posted 05-12-2020 09:30 AM               

Please join us on Wednesday, May 20, 2020, noon Eastern time, for a very topical virtual brown bag talk entitled "A Push-Button Astronaut: Isolation, Confinement, and Vigilance
in Pre-NASA Spaceflight Simulations" by Jordan Bimm, a postdoctoral fellow in the sociology department at Princeton University.

Historians often locate the origin of the astronaut in the highly trained test-pilots selected for NASA's Project Mercury. This talk considers an older, less familiar version of the astronaut fleshed out in a simulated spaceflight at the USAF School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) in February 1958.

In this inaugural week-long test, a young Airman lived sealed inside a tiny cramped mock-up of a spacecraft out of contact with the outside world. This version of the astronaut was not modelled after a pilot. Here, the astronaut was a lower-skilled passive systems monitor, similar to other push-button soldiers of the early Cold War.

Shaped by mental hazards of isolation and confinement, this proto-astronaut's defining virtue was eternal vigilance, rather than active control.

This brown bag talk will be held over WebEx. The meeting number (access code) is 909 957 324 and the meeting password is sPNnwKM*392, or you may join by phone at 929-251-9612. Please contact Nadine Andreassen with any logistical questions.