Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures

Chapter 15: Disjecta Membra, the Kármán Line, and the 38th Parallel

15 @ Disjecta membra, the Kármán Line, and the 38th Parallel james schwoch Disjecta membra: An alteration of Horace’s disjecti membra poetae “limbs of a dismembered poet,” used = Scattered remains. —Oxford English Dictionary The lines of national frontiers derive from chance and accidents of history; they have distributed natural resources and men without the slightest economic or global rationality. —François Perroux Using a National Geographic map, we looked just north of Seoul for a convenient dividing line but could not find a natural geographic line. We saw instead the 38th parallel and decided to recommend that. —Dean Rusk Between launch and orbit appear disjecta membra. The scattered remains of rocket stages, boosters, thrusters, canisters, tanks, and other odds and ends of launch-to-orbit debris appear to represent a trail of afterthoughts for most observers of outer space activities. Lacking the visual and sonic spectacle of blastoff, and devoid of the excitement and utility from either machine or human activities in outer space that commence once the desired height above Earth is reached, the debris in between launch and orbit is a lacuna for most people. Space debris is an empty signifier that is also a floating signifier —floating for a while, anyway, until it falls down to Earth, hopefully burned away into nothingness by friction and heat as the debris enters the inner atmospheric layers, with any surviving remnants cast into the oblivion of the deep blue sea. Once in a great while, space debris gains widespread attention. Some sort of turn of events overtakes that floating and empty signifier of materiality strewn between launch and orbit and charges that material with potential meanings, signs, and interpretations. So there is, so to speak, a kind of fragmentary history of these fragments—a set of scattered narratives of scattered remains, a disjointed disjecta membra discourse. These scattered narratives, on the relatively few occasions they have emerged into mainstream awareness and popular discourse, usually are about objects falling from an orbit down to Earth; elsewhere in this volume, Lisa Parks takes up a few such cases in detail. Even Sputnik, in 1957, had a famous piece of orbiting debris: as Patrick McCray notes in his book about Operation Moonwatch, Keep Watching the Skies!, the network of amateur skygazers who actively monitored satellite activities at the dawn of the space age, “In Indianapolis, scores of people called their local Moonwatch team leader after the rocket body accompanying the first Sputnik satellite appeared overhead.”1 The spectacular collapseexplosion -failure of the first U.S. satellite launch, the Vanguard attempt of December 6, 1957, produced nothing but disjecta membra about four feet above the launchpad while millions of viewers watched on television. On September 5, 1962, Sputnik 4 produced the infamous “Manitowoc fragment”: about twenty pounds of Sputnik 4 landed in downtown Manitowoc, Wisconsin , creating local and national headlines. The Manitowoc city council passed a resolution officially naming the Sputnik 4 remnant the “Manitowoc fragment ” and hoped to have it on permanent display in a local museum, but the fragment was returned by the United States to the USSR. Manitowoc now celebrates the event with a local Sputnikfest.2 The de-orbiting and decay of two space stations—Skylab in July 1979 and Mir in 2001—each caused real consternation regarding the location of debris landing until both fell into the Pacific Ocean. Recent satellite shoot-downs and midspace collisions have added more lore to the debris tale. And unfortunately some of this scattered history is truly and humanely tragic, such as Space Shuttle and cosmonaut missions that ended in death and destruction. What about the space debris that was never intended to reach orbit, that fragmentary trail of materiality between the launch of a rocket and the orbit of a satellite in outer space? For the most part, these scattered remains seem to draw little attention. I remember watching Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions on TV as a child, and seeing (thanks to excellent camerawork) the firing of the second (and sometimes the third) rocket stage on the way up beyond the ionosphere, but I gave little if any thought to the fate of those spent boosters, reassured by the conventional wisdom relayed by TV announcers that the boosters would burn up in the atmosphere far out over the Atlantic Ocean. I suppose I gave a little more thought to some of the disjecta membra 281 most unusual...