garnering acceptance from various Latin American governments and universities for U.S. strategic operations.

 

Hugo Palmarola is an associate professor in the School of Design at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He holds a PhD in Latin American studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and won the student essay prize from the Design History Society in the United Kingdom for his doctoral research (2018). With Pedro Alonso, he received the Silver Lion for the Chilean Pavilion Monolith Controversies at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2014). Palmarola has been a scholar and fellow at the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) (2008).

 

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May 15: Haris Durrani’s “‘Orchestrating’ Spectrum” Presentation

 

“Orchestrating” Spectrum: Cuba, Communications Satellites, and U.S. Empire, 1963

Haris Durrani

Princeton University

 

Thursday, May 15, 2:00 pm EDT / 1:00 pm CDT / 11:00 am PDT on Teams (link below)


In 1963, the UN held a conference to regulate a groundbreaking development of the Space Age: the communications satellite. The conference was convened at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a specialized agency that allocated radiofrequencies. The “Space Conference” would determine frequencies for communications satellites. A team of U.S. lawyers, corporate executives, agency officials, and diplomats proposed a “first come, first served” regime allowing “freedom of access” to spectrum. They soon confronted a team of engineers, lawyers, politicians, and agency officials from post-revolutionary Cuba, led by the Vice Minister of Communications, Pedro Waldo Luis y Torres, who resisted U.S. proposals. They were followed by a coalition of delegations from nations in the “socialist” and “developing” worlds. These delegations made the first “reservations” to the ITU's historically stable regulations. U.S. efforts were, Torres claimed, a continuation of the U.S. and European empires from which these “small countries” were freeing themselves. 

 

Historians have found notions of globalism intrinsic to anti-imperial efforts in international law (e.g. the Bandung or Tricontinental Conferences), or else antithetical to ideas of sovereignty. The conference presents a concept of global scale—the apparently U.S. idea of free, universal access to spectrum or outer space—and concerns about self-determination, through the claim that spectrum allocation affected Cuban sovereignty. But its story complicates the view that globalism and sovereignty were foils during decolonization. Sovereignty and the global imaginary of “free” access to spectrum were not antithetical but part of a shared legal vocabulary wherein imperialism and anti-imperialism were contested. 

 

Durrani’s talk argues Cubans’ opposition was part of a larger effort to name and reject U.S. empire. In this effort, U.S. reliance on legal certainty rendered communications regulation a point of vulnerability. Law became a field of contestation for resisting empire—an unexpected weakness which Torres and his colleague seized upon.

 

Haris A. Durrani is a lawyer and historian of law, technology, and extraterritoriality. He holds a PhD from the Department of History at Princeton University, where he was in the Program in History of Science. He previously obtained a JD from Columbia Law School, an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, and a BS in Applied Physics from Columbia Engineering. Currently, he is a law clerk in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. He is a former NASA Fellow in the History of Space Technology, and, starting this fall, he will be a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. His most recent work appears in Cosmic Fragments: Dislocation and Discontent in the Global Space Age (University of Pittsburgh Press), edited by Asif Siddiqi.

 

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