Making Time on Mars 0262043858, 9780262043854

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 MER: An Interplanetary Workplace and Community
2 Time at Work in Space
3 The Sound of No Clock Ticking
4 Dreaming of Space, Imagining Membership
5 Membering the Rovers: Humans and Robots as Coworkers
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

MAKING TIME ON MARS

Inside Technology Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, W. Bernard Carlson, and Trevor Pinch A complete list of books in the series appears at the back of the book.

MAKING TIME ON MARS

Zara Mirmalek

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Stone Serif by Westchester Publishing Services. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Mirmalek, Zara, author. Title: Making time on Mars / Zara Mirmalek. Other titles: Inside technology. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2020] | Series: Inside technology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 019029888 | ISBN 9780262043854 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780262358217 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Mars Exploration Rover Mission (U.S.)—­Officials and employees—­ Time management. | Hours of labor—­Social aspects. | Timekeeping—­Social aspects. | Roving vehicles (Astronautics)—­Timetables. | Mars (Planet)—­ Exploration—­Social aspects. Classification: LCC QB641 .M544 2020 | DDC 331.7/61559923—­dc23 LC record available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2019029888

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  vii INTRODUCTION 

1

1  MER: AN INTERPLANETARY WORKPLACE AND COMMUNITY  19 2  TIME AT WORK IN SPACE  51 3  THE SOUND OF NO CLOCK TICKING 

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4  DREAMING OF SPACE, IMAGINING MEMBERSHIP  99 5  MEMBERING THE ROVERS: HUMANS AND ROBOTS AS COWORKERS  117 CONCLUSION  141 NOTES  145 BIBLIOGRAPHY  179 INDEX  197

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A multitude of people, institutions and technologies energized the construction of this book. Given the nature of ethnographic research methods, not all can be acknowledged explicitly by name. They are appreciated privately. Thank you to all of the members of NASA’s MER mission 2003–­2004. This work has benefited from questions, comments, silences and challenges from many audiences and individuals. Many thanks to the institutions and individuals that provided forms of access and inspiration, including: the University of California San Diego (UCSD), Leigh Star, Valerie Hartouni, Yrjö Engeström, Edwin Hutchins, Chandra Mukerji, Robert Horwitz, Sharon Traweek (UCLA), Carol Padden, Michael Cole, Katie Vann; the UCSD Science Studies Program, Geoffrey Bowker, Andrew Lakoff, Steven Shapin, Naomi Oreskes, Steve Epstein, Martha Lampland, Miriam Padolsky, Katrina Hoch, Kathleen Casey, Matthew Shindell, Sophia Efstathiou; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Science Technology and Society Program, Teasel Muir-­Harmony, Lisa Messeri, David Mindell, Leo Marx, Yanni Loukissas, Tim Cullen, Lisa D’Ambrosio; Harvard University, Program on Science, Technology and Society, Sheila Jasanoff; NASA Ames, John O’Neill, Mike Shafto, Roxana Wales, Valerie Shalin, William Clancey, Charlotte Linde, Chin Seah, Jay Trimble, Kanna Rajan; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Deborah Bass, John Callas, the Athena science team, Steve Squyres, Andy Mishkin; and, the MIT Press, Katie Helke, Wiebe Bijker, Bernard Carlson, Trevor Pinch, Judith Feldmann, and this book’s production team and reviewers. I would like to thank and acknowledge conference and workshop audiences, and individuals, including the Society of the Social Study of Science, the National Communication Association (NCA), the NCA Association for Rhetoric in Science and Technology, the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism, the International Society for the Study of Time, the American Anthropological Association, the MIT

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Acknowledgments

Museum, Willow Garage, and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute; Olga Hasty, Dawna Ballard, Ida Sabelis, Frederick Turner, Leila Takayama, Shana Ashar, Carol Pfeifer, Naj Abroni, Talat Bahrami, Carol Robideau, Ameh Zari, Mina and M. R. Mirmalek, Ida Stiffarm, Veda Mirmalek, Aaron Mirmalek, Leonard Peltier, RJ, DH, MK, FD, JC, Matt Chavez, Veronica Marquez, and Timothy Denehy. One final group I must acknowledge is the technology on which I relied during MER: spiral-­ bound three-­ subject notebooks modified with foam board backing, 1.7mm ballpoint pens, highlighters, two laptops, software, printer, two cameras, and sticky notes.

INTRODUCTION

Together exploring the rocky red planet, a team of robots and humans search for evidence that life once existed on Mars. The planet’s poisonous atmosphere and its distance from Earth prohibit humans from physically traversing it, but not inorganic robots. Standing almost five feet tall, weighing four hundred pounds, two titanium assemblages winged with solar panels have survived seven months of interplanetary travel to arrive on Mars in working condition. Their encounters with treacherous canyons, craters, and bedrocks are being controlled from Earth, where the robots’ human counterparts send directions on where to rove, which tools to use, when to send data, and when to rest. What may seem like an excerpt from a science fiction story is, in fact, a description of the real-­life event of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Mars Exploration Rover mission 2003. Known as MER for short, the mission was a search for Martian science and history conducted by scientists and engineers, located at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California, with two remotely operated robots positioned on opposite sides of Mars. The aim of this unprecedented feat of interplanetary exploration was to discover new scientific information about Mars, particularly evidence of a watery past, which could provide insight into Earth’s future. Technologies both futuristic and familiar played significant roles on the MER mission, from Alpha Particle X-­ray Spectrometers for in situ chemical analysis of Mars features to airbags for cushioning the robots’ landings on Mars. The most curious of them all was “Mars time”—­a version of clock time used to keep track of Mars’s planetary rotation that was chosen as the primary time zone according to which MER’s daily schedule of work activities was arranged and restricted, every day for three months. This is a book about time on Mars—­how institutions, individuals, and machines worked together to produce a form of temporality that mattered for the particular and unique workspace of Martian science and exploration.

2

Introduction

On its surface, the story of Mars time can be read simply. MER (pronounced /mər/) mission scientists remotely operated two robots at different sites, each for 90 consecutive days on Mars. The complexity is elevated through a lens of time and work coordination. Ninety days on Mars is not the same temporal experience as 90 days on Earth. One complete axial rotation is longer for planet Mars than for planet Earth. Although the precise length has yet to be agreed on by the international science community, the length of day on Mars was clocked at 24 hours and 39.6 minutes long, and called a “sol.”1 MER scientists and engineers created a daily schedule of work activities that ran the length of a day on Mars, according to Mars time. And, as it is for clock time at two locations on opposite sides of Earth, the robots on Mars were in two different “Mars time zones,” while MER members on Earth were mainly located in the Pacific time zone but also linked to time zones across the United States and Europe. To increase the longevity of the solar batteries by which they were powered, the MER robots were operated only during the sunlight hours on Mars. Their Mars time working hours were used to direct working hours for the MER scientists, who worked during the non-­sunlight hours on Mars. In effect, MER members had to work, and live, according to Mars time. “But how will the scientists know what time it is on Mars?” asked a NASA researcher during a MER mission planning meeting that took place less than six months before the start of the mission. Another scientist replied, “They’ll look at their watches and do the math,” which he accompanied by the familiar gesture of raising a wrist to bring an imaginary wristwatch into view. His matter-­of-­fact statement put an end to the discussion that day. The acceptability of the reply reflected a cultural norm at NASA: that its scientists and engineers are brilliant and unquestionably capable of conducting simple activities. For such people, reading a clock face and using basic math to calculate the time difference between two time zones obviously fall in the category of simple. Indeed, in this context, even raising the question was borderline insulting. Surely anything so simple would be obvious to all and would be addressed as thoroughly and seriously as the matter of safely dropping two robots onto an alien planet using parachutes and airbags. As such, one of the most high-­tech, innovative work environments in the United States, indeed on Earth, embarked almost unthinkingly on an unprecedented work plan distributed between two planets using the traditional, industrial-­era habit of relying on humans to adapt temporally and keep up with machine-­set timetables. Technically speaking, keeping Mars time involved a process familiar to people who track time in two different time zones. For example, traveling

Introduction 3

from one time zone to another one entails converting and adjusting to clock time differences. Or planning to call someone on another continent entails figuring out whether a good time for you to call is a good time for them. A standard time difference between two different time zones is added or subtracted, depending on where the person doing the conversion is located, and this time difference remains constant. In other words, the three-­hour time difference between Los Angeles and New York is the same every day. Converting time between Mars and Earth, however, is unlike converting clock time between two time zones on Earth. Because the planets have different durations of axial rotation, the forty-­minute time difference has to be adjusted every day. For the MER mission’s daily work schedule, for 90 continuous sols, each workday began approximately forty minutes later than the previous day. MER mission members were scheduled to start work at the same Mars time every sol, and thus they began their work according to a different terrestrial clock time every day. Over weeks and months, the start of their work day changed continuously across hours of day and night on Earth. The work schedule was strikingly unusual; but at the same time, the numerical language of the Martian clock time was so familiar that it supported the sense that adjusting to a new temporal environment was, more or less, a simple numerical conversion. The complexity of making Mars time to order time-­sensitive tasks according to the movement of sunlight on a planet that cannot be seen on a daily basis was muted even by some people who experienced it. One mission member reflected, “I loved being on Mars time because I got forty minutes more to work each day!” This sense of keeping Mars time was both misleading and accurate. The Mars day was a matter of each second, minute, hour being longer by enough so that the entire sol ran forty minutes longer, but not an additional forty minutes all at once. Working according to Mars time while living on Earth did not amount to having more time each day. Time on Earth passed just as quickly as ever. Mars time provides a numerical representation of daylight on Mars. But coordinating work with natural sunlight and coordinating work with clock time result in two radically different work patterns with different cultural, historical, and environmental implications. This insight emerged from my ethnographic research. In retrospect it seems straightforward enough, but it was not obvious before the project began. Indeed, seeing what it means to work simultaneously in two temporal systems required working across disciplinary lines, themselves often guarded by gatekeepers in the same ways that scientific fields and communal enclaves maintain separations from one another.

4

Introduction

Mars time provides a numerical representation of the invisible progression of sunlight on Mars, but numbers alone provide insufficient support for conducting work on Earth according to the time of day on Mars. The MER mission’s organization of work, which was scheduled according to the movement of the Sun on a distant planet, may be better understood as “agrarian work”—­although without the critical physical experience of sunlight, which even a brilliant imagination cannot replace. Before industrial work routines, ushered in by factories, electric lights, and mechanical clocks, the agrarian era harmonized work to the presence and absence of sunlight. Farmers went to work at dawn, came home at dusk, had early dinners, and went to bed not long after.2 Conducting agrarian work using clocks marked a transition to industrial-­era work organization and brought with it the industrial habit of scheduling and conducting work at any hour of the day or night. I came to see the MER mission work environment itself as resembling both an early nineteenth-­century arctic expedition, with daily forays by daylight into treacherous, hazardous terrain, and a stopwatch-­driven factory production site, with a rigid timetable for task completion, decision making, and social interaction. Understanding Mars time and what it reveals about human–­technology relationships at work requires paying attention to the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which clock time and industrial work practices have developed. In this book, I draw together cultural and historical research on time, work, and organizations, supplemented by a year of fieldwork on the MER mission, during which I lived and worked according to Mars time for 90 sols. Making Time on Mars is a story of technological and communication breakdowns, of social and technological workarounds to circumvent the inadequacies of time management, and of the ways in which cultural values and beliefs particular to explorers, scientists, and robots shaped Mars time. My aim is to render an alien expedition familiar, so that readers will come to better understand—­through the experience of terrestrial-­bound humans remotely exploring the Martian landscape—­our own assumptions about relationships between work, time, technologies, individuals, and organizations here on Earth. Mars time was a culturally produced sense of temporality on a planet not visible in real time. On one level, this story is about the production of Mars time: what it is; what technologies, habits, and social practices were used to make it; and which of those practices were particular to the work environment of space exploration and which were in general circulation. On another level, the story is about time–­work relationships on Earth: what foundational assumptions do we rely on about the relations between clock

Introduction 5

time and work time, about science and work, and about technologies and the human to render artificial constructs like clock time natural? Making Time on Mars offers an examination of a phenomenon—­the normative temporal order—­that is so embedded in our conceptions of order and organization that it is almost impossible to stand outside of it in order to examine it critically. The time–­work relationships used by organizations in the United States have altered little since Frederick Taylor and his stopwatch took root in American worksites over one hundred years ago. While the MER mission successfully reached and exceeded its science and technology goals, the sol-­to-­sol social, technical, and cultural challenges of working on Mars time brought to the surface unacknowledged assumptions about the relationship of time and work in scientific knowledge making, about creating standards and leaving them unexamined, and about the bodily relationship between humans and sunlight. The case demonstrates a set of entanglements around the technology of time as an idea, a tool, and a language. The MER mission used a new temporality for ordering work and mission members’ time–­work relationship. What we find when we look closely at this case are the ways in which an artificial technology, in this case clock time, becomes naturalized, while the human using that technology becomes in a sense denaturalized. To render Mars time natural, the humans themselves had to go through the mechanics of alteration. For some readers, this transformation may be more astonishing than finding water on Mars. MOVEMENTS TO MARS Every 18 months, Mars’s and Earth’s elliptical rotations around the Sun bring them to their closest proximity. Every 60,000 years they are at their very closest—­2003 was just such a remarkable year. NASA’s MER mission would take advantage of nature’s alignment that summer, their two robot-­bearing rockets launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to arrive on Mars in less than eight months. There are no photographic images of their 34,646,418-­mile (55,758,006 kilometers) interplanetary journey. Instead, we have a popular depiction of this time in the medium of animation titled Mars Rover Animation, created by Dan Maas and used by NASA and popular media (figure I.1).3 Following their June launches, weeks apart, the two robots landed on Mars on January 3 and 24, 2004. The first to launch and land, at the Gusev Crater, was the robot named “Spirit” (2004–­2010); the second was the robot named “Opportunity” (2004–­2018), which began its work at Meridiani Planum. Figure I.2 (color plate 1) provides a depiction of these landing sites shown on a topographical map of Mars.4

6

Introduction

FIGURE I.1 An abridged depiction of a rover’s sojourn to Mars, from the Mars Rover Animation. From left to right: a rover being launched inside a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida; the shielded rover separating from the rocket; reaching Mars, the rover ensconced in airbags drops to the surface for a multibounce landing; from the unfolded lander shield, the rover egresses and moves across Mars. Courtesy of NASA/JPL, Maas Digital LLC.

MER’s “Athena” science team, led by Principal Investigator (PI) Steve Squyres, chose the work sites for the potential yield on important scientific data on past habitability (life-­sustaining) and “to develop a deep intellectual understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns and interactions associated with global-­scale geologic and climatic processes that have operated on Mars.”5 In the fall of 2000, they began with one hundred and eighty-­five potential sites, and in January 2003, following multiple science community workshops, they reached consensus on two landing sites.6 Though the chosen MER time–­work relationship for scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was subject to less debate and deliberation than the landing sites, the decision stood as early as January 2001, informed by mission members’ experience with Mars time and remote robot science from NASA’s Pathfinder mission, NASA Human Factors, and fatigue counter measure studies. Though mission members did express some concern about the potential difficulties of using Mars time, by and large time management was treated as it is in most organizations—­clock time is used to drive production activities and outcomes, to establish what (and who) is and is not efficient. Almost always, time-­management problems are considered individual concerns; a “staffing problem” was the term used by some to denote Mars time and work schedule issues for scientists and engineers at JPL.

Introduction 7

FIGURE I.2 A topographic map of Mars, created with Mars Orbital Laser Altimeter (MOLA) data, shows MER’s two landing sites and those of previous Mars mission landing sites. NASA’s VL1 (Viking Lander 1) and VL2 (Viking Lander 2) were stationary robots that landed in 1976. MPF (Mars Pathfinder) included a lander and small rover (Sojourner) in 1997. Isidis was the projected landing site for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Beagle 2 stationary lander that was lost on arrival in 2003. Courtesy of NASA/JPL/GSFC. See color plate 1.

During MER’s 90 sols, the experience of the Mars time–­work relationship was occasionally covered by NASA media and other news outlets. These reports highlighted the MER scientists’ and engineers’ experiences, treating them sometimes as humorous testaments to the heroic lengths to which people would go to in the name of science and exploration and sometimes as business-­as-­usual work features. Such accounts are as important to consider as those that did not appear in the media, because the media accounts contributed to the cultural consciousness on what is possible and what is acceptable for organizational time–­ work relationships. They are institutionally approved first-­person accounts on how possible—­and just a little necessarily difficult—­it was to work every day not only at a different time but according to a movement of sunlight that was impossible to experience in real time. Indeed, public recognition of NASA’s time–­work relationship has not faltered. We are well aware that NASA won the race to the moon, both a

8

Introduction

geopolitical and a temporal competition. Scholars of US history, technology, the space race, space science, and politics refer to John F. Kennedy’s 1961 speech as a quintessential historical moment when a leader directed industries and political organizations to produce and carry out a technological feat of human lunar travel and return in less than ten years.7 NASA’s time–­ work relationship as a source of failure has also been the subject of media and academic scrutiny. Two space shuttle disasters resulted in the deaths of sixteen NASA personnel (fourteen astronauts and two people on disaster recovery detail): the televised explosion of Challenger during its launch in 1986 and the disintegration of Columbia during its return to Earth in 2003. Subsequent investigations have pointed out that contributing factors included allowing time schedules rather than safety to drive decision making.8 From an in-­depth examination of the work, people, and processes at NASA leading up to the decision to launch Challenger despite some indicators that all was not well, sociologist Diane Vaughan identified a “culture of deviance,” pointing to the organization’s acceptance of decision making attributed to schedule keeping and the ways in which it was acceptable to reject information (and people) that could contribute to schedule delays.9 Both inside and outside organizations, clock time is culturally accepted as a technology that can be adjusted—­but only in terms of time zone differences, not in terms of institutional habits. The social and historical origins of the adoption and use of standard clock time in organizations in the United States provide a partial explanation of some of the temporal work difficulties encountered on the MER mission. Treating clock time as though it is context free—­as an element of the natural world rather than of the human-­built world of organizations—­has become a culturally acceptable habit. At the same time, temporal relationship problems are perennial themes in everyday conversations, literature, popular culture, news media, and studies on the political economy of work and home life.10 Sociologist Judy Wajcman has called attention to a cultural shift in socially acceptable expectations for faster pacing (acceleration) in the twenty-­first century.11 She intersected people’s workplace and home timetables with the speed of digital technologies to show some of the ways that some social groups accept new standards for temporal activities such as interpersonal communication response time (e.g., emails, texts, social media). Wajcman maintains the primacy of human agency—­“Temporal demands are not inherent to technology”—­which stands against any argument that humans are helpless to resist living with temporal expectations driven by the speed of technology. Indeed, how we define and engage the relationship between acceptable social practices and clock time affects the ways in which accountability is

Introduction 9

accorded among technological objects, individuals, institutions, and natural and bureaucratic environments. “Why can we send robots to Mars but we don’t know what time it is?” asked more than a few MER mission members, in serious tones slightly softened with wry smiles. On the spot, this was an unanswerable question, left hanging in the air in a room full of scientists and engineers—­and literally hung on a wall, in a gallery of three-­by-­five sticky-­note art located in a hallway in a MER workspace at JPL. Amid a collection of small yellow, pink, and green sticky notes that depicted work experiences on MER, one bright green note expressed the confusion of knowing time and the singularity of time by listing the multiple temporalities, the times zones on Earth and Mars, on the MER mission (figure I.3). The message communicates concern with one of the

FIGURE I.3 This note was one among over a dozen that were artfully laid out on white letter paper (three notes on each piece of paper) and hung along a hallway. Photo by the author.

