Paper short abstract:

This talk shows why the technology-based responses to climate change, and how conflicts over the economic, ecological, and social viability of conditioned environments were all played out in-vitro in the Soviet and American space programs.

Paper long abstract:

Abstract:

One of the issues of Global Climate change is the lack of immediacy between large-scale environmental conditions and localized, even personal experience. As this paper explores, that was exactly the issue for the series of experimental animals, namely the “humans” sealed inside the Soviet closed environment life support system experiments in the 1960s and 1970s. Detailing the creation of space station closed environments, the use of “phytotrons” as food providers and waste disposers, this paper examines how the hierarchical assumptions of human centrality to not only Earth-bound life but especially space bound life were undercut and altered by the lived experimental experience of cosmonauts-on-Earth in closed environments. As this talk shows, the entanglement of experimental physiology and climatic engineering with domestic modernization policies, the technology-based responses to air-pollution and climate change, and conflicts over the economic, ecological, and social viability of conditioned environments were all played out in-vitro in the Soviet and American space programs.