Ulrike Landfester

Summary Report of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee

The U.S. human spaceflight programme appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources. Space operations are among the most complex and unforgiving pursuits ever undertaken by humans. It really is rocket science. Space operations become all the more difficult when means do not match aspirations. Such is the case today.

Missing the impossible: how we talk and write about space

“It’s late at night, and you receive an urgent phone call from the White House. ‘The President wants to know why we should continue to put humans in space. He wants a one-page summary on his desk by tomorrow morning.’ What do you write?” These are the opening words of Michael Huang’s article on The Top Three Reasons for Humans in Space which appeared in The Space Review in April 2005. Huang, who runs the website Spaceflight or Extinction — its title is based on a quotation from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994) — may certainly be assumed to be biased strongly in favour of sending humans to space. This initial question, however, whether intentionally or not, puts a precisely pointed finger on one of the more problematic issues of humanity’s urge towards expanding their existence beyond the limits of the planet Earth: when political and financial stakeholders of spaceflight are to be persuaded to engage in sending humans to space, they must be presented not only with a meaningful and transmittable vision but also with arguments which convey and stabilize its practical viability.

The Mars 500 isolation experiment

Mars 500 simulates a mission to Mars and is therefore an important part of Europe’s pathway to exploration.

The Invisible Fool: Botho Strauss's Postmodern Metadrama and the History of Theatrical Reality

In the traditional play within the play established most notably by Shakespeare, the Fool is the one persona allowed or even bound to speak what the drama stages as ‘the truth’, this ‘truth’ being the knowledge of just where the boundaries between the metadrama’s different levels of playacting are to be found. In postmodernist play-within-the-play structures, for example in Botho Strauss’s comedy Besucher (1988), the Fool as a stage persona has become invisible. This very invisibility, however, underscored as it is by the recurrence of the word ‘Narr’ and other allusions to the theatrical tradition of the visible Fool in the play within the play, serves to keep the Fool very much present, in the shape of a blank which must be filled by a knowledge about ‘truth’ which threatens to be lost together with theatre itself.

Laokoon in Outer Space? Towards a transformative hermeneutics of art

When Alan Sokal, professor of physics in New York, in 1996 published an article entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”378 in the influential cultural theory journal Social Text, the journal’s editors promoted its publication enthusiastically, taking it as a serious attempt by a representative of the so-called “hard sciences” to enter into a dialogue with the sciences on the other side of the gap between the two cultures of knowledge which Charles P. Snow had so paradigmatically diagnosed in his famous 1959 “Rede Lecture”.379 Instead of aiming at bridging the gap, Sokal’s article was meant as a parody. It sharply denounced the — in the author’s view — infuriatingly incompetent efforts of humanities’ scholars to colonialise the natural sciences while only succeeding to produce an incoherent mishmash of overblown pseudo-theoretical postmodernist terminology and misunderstood miscellaneous fragments of scientific facts. After the prompt unveiling of the article’s parodist intention, a bitter battle ensued. On the one hand some earnestly advocated the necessity of enabling and using interdisciplinary synergies between “soft” and “hard sciences”; on the other side some, like Sokal, viewed the delimitation of disciplinary work as an imposition on the purity of science on the other, as Impostures intellectuelles, as Sokal and his co-author Jean Bricmont put it in their subsequent book publication.380

Biopolitics, Biosociality and the Body: Introduction

The terms ‘biopolitics’ and ‘biosociality’ seem at first glance to be hybrids derived from categorically different concepts, one of them — biology — belonging squarely to the so-called ‘hard’ natural sciences, the other two — politics and society — belonging just as squarely to the scholarly realm of the ‘soft’ humanities and social sciences. These terms were conceived, however, against the background of a fundamental shift in the perception of the human body that affects the ‘hard’ as well as the ’soft’ sciences. Today, the human body can no longer lay claim to the radical otherness of nature as distinct from the embedding framework of culture. Rather, instead of representing a stronghold of essential subjectivity, it has come to be seen also as a malleable object, its natural elements inextricably bound up in its cultural contexts, both shaping them and being shaped by them or — in the terminology of LCS scholarship — both reading and readable, writing and rewritable.

Religion and Human Space Flight

“Wer weiss, ist es ihr nicht zugedacht, dass sie dereinst jene entfernte Kugeln des Weltgebaudes und die Trefflichkeit ihrer Anstalten, die schon von weitem ihre Neugierde so reizen, von nahem soll kennen lernen? Vielleicht bilden sich darum noch einige Kugeln des Planetensystems aus, um nach vollendetem Ablaufe der Zeit, die unserem Aufenthalte allhier vorgeschrieben ist, uns in andern Himmeln neue Wohnplatze zu bereiten. Wer weiss, laufen nicht jene Trabanten um den Jupiter, um uns dereinst zu leuchten?

Extract from “Mars Life” by Ben Bova

“The atmosphere of Mars is a mere wisp, thinner than Earth’s high stratosphere. It is composed mostly of carbon dioxide, with traces of nitrogen, oxygen, and inert gases such as argon and neon. The air pressure at the surface of Mars is about the same as the pressure thirty-some kilometres up in the high stratosphere of Earth’s atmosphere, so thin that an uncovered glass of water will immediately boil away even when the temperature is far below zero.

SETI’s Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

We, the institutions and individuals participating in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Overview of Europe’s contribution to the ISS491

The international exploration endeavour has a significant political appeal in a vision of European identity, due to its potential to contribute to the creation of new knowledge, to foster innovation and to engage new companies and research organisations in space activities.492