10

Introduction

most fundamental features of an organization’s infrastructure—­to keep a consistent relationship between work and clock time, one needs to know which time one is talking about. These notes provide some of the data that emerged and drew my attention toward social and technical representations and experiences of temporality. JOINING TIME In August 2003, I joined NASA’s MER mission as a member of the Work Systems Design and Evaluation (WSD&E) workgroup, a research group within NASA Ames Research Center, Intelligent Systems (IS), Human Centered Computing (HCC). Selected by PI Squyres to conduct research on work practices among MER scientists and engineers, WSD&E researchers collected qualitative data on interactions between the human, technological, and engineering systems and contributed analysis for the enhancement of the telerobotic scientific process and related mission operations, as well as the design of computer technologies used for planning, collaboration, and information exchange.12 WSD&E’s research methods were primarily ethnographic, with researchers participating in various capacities from observational to participant-­observation, and from occasional field site visits to full-­time immersion.13 In a 2004 interview, Squyres shared his perspective on the contributions of WSD&E: “Oh, I think it was necessary. I think it was absolutely necessary … there’s no textbook that you go to look up how to operate a robot on Mars. So, we had to work that out as we went along and what the human factors folks did, the social scientists in particular, was look at how we interacted with one another and help us find ways of streamlining that, making it efficient, making sure that information doesn’t get lost along the way. And what they helped us with was taking that sort of visceral intuitive feel that we had for how to do the science and translate it into things that could actually be turned into commands downstream without losing stuff in the process.”14 Work ethnographers study culture in organizational communities.15 The traditional definition of a community subject to anthropological study brings to mind tribes, in garb not likely found in the postindustrial workplace. But a community can be any group bound together by goals or social needs and rules of conduct necessary to maintaining membership. The cover of anthropologist Hugh Gusterson’s book Nuclear Rites, an ethnographic study of a nuclear weapons laboratory in northern California, plays with the traditional definition of community within a nontraditional site by populating an image of a missile field with humans painted head to toe

Introduction 11

in black and white stripes, carrying feathers and knives, bent forward and backward as if in ritual dance.16 Culture is a term describing a community’s norms, values, language, tools, beliefs, habits, and assumptions that guide members’ behavior, relationships, and meaning making. In general, the term may be so widely used that it can fail to inspire curiosity. But for those interested in the how and why of human-­created things and social phenomena, a cultural lens provides a methodology and a focus through which to approach always complex subjects. There is no single reason, person, or flash-­point to answer questions on how and why one version of a technology became more widely used than other versions, or explain a particular organization’s successful operations or the appearance of success followed by failure.17 And no single cultural aspect can be excised to change the culture of a community. A particular value may be identified as a reason for a community’s actions, but one aspect is never the whole explanation. Values are linked to rewards and punishment, all of which are enacted by people, by choice, and by power (e.g., social or economic pressure). Aside from reproducing a version of technological determinism, the idea that one cultural aspect can be changed without attention to the various other aspects that maintain it fails to respect the community-­generated origin of culture. In other words, it is through an assemblage of individuals that communities are created and maintained. To understand some of the ways in which they are shaped, we need to consider cultural aspects both inside and outside their community boundaries. In the spring of 2002 I was contacted by MER mission’s lead ethnographer Roxana Wales. She asked if I would be available to work on the MER mission as a WSD&E ethnographer; if so, she would pursue creating the position in the interest of adding a “fresh pair of eyes.” Roxana, a cultural anthropologist with expertise in high-­tech work domains, had been working with MER’s Athena science team for two years. While she too would continue ethnographic research on MER, her call to me was a reflection of an ethnographer’s awareness of the stage at which the strange has become familiar, to the degree that one is aware they have begun to adopt some of the cultural aspects of the community of study. A few years earlier, we had worked together, teamed up with computer scientist and ethnographer John O’Neill, on a NASA Ames study of airline delays, conducting ethnographic research among employees (e.g., customer service, baggage, flight controllers) and customers at United Airlines.18 I was stunned by Roxana’s question. I had never imagined such an opportunity. Upon the completion of our team airline research, she and John had moved on to other projects but not before seeing me into a second research

12

Introduction

study on United Airlines. This too was a successful project, but I was unwavering in my interest to complete a doctoral program. After completing my master’s degree, I moved on from research at NASA to a doctoral program in Communication and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. To some, my hesitation to accept her offer was laughable. One professor I went to for advice responded by chuckling, as though I was asking in jest. I was cautious because, although confident that I could contribute ethnographic research for WSD&E, I did not know exactly what I would find to pursue for my own cultural study of MER. My position allowed me to conduct research for WSD&E and MER’s Athena science team, as well as for my graduate research, a specified arrangement I’d asked for before joining MER. I had chosen a graduate program within which to study why and how particular intersections of culture, communication, and technology were more popular, successful, and long-­standing than others even when less functionally operational. My focus was partly reinforced by what I had experienced during my research at United Airlines. I had seen a number of interesting incongruities between how people were expected to conduct work and use work-­specific tools and how work actually took place. One example I found was the difference in interpreting a short check-­in interaction between a customer service agent, customer, and airline check-­in software. Each of the three were actants wanting and providing information with a different order of priority. The result of the mismatch was, in part, a normalization of interpretations that customer service agents are slow (they type away at who knows what), customers do not know what is going on (as more than one manager described the difficulty of getting customers to their plane in time for an on-­time departure, “Their IQ drops when they walk into an airport”), training is ineffectual, and so on. I decided to access both sides of the counter (literally stepping over from one side to another) and to participate in United’s customer service training course. With these added vantage points I identified issues affecting multiple parties and affected by a range of aspects including software design, work station design, employee evaluation, management standards, and differences in travel habits among customer-­types (e.g., travel experience, fare-­class).19 The appeal of NASA’s MER mission, for me, was the opportunity to get inside an organization known for having set the standard for highly productive, technologically advanced work—­an organizational reputation in sharp contrast to that of the airline industry. Yet NASA was also a large, multisite organization with multiple subcultures with origins in, for example, distinct center goals and membership status (e.g., civil servants versus

Introduction 13

contract employees, various areas of expertise, role hierarchy).20 I was interested in studying these frictions in a place where I also knew from previous experience that many placed great value on imagination. For example, I participated in many formal and casual discussions in which an operating shared assumption was “If we can imagine it, then we can build it” (setting aside funding constraints, of course), which informed a communication norm that encouraged paying attention to anyone offering ideas or project feedback regardless of their position in the hierarchy of age or work experience. After confirming my interest with Dr. Wales, I focused on completing coursework so that if the offer became a reality I would be free to move to Pasadena, California, and work full time on the MER mission. I began working on the MER mission in August 2003. When I heard that the mission work schedule would be set according to Mars time it registered as just one of the many workplace features specific to NASA. Along with most of the people who told me about the Mars time schedule, I took for granted that knowing this new time would not be so different from familiarizing myself with new time zones when traveling or working with people in different time zones. One of the main reasons I moved to Pasadena was to maintain a work schedule in stride with both rover operations throughout the “nominal mission”—­the designated length proposed, funded, and agreed on as a measure of success for the MER mission. (MER beyond nominal was referred to as “extended operations.”) Given the multiple temporalities involved, I knew prioritizing the MER work schedule would be difficult to sustain if I opted to travel in for weekly stints (thus adding more timetables to manage). From the first week on Mars time, in January 2004, I noticed time issues. It was early days, though; just like the first days of adjusting to any new time zone, people needed to check and recheck “What time is it?” There were a few late arrivals to meetings, but nothing that increased risk to the mission’s success. I was intrigued by the absence of formal acknowledgment of the ways in which these breakdowns might later affect the production of Martian science, which required many meetings with unyielding start and end times and alert decision making. From January to April 2004, I worked at JPL according to Mars time with both robots’ science and engineering teams (from May to August 2004, my time schedule shifted in keeping with MER’s transition to the extended mission phase, which kept Mars time for the robots’ schedules on Mars and returned to local standard time for terrestrial teams). I had not planned for this Herculean effort but was compelled by curiosity and driven by a research ethos of thoroughness. It was only shortly before the start of the

14

Introduction

nominal mission that it became evident the WSD&E research team would not be able to coordinate in-­person coverage across MER’s dual daily work plans and work schedules. There would be some coordination for collecting video recordings, and some crossing of paths throughout the mission workspaces; but all told, we were pursuing research matters separately as they emerged. One of the most compelling reasons for choosing to spend every possible moment in the field, on the MER mission at JPL, was the fact that the physical site, the work environment, of the MER mission itself, had an expiration date. As long as the robots continued to function and additional funding was provided, the MER mission would continue past the nominal mission of 90 sols but the workspaces would change. But instead of co-­located scientists and engineers, the MER mission’s extended mission operations would transition to distributed work, with meetings held via phone and some video conferencing.21 The physical workspaces would be reused, modified, and transformed for another mission. The Athena science teams’ workspaces were never meant to be permanent installations. To understand that the original material and social conditions of the MER work environment would no longer exist after April was to understand that our access was finite, that we had one set window of time to gather data in this special site to which we could never return. Ethnographers, indeed most scientists whose work requires their presence in extreme environments, know the value of access, as does anyone who has left a place to which it is hard or impossible to return. This sense of time and space drove me to work as many hours of the day and night, and as many days of the week, as I could at JPL.22 An ethnographic account does well to highlight the moments of disconnect between what is supposed to happen or what is planned and what actually happens. Staying in situ for months is a part of the method that allows patterns to be identified and checked against themselves. Did something that happened in the first week happen again in the last week, and how many times in between? Was a new workaround developed and passed along as work practice? The resulting account is not meant to be a tell-­ all or an exposé. Indeed, some may be disappointed for the lack of juicy details about individual characteristics, personal stories, pranks, hardships, esprit de corps, arguments, and intimacies. I would have enjoyed sinking in to the accounts of house parties, dinner chats, celebrity sightings, temper flares, and the like. But these types of stories belong to the subjects. These are personal accounts that I did not set out to write up and I have remained unwavering in keeping them private. The narrative structure may have flowed more easily had I relied on classic tropes of heroes, rogues,

Introduction 15

and technological progress and fears. However, my aim was to centralize the often-­overlooked importance of organizational infrastructure, human–­ technology relationships, and the world of work.23 Many mission members have written their own accounts, are available for interviews, and have been interviewed in national and local press. Importantly, most are ongoing members of space exploration communities. Indeed, I often rely on scientists’ public statements as representative of their views or in contrast to what they did not say within the context of MER. Time-­related questions first emerged while I was trying to orient myself to the logic of Mars time and the MER work schedule. What was it about an interplanetary work system that made it necessary to conduct work according to Mars time? Why were the robots on Mars determining our work hours on Earth? Why were questions and comments about temporal breakdowns not a frequent topic, especially since time and food are two socially normative topics for small talk and social bonding (e.g., “I’m so busy …” and “I can barely eat the food …”)? How was it that in a high-­tech organization known for technological ingenuity there was such an old-­fashioned vibe to addressing sociotechnical issues (i.e., a tendency to only talk about such things in private)? Why was it that what I saw as a weak point in the organizational infrastructure for others was an issue of individual strength or weakness? Given my previous sociocultural research on work support technology, I did not make the default assumption that users are at fault when technology relationships are inadequate. And I expected technology issues to be acknowledged, even sought after, because they present opportunities for innovation. Answers to those questions run through this book. The chapters of this book are organized along a trajectory of moving in to the field, beginning with both a broad and a specific focus on the MER mission workplace and the place from which the mission originated to situating the MER time–­work relationship and revealing the entanglements of individual, organizational, and technological processes. It is a nontraditional narrative timeline but one that reflects a central theme in this book, namely, that temporality is a flexible technology and experience. MARS TIME: CULTURALLY PRODUCED VIA AN ASSEMBLY OF PHYSICAL, SOCIAL, AND HISTORICAL TECHNOLOGIES SUPPORTING AND SUPPORTED BY PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS Chapter 1, “MER: An Interplanetary Workplace and Community,” lays out the MER workplace and gives an insider’s view on an extraordinary space made up of worksites on two planets, separated by millions of miles, with

16

Introduction

sets of physically distinct workers, humans and robots. Within the cultural and historical context of the MER mission, I offer a view of the MER mission as a community with boundary-­setting cultural features used to make and interpret shared meaning, such as membership rituals, language, operating values, beliefs, and artifacts. Moreover, MER was nested within NASA, the “parent” organization and one of its centers. NASA, of course, is not a typical work environment. It sits at the nexus of producing and circulating scientific and technological materials and discourses at local and global levels, from the very definition of “rocket science” to negotiations of troubled political and economic relationships across countries. NASA’s productions of science and technology are shaped by individuals, the public (as an audience of consumers and contributors), the government, and private companies. Since the successful Moon landings, NASA has been in some sense the people’s organization, capturing the imaginations and aspirations of multitudes of Americans. We generally respond agreeably to NASA-­produced information on what the world is made of, what is the past and the future of our terrestrial environment, and the acceptable means by which to explore hard-­to-­reach-­and-­see nature.24 We also want to know more about how particular things work, who does the work, and what reconciliations take place to render things operable. Chapter 2, “Time at Work in Space,” describes the making of Mars time in situ and the discordances among MER’s multiple temporalities against the historical background of the institutional production of standard clock time in the United States. Standard clock time is a relatively recent phenomenon, with an official start date on November 18, 1883. Following its national adoption, standard clock time became a fixture of workplaces as a tool by which to evaluate and drive individual work efforts. This historical relationship highlights the production of standard clock time through technologies (material and process) and social (professional) activities. MER’s time matters were unique but also inextricably coupled to organizational and technological histories over a hundred years strong. Technologies fashioned just for Mars time could not remedy some of the fundamentally temporal incongruities in the experience of physically working on Earth according to the time of day on Mars. I share examples of observed breakdowns while working in multiple times and the technological drift of some of the formal and informal work-­support technologies that emerged as a result. There was no “right way” to manage Mars time, nor was there a right way that for some reason was ignored. Instead of regarding breakdowns in time management as failures of human practices, culture, or technology design, I examine how the time–­work relationship

Introduction 17

was managed by looking into the connections between technologies, social processes, organization, and work culture history. Chapter 3, “The Sound of No Clock Ticking,” discusses some notions that complicate the interpretation that Mars time issues were user issues, and similar to most time-­management issues experienced at work. I argue that the time–­work relationship established for MER was made up of conflicting temporal rhythms that could not be resolved by adjusting numerical representations of time. Repeating activities, in nature and human-­built environments, produce a rhythm that includes explicit time markers (e.g., work timetable, aging, seasons) and implicit pacing that comes from physical experience, as described by sociologist of time scholar Eviatar Zerubavel.25 Temporal rhythms are also shaped by distinct historical periods. Working on the MER mission according to Mars time required scientists’ work activities to run in accordance with a temporal rhythm set by sunlight, while the work itself was planned and carried out in an organizational setting without any Mars sunlight proxy. In trying to fit the experience of solar time on Mars into the framework that produces clock time on Earth, the role of human physical experience was all but missing. The notion that time is known exclusively through numbers ignores the important contribution of human experience in constituting such knowledge, specifically the physical experience of knowing time through its prenumerical representation—­the Sun. This observation echoes a point made by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and by anthropologist Edwin Hutchins that the phenomenology of human experience cannot be fully represented by a set of numerical values.26 Making time on Mars without calibrating it to the physical experience of receiving a translated version of the movement of sunlight on Mars effectively laid intellectual claim to new territory, but it did not wholly support the relationship between time and work in an interplanetary work system. Chapter 4, “Dreaming of Space, Imagining Membership,” discusses the relationship between professional identity and media-­derived imaginaries of working in space science and exploration. Many personal biographies, among MER mission members specifically and among individuals working on space exploration, locate their inspirations in popular media such as science fiction literature from the nineteenth century, as well as gazing up at the sky. Studies of media and the sociology of occupations provide background on the relationship between popular media as a source for imaginaries of work and professional identity formation. The media, I argue, also provide normative categories of who participates in space-­related work, how to participate, and what counts as success and failure. Media content not only inspires people but also feeds the imagination of what it means to work

18

Introduction

in an extreme environment. Some details are explicit, like the characterization of rocket scientists as the popular benchmark of highest intelligence (as in “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out”), while other details are part of the subtext, for instance that successful work performance means the ability to endure and overcome any technical adversity. These normative preconceptions of work practices conflict in critical ways with the actual lived experience of work. MER member responses to technological breakdowns, inadequate time-­keeping tools, and lack of support during the mission reflected cultural values and beliefs that circulate both outside and within NASA. Indeed, participation in physical hardship and adversity are necessary to demonstrating one’s identity as a good scientist and explorer. Returning to the MER robots as geologists, chapter 5, “Membering the Rovers: Humans and Robots as Coworkers,” highlights another significant feature of the Mars time–­work relationship. The MER robots, first categorized as artifacts, came to be constituted as coworkers through discourse, work practices, and temporality. The robots contributed to the construction of Mars time as the only mission members to physically experience solar time on Mars. The rhythm of work on MER included uncertain temporal durations, such as waiting each day for confirmation that the robots had received and followed data-­collection commands, while earthbound mission members also prepared to work based on anticipation of the robots’ responses. Considering robots as coworkers, rather than as commanded and controlled objects, expands our understanding of the social and cultural aspects of human–­machine relationships. During the MER mission, scientists anthropomorphized the MER robots by imbuing them with human characteristics of kinship, emotion, appendages, and even death. Characterizing the robots’ operational status as “sleeping,” “tired,” or “sullen,” human mission members used human characteristics as explanatory devices to manage durations of uncertainty—­when they did not quite know what their robotic partners were up to. The robots were not in fact autonomous surrogates; they were not equipped with artificial intelligence matching human intelligence. Scientists and engineers had to imagine how the robots would carry out the scientific data collection as though they themselves were on Mars. The robots’ appendages presented many limitations in movement, as did the rate at which they could move. Scientists and engineers worked together to translate human gestures into robot movements using their bodies and creating new words, and the robot’s physical affordances and constraints guided the scientists’ imagining of data collection on Mars.

1



MER: AN INTERPLANETARY WORKPLACE AND COMMUNITY

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), locally referred to as “the lab,” is in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, whose highest peak is 10,064 feet (3,068 meters), in southern California. About twenty freeway minutes northeast of the city of Los Angeles (pop. 3.7 million), the lab’s footprint spans both the city of Pasadena (pop. 140,000) and the town of La Cañada Flintridge (pop. 20,700). By national reputation, Pasadena is known not for rocketry but for roses. Since 1890 it has hosted the Tournament of Roses, a parade known for its floats made entirely of flora.1 Every January 1 since 1947, the Rose Parade procession along Colorado Boulevard has been televised (prior to which it was nationally broadcast by radio since 1927). Film and television celebrities, athletes, and nationally recognized heroes have served as grand marshals. In 1969, the grand marshals of the parade were Apollo 12 astronauts Alan Bean, Charles Conrad, and Richard Gordon, who had just returned from the Moon two months earlier. Pasadena’s annual spectacle is a reminder that it is geographically located in a place that is warm during the winter months in the United States. Pasadena was first built up as a resort destination for wealthy Los Angelenos. Over a hundred years later, the same place that once drew people seeking respite from the city became a place some people left for the sake of their health. Many residents of Pasadena that I spoke with about what it was like to live in Pasadena led with a description of the environment, in particular a negative feature—­smog. One local small business owner said that she and many other residents would close up shop and leave town during the yearly periods of smog because of its effects on their respiratory health. Indeed, when smog was present, it would hang in the air, not visible like fog but apparent from the burning sensation that it inflamed in one’s eyes, nose, and throat. The habitability of the local environment was something I often thought about while driving to and from JPL and while

20

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working inside JPL’s office buildings among people looking for habitability on Mars. MER’s interplanetary workplace was located amidst this landscape. To understand the people, processes, and technologies of the MER mission workplace at JPL, we need to go further than locating the home institution’s address. An organization’s history is a primary source that explicitly and implicitly informs an organization’s work practices (e.g., “We’ve just always done it this way”), power relationships (e.g., work roles, hierarchies), language, social values, and member expectations.2 An organization’s infrastructure, which includes social processes, expert knowledge for production goals, and material technologies, does not spring up wholly assembled with no other origin than a single individual.3 A single organization holds traces of many other organizations. Like most human-­built technology, its parts come from other organizations, from local power grids and laws that shape operations to employees’ previous work and education experiences that shape how they work and how they enact organizational culture. JPL’s origin story is one of rocketry and institutional invention. It contains a familiar trope of technological innovation born of young male inventors working without regard for their physical safety to achieve great feats. It is also an instance of a federal institution built on scientific and engineering knowledge produced by members of three different types of organizations—­university, government, and private. In this chapter I discuss the cultural and political histories of JPL and rocketry, which are important contextual features of MER’s interplanetary workplace. BECOMING JPL Driving west on the 210 freeway, the first sighting of JPL is a green sign that reads “NASA-­JPL Next Exit.” The text calls up the history of JPL and the creation of one of the foremost sites for robotic space exploration. Indeed, it could read “NASA-­Caltech-­JPL Next Exit,” as JPL’s institutional progenitor and ongoing manager is the California Institute of Technology, “Caltech.” Before the creation of NASA, before German scientists and rockets were relocated to the United States as spoils of World War II, the development of rocketry here began in Pasadena with a group of men known as “the Suicide Squad” and a Caltech professor known as “the Einstein of Aviation.” Locally, the story begins in the late 1920s with two teenagers attending the same high school in Pasadena, Marvel John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons (1914–­1952) and Edward “Ed” Seymour Forman (1912–­1973). Their fascination with depictions of rocketry in science fiction drew them together

An Interplanetary Workplace 21

and they began working on turning the fiction of rocketry into reality. In 1935 they attended a public lecture at Caltech on wind dynamics given by William Bollay,4 a student of Theodore von Kármán (1881–­1963), “the Einstein of Aviation.” Parsons and Forman approached Bollay seeking support and collaboration and he directed them to Frank Malina (1912–­ 1981), another of von Kármán’s graduate students.5 After learning of their novel ideas and experiments for developing rocketry, Malina brought their work to von Kármán. Malina became their institutional liaison and colleague. Parsons and Forman did not become Caltech students and were not granted formal positions in von Kármán’s lab, the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory California Institute of Technology (GALCIT). Von Kármán did acknowledge their work and gave them access to GALCIT to work with some of his students. For three years, Parsons and Forman worked with Caltech graduate students Frank Malina, Apollo Milton Olin Smith, and Hsue-­Shen Tsein. Their trial-­and-­error experiments produced explosions that were often felt by the entire campus, earning them the nickname “the Suicide Squad.” Asked to take their experiments off-­campus, they relocated to Arroyo Seco, an uninhabited canyon in the same area where JPL stands today. In need of funds, they accepted $1,000 from Caltech student Weld Arnold, who wanted in exchange exclusive access to take photographs. Figure 1.1 illustrates a moment sometimes referred to as JPL’s Nativity Scene.6 The Suicide Squad posed for this photo in 1936 while testing rockets in the Arroyo Seco. Malina, working closely with both the Suicide Squad and von Kármán, was the de facto embodiment of knowledge transfer. Malina bridged the boundary between the local inventors who were without Caltech affiliations and a Caltech professor and his students. Given the degree to which their contributions would become less well known, it bears noting that two key figures of the events leading to the development of rocketry and JPL were never full members of Caltech. Neither Parsons nor Forman attended Caltech, and neither was hired by Caltech.7 It was then, as it is still, remarkable for nonmembers to have access to a private and elite institution and to have legitimate access to its resources (whether these resources are intellectual or material). Malina shared the development of rocketry with GALCIT and von Kármán while extending materials and insight from GALCIT to Parsons and Forman.8 While Squad membership fluctuated somewhat, the three constants were Malina, Parsons, and Foreman.9 By 1938 the Squad’s work had attracted the interests of industry and fellow inventors, in particular Consolidated Aircraft Company of San Diego and rocketry developer Robert Goddard.10 While the interactions with

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FIGURE 1.1 JPL’s Nativity Scene. From right to left: Jack Parsons, Ed Forman, Frank Malina, Apollo Smith, and Rudolph Schott. Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology.

