Building a Future in Outer Space: Knowledge Control, Institutional Cultures, and Cold War Imagined Technologies
Alex Hall’s project examines U.S. designs during the Cold War for lasting, habitable infrastructure in outer space, including lunar bases and orbital stations. It considers how secrecy, other forms of knowledge control, and differing institutional cultures can affect designs and expectations for technological futures.
Alex asks how control over sensitive knowledge and technologies might determine what is learned or not learned through research and what is considered technologically feasible. What relationship did restricted networks have with open research and popular culture, and what does it mean to call an imagined system “secret” when associated knowledge, ideas, and people also circulate outside it?
Engaging the Science and Technology Studies literatures on secrecy and non-knowledge, this project traces official plans through policy papers, feasibility studies, and other government documents, alongside developments in open networks of research, policy, and advocacy as well as popular culture.
Alex holds a BA in History from the University of Exeter, where he won the dissertation prize for his research on the American space shuttle program. He has also worked as a research assistant in Exeter University’s Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health and holds an MSc in Security Studies from University College London.
Publications & Presentations
Presentations
August 2024: “Imagined Atlases: Depictions of Technological Futures in Cold War America”, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.
Image 1: Landscape painting of a lunar outpost design, featured in the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency’s Project Horizon draft report in 1959 (© Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum).
Image 2: Photograph from the Pic du Midi observatory, used in a 1961 report by the US Air Force’s Geophysics Research Directorate, titled “Location of a Lunar Base” (Public domain, available through TRAIL: Technical Report Archive and Image Library).
Image 3: Slide from a 1983 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) viewfinder presentation, detailing its plans for Space Station Freedom. (© Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum).