This article uses the history of an unrealized technology to rethink conventional accounts of American spaceflight that cast the space cabin as the ultimate expression of humans’ capacity to technologically master their environments. Drawing on archival and published sources, I detail the history of the bioregenerative life-support system, a system in which simple organisms—most commonly algae—would inhabit the spacecraft and, through a series of interspecies symbioses, maintain cabin conditions and sustain astronaut life. By homing in on the maintenance practices of the system and taking seriously the kinds of interspecies possibilities they would have engendered, this account does the work of recovering how the history of American spaceflight as we know it today was not at all inevitable, and in fact it could well have been a thoroughly multispecies affair. At the same time, by offering an exaggerated example of the ways astronauts during space travel were (and are) in reality wholly reliant upon a host of technical systems for survival, the bioregenerative system points to the ways that this history not only could have been otherwise but was otherwise: the human in outer space is always already a problem of safely delivering a threatened body through an altogether inimical environment and back again. The maintenance practices of spacecraft life-support systems, real or imagined, thus afford occasion to recover a new layer of historical relations that, in turn, provide a frame through which to resignify the meaning of the space cabin in the history of American spaceflight: from an emblem of technoscientific supremacy to a place of interdependency. (Text from author’s abstract)

中文翻译：

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宇航员和藻类

本文利用一种尚未实现的技术的历史来重新思考美国太空飞行的传统说法，这些理论将太空舱视为人类掌握技术的能力的最终体现。我利用档案和公开的资料，详细介绍了生物再生生命支持系统的历史，该系统中简单的生物（最常见的藻类）将居住在航天器中，并通过一系列种间共生来维持机舱条件并维持宇航员的生命。通过关注系统的维护实践并认真考虑它们可能会产生的各种物种间的关系，该工作可以帮助我们恢复我们今天所知道的美国航天史，这并非完全不可避免，实际上，这很可能是完全的多物种事件。同时，通过提供太空旅行期间宇航员实际上完全依赖于一系列生存技术系统的方式的示例，生物再生系统指出了这种历史不仅可以否则，情况就不一样了：外层空间中的人类始终已经成为在完全有害的环境中安全地运送受威胁的身体并再次返回的问题。因此，无论是真实的还是想象中的航天器生命支持系统的维护实践，都为恢复新的历史关系提供了机会，而历史关系又提供了一个框架，可以用来重新表达美国航天史上太空舱的含义：从技术至上的象征到相互依存的地方。（摘自作者摘要）