Goddard would not lead to collaboration, interest from the federal level continued the process of institutionalizing the Squad’s work.11 In December 1938, von Kármán sent Malina to present their work to the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Army Air Corps Research in Washington, DC. The response from the US Army Air Corps was a contract for $1,000 to create a formal research project to be directed by von Kármán—­the Air Corps Jet Propulsion Research Project. The title chosen for the project reflected their awareness of the importance of public support, as it was a compromise between the rocketeers and the Army Corps. Malina wrote, “The word ‘rocket’ was still in such bad repute in ‘serious’ scientific circles at this time that it was felt advisable by von Kármán and myself to follow the precedent of the Air Corps of dropping the use of the word. It did not return to our vocabulary until several years later, by which time ‘jet’ had become part of the name of our laboratory (JPL).”12 In 1939, the Army Corps increased their support to $10,000.13

An Interplanetary Workplace 23

In 1944, Caltech acquired land in the Arroyo Seco where it located a facility for the Air Corps Jet Propulsion Research Project and called this facility the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Frank Malina was named director, replacing von Kármán as the administrative head; only one member of the Squad, and von Kármán, would have formal positions at JPL.14 Meanwhile, the Squad and von Kármán developed another rocketry organization, a private company called Aerojet.15 After Parsons’s invention of jet-­assisted take-­off (JATO) units was adopted by the US military, the business of manufacturing had to be addressed.16 The US military wanted the JATO units, but neither they nor Caltech were interested in becoming manufacturers. Private companies were approached, but no agreement could be reached because Parsons would not give up his patent rights. Unfortunately, there is no in-­depth account of this impasse that is of interest given the ongoing conflict that continues over individual and institutional ownership of inventions, patents, and intellectual property within sponsored-­ research in universities and companies. Parsons’s autobiography does not describe these events in detail.17 Von Kármán, in his autobiography, wrote that it was Malina’s idea to set up a manufacturing business and that Parsons and Forman eagerly agreed.18 Receiving some resistance from both Caltech and Army Air Corps for this venture, Malina argued that by creating Aerojet they were contributing to the preservation of the university as an institution of research and scholarship by keeping the business of producing and selling technology distinct.19 Von Kármán’s suggestion to name the company “Superpower” was overruled. In 1942, Aerojet was formed by three members of the Squad, von Kármán, and another Caltech graduate, Martin Summerfield (figure 1.2).20 It was not until 1958, twenty years after its inception, that JPL joined the newly created federal organization National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), created in response to Sputnik. Circling the globe every 98 minutes, it was a constant reminder that the USSR had moved rocketry from science fiction into real science and technology.21 President Eisenhower reacted with law PL 85-­568 that established a broad charter for civilian aeronautical and space research and transformed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) (1915–­1958) into NASA.22 NASA’s first administrator T. Keith Glennan, president of Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) and former commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, was empowered to build NASA with already existing government programs. This led to NASA taking control of two Army teams. Historian Roger Bilstein wrote that the “Army balked at losing the Huntsville [ABMA] group,” and “grudgingly gave up JPL.”23 Effective

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FIGURE 1.2 Aerojet’s five founders. Source: Bernie Dornan et al., Aerojet: The Creative Company (Los Angeles: Aerojet History Group, 1995).

An Interplanetary Workplace 25

December 3, 1958, an executive order transferred the government-­owned JPL and the Army contract with Caltech to NASA. And on March 15, 1960, ABMA’s Development Operations Division led by Wernher von Braun was transferred to NASA.24 By 1958 none of the original Squad members were working for JPL, Caltech, or Aerojet. Today, on special occasions, JPL produces a unique tribute to the group of guys whose work together helped to lift rocketry from the realm of science fiction into the institutional realms of federal agencies and onto the global stage. A re-­creation of the iconic photo of Suicide Squad (figure 1.1) in the Arroyo Seco is set up as an open-­stage diorama at JPL, just in front of the Theodore von Kármán Auditorium. Five mannequins are placed in the same positions as in the Nativity scene photograph around a rocketry experiment. Four of the mannequins are in repose and one is seated on a rock. Walking past this tribute in 2004, I was not immediately aware that the five figures were inhuman. All five, dressed in white short-­sleeve shirts and dark pants, could have just gathered to hang out in a square of rocks and trees, a natural feature within the quad’s concrete landscape. It was a simple reproduction reflecting not only past events but also present work conditions at JPL. I appreciated it as a tribute to the grit of everyday work, teamwork, technologies, and experimentation.25 THE LAB, 2003 It was August 2003 when I first stepped into the lab. Driving from the Burbank Airport with lead ethnographer Roxana Wales, along the 210 freeway, to Oak Grove Drive, I was surprised by the sudden contrast between city and rural landscape. JPL is located between a concrete freeway maze and the perimeter of the Angeles National Forest (1,024 square miles). It is only minutes from the skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles, yet the mile of landscape around JPL is untamed, tall yellow field grass among dry shrubs and trees. Just before reaching the first of several JPL security checkpoints, while looking around to see what the neighboring residences or businesses were, I saw fencing that I thought was for a private residence. It was for the La Canada Flintridge Riding Club.26 There was nothing remarkable about the property, but the juxtaposition of horses and rocketry caught my attention. On the spectrum of transportation, horses and rockets must be at opposite ends. The first of JPL’s many security checkpoints was a two-­person guardhouse. JPL’s security practices are in keeping with NASA, rather than Caltech. The

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Chapter 1

Caltech campus, like many universities, is unfenced. Anyone can pass from the residential and business streets right on to the open grounds and walk among the university’s pale pink and cream buildings, manicured green lawns, and rectangular fountains. At JPL, like other NASA centers, there is no entry beyond the first checkpoint without approval. Anyone can drive up, but everyone has to stay inside their car while guards determine whether they can continue on through the gates to further checkpoints or have to make a U-­turn and drive away. Even with security clearance from NASA Ames Research Center, I had to meet each security measure for JPL anew. Membership at one NASA center does not entitle you to pass through any NASA workplace. It is taken for granted that the normative institutional practice is not to accept a person’s oral account of who they are; it is insufficient as proof. Only through earning an institution-­granted token of authorized trust can an outsider become a member. For many organizations, this token that speaks for the authorized status of the holder comes in the form of a security badge. For state and national institutions, these tokens are birth certificates, passports, voter registration cards, or driver’s licenses. Indeed, these ubiquitous tokens may register as mundane. Sometimes it takes the experience of a myriad of obstacles, both social and institutional, to obtain one in order to appreciate their significance.27 For some, going through institutional passage points, past human or machine gatekeepers, inevitably brings with it a feeling of unease. These are places where time and communication can unravel. Time durations during an entry process can go from a planned routine of a few minutes into unplanned stretches of time, across hours, days, and weeks. Like many people, I have experienced the unexpected increase in time spent just trying to get past gatekeepers, sometimes even with the right documents in hand. One minute you are going through a routine communication exchange to enter a place and in the next minute you could be deep in miscommunication, leading to delay or even detainment. On the other side of the first checkpoint, a JPL/NASA/Caltech placard came into sight. It was remarkable for its lack of splendor. Just past the guard house, we reached the next passage point. This one was informal but nonetheless a challenging hurdle linked to increasing time spent finding a parking space. On that day, and in the months that followed, there seemed to be fewer parking spaces than people arriving to work at the lab. A common inconvenience for drivers everywhere, it was a surprise to find it to be an issue in a place that set the bar for technological achievement. It was one example of the encounter that ironically brought to mind, “It’s not rocket

An Interplanetary Workplace 27

science!”—­not in a mocking way, but as a way to call into question and to challenge a norm that anything less than rocket science should be simple and easy. Turning the question around, I asked, “What makes this more difficult than rocket science?” What has to happen for an organization to not have enough parking spaces for cars and their drivers, a known quantity essential to the operation of the organization? Truly the coordination of humans, machines, space, and time has degrees of difficulty beyond that of the technical design of rockets. The last institutional checkpoint between the parking lot and making it to the lab was a small building through which those who had no security badge had to enter for evaluation. Inside to the left was a row of seats and to the right was a long counter staffed with access administrators. Behind their seats was the door that led directly to the central quad area of the lab. Getting through to that door required their clearance. Though the room was calm there were physical signs of time anxiousness (e.g., people frequently checking their watches and phones) and information confusion (e.g., paper and planner shuffling). Adding some eeriness to the setting was the synchronized head craning of the people who sat waiting for approval each time the door to the lab was opened by someone who had been granted access. The visitor badge I received that day gave new meaning to “temporary.” It looked like a regular three-­by-­four-­inch white paper badge with red lettering, until later in the early evening I saw it had turned a blotchy red. The badge had self-­activated a defacing process that rendered it useless, a more prominent mark than the expiration date written on the badge. Not only did it signal the badge had expired but continuing to wear it revealed that you were unaware of a huge ink spot that everyone else could see. The badge also identified that I had to be accompanied by a person with an actual JPL security badge at all times. Inside the buildings, where most doors could only be opened by approval from the badge reader, it was not an option to come and go without an escort. This brought an unanticipated awkwardness when having to ask, or being asked by, a colleague to go with you to use the restroom or the vending machines. When I walked through the last checkpoint, the door opened to a main quad, where later I would see the Nativity scene. The lab’s main open area is enclosed by concrete walkways and buildings housing mission control for the deep-­space network, administration, press, robotic development, testbeds, cafeteria, library, and gift shop. The enclosure that was so hard to reach by humans was more easily reached by wild life. Early in the morning and at dusk, deer could be seen sitting, standing, and eating in the grassy

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area to one side of the quad. Though they were present almost daily, the sight of them in a place built to extend our human experience to another planet was remarkable. Some evenings, during MER, alongside the deer in the quad you could look up to see Mars. In these moments, even after having just left a facility where communication was taking place with robots on Mars, it would feel as if we were no closer to being on Mars than the other mammals beside us. MER MISSION: PEOPLE, ROBOTS, SPACE, AND TIME Considering all the individuals who participated in MER’s various stages of planning, funding, designing, and operations over more than a decade, it is difficult to calculate the exact number of participants. MER mission’s Principal Investigator Steve W. Squyres gave a count of over four thousand in his book about the MER mission.28 A couple of hundred people were involved in MER’s nominal mission at JPL, though not all were present at the same time. PI Squyres’s Athena science team included twenty-­ two co-­investigators, each of whom added colleagues and students to the team.29 A photo taken in 2003 at JPL includes (some) MER mission participants assembled in the JPL quad (figure 1.3). Some were affiliated with PI Squyres’s primary organization, Cornell University, and others were affiliated with institutions (public and private) such as the US Geological Survey (USGS), the University of Washington, Honeybee Robotics, the Max Planck Institute, and the University of Arizona. A few even had additional roles on the “M-­team” for Marsapalooza, a public education campaign about Mars “designed to imitate a rock concert–­style tour” in five cities.30 Together, the MER mission members worked in a context of shared values, meanings, and hierarchy that had developed both informally and formally over two years of preparation. Some had known one another for over two years and some had relationships that were part collegial, part competitive, even part rivalrous. In his book, Squyres gives one account of the process by which scientists propose planetary science research to NASA with respect to the numerous Athena science team members who were also contenders for the role of science PI on NASA Mars missions.31 What he does not fully capture in his account, perhaps in part from humility but also from the difficulty of stepping back to assess processes in which one is deeply enmeshed, was the high degree of managerial competency demonstrated in organizing and maintaining social order among a group of people who themselves were in the habit of conducting science work independently and leading their own workgroups. It was an extraordinary achievement to

An Interplanetary Workplace 29

FIGURE 1.3 MER mission members assembled for a group photo in the JPL quad area. In this picture, the majority of people are from the Athena science team. It does not represent all MER mission participants. Courtesy of NASA/JPL/Caltech.

support a team that had to mutually construct and maintain a work environment that included daily group deliberation and decision making, independent and group analysis, intense goal pressure, public and government scrutiny, remote robotic presence at two sites on another planet, and novel temporal settings. Moreover, the nature of the work—­the pursuit of scientific knowledge—­is normally conducted in smaller workspaces, with far fewer colleagues, a single lead scientist, and only occasional, if any, daily group deliberation (a formal meeting required to reach a decision by consensus). While a concentration on the theme of co-­located scientists’ decision making for remote presence team work in an extreme environment is beyond the scope of this book, it is a theme I have continued with in subsequent research projects and one that is informed by the Athena science team’s best practices and human–­technology entanglements that I observed.32 The spectrum of individual demographic differences was small. The Athena science team had more male than female members. There were students (undergraduate and graduate) and senior scientists. The group’s ages ranged from 19 to 65+. Age was the most visible feature with a significant spectrum. Held up to the United States Census Bureau’s identity categories,

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one selection (“White”) in the demographic category of “race” was represented more than all others. That said, obtaining data on individual participant demographics was not a feature of WSD&E’s ethnographic research. I was most interested in two aspects of individual participants, their age and work background, that inform communication habits (e.g., with or without mobile technology), work practice norms (e.g., did they learn work fundamentals with or without digital technologies), and resources for meaning making. Age provides some contextual information by indicating the general human–­technology relationship time period in which a person may have been introduced to popular communication and digital technologies (information communication technologies, or ICTs). For some MER mission members, computers, software, and digital file systems were part of the world in which they grew up, whereas others came to know the world and develop their work practices in eras preceding prolific ICTs and through the periods of rapid ICT development. The Athena science team included senior scientists who had participated on NASA’s 1975 Mars mission, Viking I and II, midcareer scientists, graduate students, and undergraduate students, some born after 1975. In a high-­tech workplace, the range of experience across eras characterized by new ICTs intersects with workgroup members’ experiences with adopting, adjusting, rejecting, and inventing new technologies. The second aspect, work background, relates to a category that I call “institutional experience” to cover two traditional human resource categories of education and previous work experience. Both of these are learning activities, with evaluative stakes, that take place in formal institutions, with particular structures and cultures. Time spent in these institutional environments entrains a person to specific work practices and values. In any work environment, people bring their institutional experiences to bear on their everyday work, whether or not it is explicit. A person’s previous and concurrent institutional experience are meaning-­making resources for the ways in which they interpret information, their habits of communication and work practices, and values. Among the MER mission community, some people had only worked at one institution but their educational institutions also shaped how they interpreted words and actions. And for some, their institutional experiences were many, prior to and while working on MER. It is from this category and the presence of multiple sources of meaning making that I identify work environments as sites of intercultural communication. Another category that emerged from my analysis (from a memo in my fieldwork notes)33 to indicate the high number of shared institutional

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experiences among the MER community is “institutional kinship.” Institutional kinship denotes relationships between people with current or previous shared institutional experiences. In anthropology, kinship is the study of familial relationships within a community. These relationships can be biologically or socially based (e.g., marriage). A kinship diagram (similar to a family tree except it uses symbols instead of names) is a common method for visualizing relationships among members of community. Connecting how they are related, by blood or by marriage (with additional context such as calendar time), can potentially reveal relationship patterns. While two MER mission members were blood relatives and several were married to scientists (who were not members of MER), these traditional kinship ties were not part of my focus. Of greater interest were the numerous institutional kinship ties. Institutional kinship, similar to traditional kinship, connects people through shared experiences within a social group, within the larger social system. As a subgroup, or subculture, those who share an institutional kinship tie share language, practices, values, and habits that, while originating from another organization, continue to inform their relationships (and may exclude others). Many members of the Athena science team were connected via institutional experience at universities (e.g., Arizona State University, Cornell, Caltech), government agencies (e.g., military, NASA HQ, JPL, USGS), prior NASA Mars missions (e.g., Mars Polar Lander, Pathfinder), and private companies. Some of these institutional kinship ties were still active (i.e., members were still working there) and some had been established in the past. It was not necessary for two people to have necessarily been active at the same institution at the same time for a tie to be in place (e.g., the alma mater connection). As well, the MER mission itself provided members with a new institutional kinship tie. To work on the MER mission, many members of the Athena science team relocated to Pasadena, for various time periods. The official schedule of work, recommended by the NASA Ames Human Factors team, was for scientists to work four days on and three days off. This schedule allowed people to live as part-­time residents in Pasadena and their home locations, which included elsewhere in California and out of state. Some people rented apartments and some stayed in the temporary residences set up in condominium complexes in downtown Pasadena. Most of these temporary units were set up as shared housing, so in many cases people worked and lived together. My own workgroup’s housing accommodated only short-­ term stays, for which I did not qualify as I was moving to Pasadena to live as a permanent resident. I found an apartment about a mile down from the

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temporary housing with convenient access to the freeway, making my commute to JPL between ten and fifteen minutes.34 Once the nominal mission was in full swing the number of people staying locally increased. This was because some people who had been leaving town to return home on their days off found the transition difficult. Time away from MER meant being out of sync with the community with respect to Mars time and social relationships (for work). Many chose to spend their days off at the lab or in Pasadena, rather than traveling home. As with all social groups, subgroups, or cliques, formed. For MER some of these were formed around shared experiences such as living in downtown Pasadena or sharing the same home institution and interests such as going to downtown LA for the nightlife, to the racetrack, to the movies, eating out, and so on. Shared meals outside the lab almost always provided for new groupings because of the irregular schedules (schedules were changing regularly based on work for MER and for home institutions, meetings, and informal discussions). There were some formally arranged events (via email) to which everyone was invited, particularly for celebrations at the end of the nominal mission, and some events that were for specific workgroup(s) to get together. I spent more time outside the lab with MER members outside of my WSD&E workgroup. I was interested in hanging out with people outside of JPL in part to ask them questions about MER and their work while they were not in the midst of work activities. Refraining from interrupting workflow and mission critical work, whether people are working with machines or deep in thought, is an important aspect of work ethnography. And it is important to find time to ask questions that have to be held back, which long-­term fieldwork provides time for.35 Hearing one mission member ask a group of us who were walking into a restaurant, “Why is Zara interested in talking with XXX,” brought a chance to speak to the fact that alongside my work as an ethnographer I had preferences for the company I liked to keep when work was not the focus. At that moment, I had been talking to XXX, the partner of a mission member, because they had a comic sensibility and flair for performance. Another time I asked if I could join a couple of mission members on a trip to a vacant area in the Arroyo Seco to watch as they operated a remote vehicle (a race car with scaled-­down monster truck tires). I also did not participate in everything to which I was invited. I often had to decline because I had more work to do outside the lab (e.g., writing up field notes), and sometimes I chose to decline because of who else was going. To represent all the MER mission members, what they were like and what they were interested in, is not possible here. Most, close to all, of

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them were striking in their ability to focus intently, manage multiple scenarios, process information, and reach out for assistance on what was not their area of expertise. Many, though not all, were also striking in their ability to switch between seriousness and humor without ceding intellectual gravity in a discussion. MER mission members had a range of interests that included cooking, baking, science fiction, film, film production, eating, drinking, photography, animals, social service, music, travel, electronics, and space exploration. More than a few of the members described having dreamed since childhood of going to outer space as an astronaut, working at NASA, and exploring Mars. Some had never imagined their career trajectories would include an actual Mars mission. For others, it had been the ongoing focus of their entire careers. Their personal reflections on childhood dreams made me wonder about the ways in which workplace environments had or had not figured in these dreams. When dreaming of going to outer space, did the dreamer include the facilities and social and technical relationships by which they would get there? And among those who had explicitly named NASA as their dream workplace, I wondered about the depictions of the organization that they had seen, beyond its iconic logo. This led to a theme, developed during the mission, of the relationship between what people explicitly imagined it would be like to work in outer space, the sources that fed that imagination, and the actual experience of working on a space exploration mission (which is the subject of chapter 4). During and after the mission I explored film and literature, some of which I was directed to by mission members’ descriptions of outer-­space reference points. These included biographies and autobiographies of administrators, astronauts, science fiction writers, and space enthusiasts. Back in San Diego, I even attended a monthly movie night hosted by Mars enthusiasts in the local chapter of the Mars Society, an organization that promotes humans going to Mars.36 The organization calls attention to another aspect of the MER mission: not everyone working on MER thought that the best way for people to explore Mars is with robots. Some see the goal as getting humans to Mars, while for others the remote operation of robots will continue to provide scientific understandings on the habitability of the planet. For the former, robotic exploration is a step toward sending humans to Mars. After robots will come humans (who will also use robots to assist them). For some, the idea of humans on Mars is a pursuit of hobbyists, and funding such endeavors takes away from significant scientific exploration that could be conducted via robots. I found this to be one of the clearest binaries among

