Lisa Ruth Rand

Ph.D., Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine

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Fellow in Residence

Space Junk: An Environmental History of Waste in Orbit

I am currently writing my first book, Space Junk: An Environmental History of Waste in Orbit. This book traces changes in the natural geophysical environment beyond Earth’s atmosphere by focusing on the rise of a form of waste colloquially known as “space junk”—technologies built for use in space that no longer serve a designated purpose. Space Junk will show how human societies and Earth orbit have mutually shaped each other over time. Looking beyond the standard historiographical focus on Cold War superpowers’ efforts to establish hegemony in the race to the Moon, I explore how scientists, state actors, and mainstream communities around the world came to view outer space as simultaneously threatening and vulnerable, detailing its transformation from an infinite frontier into a limited natural resource requiring order and management.

Updates

Lisa Ruth Rand

Lisa Ruth Rand has been appointed Assistant Professor of History at Caltech. Ruth also signed a contract with Harvard University Press for her book, Space Junk: A History of Waste in Orbit, and has received a six-month Guggenheim fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum.

Lisa Ruth Rand

Ruth has begun a two-year Haas Fellowship at the Science History Institute.

Lisa Ruth Rand

Ruth was awarded the Perry World House's Inaugural Emerging Scholars Global Policy Prize for original essays intended for a policy audience that draw on original academic research. She also published an article titled "Falling Cosmos: Nuclear Reentry and the Environmental History of Earth Orbit" in Environmental History. In fall 2019 she will begin a Haas Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Science History Institute.

Lisa Ruth Rand

This year Ruth held the 2015-16 NASA Fellowship in the History of Space Technology. In fall 2015, she presented a paper titled "Up to Earth: Falling Space Junk and the Spatial Expansion of Environmental Politics during the Long 1970s" at the Society for the History of Technology annual meeting, and was a featured guest on the podcast at Environmental History Resources. In spring 2016 she attended, presented a paper, and organized a panel at the American Society for Environmental History annual meeting. Her recent publications include (with Dave Baiocchi) Good Seeing: Best Practices for Sustainable Operations at the Air Force Maui Optical and Supercomputing Site (RAND Corporation, 2016) and a review of Turchetti and Roberts, eds., The Surveillance Imperative: Geosciences during the Cold War and Beyond, published in Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 23 no. 1 (2016). She has publications forthcoming in several forums, including Isis, the Smithsonian Institution, and Physics World. In the spring semester Ruth was awarded a 2016-2018 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.