Before Apollo reached the Moon, there was Ranger. And it did not land, it crashed.

From 1959-65, NASA’s Ranger program was tasked with delivering images of the lunar surface for the upcoming astronaut missions. However, it was only after six failures that Rangers VII-IX finally delivered what NASA needed. With its success, it became the first spacecraft to “land” on a planetary body. This talk delves into the implications of an Earth-based entity—the Ranger spacecraft and its microbial hitchhikers—crashing into an extraterrestrial planetary environment of unknown composition. To advise on this interplanetary encounter—one that could violate NASA’s stringent restrictions of biological exchange from one planetary body to another—a cadre of NASA scientists, US Army Biological Laboratories, and various commercial corporations were called upon. What emerged from their meeting was a reconfiguration of biopower on an interplanetary scale, in which bios was expanded to potentially include non-Earthly life.

Burton makes space for Ranger’s other impacts, involving interplanetary multispecies relations, neoliberal geontopower logics, and prestige politics. The 1960s rendering of life into categories of purity and contagion—earthly and extraterrestrial—simultaneously made possible de-centering Earth itself, with material and affective consequences. What becomes of humans, of biology from Earth, when Ranger’s immediate success and the future of NASA lunar operations hinges on institutional requirements to eliminate all animate terran life on the spacecraft? The Ranger program’s history provides insights into our current outer space moment, as NASA prepares for the return of human’s physical presence to the Moon.

Event Speaker

Dana Burton, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration required. Contact scienceandsociety@columbia.edu or historyofscience@nyu.edu for questions.

This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.

Sponsoring Organizations:

• Columbia University in the City of New York
• NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
• The Graduate Center, City University of New York
• The New York Academy of Medicine
• The New York Academy of Sciences