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people who share a deep interest in Mars exploration. Regardless of what, or who, MER members imagined for future Mars exploration, they worked together with the two robots and kept a tightly coordinated and arduous schedule of interplanetary science exploration. And, from what I saw, they formed relationships with the robots that were not unlike kinship. The Robots Since 1964, NASA’s planetary exploration of Mars has been conducted using orbiters, landers, and rovers. In 1965, of the two identical spacecraft (Mariner 3 and 4) launched in 1964 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to explore the inner solar system, Mariner 4 flew by Mars and sent back to Earth the first close-­up images of craters on Mars. Although Mariner 3 failed after launch, it was successful as one of a pair of space vehicles that established a precedent of using two identical spacecraft for Mars missions. These include: Mariner 6 and 7 (1969), both of which successfully went into orbit; Mariner 8 and 9 (1971, with only Mariner 9 successful in orbit); Viking 1 and 2 (1976), each a pair of two spacecraft (an orbiter and a lander), all four successful; Pathfinder (1997), a lander paired with a twenty-­three pound rover, both successful; and the Mars Exploration rovers (2004).37 The MER mission was the first to employ two identical remotely operated robots.38 Before they were christened “Spirit” and “Opportunity,” the MER robots were respectively called “MER-­A” and “MER-­B.” Often referred to as “twins,” they were identical in build, sharing the same height, weight, and instrument suite. Both were designed to be “robotic geologists”—­literally and figuratively robotic stand-­ins for human geologists. Athena scientists needed the robots to conduct the same activities they themselves would use to investigate terrain, which included visual and physical identifications and assessments. Each robot stood about five feet (1.5 meters) tall, with six wheels instead of feet and cameras in lieu of eyes (figure 1.4). The Athena science instrument suite included a stereo panoramic camera (PanCam) mounted on a mast extended up from the robot’s main assemblage, or body, that provided an “eye level” gaze.39 The robot’s arm, technically called the Instrument Deployment Device (IDD), held the following Athena instruments: (1) a Mini-­Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-­TES) for measuring mineralogy and temperatures of rocks and soils;40 (2) a Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) for grinding the surface of rocks;41 (3) a Mössbauer spectrometer for detecting iron-­bearing minerals;42 and (4) an Alpha Proton X-­ray Spectrometer (APXS) for analyzing the elemental chemistry of rocks and soils.43 Information communication technologies were also part of their field equipment. Each robot was equipped with a computer and antennas

An Interplanetary Workplace 35

FIGURE 1.4 Humans draped in gowns to protect the space vehicles while working on their assembly. Courtesy of NASA/JPL/Caltech.

for direct-­to-­Earth communication, sending information via radio waves from Mars to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) antennas on Earth, or by uplinking information to orbiting spacecraft.44 Each robot could move at a rate of five centimeters per second, about forty meters (132 feet) per day. However, when working on Mars in situ, the required use of hazard avoidance equipment decreased the rate to one centimeter per second, or about a half a meter (two feet) per minute. This was certainly slower than the movements of a human geologist on Earth. However, the robot’s speed was not the only determinant for how far it could travel. The Athena scientists themselves sometimes requested covering shorter distances because of sites of scientific interest they wanted examined. And the rovers used their instruments only during the day, which could also increase time spent in covering a short distance. That said, the robot’s mobility rate is one example of a MER work condition that required scientists to consider how they would conduct normal geologic work practices (i.e., covering a couple of sites of interest in one day) as a robotic geologist (i.e., covering one site over several days).

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Two Teams, Science Themes, and Instrument Subgroups The Athena science team was divided into two teams, one for each robot at each landing site. The teams had formed during the MER planning stage according to each scientist’s interests at the selected landing sites. The entire Athena science team would work to complete MER mission science goals as well as their individual research interests.45 The site-­selection decision process involved participation from the science community via four open workshops over a two-­year period. An initial list of 155 potential sites was narrowed down to four, based on scientific interests and potential data and robot safety, and then to two.46 MER-­A was sent to Gusev Crater and MER-­B to Meridiani Planum, sites that were approximately on opposite sides of Mars (circumference 13,263 miles or 21,344 km). For both MER-­A and MER-­B, scientists organized into five theme groups: Atmosphere, Geochemistry/Mineralogy, Geology, Long-­Term Planning, and Soil. Each workgroup had at least two co-­investigators. While scientists took a primary assignment in one of the five workgroups, these roles did not prevent them from participating in other theme groups. The physical layout of the workspace had been carefully planned to support their collaboration.47 They could, and often did, work within their theme group, across theme groups, and across robot/landing site teams. I initially had a hard time associating each scientist with their particular theme group because so many scientists worked across theme groups for each and for both landing sites. The Athena science team also included workgroups for each of the instruments: APXS, MI, MiniTes, PanCam, and RAT. Interplanetary Workspace The designated JPL building for MER housed workspaces for a number of missions (figure 1.5). Some floors were dedicated entirely to a single project, while other floors were occupied by multiple projects. The building’s small lobby had no signs indicating the remote sites you could get to if you knew which floor to select in the elevator. As I made my way to the MER mission workspace I registered everything that I saw as objects of interest, artifacts that are, as organizational behavior scholar Pasquale Gagliardi puts it, “visible expressions of culture.”48 My first ride up the elevator was short, but for all my anticipation it felt like ages before the doors opened. On the other side of the doors was a hallway designed in the theme of “early government building.” The walls were a gray beige white with a thick plastic wall base that met the low-­pile gray-­blue carpet. The trim was similar in color to the various doors in the

An Interplanetary Workplace 37

FIGURE 1.5 The designated JPL building for MER. Courtesy of NASA/JPL/Caltech.

hallway, some of which had small cutout windows with tiny grid dark patterns. Getting into any of the rooms required approval from the security card readers. The rooms were identified by writing on small placards positioned above the card readers or the doors. Inside, MER’s workspace encompassed three floors of the building. The three floors were sequential and connected by two elevators and two sets of stairs. Two floors were a dedicated workspace for a MER robot and the third was used for operations for both. The first of these three floors was for MER-­A (Spirit) and the second for MER-­B (Opportunity). Both floors had identical workspaces including a large room, the science operations work room, semiprivate workgroup rooms, administrative cubicles and offices, and bathrooms. Some areas on these two floors were not duplicated. The travel time between the two floors for MER-­A and MER-­B was about one minute. They were located on consecutive floors, so access between them was by way of staircase or elevators. There had been no plan or pretense for the MER workspaces to mimic the temporal distance between each work site on Mars. As such, you could travel from one side of Mars to the other in just minutes. The short distance that kept the whole team in close proximity allowed scientists to leave their own Mars time/site on one floor and run up or down the stairs to another Mars time/site where they could remain for minutes or hours depending on the science work and discovery

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in progress. Traveling across time zones on Mars in a matter of minutes was not in and of itself harmful. However, it did play some havoc with the few features of the built environment intended to provide physical material support for being on Mars time. During a single sol of work, it was common to go back and forth between science work rooms, for various reasons. The work schedules and floors separating scientists and rover operations were not enough to keep scientists to the floor set to their Mars time schedule. The proximity of the science operations workspaces was important to the sharing of information and exchange of expertise. It was not unusual for one of the only other experts on a particular Mars terrain feature to be a flight of stairs away. Another reason for crossing times was curiosity. Nothing short of a physical barrier could have kept people from running up or downstairs to see what was happening on another site on Mars. Whether you waited your entire career for this opportunity or not, most everyone knew the situation was rare and time was fleeting. A simple color-­code schema was used to distinguish which MER floor was for which Mars worksite: red for MER-­A, Gusev Crater, and blue for MER-­B, Meridiani Planum. The first representations of the color code appeared in the area between the elevators and doors to the stairwells and workspaces. A thick stripe of paint ran horizontally around the hallway identifying the space as part of the MER mission workplace. Figure 1.6 shows the entry area for MER-­B. Along the wall, a thick stripe painted in the color identified the floor’s corresponding worksite on Mars. The stripe in this picture is blue, the identifying color for MER-­B. The door on the right led to a stairwell connecting MER work floors. In the fall of 2003, and through the start of the mission in 2004, the stripe (and its text) was the only MER floor identifier. The photo in figure 1.6, taken in April 2004, shows two additional identifiers. Additional text was posted to identify the floor. On the far right, an 8.5 × 11 sheet of paper displayed the landing site, the rover’s name, and the floor number. The material of the sign and the timing of its addition to the space indicate that providing this information was an afterthought, as though it was not considered necessary to let people know where they were. The color code was, at times, insufficient for informing mission members about the floor of operations for the corresponding Mars site. Sometimes mission members stepped into this area and asked, “What floor am I on?” The two images on the left are of the landing site Meridiani Planum for the rover Opportunity; identically, images of Gusev Crater were posted on the wall of Spirit’s hallway. The intention may have been to proudly display the successful arrival at the landing site, but it also provided a significant identifier to the workspace.

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FIGURE 1.6 A partial view of the entry area for MER-­B. Photo by the author.

Often, the images of the corresponding workspace on Mars gave people local workspace orientation information, myself included. Figure 1.7 shows the other side of the hallway shown in figure 1.6. Alongside the grand poster were small printouts of terrain images sent by Opportunity. The door at the far end was the entrance to one of the primary Athena science team’s workspaces. These hallway images also show what was absent—­clocks, for either Mars time or local time. The color coding extended beyond the main hall. Each of the working group rooms was identical in layout and features, with the same tables, chairs, projectors, lights, and computers. Everything but two sets of objects: the chairs and the theme group placards were color coded to match the color code for that floor. In the MER-­A workspace, the chairs and placards were burgundy red, and for MER-­B these items were dark blue. The color-­coded office chairs were an unexpected source of information regarding the insufficiency of seating. Had all of the chairs been the same color it would have been far less noticeable when chairs were moved from one floor to another. More chairs were needed by working scientists, engineers, and observers including media, politicians, other NASA employees,

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FIGURE 1.7 A partial view of the entry area for MER-­B, opposite the area shown in figure 1.6. Photo by the author.

and students. The migrated chairs stood for the fact that there were more people in the science work rooms than planned. It was, however, mostly a surreptitious action. Not wanting to be caught breaking up the color code, people often moved chairs when particular authority figures were not present. Scientists in one room tried dealing with the migrating chair issue by labeling their chairs, taping a piece of paper with their name on it to the back of a chair in their workspace. One problem with the migration of chairs between floors, and from one work room to another, was that the borrowed chairs were not returned after being used. This would result in the next shift of scientists having to scramble again for seating, an activity not planned for in the tactical timeline. Though it was sometimes funny (for example, once, as a joke, a couple of people stashed about a dozen chairs in a workspace where the door remained open so they were visible), it was an uncomfortable reason for a meeting to be held up. Not that everyone had to be seated for a meeting to begin, but seating was needed for the work hours and for being side-­by-­side during

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collaboration. When there were more people than chairs in the room the cultural norm was the “mission critical” rule, an evaluation for determining whether or not the presence of something, or someone, was essential for success of the project. Cultural norms for seating (when there are fewer seats than people) include offering one’s seat according to a hierarchy of individual attributes such as age, title, achievement, or physical well-­being. In the science working rooms, the cultural norm was for seating to be offered up to those whose participation in the meeting was mission-­critical. This could change during a meeting and seat adjustments would follow. And when there still were not enough seats, at times people would sit on overturned small metal wastebaskets. In one of the engineering workspaces, I found a couple of mission members sitting on overturned wastebaskets while monitoring the rovers. One of them commented that the mission setup should have borrowed a page from film production by earmarking a million dollars just for items like chairs and food services (comparisons with the Hollywood film industry were not uncommon and typically always in relation to an organization’s ability to conduct large-­scale productions requiring multiple workgroups). One of the MER floors housed the mission control area for telemetry (communicating with the robots) and an engineering work room known as “the sequencing room.” The sequencing room did not require a key card; instead, entry was moderated through size limits and informal gatekeeping. I was told that entry was based on approval from the lead JPL engineer; entering the room without it was frowned upon (which I saw happen). The size of the room was prohibitive to nonessential personnel and the work inside was critical to daily completion of work plans (“commands”) for each rover. Inside, there were just enough workstations, around the room facing the walls, for the engineering team, with a table in the center of the room that they could reach with a swivel of their chairs and a small push. The activities that took place therein included engineers balancing science plans with a robot’s resources and “health” (e.g., checking that the order on the use of instruments was operationally sound, negotiating scientists’ plans with available time during a robot’s workday) before turning them into a language understood by the rover (i.e., code).49 On each floor for MER-­A and MER-­B were small office spaces for each instrument and science workgroup. The doors to these offices were almost always open, and no badge was required; but, again, as in the engineering room, social control mediated entry. It was known that only workgroup members, managers, and invited guests were allowed to come and go freely.

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One set of offices in which I was a regular was that of the RAT (Rock Abrasion Tool) workgroup. The team rooms contained collections of artifacts displayed both strategically and haphazardly. Buddhist prayer flags hung in one room. A large bottle of champagne was prominently displayed in another. There were family photos, comic strips, pictures of the room’s occupants, posters that had been “borrowed” from the science work rooms, Photoshopped images. The white boards told more stories. There were poems about the MER mission, notes on plans for meals, drawings, work schedules, and sarcastic one-­liners about the MER mission, JPL, and NASA. The third floor held a large meeting room used for both rovers, a section of small cubicles for scientists, a section of medium-­size cubicles, and some individual offices. The meeting room was designed specifically for each science team’s final meeting on science plans for the rover’s next day of work (figure 1.8). In this workspace, science operations working group meetings took place to review and deliberate over science plans, which were then handed over to the engineering team for review, assessment, and translation into rover commands. Windows on two sides of the room allowed for spectators. On the left wall (not pictured in the figure) hung three large screens onto which items under discussion were projected for shared viewing. One mission manager for MER described it as the “Callas Palace” because, he said, it would invoke a sense that it was a special space. The room itself was not ornate; it continued the “design theme” of government agency. The key people for the science operations working group held meetings in this room at tables in front of the projector screens. One row of tables was set up behind a second set of tables positioned in the shape of a horseshoe. Seats at the table were assigned, with the role of the person displayed on a blue foam name card. For those who had no seat at the table, there were several rows of folding chairs. Communication was enabled via microphones and speakers (the room was that large), and at each seat was a long flexible microphone that had to be switched on and off for use. At the open end of the horseshoe were several wall-­sized screens on which the items of discussion were projected during meetings. These screens were large enough that they could be used to display 3D images of the Mars terrain that seemed to be to scale—­standing in front of them wearing 3D glasses gave a visual impression of standing on Mars. Still, fitting the knowledge and information that had to be shared during these meetings onto the screens was difficult enough that more than a few people had trouble reading from these screens. One person even used a tiny periscope from their seat to read the text on display.

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FIGURE 1.8 Science Operations Working Group (SOWG) meetings were held in the “Callas Palace.” Photo by the author.

Stepping into a Martian Workspace The MER workspace setup was underway in August 2003, during my first day at JPL. Roxana Wales and I joined scientists preparing to test a formal work routine for MER mission operations that would support daily science data collection and analysis. They were assembled in one of the two identical science work rooms. When we entered the meeting room, a few of the chairs swiveled around in unison to reveal seated scientists. Most were casually dressed in T-­shirts, shorts, and sandals (with socks), and in various seated positions—­slouched to one side, leaning back, rocking, but nevertheless maintaining a formal demeanor for their meeting.50 The tall backs of the blue chairs framed the serious faces of the scientists who turned to look at us. This was my first time meeting Athena science team members face to face. They recognized Roxana with nods and brief greetings, then chairs swiveled back around and they resumed their conversation. I was surprised by the familiarity of the materials in the science work room. The workspace was anything but a science-­ fiction dreamscape. Although I was familiar with workspaces at NASA, the state of this low-­ tech landscape seemed at odds with what was definitively an interplanetary work environment. It was a plain room with white-­beige walls and the same gray-­blue office carpet continued in from the hallway. Along the

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back wall were large windows, almost three-­quarters the height of the wall, outfitted with automatic shades, which would be used as blackout shades during local daylight hours. Large projector screens were mounted along the walls and compact projectors hung down from the ceilings. In the middle of the room and at each corner were tables with brown plastic tops and brown metal legs. They looked like the deluxe-­grade folding tables used at banquets. Atop each table were computer monitors cabled to CPU units that sat on the floor. The tables were not as haphazard as they first appeared. They reflected the nature of the MER mission workspace itself, which was wholly temporary. At JPL, transforming the same workspace for different missions is a normal practice. Nonpermanent materials were used because the MER mission was planned for only three months. Even if it went on longer, MER science would have to transition out of this physical space.51 In fact, planning for this space preceded the nominal mission by two years, in 2001.52 Learning that the physical workspaces across the three floors of the JPL building were temporary unexpectedly changed my sense of the place. I immediately began thinking of the field site as ephemeral, a place to which I could never return because it would necessarily cease to exist.53 Though I walked in knowing the mission end dates, I had not considered that the actual setup would disappear. I had no future plans (in my research scope) to return to the MER mission workspace at the end of my fieldwork. Yet I felt a visceral shift in urgency, a sense that would ultimately drive me to collect data in situ for as long as I could, sol after sol, across both rover operations, for about seven sols on and one sol off, ignoring the NASA Ames Human Factors guide to work four days and take three days off. HUMAN–­TECHNOLOGY RELATIONSHIPS AT WORK Around the science work room, various technologies signaled the multilayered composition of human-­technology relationships, for both individuals and the organization. Examining these layers can bring into focus what organizational resources had been assigned or overlooked, and who was the beneficiary.54 This can entail asking questions about objects or activities that appear to some as mundane or inconsequential and following objects through the trajectory of their use in a workplace.55 One key reason for long term ethnographic fieldwork is that it allows for the opportunity to follow multiple instances of use trajectories, patterns (as opposed to a few instances), and time to build up to asking critical questions, as needed. Among the technologies in the science work room, I here highlight three

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items customized for the MER mission: collaborative displays, chairs, and bumper guards. On the day I first began meeting people at JPL, the mission members resumed their meeting, after brief greetings, and I took a seat in the back of the science work room. I watched from my corner as presenters gave brief introductions of themselves and then descriptions and presentations on the mission support technology they represented. These were technologies developed for MER mission science operations, most of which were not yet ready for use but which would be completed and integrated into the workspace before the robots landed in four months. This was the first time I met the MERBoard, which, though I didn’t realize it at the time, would become a key player in MER members’ Mars time–­ work relationship. Developed in conjunction with MER scientists’ pre-­mission planning, the MERBoard’s main function was to serve as an interactive data collaboration tool.56 There would be more than ten of them across the two floors of MER workspaces. That day, it did not operate during its demonstration. It was a typical human–­technology hiccup, not a significant failure. The hiccup was not noted, but what caught my attention was the response of the audience. When the presenter couldn’t get the MERBoard to function as he’d described it would, this drew some laughter and a few long exhales from the science team. What they did not appear to do was give any indication that the presenter did not know what he was doing. In other words, no one indicated that the user was the problem. That day, and in many other instances that followed, when there were difficulties with operating technology (e.g., connecting a laptop to a projector, or finding documents and images in databases), it was normal for mission members to not react with annoyance or frustration toward other users. There appeared to be a high level of confidence in the competence of the users in these human–­ technology interactions. This was in contrast to other work environments where I had found that when a technology failed to operate during a human–­technology interaction it was common to blame the user.57 For example, in my research on technology and culture at United Airlines, this was (and often still is) a common interpretation by managers and customers toward customer service agents experiencing difficulty with computers and flight software. There were, in fact, identifiable issues with the software interface, which were not visible to the non-­agents, which directly contributed to time durations for check-­in and flight management.58 A level of trust in machines and mistrust in users’ abilities may be normal, but it directs attention away from

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identifying social and technical contributions to frictions among humans and technology at work. Seating for the dozens of mission members on each of the three floors was thoughtfully considered with respect to comfort (e.g., cushion and back support) and workspace (e.g., color coding). During the setup phase in summer and fall 2003, there did not appear to be enough chairs to seat everyone during meetings. Some assumed, as I did, that this was an artifact of the premission phase and that sufficient seating would be part of the completed workspaces. But when the nominal mission began, there were still not enough chairs. As noted earlier, to address the lack of seating people borrowed color-­coded chairs from other floors, which perpetuated the problem because after chairs were borrowed they were often not returned. White folding chairs, already in use in the Callas Palace, were added to the science work rooms. Even overturned garbage cans were used as seats. Sitting on the floor was not a good alternative because other features (e.g., size of the room, height of chairs) made it difficult to see information displays. These data points, reviewed together, indicate that the matter of seating needed further questioning. While the number of people may have increased, it was not enough to be the main cause of the seating shortage; but if an overwhelming increase in the participation was not the cause, then what was? Seating has long been an area of study in the design of workplaces where people have to sit for long periods of time.59 How was it that during the MER mission there were just not enough chairs for the number of people working in the science operations rooms, and sometimes also in the engineering rooms? Workplace setup, which includes physical materials and their arrangement, is typically defined and provided for by the organization that brings people in to do their work. An organization, formed to achieve particular goals (e.g., manufacturing, planetary science, food service, museum art displays, state social services) necessarily requires fundamental components to produce its goals. The degree to which tools and materials are provided can vary, by factors such as industry, market, legality, budgets, and law. Nevertheless, workplace setups fall under the rubric of organizational infrastructure, the conjunction of employees, materials (e.g., utilities, physical structures, production tools), and processes (e.g., workflow, human resources, legal frameworks) required for operations.60 In an organization like NASA, organizational infrastructure is in some ways unique and unprecedented and in some ways traditional. If MER’s mission workspaces at JPL were carefully considered, why were additional chairs needed? This question, like many raised in this book, is not a “gotcha”

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question in search of identifying a person or event to blame. It is a question about matters typically taken for granted that demonstrates there are more ways to count human–­technology relationships than “one and done” head counts. Another way of examining the undercount on needed seating is to ask if there were cultural aspects of planetary science work that had not been factored in. The ethnographic data would show two characteristics particular to this work community contributed to an increase in head count (e.g., more people staying onsite to collaborate on operations for the other rover): an acute awareness and constant reminders of the preciousness of operating time, for the robots on Mars and their own physiological limits on Earth; and an innate curiosity to witness and contribute to Martian phenomena (these will be discussed further on). The third example that highlighted multilayered human–­ technology relationships in the science work rooms were small objects, which one might never imagine finding on a Mars mission, known as bumper guards. An off-­the-­shelf (consumer) product, a bumper guard is a plastic object designed to be placed on the edge of a table for the purpose of protecting young children from injury, prone as they are to bumping into furniture as they learn to walk. Frosted plastic bumper guards populated each of the MER science theme workgroup areas. The reasons for this began not with protecting small children from sharp corners but with competing human and technology interests. As the science work rooms needed to support scientists receiving and reviewing large data files (i.e., daily data returns from Mars rovers) desktop computers were purchased for all of the workgroup areas. Sitting among the running computers, scientists found a level of sound disruptive to concentration and conversation. The collective noise of the CPU fans was too loud. The response to the computer noise problem was to muffle the sound by covering the CPU towers. Custom-­made particle board boxes lined with sound insulation foam were placed over the CPU towers which sat on the ground beneath the worktables. These boxes were referred to as “dog houses.” After the computers had been quieted for better human interaction, another technological problem arose. The location of the CPU towers, which had not previously been an issue, began interfering with human well-­being because the people were knocking their shins and knees into the sharp corners of the dog houses. The response to this issue was the placement of bumper guards to the four corners of each of the dog houses. The bumper guards are artifacts of the MER mission that exemplify a workspace modification in response to the in situ human–­technology relationship. Everyday interactions revealed unanticipated considerations (or

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if they were anticipated, they were not considered critical enough to be avoided). The story behind those little pieces of plastic in the MER work environment is about negotiating the occupation of space by humans and machines. Although the science work rooms were planned with both humans and machines in mind, the machines moved in first. Their occupation of the room was not considered in terms of their interaction with humans during work processes. The interactions resulting from people working and machines running in the same room (e.g., sound interference) are important to consider, in addition to the processor size needed for the digital workload. Often in high-­ tech work environments, the technical comfort of the machines is treated as unquestionably more important than the comfort of the people working in the room. For example, CPUs require cool environments. While working at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, I knew computer scientists who carried their winter coats with them to work every day during the summer. The reason was that they worked in rooms set to a temperature to keep the many computers cool, which was far cooler than was comfortable for people. As adjusting the temperature to human comfort level was not an option, they carried in their coats and sometimes took breaks just to leave the room and warm up elsewhere inside the office building. MER TIME: DAYS/SOLS AND DEADLINES The nominal mission was planned around a safe estimate of the number of days that each robot could remain operational on Mars, an estimate based on the fairly certain expectation that they could actually function for three times as long.61 The never-­before-­undertaken work of remotely operating two robots for the exploration of Mars was planned and funded for 90 days on Mars. Describing the “simple” deadline as a number of days is somewhat complicated by the fact that there are no “days,” only “sols,” on Mars. The mission objective was for 90 sols, 90 “days on Mars,” which was equivalent to 92 days on Earth. “Day,” of course, is the English word for the axial rotation of the planet Earth, 24 hours in duration. Mars also turns on its axis while rotating around the Sun, giving it alternate periods of sunlight and darkness. However, for Mars, one complete axial rotation takes approximately 24 hours and 39.6 minutes. Were it not for the forty-­minute difference, naming a day on Mars might not have been necessary. Sol, the Roman god of the Sun (in Spanish it translates as “Sun”), was used on two previous NASA Mars missions. It was a familiar term that scientists and engineers could use when distinguishing

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which of the two planets they were talking about and determining the criteria for a successful mission of 90 sols of operations on Mars. As of yet, there is neither a temporal lexicon for Mars codified by scientists, nationally or internationally, nor any internationally accepted time standards for Mars.62 The length of the nominal mission was part of the mission’s formal success criteria, a set of science and engineering objectives that had to be met in order to evaluate MER as a complete and total success: “The MER-­2003 rovers [robots] shall each acquire science data and conduct in-­situ analysis for 90 sols.”63 Though it is not specified in this statement, the 90 sols would run continuously with no break. Thus, MER scientists and engineers had a calendar deadline, 90 consecutive sols of 24 hours and 40 minutes, by which to complete their list of success criteria that included using all the robots’ instruments, traveling at least 600 meters, working at least eight different sites, and operating both robots simultaneously for at least 30 sols. Ultimately, the MER robots would exceed expectations across all the success criteria.64 Across organizations, setting work deadlines to a specific calendar day is used to motivate work activity, with the knowledge (and pressure) that time is limited and adherence is evaluated. Of course, time is not really limited; the clock will still run and the Sun will rise the day after a deadline. But in the social world of organizations, work-­specific temporal rhythms and expectations are formed and reinforced through policy, technology, and everyday work practice. As sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel has explained, schedules are one of the primary technologies used to impose social order (e.g., direct human activities) in organizations. Adherence to schedules is maintained through formal rules and the enactment of schedules by organization members.65 Although work deadlines can shift for many reasons, there are some deadlines that people do not want to change, regardless of the difficulty of the work required to meet the deadline. The types of deadlines that people are reluctant to alter are those that are tied to a public spectacle, a national discourse (a deadline made in public, for the public, and includes the public)—­consider President Kennedy’s 1961 declaration that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” Now imagine if he had added “unless an extension is requested,” or later had had to announce that the goal be changed from “before this decade is out” to “in less than two decades.”66 A deadline conveys the finiteness of time for an activity (a process or the process of reaching a goal), the extinguishment of the lifespan of a project. Within MER’s temporal context, scientists decided that in order to maximize the opportunities to meet all of the mission success criteria they would

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conduct a daily work schedule. This meant carrying out their science work plan from start to finish each and every sol at each exploration site on Mars.67 Every sol, MER robots would collect data on Mars and send data to MER engineers, scientists would analyze data and determine the next course of action, and engineers would send instructions for the actions to the robots. Each robot’s landing day on Mars started the calendar count for each site (starting with sol number 1 and continuing sequentially until the final sol of a rover’s ability to function) and the countdown of sols (how many sols remaining to complete mission success criteria) at each site. Each landing site had a different calendar sol, but both sites were on the same clock. It would appear that a transfer of our terrestrial time-­keeping gave us clock time on Mars, a temporal framework to support the normative organizational experience of coordinating work between two worksites using the technology of clock time. Making time on Mars was a detail that many people treated as a relatively simple matter resolved with numerical naming. These are the basic circumstances of the MER mission—­people, organizations, process, time, and space—­and this is the true story of the human–­ technology relationships of remote robotic exploration and of making time on Mars. What follows is a focus on cultural and sociotechnical relationships among professional scientists, engineers, and robots in a high-­tech, extreme work environment in which the production of new knowledge of Mars science, of remote robotic exploration, and national and organizational pride was at stake. I view this grand event as a case in which seemingly mundane technologies like clocks and work schedules become fascinating objects with deeply nested reliance on social habits, values, and work practices. What I learned of human–­technology relationships in this grand event applies to everyday workplace environments as well as remote robotic exploration. Indeed, this contribution of new insights into and understandings of human–­technology relationships in the twenty-­first century ranks alongside the MER mission accomplishments.

2



TIME AT WORK IN SPACE

In the months leading up to the rovers landing on Mars—­the start of the nominal mission in January 2004—­I learned about MER’s unique time–­ work relationship: people on Earth would be conducting remote robotic exploration on Mars according to the time of day on Mars at two different sites, for 90 consecutive sols.1 A few MER mission members who described this work schedule assured us that the arrangement was tenable in part because of precedent. NASA’s 1997 Pathfinder mission to Mars, in which some MER members had participated, included a Mars time work schedule while remotely operating a small robot (Sojourner) for several weeks.2 We assembled at JPL in the fall of 2003 to enact operations readiness tests (ORTs). The ORTs gave people time to practice the social and technical activities required for a complete cycle of the production process without jeopardizing works goals. The MER mission workflow had been developed over two years earlier.3 Earlier ORTs had focused on specific areas such as engineering products, activity procedures, science processes. The fall ORTs focused on mission readiness for the full production of Mars science and exploration using remotely operated robots. This was the time to look for and consider any slight adjustments that could be made to technologies or social processes to better support people and the production process. During ORTs, scientists and engineers practiced the production of remote science on Mars by conducting all of the activities on their “tactical timeline,” a linear timeline of all the activities required for a full day of work, set out in sequential order with firm durations (start and stop times), for all mission members (scientists, engineers, and robots). Averaging a week in length, ORTs were conducted like a traditional stretch of work: Scientists and engineers worked during the daytime at JPL. At the end of the day they would have plans for their proxy robot to carry out. The role of the robot on Mars was played by a robot, identical to Spirit and Opportunity, located at JPL in a large room designed as an analog for Martian terrain, a “test-­bed,”

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also known as “the Mars yard.” Overnight, the scientists’ plans were carried out in the test-­bed, and resulting data would start the next day’s work for the scientists. Scientists were asked to refrain from going to the test-­bed to watch the robot in action. There was even a sign on the door of the building leading to the test-­bed viewing corridor that read “MER Scientists Keep Out.” As work simulations are intended to be, the ORT experience was valuable for learning the physical kinetics of movement and communication, such as where to be when and whom to talk with and for how long. Yet two key features of the MER work environment were missing from the simulations: if everything went according to plan on MER, unlike on Pathfinder, two robots would be working on opposite sides of Mars with two tactical timelines running each sol; and people would be working according to the time of day on Mars, not the time of day in Pasadena, California. For the ORTs to have provided a more accurate simulation of a full sol of work, the team would have had to divide into two teams, work through separate tactical timelines, according to Mars time at their site on Mars. I asked mission members about these temporal features that were missing from the ORTs. How could people enact such an alien time schedule, which most had never before experienced, without physically going through it? In reply, I heard comments like “It will make sense once the robots are actually working on Mars.” Interpreting my question as being about speed, completing tactical timelines every sol, they were pointing out that some temporal features could not be simulated. Although the robot in the test-­bed was off-­limits during the ORTs, there was no forgetting that Mars’s unknown sites and sights and the fragility of interplanetary communication were not yet present in the MER work environment. Without the robots “really” on Mars, it was not possible to conjure up the anticipation and adrenaline that drives temporal focus in a situation where there are no “do-­overs.” The intent of my question, however, was to address the absence of experiencing Mars time in the process of running through tactical timelines. There was also something to be said for the institutional reassurance that no matter how alien a plan appeared, it could and would be carried out. The “Failure is not an option” mantra was everywhere. It would come up in conversations. And it appeared in inspirational posters that hung in building hallways, on merchandise in the gift shop, and in various media around Pasadena (e.g., posters at Vroman’s Bookstore, the Pasadena public library, the Caltech campus, and coffee shops). Once the nominal mission began, Mars time problems became evident, though none were catastrophic. I examined these problems as opportunities for identifying frictions among humans and technologies in the

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interplanetary work environment, which I discuss specifically in chapter 3. But first, it is important to complete the examination of the structural and cultural context in which Mars time on the MER mission was situated. Without explicit attention, the organizational conditions supporting the Mars time arrangement as a viable work environment can be interpreted as solely individual issues (i.e., “people problems”). Clock time is so embedded in the organizational infrastructure that most people treat it like an element of the natural world as opposed to a construction of the human-­built environment.4 However, organizations are large-­scale technologies, human-­built and operated. Clock time is a standard feature of organizational infrastructure, and, like all technologies, it can be retooled. There is nothing inherently immutable about any of our human-­built institutions. People can change anything about an organization, from the infrastructure and the composition of workgroups to the tools they use to carry out their work and support production goals. Why is clock time treated like a mandatory condition of the human experience? Its long institutional presence in our lives has led to its naturalization. Clock time tracks with sunlight and darkness, a relationship that lends itself to a simple conflation between clock time and the Sun’s unalterable natural rhythm. “You can set your watch to it” is an expression to indicate the regularity of an event and a particular time each day, which is synonymous with another expression of temporal regularity, “as sure as the sun rises in the morning.” Yet clock time is not in and of itself an exact copy of the Sun or the ocean—­it is not a natural phenomenon. With respect to the coupling of our lives to time, clock time is alongside us at birth (e.g., the clock time recorded on birth certificates) and throughout our lives until our death. Sociology of time scholar Judy Wajcman highlights the process by which the experience of speeding up (i.e., a sense of faster pacing) accompanies the proliferation of digital communication technologies, contributing to a blurring of already hard-­to-­manage boundaries between home and work activities.5 Indeed, habits and values, such as those that inform how we are expected to enact and react to clock time, that are enforced across social worlds (i.e., home, leisure, work) and communities have to be among the most daunting to challenge or change. The time–­work relationship particular to organizations is a phenomenon that is constituted with structural and cultural support, rather than an activity or set of habits that is just particular to individuals. This shift in perspective is dynamic, not static; it entails moving between organizational infrastructure and individual activity, between the categories of the historical and the everyday. Historical processes inform present day activities,

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sometimes explicitly (e.g., “We’ve always done it this way”) and sometimes implicitly (e.g., “I don’t know why, we just do it this way”). This chapter juxtaposes past and present accounts of time–­work relationships. It begins with a historical account of events in the United States that led to the standardization of clock time at national and local levels. Despite our habit of treating clock time as a natural, and an immutable phenomenon, it was only around the end of the nineteenth century that clock time ascended to its current status. Its rise was propelled by two important events—­the standardization of clock time and industry’s adoption of scientific management—­both of which came about through people’s efforts to coordinate and synchronize work activities. The historical social forces contributed to maintaining clock time as central to work are part of the MER mission’s sociocultural and organizational infrastructure. The second part of the chapter jumps forward almost one hundred years to focus on MER’s time–­work relationship. Specifically, we look at the underpinnings that inform questions such as, “Why work according to the time of day on Mars?” and “What time do I go to work, according to Mars time?” While Mars time and MER scientists did not formally advocate for a new temporal standard as nineteenth-­century scientists once did, the public representation of MER’s successful use of a new temporal order became part of the cultural memory of not only space exploration and technological progress but also organizational time–­work relationships. CLOCK TIME AT WORK: STANDARDIZING CLOCK TIME FOR SCIENCE WORK On November 18, 1883, the United States established a national standard clock time with synchronized time zones. Until this time, there were an estimated six hundred different settings of clock time across the nation. Every town, state, company, household, and train depot ran according to its own setting of clock time.6 Though the topic of a single unifying standard of clock time was not unheard of, the drive to bring about national change came from a surprising source—­weather scientists—­and for a quite relatable reason—­their work goals were frustrated by clock time. In the mid-­nineteenth century, scientists were frustrated by the multiplicity of local clock time, particularly when the study involved comparing natural events at the same time from across national sites. A study could be set up to take place on the same day across sites, but the challenge of lining up observations at the same time of day was complicated by the variety of local time settings (and the differences were inconsistent, unlike with time zones).

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America’s “first weatherman,” Cleveland Abbe, grappled with the issue in his research on the aurora borealis.7 A phenomenon of popular and scientific interest, the aurora borealis is marked by the appearance of bright colors in a variety of hues of green, yellow, and magenta across the sky.8 Abbe, an astronomer and meteorologist, set up a study in the spring of 1874 to compare observations of the phenomena. He had over one hundred individuals collecting data from vantage points across the northern Untied States. Only after data were collected did Abbe realize how time had hampered his study. Abbe tried to determine the aurora’s height above the Earth and attempted to make correlations with concurrent weather observations and magnetic measurements. He wrote, “The errors of the Observers’ clocks and watches and even the standards of time used by them, are generally not stated … so that the uncertainty of this vitally important matter will be found to throw obscurity upon some interesting features.” He was unable to line up observations of the phenomena across the various observation sites because of “the errors of the observers’ clocks and watches and even the standards of time used by them.”9 Abbe’s observers had recorded their observations with time notations that were accurate for their individual sites, which at that time was primarily determined by “rail time,” the local rail station clock. “Rail Time” Railway station clocks served as a source of clock time for people in the surrounding areas. Between two depots, however, people would have to choose between numerical accounts of the day, because stations did not coordinate their clock settings. Each station used the clock for the comings and goings of the train in and out of their locale. Without a rival for a local time reference, trains and the rail clock sufficed for coordinating personal and industrial activities. For railroad managers, the business of running trains was not significantly troubled by the variability of local train timetables. Indeed, while railroad tracks, trains, and stations invoke images of homogeneity from a twenty-­ first-­ century viewpoint, nineteenth-­ century railway operations included a great deal of nonuniformity. Rail time was not the only nonuniform condition of the railway infrastructure; Richard White’s social and political history on the development of transcontinental railroads in the United States states that another nonuniform feature was the railroad track systems themselves.10 Contrary to later popular ideas of a transcontinental railroad as a uniform set of tracks stretching continuously across the country, its railroad track segments varied in accordance with who owned that section, and they were not seamlessly connected. Gaps between track

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sections required unloading passengers to cross by foot while the train was dragged by horses to the next section. In an 1873 article in the Railroad Gazette, railroad employees wrote that the variation of clock times across railway stations was only a minor problem and one that was primarily experienced by passengers: “For the great body [passengers] travel only short distances, and to them the proposed uniformity is of little or no importance.”11 Ian Bartky, in his history of timekeeping in the United States, contextualizes this quote by explaining that “indeed, multiple times affected a minority of the public: No problem existed for those travelers residing in the large cities—­New York, Chicago, Boston, and so on—­whose local times were being used by the regions’ roads. Yet, for a traveler whose home city might use either a particular railroad’s time or its own local time, there was some confusion. The solution was simple, however: Ask.”12 Indeed, an underlying theme was then, as it is now, that it is the individual’s responsibility to keep track of institutionally produced multiple clock times. The Railway Association of America (RAA), composed of the presidents, managers, and superintendents of numerous western, southern, and south-­ western roads, formed a committee to evaluate public need for national standard time.13 During the RAA’s 1873 biannual meeting, the committee presented their conclusion: there was no public demand for a uniform system of national time.14 Who made up this public, and how were their needs for standard time assessed? These are questions not answered in the write-­up of the meeting. Railway managers themselves may have recognized that the public was using rail time to coordinate activities other than riding trains, but they were not inclined to change their system for these kinds of activities. Standardizing Rail Time for Coordinating Science Work The subject of a national standard of time was a topic of scientific discourse and received some industry attention, but it was Abbe’s efforts to solve his data collection problem that led to the standardization of clock time.15 He focused on a solution—­standardizing rail time—­and on politically elevating it by bringing scientists and railway managers together. Abbe, and the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Standard Time, lobbied railway managers for the temporal synchronicity that would benefit the rail industry as well as science. Abbe did not change the direction of the railway industry alone. Indeed, among the various people working on the change, one person who helped was William F. Allen. Allen was a railway industry insider who held various positions, including secretary of the General Time Convention (comprising

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railroad representatives) and editor of the Railway Gazette.16 As editor he often mentioned standardizing rail time, a strategy that worked to keep the topic from being relegated to private meetings and associations. By 1883, Abbe’s and Allen’s efforts for the railway industry to adopt a standard time were realized. A detailed time system was drawn up and distributed among railway stations. At noon on November 18, 1883, clocks were reset throughout the entire system.17 The history of standard clock time includes events that are similar to those of Mars time. In both cases, the momentum to change time partly drove the work of producing scientific knowledge. Changes to clock time were made to support the coordination of groups of people separated by distance synchronizing their studies of natural phenomena. In both cases, we see an emphasis on changing social processes by embedding a new temporal technology at the organizational level (e.g., national infrastructure, institutions). As it became a fixed feature of an institutional landscape, clock time would no longer be determined by local settings or individuals; rather, individuals would adjust their ways of living and working according to the new standard of clock time. The all-­encompassing shift in time authority (who tells us what time it is and what is the standard of time) is furthered by its position as a feature of a large technological system, a component of the national infrastructure. The railroad industry would eventually lose its role as primary timekeeper, and the standard of clock time and its role in human-­technology relationships would gain the dominant role in setting time and movement in industrial work environments. CLOCK TIME AS “NATURAL” TO THE WORK ENVIRONMENT By the late 1800s, a century after the Industrial Revolution, factory workplaces had become commonplace work environments. Inside the manufactured site, nature was no longer the arbiter of work hours. Electric lights and clocks replaced the traditional use of sunlight for setting work hours.18 Standard clock time would become embedded in organizational infrastructure to the degree that in a few decades it would be “unnatural” for an organization not to run multiple mediums of standard clock time throughout operations. This integration of clock time into work environments was a fusing of clock time and movement with a formalized evaluation and compensation system. Known as “scientific management,” it was developed and disseminated by Frederick W. Taylor, in cooperation with factory owners who employed him and the employees who participated in embodying the factory setting.19

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Taylor spent the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century working to develop a “science to replace the old rule of thumb knowledge of workmen.”20 He began his own career working on the shop floor, first as an apprentice machinist and later as a foreman. This experience and his eye for invention were part of his rise to the management level at Midvale Steel Company. As a manager he began to tinker with the social processes and workflow of shop floor machinists in order to increase productivity.21 He developed “science time management” and a “piece-­rate-­system” to increase production output among workers. Identifying that a key issue limiting production was the system of paying employees according to work class (e.g., laborers, machinists, engineers), Taylor argued that it was an insufficient and demoralizing reward system (because it “paid according to position … and not according to their individual character, energy, skill, and reliability”).22 Rather than a day’s wage, employees would be compensated for each completed “cut” (piece) within a system of compensation rates and minimum output based on time-­motion research. This modus operandi involved observing people while using a stopwatch to track how long it took for a “healthy man” to complete work tasks, in the length of a day’s work, over a number of days. A hallmark demonstration of Taylor’s methods and goals took place at the Bethlehem Steel Company, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. On site, Taylor focused on the productivity of employees whose job was to unload and shovel raw materials in the production of pig-­iron. He began with a group described to him as “steady workers, but slow, phlegmatic and nothing could induce them to work fast.”23 While observing the work processes in situ, Taylor and his associates would time each action in the set of steps required to complete a task (four steps in the task of shoveling pig-­iron included picking up pig-­iron, walking with it to a railroad car, laying it on a pile, and walking back to the first pile). From these time-­motion observations, Taylor determined that for a pig-­iron handler a standard day’s work was to move twelve and a half tons of pig-­iron. However, the handler could move between forty-­seven and forty-­eight tons if a particular order of tons (varying weights) were carried and required rest breaks were taken. In 1912, Taylor gave testimony before a Special House Committee Hearing investigating Taylorism and other systems of shop management.24 He stated that his method had in mind the physical well-­being of the worker. Indeed, Taylor’s time-­motion studies were intended to produce a work system that would support the worker’s ability to be productive and remain healthy. But it was not a method based in altruism. Time-­motion studies were Taylor’s method of seeing how to motivate employees to do more work in the course of a day without a substantial increase in wages.

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Taylor’s piece-­ rate system used higher earnings as the incentive for increased production; an employee would be paid according to the completion of tasks, per task, rather than earning a standard day’s wage. At Bethlehem, the piece-­rate system was presented to employees who were otherwise not given raises or who had no opportunity for advancement as a way to make more money. With the new system, they could make $1.85 for a day’s work, up from $1.15. Rather than a flat rate for a day’s work, pig-­iron shovelers were to be guided by a foreman (whom Taylor specified as “college educated”) directing the amount of pig-­iron to carry and when to take mandatory breaks. Their compensation was per ton moved. For forty-­seven tons, they would earn $1.85 (47 tons × $.04 = $1.85). Social justice activist Upton Sinclair pointed out, in a letter published in the American Magazine, that Taylor’s new system gave the pig-­iron shoveler a “61 percent increase in wages” for a “362 percent increase” in work.25 Critical views such as Sinclair’s were informative, but they were no match for the momentum of time-­motion studies. A century since its introduction, Taylorism is now a well-­fixed concept of study in organizational discourse.26 It may not circulate by that name, but the method can be seen operating in organizations, for example, where quotas are used to evaluate and compensate employees. There may not be men equipped with stopwatches standing in situ to count task completion; however, as sociologist Michael Burawoy described, by 1975, the “watch-­ dogs of efficiency … time-­study men” were “replaced with industrial engineers, who spend most of their time in some distant office,” now aided by computer technologies and other apparatus of digital era surveillance.27 The digital age, of course, brings with it an increased ability for management to measure, manage, reward, and discipline employee productivity without even being on the same continent. Scientific management continues as a service for sale by efficiency experts (e.g., management consultants), a popular media theme (e.g., the theme of David and Goliath with the latter represented by companies, from factories in Modern Times [1936] and Gung Ho [1986] to post-­industrial organizations in Office Space [1999]), and a focus for social scientists (e.g., studies of time-­motion driven workflow and employee resistance, changing work habits, the information age, and varying cultural communities). Taylorism: A Hard Habit to Break There were no old-­fashioned time-­motion watchers, human or robot, on Mars for the MER mission. Still, the ideas and processes of efficiency and time-­work management were strong underpinnings of the organization of

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MER’s interplanetary work system. This was not something I expected to find amid the work of science and exploration on Mars, particularly in an organizational workplace that defines high-­tech innovation in the domain of outer space and represents the highest rung of technological achievement. The time issues that I noticed were not so strange, at first. I found them to be in character with large organizational work environments, in which employees are concerned about deadlines, meetings often run too long, and time zone differences confuse distributed workgroups. No temporal issues were so alarming that they needed immediate attention or intervention. Coordinating activities within parameters set to clock time is a common practice across all kinds of organizations. In each, the organization’s culture and subcultures inform habits of managing time, such as what activities are more highly valued and considered a priority, various ways of interpreting deadlines (e.g., a deadline can be interpreted as before the appointed hour, on the dot, or several hours later), and norms of acceptance for time mismanagement (e.g., some deadlines are such that no one gets in trouble for missing them). It would take time for the MER culture to unfold and for time habits to develop. MER was a first-­of-­its-­kind work environment, but it was situated within long-­standing organizational arrangements that shape work practices across professional communities, including science, engineering, and space exploration. As such, historical work practices for time management needed to be foregrounded and considered more thoroughly. MER used some new work technologies that had yet to be in operation long enough for cultural practices to be established, but the majority of its tools, social processes, and other components of organizational infrastructure had been in use for some time, by MER members at NASA and in their other organizational work environments. Organizational memory refers to an organization’s historical social and technological features that are part of its ethos, infrastructure, and culture.28 An organization’s past is embodied in its present traditions, operating in routines, records, and individuals.29 This is not intended to cast the organization as a biological entity. An organization is a constitution of people and people-­ built and people-­alterable technologies. Some social practices and technologies are identified and intentionally carried over to new arrangements, and some continue without consideration until someone questions why that old technology is still in use. For example, this can be heard as “We’ve always done it this way; no one knows why,” a response to questions about why work is done in a certain order that does not make obvious sense. Taylorism’s time–­work relationship puts the movement of clock hands as the primary motion and the movement of human hands and minds as secondary. In some cases, it may be fitting, and in others, less so.30 It is not

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always the case that certain technologies ascend and remain fixtures, in organizations or in society, because there are no better alternatives. Taylorism’s social and technical practices are so deeply embedded in organizational memory and well supported by organizational infrastructure as the very definition of the time–­work relationship that they are reproduced even in organizations where alternatives are conceivable. Organizational context, production, and outcome goals should be considered in relation to whether or not a Taylorism time–­work relationship is fitting, supporting, exploiting, or undermining an organization’s development and innovation. Within the digital age, progress in technological innovation and cultural awareness can be used to innovate organizational infrastructure for radically new work environments, where innovation means more than automation or faster production. Given the organization’s cutting-­edge high-­tech historical and contemporary achievements and resources, MER is an unexpected example of how technologies of clock time and Taylorism have become ingrained in the work environment. TIME AT WORK ON MARS For MER’s organization of work, it was necessary to coordinate various work activities (tasks) in a specific order by specific workgroups on Mars and on Earth. The MER team decided to conduct their work throughout the length of a sol, for 90 continuous sols. As such, two critical temporal features played into their time–­work relationship: the timeline of a full cycle of work for each sol on Mars and positioning the required work activities along a Mars time timeline. A year before MER, MER scientists convened in Pasadena, California, for final deliberation on using a work schedule that entailed completing one cycle of data collection for each sol. In other words, every workday the same set of tasks would have to be completed from start to finish. Each following day of work would build on the completion of work from the previous days. This pace gave them the best opportunity to reach their mission goals while conducting scientific exploration and collaborative discussions. The work schedule was designed to support more than a dozen scientists directing, analyzing, and interpreting data. Their acknowledgment of the time needed for deliberation, discussion for deeper understanding of a colleague’s scientific interest, and for confirmation of findings from multiple scientists was a special and significant reason that, although ambitious, it was a good plan. Indeed, during the mission the daily process of surveying, sorting, and sifting through the many possible science data collection

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commands was sometimes referred to as “making the sausage” or “eating at the buffet.” This jargon gives some indication as to the variety of interests that constituted a science plan—­akin to the variety of meats and meat parts that go into a sausage, or the selection of foods one finds at a buffet. To manage this work schedule, they created a tactical timeline, a representation of the primary set of activities required for one complete sol of work. Each activity (task) was carried out in an assigned length of time. And they set the specific start and end time for each activity to the time of day on Mars. MARS TIME Making time on Mars is an ongoing process. Scientific observations of Mars have, throughout the centuries, focused primarily on identifying, comparing, and naming features that can be seen. The axial rotation of Mars is one of those features. The topic of time on Mars does not appear often in literature on the development of scientific knowledge about Mars. When it does, the focus is on the length of Mars’s axial rotation, or the length of a day on Mars.31 In 1659, Christiaan Huygens tracked the reappearance of a feature on Mars known as Syrtis Major, a dark marking roughly triangular in shape. He determined that “Mars, like Earth, rotated on its axis and that the length of a Martian day must be close to ‘24 terrestrial hours.’”32 In the late 1700s, William Herschel’s telescopic observations of Mars included a calculation of its axial tilt, information that he used to posit that the length of a day on Mars was longer than a day on Earth. Herschel’s figure was improved upon in the mid-­1800s by Johann Mädler and Wilhelm Beer, who established a system of latitude and longitude and a defined zero longitude for Mars (mirroring the discussions of latitude and longitude on Earth and the establishment of a prime meridian). Mädler and Beer are credited with creating the first global map of Mars.33 Their timing of one axial rotation established that the length of a day on Mars was 24 hours, 37.3 minutes. During the Space Age, rocket scientists Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun collaborated with Walt Disney, one of the most successful media producers of space exploration discourse, on a series of films about space travel.34 On the subject of telling time on Mars, in Mars and Beyond, Ley wrote: Mars turns on its axis in 24 hours, 37 minutes, and 22.6 seconds. This means that the day on Mars lasts about 37½ minutes longer than a day on earth. We could use our own watches there because a good watch can be adjusted to take half an hour longer per day, or rather a quarter hour longer per twelve hours.35

Time at Work in Space 63

They correctly described the length difference between a sol and a day: one sol is almost 3 percent longer than a day (because of Mars’s greater distance from the Sun, a Mars year comprises 668.6 sols while a year on Earth comprises 365 days). And while their claim that knowing time on Mars can be managed by adjusting “a good watch” did materialize in a technology used during MER, it is an inaccurate portrayal of using a technology developed for Earth on Mars. By the late twentieth century, there was little debate that the length of a sol is 24 hours and 39.6 minutes.36 Its axial rotation is slower than that of Earth. The forty-­minute difference was not, as some have casually characterized, an “additional” forty minutes added to the end of 24 hours. Rather, the passing of time during a Mars sol is altogether slower. Getting a 24-­hour clock to keep Mars time involved slowing it down, a small increase to the lengths of minutes and hours. This was demonstrated by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) scientists Dr. Michael Allison and Robert Schmunk. In 1997, they developed a Mars Sunclock (figure 2.1; color plate 2), which was publicly available as an applet and used by some mission members.37 Seeing Mars time in the familiar language of clock time is one way of making sense of time on Mars.

FIGURE 2.1 The Mars24 Sunclock is a cross-­platform Java application with both graphical and numerical representations of Mars time. This screenshot was taken five years after the MER rovers began working on Mars, reflected in the sol count. Also shown are numerical representations in a 24-­hour format for four sites on Earth and Mars time. See color plate 2.

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Daily Adjustments to Keep Mars Time Paying attention to time zone differences is a common feature of coordinating work activities in different locations. A distributed workgroup, as defined by business anthropologist Marietta Baba, is made up of members (employees) who are based in two or more regions or nations and who must work interdependently to achieve a common goal.38 Coordinating any activity among a distributed workgroup requires knowing the local time at each worksite, even if one particular local time is used to drive work activity across all sites.39 Time zone awareness for coordinating activities typically follows the same few steps: Look up the time difference between the geographic locations to find the difference in clock time, either adding or subtracting a number of hours. Between two sites, for example, one in Madrid, Spain, and the other in Los Angeles, California, the time difference is plus or minus nine hours (local time in Los Angeles plus nine hours synchronizes with current local time in Madrid). At each site, they need only look up the time difference between the two sites once; that is, the time difference is not going to change. Every day, at any time of the day, the time difference will be the same. Still, for coordinating activities among a distributed workgroup, this time difference has to be regularly maintained and managed. In contrast, to synchronize the time of day on Earth with the time of sol on Mars, clock time on Earth had to slow down, just as described in Disney’s Man in Space, to include an additional 39.6 minutes each day. Modifying a clock to run more slowly was possible, but it did not address the need to synchronize multiple clock times with Mars time. For this, a specific, explicit work practice was needed to make time on Mars for MER. And this is how it went: every day the 39.6-­minute time difference had to “slip”; synchronizing clock time and Mars time required a daily adjustment to standard clock time by setting it forty minutes forward. Every sol, local clock time had to reset forward 40 minutes to be in sync with 20:00 (8 p.m.) Mars time. Table 2.1 depicts an example of this temporal shifting in the context of the MER work schedule for eleven sols. Local Pacific time was adjusted 39 minutes forward every day. The start of the workday for mission members at JPL was 20:00 Mars time at Gusev Crater. As Athena science PI Squyres put it, “So if the planning process [first meeting of the work day] started at 8:00 a.m. Pacific time today, then tomorrow it would have to start at 8:39 a.m., slipping 39 minutes later to account for the longer duration of a sol. The next day it would be 9:18 a.m. Then 9:57 a.m. Then 10:36 a.m. Three weeks later, it would be in the middle of the night, sliding inexorably inward around the dial of the Earth-­time clock.”40

Time at Work in Space 65

A work schedule that encompasses evening and early morning hours is known as a “night shift.” For MER, with the start of the workday shifting forward 40 minutes every day, the work schedule would eventually include night-­shift work hours in local time. However, the shifting of clock time meant there was no reoccurring set of specific night-­shift hours and circumstances to which one could grow accustomed. Studies of shiftwork use reoccurrence as one baseline by which to provide support for adjusting to nightshift work.41 One of MER’s extraordinary reversals of traditional organization of time–­work relationships was designating Mars as the primary work-­hour-­ determining site (in table 2.1, I intentionally placed Mars time above JPL). Typically, an organization with a distributed work environment sets its headquarters as the arbiter of temporal standards that everyone else, across sites, has to keep in sync with and manage time differences. For example, when coordinating a meeting time across workgroups located in California and Delhi, India, it is the organization’s headquarters in San Jose, California, that determines the meeting time (or possible options); still, as has been described to me, while a meeting time may be more in sync with California employees’ normal workday hours, they are not unaffected by the time-­management difficulties encountered by their coworkers in India. It is a familiar situation for workgroups distributed across several company sites and for companies with outsourcing arrangements. Given how central both Mars and Earth were in setting the pace and possibilities of MER work, either could be considered the primary worksite. By designating the time of sol as the one to keep up with, MER designated Mars the primary worksite. As table 2.1 shows, the regular schedule for the first meeting of each workday was set to the time of sol of 8:00 p.m. Contrary to the norm, the people leading the work (the primary site) were the ones keeping up with the local time at another site (typically the secondary sites have to maintain local time at the primary site). And in this case, the primary site was where the robot members of the workgroup were working. Table 2.1 Mon. Tues. Wed. Thurs. Fri. Mars time 20:00 20:00 20:00 20:00 MER-­A JPL 8:00 8:39 9:18 9:57 Pacific time

Sat.

Sun.

Mon. Tues. Wed. Thurs.

20:00 20:00 20:00 20:00 20:00 20:00 20:00 10:36 11:15 11:54 12:33 13:12 13:51 14:30

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However, the notion that there was just one primary site was complicated by the fact that there were two worksites on Mars that were not in the same time zone. The day the first rover, Spirit, landed on Mars, counted as sol 1, of the 90-­plus sol mission. On sol 18, seventeen days later, the second rover landed on Mars. Because their sites were located on opposite sides of Mars, the robots were, so to speak, in different time zones, approximately a twelve-­hour difference. As such, the MER workgroups could no longer all work together coordinating local clock time in California with the same Mars time. Table 2.2 depicts the coordination of working schedules at JPL for each science group at each Mars worksite. This table is a simple depiction showing that coordinating time between Mars and Earth necessarily (resulting from the successful landing of two operational robots on opposite sides of Mars) involved two different times of sol. Row 2 shows that MER work for Mars site A began in the morning at Mars site A, and Row 1 is the coordinated clock time at JPL in Pasadena. Meanwhile, it was evening at Mars site B, though when morning arrived work would begin and additional time coordination would take place. Once the second rover landed on Mars, two tactical timelines were operated by two teams of scientists, one dedicated to each rover. Some scientists had particular interests in one landing site more than the other. Self-­selection was the primary method by which scientists were assigned to a rover team. Given the numerous responsibilities outside of the MER mission—­the temporal rhythms of family life, single life, health care, and other organizational work processes including funding and publication deadlines—­all scientists were not always present to participate in situ on their rover team. Scientists would cover shifts for one another, or a scientist’s expertise or experience with certain mission-­related processes would be needed for discussions on the rover operations to which they were not at the moment assigned. MER’s two tactical timelines ran counter to one another. Scientists working with Spirit would work twelve hours opposite the scientists working with Opportunity. Scientists ending their sol of work with Spirit would be leaving around the time scientists working with Opportunity would just be starting their work sol. As in most organizations, the work schedule did not determine how early (or late) people came in before or stayed after their work shift. And for MER, the work itself was so unique that scientists stayed past the end of the “regular day” either to keep working on their site or to hop over to the other site.

MER-­A: Mars time for Spirit robot at Gusev Crater JPL: Start time of science operations for Spirit robot MER-­B: Mars time for Opportunity robot at Meridiani Planum JPL: Science operations for Opportunity

Table 2.2

20:00

8:39 a.m.

8:00 a.m.

Off shift

8:00 a.m.

8:00 a.m

Off shift

Tues.

20:00

Mon.

Off shift

8:00 a.m.

9:18 a.m.

20:00

Wed.

Off shift

8:00 a.m.

9:57 a.m.

20:00

Thurs.

Off shift

8:00 a.m.

10:36 a.m.

20:00

Fri.

Off shift

8:00 a.m.

11:15 a.m.

20:00

Sat.

Off shift

8:00 a.m.

11:54 a.m.

20:00

Sun.

Off shift

8:00 a.m.

12:33 p.m.

20:00

Mon.

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Working Mars Hours The primary reason for having scientists on Earth work according to Mars time was to maximize the utility time of the rovers, increasing the odds of completing all of the mission success requirements. Just as sending two rovers instead of one doubled the chances of success, the choice to run the rovers in accordance with solar time on a daily basis allowed mission operations to run through the work processes of rovers and scientists on a daily basis, creating the possibility of having 90 sols of full data collection to meet the measures of mission success that had been set out in the mission plan. Each rover had a large solar panel deck that produced nearly 900 watt-­ hours of energy per day to repeatedly recharge two batteries inside the body of the rover. Over time, the rovers’ batteries would slowly lose their capacity to store charges, analogous to what happens with cell phone batteries. It was expected that the dust in the Martian atmosphere would accumulate on the solar panels, eventually blocking reception of sunlight. Rather than use energy to power the rovers through the cold nights on Mars, the rovers would only work during sunlight hours and not work at night on Mars. Thus, the timeline for work processes for the MER mission’s interplanetary work system was designed around the best hours of operation for the rovers—­sunlight hours on Mars. MER was under the temporal pressure of uncertainty—­uncertainty over how long the rovers would operate on Mars. While the rovers were “stronger” than humans, by physical composition able to travel millions of outer-­ space miles to work on inhuman terrain, they were also more fragile and constantly at risk of failing without warning, or, as they said on the mission, of getting sick or dying. Mission members personified their temporal fragility by referring to them as “terminal patients,” a status that was sometimes used to highlight the urgency of carrying out a particular datum-­ collection plan. Tactical Timeline MER scientists coordinated their work with their robotic geologists guided by a customized work process set to a time schedule known as the tactical timeline. Tasks were plotted along the linear timeline, in order of required sequence and strict duration (time limit), representing one complete cycle of work. Developed and refined in the years preceding the rovers’ landing (with field testing each year in 1999, 2000, 2001), it was a primary communication tool used for coordinating the activities of communication passes,

Time at Work in Space 69

data analysis, and decision making. It was also a representation of the division of labor and the coupling of task completion (by one workgroup for other tasks to begin) among three workgroups: the rovers, the engineers, and the scientists. Figure 2.2 shows a MER mission tactical timeline. The rectangular boxes represent science and engineering activities required for one complete sol of work. The length of each box corresponds with the activity time duration. Colors, blue and green, were used to designate engineering and science activities. The tactical timeline provided a depiction of the daily workflow required for the daily production of Mars science and exploration with remote

FIGURE 2.2 A MER mission tactical timeline. Courtesy of the MER mission.

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robots. At the start of the work cycle, data from the MER robot was sent to JPL, “downlink,” while scientists met to prepare and to review data; each of the several science workgroups (e.g., geochemistry, atmosphere) and instrument workgroups (e.g., mass-­spectrometer, rock abrasion tool) deliberated over which data to pursue with short-­term planning (e.g., use a particular tool to examine a rock feature) and which to pursue with the long-­term planning (e.g., traverse toward a rock outcrop). They analyzed data and conferred in smaller groups based on areas of expertise, and they held informal discussions to negotiate the next steps for the robot, which would be formally determined in a group meeting toward the end of the work cycle. Finally, for most of the scientists, the sol of work would come to a close following the group’s meeting (the Science Operations Work Group Meeting, SOWG) to approve the next set of data the rover should collect. That set of data was then carried over to the engineering workgroups for deliberation, monitoring the rover’s “health” (making sure none of the requests carried out by the robot would harm the robot), processing, and uplink to the robot. During the series of activities during which engineers translated the science plans into rover commands (activity refinement), one last science meeting, not officially part of the timeline, was held by scientists who wanted to continue discussions in the mission space (and many did). Figure 2.3 (see color plate 3) is a representation of the tactical timeline, featuring photographs of MER mission members and their workspaces. Regular communication between MER science and engineering workgroups was both formally scheduled and informal. There were particular time periods, “handovers,” following task completion when information needed to be exchanged. And there were ongoing exchanges in person or by computer for ongoing awareness and check-­ins among the workgroups. The formal handovers were themselves the subject of study, in that often the handover of content and the form it was presented in was informal and subject to individual habits (e.g., communication habits attributable to professional identity differences and institutional backgrounds).42 The tight coupling of tasks required to complete the tactical timeline during each sol was one example of a technology and its set of social processes (required human interactions) that contributed to the sense of Mars time running in the work environment. Coordinating time and communication across MER’s interplanetary work sites was not only about lining up hours. A good distributed work system process does not mean an absence of difficulties. People working closely (bound by the work timeline) across vast geographic distances have challenges that cannot be addressed with solutions such as real-­time face-­to-­face

Time at Work in Space 71

FIGURE 2.3 An abridged depiction of MER’s daily work cycle assembled with different sols. Top row, from left to right, data sent via downlink to Earth included images of the terrain, sol 50 at Gusev Crater; engineering teams receive and process data; Athena science teams meet to view and discuss data return and to produce a next set of activities for the rover to carry out. Second row, left to right, scientists meet to confirm and order (sequencing) final set of commands; hand these over to engineers who test the activities on rover modeling software and confirm command sequencing; uplink to the rover, and the cycle begins again. The last panel shows data from sol 51. Image credit for first and last panel: NASA/JPL/Caltech. Image credit for workspaces on Earth: the author (See color plate 3.)

communication. If an email does not make sense, typically, you can send an urgent reply for clarification or ask by phone call or instant chat. An expression of dealing with these communication constraints on MER came in the form of a comic strip taped to the wall in a workspace where engineers worked to turn science data instructions into commands for the robots. Someone had photocopied a Dilbert cartoon, added “MER ORT-­4/5 Sol 6 Process” across the top, and hung it in one of MER’s main work rooms at JPL (see figure 2.4). The comic tells a brief story about information handovers, task completion, and the difficulty of cross-­cultural and cross-­temporal communication.43 A humorous critique on the science and engineering work process, Dilbert’s managers could be seen as akin to the MER scientists,

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FIGURE 2.4 Dilbert, © 2003 Scott Adams. Used by permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.

and the “Elbonians” could be the MER engineers who work after the scientists’ work sol has ended. Another interpretation is that Dilbert’s managers are the humans on Earth and the “Elbonians” are the rovers on Mars. Along the production line guided by the tactical timeline, the objects being produced were the rovers’ commands for data collection. Understanding that what was being produced through each cycle of work was the information that was sent to the rovers on Mars, not the science data presented to the public on Earth, brings us to the reason for organizing the scientific knowledge production of Martian science around the rovers’ rather than the humans’ optimal hours of operation. Working in “Robot Time” The tactical timeline provided a structure for minding the unwieldy and unknown temporal features of remote robotic interplanetary exploration. MER scientists were working at a novel site where the strangest feature was not the landscape but the tool they had to use to explore it—­a “robotic geologist.” Most of their normal work practice of picking up a rock with their own hands, or with a tool, feeling its weight, tasting it, and examining it face-­to-­ rock was completely displaced. Geologists in the field typically move about while exploring a site, poking at rocks, and touching, tasting, and smelling them (i.e., work practice norms). They select what to further investigate, all the while reflecting on comparatives from other research or literature in their mind’s eye. Light from the sun does not necessarily limit their fieldwork as they can use battery-­powered lights or electric generators to light a site. Operating the rovers remotely was not analogous to operating a remote-­ controlled car. The work of directing the rovers’ movements toward a rock, grinding its surface, and taking a picture required an iterative process of

Time at Work in Space 73

hypothesis formulation and testing, without real-­time feedback. This was different from most scientists’ customary work, which involves immediate real-­time response. As one scientist put it, “We decide and then move our hand to pick up a rock. When we use a robot to pick up a rock for us we have to consider the time-­delay involved for planning how long it will take.” In addition, the work required of the rovers—­the same work that the scientists imagined they would conduct were they exploring the Martian terrain themselves—­had to be implemented especially slowly. The phrase that was used to compare the time it took for a rover to complete the same action as that of a human was “1 day to 30 seconds,” meaning that it took the rover one workday to complete the same activity that a human could do in 30 seconds. The rovers’ top speed on flat, hard ground was five centimeters per second. This rate included stopping to negotiate hazard avoidance (controlled by preloaded software, the rover was required to stop and reassess its location every few seconds). The rover was really traveling at a speed of one centimeter per second. One practice that scientists came up with to manage these novel temporal durations and the kinetics of astro-­field geology was to ask “If I was the rover, how would I do it?” And when describing a possible plan for the rover to carry out, some would begin by saying, “In coming up with this plan, I moved myself as the rover has to move.” Both during the working out of a plan and description, some scientists would physically move their arms and head in order to work out how to conduct scientific data collection like a robot. They were enacting figuring out the movements and order of instruments to use as a robot rather than as a human. Embodying the slower temporality of moving like a robot by moving in slow motion was not a part of the enactment, though amusing to imagine. A scientist working out a set of initial actions for investigating an outcropping like a rover would come up with a series of movements that, in discussion with instrument team members and engineers, would become a plan that required two or three sols of work for the rover to carry out. As a daily practice, the scientists’ ability to “just know” how a rover would do it and how long it would take eventually shortened the time needed to translate from human actions to robotic geologist commands (directions). Not in “Real Time” Digital media considerably shrinks the distance between them, but sending and receiving information between Earth and Mars is not instantaneous. Time delay (latency) is an important feature of communication in remote operations. With communication between planets, latency can vary but

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it is always a consideration that has to be planned for. Indeed, it has to be planned around. Nature determines when the planets are closest and when technologies will align for information to travel between planets. NASA’s Deep Space Network satellites, located 120 degrees apart around the world, and Mars-­orbiting spacecraft enable access to Mars in a relatively short amount of time (bearing in mind that a physical one-­way trip to Mars takes at least seven months). A round trip for information takes around twenty minutes—­about ten minutes for radio signal transmissions from Earth to reach Mars and ten minutes for the requested data to reach Earth—­via a telecommunications network that includes global and outer-­ space infrastructure.44 Given that the two sites were in constant motion, the travel time for information, however, would not be consistent. Over the course of 90 sols, Earth and Mars moved steadily apart. As they separated, the time it took for light to travel from Mars to Earth steadily increased. In January 2004, the planets were about 106 million miles apart, which translates to about a ten-­minute lag each way. Ninety sols later, Earth and Mars were separated by more than 180 million miles, resulting in a time lag of more than 16 minutes.45 In the context of a work environment where every minute of the sol counts and all of the work processes start and end with communications, the increase is no small matter. It is, however, a temporal feature of communication with which NASA has decades of experience. For scientists, communication latency was one more particular feature of working with robots remotely. National Time Pressure Media and national representations of the MER mission praised the mission as a success after both rovers landed and emerged from their shells in working condition. Certainly, this was a benchmark, as some other Mars missions had ended before space vehicles even reached Mars, and others had ended after vehicles reached Mars and then failed shortly after arrival. A few days after Spirit landed, President George W. Bush announced a national commitment to return to the Moon and to send humans to Mars, and mentioned NASA’s MER success: “At this very hour, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is searching for evidence of life beyond the Earth.”46 Yet for MER to be a successful mission it had to meet the specific criteria set out earlier that included both robots collecting data for 90 sols, using all of their instruments, obtaining images, both rovers operating simultaneously for 30 days, and each traversing for a minimum of 600 meters (.37 mile). The national pressure to complete mission success criteria is one of many sociotemporal rhythms, defined by E. Zerubavel as rigid patterns of time

Time at Work in Space 75

related to social activities and events, that originated out of MER’s workspace but also contributed to the weight carried by each passing hour.47 In addition to the sitting US president’s mandate to return to the Moon in 2020, former President Kennedy’s mandate to achieve the first feat of human lunar exploration within a decade of his pronouncement continued to inform the temporal drive to achieve success. Another example of external institutions’ goals coming into the MER temporal environment was the multitude of professional time pressures scientists regularly grapple with, such as department responsibilities, publication deadlines, and teaching and advising students in keeping with the academic calendar. These national and institutional sociotemporal rhythms contribute time pressures that are often nonnegotiable. Making time on Mars via various technologies is the subject of the following chapter. Telling Mars time required new technologies that were adaptations of familiar time technologies. Some ideal designs fell short of work support needs, and other tools were modified to provide stable support. Both allow for a closer examination of the cultural context in which some features would highlight overlooked assumptions, unaddressed values, and implicit habits.

3



THE SOUND OF NO CLOCK TICKING

Jim Rice, an astro-­geologist from Arizona, has such a physical presence that it’s almost unnecessary for him to state that he had aspired to be an astronaut. On MER, he worked at the Meridiani Planum site with the rover Opportunity. When asked, at the start of February 2004, about working with multiple temporalities, he replied, “Days of the week on Earth don’t matter anymore because we are living on Mars time with the rover twins. … Most of us are averaging about 4–­5 hours of sleep a night. I don’t know if it’s a.m. or p.m., but I’m loving every minute of it!”1 Many on MER shared Rice’s expressions of energy and enthusiasm throughout the mission. There was a constant buzz of shared acknowledgment and excited awareness of being part of a grand historical event. Every day was a new sol on another planet holding the promise of a new discovery that hundreds of thousands of people around the world were clamoring to see. This same atmosphere, however, can stifle people from acknowledging the difficulties of time–­work relationships, which were not all joyful. One demonstration of this kind of acknowledgment was offered by MER scientist Matt Golombek in December 2003. In an interview, he described some of the everyday difficulties of managing so many different times. “It totally messes you up to shift every day,” said Golombek, who was the project scientist for Pathfinder and the Science Operations Working Group chair and long-­term planning lead for the MER mission. “You’re not going to the bank. You’re not talking to your friends. You see deer more than you see people at JPL. You’re on another planet.”2 Rice and Golombek offered two perspectives about working on Mars time, which were not mutually exclusive. Many MER mission m ­ embers shared both reactions: it was exhilarating, and it was difficult. Rice described a workplace where one type of time has no meaning (days) and another type of time holds all meaning (Mars time), both were temporal conditions

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of his mission life. Golombek’s comments called attention to asynchronies with important livelihood institutions and other animals that resulted from working on Mars time. These publicly shared expressions were representative of many conversations during MER, though the various workspaces had different social norms concerning when and how to talk about working on Mars time. Indeed, some individual-­based statements about the difficulty of Mars time were not only acceptable but a mark of valor (discussed in chapter 5). But before moving to the notion that time management is solely a personal responsibility, this chapter focuses on the technologies that were and were not provided by the organization and the technologies that emerged from workarounds to make Mars time work. The MER mission conceived of clock time in a place where there are no clocks or people physically present to set time. Though it is a common belief, locating time as uniform in any place is more figurative than literal. Moreover, within the assumption that clock time is the same everywhere is another assumption, namely that the experience of time is fundamentally a matter of numerical information (language). It is not, and the claim that there are multiple experiences of time distinct to community cultures is not a new observation. In this chapter, “The Sound of No Clock Ticking,” we look at how coordinating a work schedule timeline between two planets relied on the idea that mission members would be able to follow a physically distant experience of clock time, much in the same way that humans manage time across time zones on Earth. When I was on a tour of the MER mission workspace with JPL mission manager Dr. John Callas, in the fall of 2003, he described how the space would be customized to support mission members working on Mars time. Callas, a physicist and an administrator who played a lead role in outfitting the MER workspace, explained that mission members would need physical separation from local clock time and local sunlight. While we did not discuss the reason for this need, the implicit context was the effect of natural sunlight on circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms are “self-­sustained biological rhythms which in a natural environment are normally synchronized to a 24-­hour period.”3 It is a familiar concept but one that most organizations are not in the habit of valuing, except in the aftermath of accidents (e.g., for assigning blame or considering a limit to work hours).4 For MER, NASA Human Factors workgroups studied and provided guidance on managing fatigue and stress, which included small signs hung around the workspaces listing best practices for self-­monitoring.5

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Callas explained that there would be blackout curtains on all the windows in the workspaces and in personal living spaces. In the workspaces, automatic shades would be lowered and raised at the touch of a button. For personal spaces, at home or in a hotel, everyone would be encouraged to outfit their windows with blackout curtains. He said there would be special vans with darkened windows to carry passengers wearing dark sunglasses to and from JPL. There might also be special sleeping quarters set up so that people could remain at the lab without interruption. And, because the JPL cafeteria operation hours were 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. PST and were not altered even for mission operations’ hours at the lab, food services would be arranged for members’ lunch breaks at 1:00 a.m. local Pasadena time. These accommodations indicated an awareness of the relationship between light exposure and circadian rhythms.6 A few months later, a week before the nominal mission began, Callas was interviewed by the news media (who had been given space to work out of the von Karman auditorium to cover the first robot landing). Asked about managing Mars time, Callas described some of the customization plans and said that they would not be fulfilled because of “budget limitations.” Of the original list, the blackout curtains in the workspaces were the only consistently maintained support item, followed by meal service. For a short time, a meal service was available for those whose workday took place during close-­of-­business hours for the JPL cafeteria and local restaurants (figure 3.1). Offering items such as sandwiches and fruit, it was said that it inspired so little interest from mission members that it had to be discontinued. Within the area of MER’s workspaces, there were also office kitchens (with refrigerators and microwaves). Another source of food was the vending machines in the loading dock on the first floor. And, for a short time, an ice cream freezer. As a reward for MER’s achievements a JPL administrator gave the MER team an ice cream freezer and an unlimited supply of a variety of ice cream bars (figure 3.1). It was a very popular food source. A few people even took to relocating ice cream from the freezer to the refrigerator freezers to keep their individual supply going. During the mission, the blackout curtains did modify the workspaces to keep out local natural light, except for occasions when people left them up. Banks of windows ran along all four sides of the JPL building, an advantage for people who wanted to see the sunny days (which happen often in southern California) but a hinderance for those who needed to be shielded. We were instructed to keep the shades down during science work shifts and use the overhead lights. This would prove challenging.

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FIGURE 3.1 The unusual meal landscape that accompanied working in Mars time. Photo by the author; courtesy of the MER mission.

Handwritten signs appeared, taped on the walls near the windows, that read “Keep the shades closed out of consideration for colleagues.” It was an appeal made in response to the habit of some to open the shades and leave them up or partially up for their individual (or group) needs, which did not always coincide with the needs of other workgroups in the science working room. And it was an example of managing the organizational infrastructure as an individual issue, or a user problem. If the black shades were supporting working on Mars time, then should they not have been set to remain closed using infrastructural means rather than appeals to individual character? The built space for the work of MER was not constructed to wholly support the physical experience of being on Mars to the exclusion of the physical experience of local sunlight.7 Instead, in an example of infrastructural maintenance work, individuals are asked to do the work of monitoring and resetting the built environment as needed for their organizational work.8 Ideally, the local built environment at JPL would provide mission members some version of synchronicity with the temporal atmosphere of the Mars worksite; as it happened, this ideal would have to come together using a few technologies and a lot of individuals’ perseverance. Knowing Mars time on a daily basis was to come from smaller technologies, numbers, and information displays.

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MAKING TIME WITH SUPPORT TECHNOLOGIES: DISPLAYS, WATCHES, AND RAINBOWS When situated within the scientists’ workspaces, there were a few ways to figure out Mars time, but none had been physically set as a principal time-­ telling technology. Scholars on the relationship between clock time and communities (society, organizations), such as L. Mumford and E. Zerubavel, have recognized that primary to using time to drive work is a principal material representation, established by size and empowered by a social system, such as a large clock on the wall overlooking a workplace, a bell that is rung throughout the day, or a railway station clock tower.9 There was no big “Mars clock” on the wall loudly ticking off minutes on Mars. There were no clocks that were different in appearance from a regular clock. This is not to suggest that had such a timepiece been present in the mission space there would be nothing more to say about Mars time. Rather, it is the absence of such a timepiece (formally speaking) that is worth noting for the assumption that it was not needed in such an advanced workspace. Handheld mobile technologies, such as Palm Pilots, were still relatively new and costly, and not yet as ubiquitous as they are today. Most people’s cell phones were still just mobile phones and not hand-­held computers. Desktop computers throughout the mission space could display Mars time as long as they had not gone into sleep mode. Laptop computers ran the Mars time digital clocks as well, if their owners had run the gauntlet of accessing the virtual private network (VPN). Informal technologies were the primary technologies used to keep time on Mars. The categories of formal and informal are used here to designate between technologies that were deliberately and officially selected for use (for specific purposes) and those that were created and used (adopted) as needs arose in situ and workarounds were sought. Formal technologies are organizationally approved and are known entities operating in the work environment. Informal technologies often arise as workarounds, activities that bypass formal arrangements. Had there been a principal Mars time clock within the workspaces, to which mission members could always look to check the time of sol at the Mars site where they were working, up and running during ORT phase, it would have been a formal technology, aligning with the use of a principal temporal driver for setting time. Leading the list of the informal technologies used for keeping time on Mars were two: the MERBoard and the Collaborative Information Portal (CIP). These began as formal technologies made for MER for particular

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purposes, then were recast by users to address needs different from those they were formally designed to address—­a workaround activity that organization studies scholar Claudio Ciborra calls technological drift.10 This drift did not necessarily reflect the inability of these formal technologies to function as intended. Both tools drifted into use for supporting the Mars time–­ work relationship once the mission began. MERBoard: “Cutting-­Edge Data Management Tool” and “$20,000 Clock” In each of the main science work rooms, amid the collection of low-­tech and familiar items such as folding tables, office chairs, desktop computers, printers, projectors, screens, extension cords, garbage cans, and dry-­erase boards, were five free-­standing 50-­inch high resolution plasma screen MERBoards. Mounted on a black metal frame with wheels, each was about six feet tall. One stood in each of the five science theme workgroup areas, and several more throughout the MER mission workspaces. Across the three floors were eighteen MERBoards. The MERBoard was designed specifically for MER by a team from NASA Ames using research they had collected on how scientists were using display technologies while discussing data during the mission’s science planning phase.11 Scientists were observed huddling around laptop computer screens, which, given the size of the group (in numbers and height), table height, and screen size, required some juggling around for everyone to be able to see the images of data being discussed. When the group grew too unwieldy, the laptop would be connected to a projector screen, an act of technological coupling that often came with the familiar delays of securing stable connectivity. The MERBoard provided a large, eye-­level display with a touch-­screen plasma display to support collaborative work by countering limitations identified during mission-­planning stages (figure 3.2). It was described as filling “the need for a medium such as an electronic whiteboard that allows for brainstorming, sketching ideas, compositing, and lists that can then be captured and shared easily.”12 Users could view specific data (e.g., images, text) or use an interactive whiteboard, annotate displayed images, save annotations to individual files, share saved annotations with specific users who would initiate interactive access using identification information, and access a suite of software including Microsoft Word and the Collaborative Information Portal (CIP). The CIP, also known as MER/CIP, was designed to provide “a centralized, one-­stop delivery platform integrating science and engineering data from several distributed heterogeneous data sources.”13 The CIP had tools

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FIGURE 3.2 A MERBoard displaying an image of Mars taken by Spirit to which scientists have added annotations. Photo by the author.

for scheduling; announcing schedule changes; tracking the status of work along a version of the tactical timeline; data management search and analysis; and sharing data, analysis, and annotations among scientists and engineers. CIP also had a feature that was, at first, relatively minor. The CIP team, also from NASA Ames, created a CIP clock to allow users “to view any time zone, including Mars time zones.” It could be called up and displayed on the CIP interface or made a standalone feature and displayed on a MERBoard (figure 3.3). There were three colors set for associating the displayed time with its geographic location. A green horizontal bar signaled the time shown was for Mars time at Meridiani Planum. A purple horizontal bar displayed Mars time at Gusev Crater. White horizontal bars could be configured to show time at any terrestrial location. According to the daily actions of MER mission members, the primary use of these tools was for telling time on Mars. People turned them into “$20,000 clocks,” a phrase repeated by many, to give themselves the contextual information required for successfully working on Mars time. Though somewhat pejorative, it was also a comment on mission members’ spirit

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FIGURE 3.3 The Collaborative Information Portal (CIP) used to display clock time at three sites in the United States and one site on Mars. Photo by the author.

of innovation and resourcefulness. Over days and weeks, MERBoards were constantly used to display CIP clocks. There were no other Mars time displays around the science working rooms. Ongoing workflow provided a sense of temporality because the order of activities on the tactical timeline was the same every sol. But people needed to regularly check Mars time while working and organizing their work to keep within the allotted times on the tactical timeline. While some of the CIP’s features continued to support mission operations (e.g., its display of tactical timeline activities), the MERBoards’ other features were no competition for its time-­telling features. A CIP designer shared their disappointment on the turn of events, describing to me some of the reasons that the CIP’s most popular feature was its time displays: the scientists’ lack of familiarity with the software, not enough time allotted for training, and the need for one feature for which the scientists had no alternative—­displays of Mars time in the workspaces. MERBoard designers would later reflect that the MERBoards were used less for their intended purposes and more for unintended purposes as a result of “unanticipated challenges of the real world,” including not enough training time, use time, or understanding of the importance of certain features.14

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In each science work room, at least three of the five MERBoards were typically in use as time displays, from the first week to the end of the nominal mission (April 2004). They continued in this way even during extended operations when the MER mission had stopped using Mars time, as planned. Figure 3.4 is a photo of scientists in a science work room, sitting in a small group, with two MERBoards in the background, each with a different set of time zones on display. As members developed the habit of using MERBoards as clocks, individual and workgroup differences brought another dimension to the temporal landscape. The $20,000 clocks typically all displayed different selections and orders of time. This lack of uniformity is not a feature normally attributed to clocks. Walking from one side of the science workroom to the other, and through the rest of the MER work environment, one would encounter different time displays that reflected the local context. The MERBoard/CIP time displays were almost always different depending on the location and position of the workgroup and the MERBoard. One MERBoard in figure 3.4 has four horizontal bars, each of which represents a time at a different location; the second MERBoard shows the time at two locations. The lack of uniformity across MERBoard/CIP time displays is an important reminder that they were similar to but not the same as everyday clocks. Figure 3.5 shows the same workspace as in figure 3.4 but with the MERBoard displaying a different set of times (the images were taken approximately a few months apart). It was impossible to read the time display as quickly as a traditional clock, which typically involves taking for granted

FIGURE 3.4 Athena team scientists meeting in a science work room. They sit facing one another while the MERBoard sits outside their circle. Photo by the author.

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FIGURE 3.5 The same MERBoard and workspace in figure 3.4 taken on a different day shows a different selection of clock times on display. Photo by the author.

the geographical site described by the numerical text. It took more than a glance, which is what we are accustomed to doing when looking at a digital time display, to read CIP’s time display setting. The MERBoard and CIP were formal technologies—­designed, produced, and approved features of a work environment’s organizational infrastructure—­ and they were high-­tech, digital tools. The informal technologies, items added later to support work without earlier review and planning, are often also low-­tech, analog technologies. It is an important category linked to how mission members dealt with the subsequent breakdowns of tools they adopted for help with time management. Informal, Low-­Tech Mobile Technologies Supporting Mars Time Topping the list of low-­tech informal technologies employed by mission members to make up for the lack of the formal support technologies were two objects: paper and wristwatches. These objects were introduced and shared by mission members without negative characterizations of the sort that can sometimes follow items marked as low-­tech (which, compared to

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high-­tech, are therefore considered rudimentary, old-­fashioned, and basic). Indeed, the emergence of low-­tech items calls attention to the functionalities that high-­tech often fails to deliver.15 As described earlier, the CIP software allowed people to follow the tactical timeline as it progressed (in a dynamic display of activities that shifted forward as a sol progressed). However, one major problem with relying on the CIP to keep track of the tactical timeline was that it could not adjust in real time. If a meeting start-­time had to be delayed by five minutes (which was not considered an insignificant amount of time), it was not possible to adjust the CIP’s representation of the new start-­time. Part of what makes an extreme work environment such as remote robotic space exploration so unique is the critical importance of seconds and minutes and the weight they carry across operations. Even a one-­to five-­minute change to a work activity start-­time or end-­time can affect the outcome of an entire work process. But the CIP could only be adjusted by an authorized person, none of whom were present during the nominal mission. Instead, MER members came up with workarounds “to let people know” using word of mouth (e.g., “Did you hear about the meeting time change?”), email, and cell phone updates (it was still the early years of cell phones, so texting was not yet a popular option). Another workaround of the low-­tech variety was taping a piece of paper with the time change written on it to the hallway wall facing the elevator doors, the most common point of entry into the mission workspace. (Sometimes, though, these pieces of paper fell on the ground, where they remained unnoticed.) Another use of paper for disseminating current information on time adjustments was a large pad of paper set up on an easel and propped in front of a MERBoard (this paper workaround was not replicated in front of all MERBoards, only the MERBoard located at the front of the science room). The most robust low-­tech time support technology was a spreadsheet, distributed as paper copies, known as “the Callas Rainbow.” Shared during the fall of 2003 and named by its author John Callas, it was a single-­page representation of the tactical timeline, work schedules, Mars time, and Pacific Standard Time, for several sols, using a rainbow of colors. Shown in figure 3.6, the time conversion table was divided into three sections. The first depicts the tactical timeline with each activity listed on the vertical column and its duration to the right, staggered forward across the full length of a day on Mars. The table used multiple colors including dark green for the activities led by science teams and blue for the activities led by engineering teams. The second section lists mission roles and the duration of their work shifts, with pastel colors, which can be lined up with both the Mars time and local Pasadena

FIGURE 3.6 The Callas Rainbow is one example of the paper-­based time conversion text created by mission members to keep track of the time on Mars. Photo by the author; courtesy of the MER mission.

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times listed in increments of 31 minutes in the third section. The left-­side vertical column in the third section includes time coordination for four sols of mission operations. The piece of paper, unlike the CIP software, could be carried anywhere on or off site (JPL) and required no internet connection. The Callas Rainbow was an informal support technology created to assist mission members in managing Mars time work schedules. It was the best single representation of key time–­work relationships for MER’s interplanetary production of Martian science. Callas would print these out and leave a stack outside of his office, which was on one of the floors of mission operations. Although it was not a regular provision for work support, several of the workgroups made their own versions of the Callas Rainbow during the mission, but none were made to give everyone a single shared representation of the entire team’s time–­work relationship according to Mars and local Pasadena time. As useful and critical as it was in supporting science exploration with robots on Mars according to a strange new time rhythm, the paper-­based technology was not the sort of thing that made headlines, unlike the other low-­tech item that topped the list of informal workarounds that helped with time on Mars—­the Mars watches. Like the Callas Rainbow, the Mars watch was developed by mission members who came up with an idea to deal with working on Mars time, particularly the problem of how to know the time on Mars when one was not ensconced in the MER mission space at JPL. Unlike the Callas ­Rainbow, the Mars watches caught media attention and were regularly featured in coverage of the mission. A prominent example of their public circulation is on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC.16 There, in the Exploring Planets exhibition, hangs a panel titled “From Bits of Data to Science” that includes sections about MER mission instruments, team members, converting data transmissions into science, and Mars time. Mounted above the “Keeping Mars Time” description is a clear Plexiglas box protecting and displaying a Mars watch that lies against a backdrop image of Mars terrain. The description notes that the watch was designed by Garo Anserlian. In late 2003, two JPL engineers sent an email to the MER team informing us that they had found a local jeweler, Garo Anserlian of Executive Jewelers, who said he could modify a watch to run forty minutes slower. In other words, you could have a watch that ran according to Mars time. I heard such watches existed but that they were unique and not widely available.17 One afternoon, earlier in the fall, PI Squyres came into the science workroom where a group of scientists were sitting in conversation. As he paused to chat, someone noticed a pocket chain dangling from his jeans, an adornment that stands out particularly on a person with a no-­nonsense style of

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dress. Squyres pulled on the chain drawing out from his pocket a watch that had been adjusted to run according to Mars time that he had been given in Florida following the launch of the second Delta rocket (carrying Opportunity). The scientists “oohed” and “ahhed” as Squyres pocketed the watch and walked off. As the door to the science workroom closed behind him, one scientist said, “Well, at least he’ll know what time it is.” This was a brief encounter with little follow-­up discussion on the subject of watches that could run according to Mars time. Executive Jewelers was located in the nearby town of Montrose, about a twenty-­minute drive from JPL. Mr. Anserlian would take an automatic mechanical watch and physically attach additional specific lead weights to precisely alter the movement of the wheels.18 There were a few conditions to this deal, which was one reason we were being asked via email to sign up for a watch, if we were interested. All watches had to be purchased from Anserlian (you could not, for example, bring in your own watch and have it  modified), orders had to be placed six to eight weeks in advance, and there was no money-­back guarantee. The starting price for a watch was $100.00 and went upward of a couple hundred dollars (figure 3.7).19 And,

FIGURE 3.7 An image of watch options sent around to mission members in December 2003. Photo credit courtesy of the MER mission and Caltech.

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for an additional $50.00 a sticker of Mars was placed on the face of the watch, beneath the glass, and a certificate of authenticity included. Initially, the Mars watches were met with excitement. They held the promise of knowing Mars time wherever you were. You could know the correct time at your workplace even when you were not there. You could be at home, at the movies, traveling during your days off, or waking up for your workday. The cost was not so exciting. It was high enough that it was not, for everyone, an easy purchase. And, to be clear, these were paid for out of pocket, by each person. Granted it seemed like a necessary expense, but there was still the matter of whether or not they would actually keep Mars time as well as needed. Many people purchased the watches, and they were fun to see. Several mission members bought them for the attention they anticipated receiving; as one scientist put it, “When someone asks me if I have the time, I can say, ‘Sorry I only have Mars time.’” As a novelty item, they did pay off. They were not so successful as reliable timekeeping devices. The problems with the watches became evident once they were in use—­problems that were troublesome enough that there was a reduction in purchase orders (although the list of people who were waiting on their order was already quite long). One problem was realized by mission members who would stop wearing the Mars watch on their days off. When returning to work they found their watch had stopped running, because taking off the watch for a couple of days was enough for the self-­winding mechanism to stop. Adjusting the hands of the watch added to the gradual slipping of the minutes such that over time it was no longer running 40 minutes longer every 24 hours. Even regular wear of the Mars watch did not ensure the accuracy of its special timekeeping, a slip that might only get noticed when finding oneself a few minutes late to a meeting. The solution to this was another problem. To have the watch adjusted required driving back to the jeweler’s shop, during shop hours in the bright southern California sunlight during what could be the middle of night for your work shift, and leaving the watch there for adjustment (and having to return a few days later to pick it up). One scientist referred to it as an expensive piece of junk. Still, it was a good effort, and some tried to use the Mars watches for keeping time at both of the MER worksites on Mars. Figure 3.8 shows one mission member whose role required knowing Mars time at both sites, as well as local time, wearing multiple watches. From right to left, the first watch is a Mars watch keeping time at Spirit’s

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FIGURE 3.8 A mission member whose work required them to know time at multiple sites wears four watches. Courtesy of NASA/JPL/Caltech.

location on Mars; the second is a dual-­faced watch for keeping time at two sites on Earth; the third watch is a fatigue measure watch, worn by volunteers for NASA Ames Human Factors team;20 the fourth watch is keeping time at Opportunity’s location on Mars. Telling Mars Time No matter which time-­ keeping technology mission members used, the work of keeping Mars time was confusing, exhausting, and disconcerting. Because it did not contribute to any catastrophes (fortunately), it was not classified as a significant issue.21 Indeed, mission members’ difficulties with Mars time were not an easy subject to talk about openly (I discuss possible reasons why in chapter 4). When Mars time came up in conversation, it was either as a check on whether or not you were really participating on the MER mission (as opposed to participating on occasion or joining after the nominal mission, when Mars time was no longer the primary time driver) or to exchange comments made through forced smiles about a Mars time difficulty, accompanied with eye rolls of camaraderie. Another ethnographer on the mission, Charlotte Linde, and I took to noting when, if ever, mission members standing in the main science working rooms would comment about the difficulties with Mars time. We wondered to what degree

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this private work room was in fact too public for conversations that could be interpreted as complaining. The extraterrestrial time zone was not “just another time zone.” Knowing time was (and is) not wholly understood through numerical information displays. Knowing time is an experience in which we are so embedded that it is difficult to step outside of it and consider our agency in its constitution. MER’s Mars time–­work relationship was a temporal rhythm made up of a set of unresolved temporal patterns. Every day we are always already embedded in multiple temporal patterns, each with its own timeline and requirements. Zerubavel has drawn out three fundamental types of temporal patterns that are present in our everyday experience with time: bio-­, physio-­, and social.22 Biotemporal patterns occur in relation to the functioning of biological life, such as the stages of larva or pregnancy; physiotemporal patterns occur in relation to the movement of planetary bodies, such as planetary rotations; and sociotemporal patterns occur in relation to social situations, activities, and events.23 During a typical day at work on Earth, there is one physiotemporal pattern set by the rotation of the planet, possibly many but at least one biotemporal pattern (e.g., oneself, people they are working with or caring for), and definitely many sociotemporal patterns (e.g., work, rental payments, bills, bus schedules, car maintenance, government office hours, tax schedules). Comparing this with MER, two significant differences readily stand out in the physio-­and biotemporal patterns. MER operated according to two physiotemporal patterns, located in the axial rotations of Mars and Earth. Though Mars’s rotation drove the temporality of the work system, there was no escaping being physically embedded in Earth’s physiotemporal pattern. Second, though it is not unusual to manage more than one biotemporal pattern in the course of a day, project, or time period, MER had a nontypical primary biotemporal pattern, namely the rovers’ “life spans.” Members were constantly asking what time it was on Mars, on which Mars (i.e., which site on Mars), and how much time was left for the current activity, according to Mars time and according to local Pasadena time. Outside of the science workrooms, in the side rooms, and outside the lab, people talked about being tired when coming to work and when leaving work, and about not being tired enough when leaving work at all hours. They talked about going to eat dinner at a breakfast cafe because that was the only thing open at 6:30 a.m., and the faces of other diners who watched them drinking a beer while everyone else was drinking coffee. One scientist described how driving when tired after work led him to turn the wrong

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way onto a freeway off ramp.24 It was common for scientists to explain an act of confusion, like forgetting how to use the projector or being unable to locate their data during a presentation, with a statement to the effect of “Sorry, I’ve been up way too long.” This would be received with smiles and nods and then the work would continue. But it was mainly in private spaces—­the work rooms for the instrument teams or in the cafeteria or restaurants—­that mission members talked about time confusion as openly as the decision on what to order to eat. As described earlier, of all the items Dr. Callas had thought of for supporting Mars time work, two items were consistently available and used: the blackout shades and the cots. An earlier image, figure 3.4, shows these shades both closed and open. For the most part, the shades were all closed in keeping with the need for people to maintain a sense of the time of day on Mars rather than the local time (and local sunlight). Enough people were opening the shades during local sunlight hours, regardless of other people’s attempts to establish a habit of sunlight exposure in sync with Mars time, that handwritten signs were posted asking people to be considerate of others and not open the shades for a glimpse of sunlight. More than a few folded cots were available. Army green with metal frames, they were folded into bags that leaned up against the walls in a work room that was designated as the scientists’ “open workspace.” It was a very large space outfitted with many cubicles that were partitioned and clustered to create some semblance of subgroups. One side of room’s windows provided a view of Mount Wilson (the San Gabriel Mountains), home to a famous observatory founded by George Ellery Hale.25 There were chairs, telephones, and enough clear floor space to open up a cot to nap on. Yet it was one of the least used spaces of the three floors for the MER team. Cots were used most often in the more private spaces of team work rooms. And informal sleeping—­nodding off while sitting in a chair—­was acceptable in most every workspace as well (figure 3.9). MER’s work schedules for people were arranged, at the outset, in groups four and three: four days on lab and three days off, a recommendation by the Human Factors team.26 It was an arrangement that seemed rarely to be followed, and it was not a schedule that needed to be enforced (unless something went wrong); it was only a suggestion. Initially, people who lived out of town followed the schedule, as three days was just enough time to travel home for a day or two and then return. For some of these mission members, this break was more work than relief. Once they arrived home, they would have to resume normal daily routines and time. Or, if they tried

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FIGURE 3.9 On the left, a makeshift bed on the floor of an office, with a Mars terrain image for headboard; on the right, a cot set up in an instrument team’s workspace. Photo by the author.

to stay on their “own [work] time,” they would be out of sync with their family’s temporal rhythms and adherence to terrestrial time. Some of these scientists stopped making the trips home because, as one scientist put it, “What good is it being with my family when I am awake while they sleep and I sleep while they are awake?” Staying in town was made easier by the fact that so many people were living in temporary housing. And remaining in town meant more time at JPL; after all, the MER mission was a rare opportunity on which everyone wanted to spend their time. I personally worked to a schedule that was typically seven days on and one day off (on the eighth day, I could notice the fatigue in my thinking, which was not a good state to be in while doing research but was perfect for running errands or watching a movie). It was more comfortable to work around the clock for a few days than to take artificially imposed breaks in the interest of “getting a good rest,” as advised at the outset. We can glean another facet of this experience from data collected by the Human Factors team (from thirty MER members who volunteered to keep journals noting their sleep

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and wake times): “there was no difference in the amount of sleep obtained by personnel whose family and permanent residence was remote from JPL compared to personnel whose permanent residences were local to JPL.”27 Semi-­anonymous notes about the Mars time experience were posted around the third floor of the MER workspace, the floor that included management offices. In addition to the post-­it note mentioned in the introduction, a large whiteboard hung on the outside of a cubicle was impossible to avoid when passing through this space. Written in bold black marker was a list of “top 10 quotes heard ’round the project.” The list ran longer than ten quotes. Of several that spoke specifically to the Mars time experience were these choice comments: 10. If I’m working Mars hours, and Mars hours are 25% more than Earth hours, shouldn’t I get an extra 25% pay raise? 11. FACT: One man, one woman, 9 months → one baby MBA: 9 couples can make that baby in a month MER: 900 couples can make it in 0.01 months = 30 seconds but don’t be surprised if it is a [words synonymous with an unhealthy child] 12. WHAT TIME IS IT IN REALITY? 13. HELL, what time is it ANYWHERE? The title of the list signals that it is intended to be a humorous list, as it mimics a regular feature on a popular late-­night show, Late Night with David Letterman, a top ten list of intended to be funny and often irreverent, tongue-­in-­cheek observations on any given subject. Still, these excerpts, and the list in its entirety, are examples of the ways people expressed themselves on the subject of Mars time in public spaces without claiming authorship. One event highlighting the relationship between fatigue and work effects took place one afternoon (local Pasadena time) while I was interviewing several mission members in their team work room. A senior scientist came through the door with an image of the Mars terrain. He asked for help with examining it; that is, he asked the small group to all look at the image and locate a particular feature on a Martian rock. The scientist told the group to come and find him in the main science work room when and if they were successful. They immediately gathered about the paper image while one person accessed the digital image on a desktop computer and began manipulating it to try and discern the feature being sought. As they searched for the feature, the conversation was as much about how tired everyone’s eyes were as it was about various technical strategies to employ. I myself lacked

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the training to see the type of feature that was being sought (I tried but could not find it); instead, I observed the scene itself. It is clear that seeing is a critical activity in science knowledge production.28 What would a work schedule look like if it were organized according to the best times for seeing—­not the rover’s best time for taking pictures using sunlight, but for humans? Eye strain and fatigue are experienced in different degrees surely based in part on individual physical aspects and experience with developing professional vision. A senior scientist broke away from the main work room, where he along with his fellow senior scientists were analyzing data, in order to harness “fresh eyes.” Indeed, their eyes were younger but still tired. About an hour of looking passed before someone found the feature, circled it on the paper, and left to give it to the scientists in the science work room. Later, I consulted the Human Factors list of “Signs and Symptoms of Fatigue and Stress” to check if “tired eyes” was a sign of fatigue, as a condition that affected work performance.29 It was not listed. Mars time is an example of a workplace technology that was culturally acceptable to overlook or deride. Technologies that are viewed as mundane are easy to overlook, resulting in their complex inner workings and relationships getting cast as mundane as well. Why talk about a clock, or a chair, when there are robots in the room? Even without robots to compete with, the clock on the wall attracts little attention, particularly in workspaces where its hands were set by Taylorism over a hundred years ago. Indeed, questioning the basic tools that are common to most work communities can lead to a rejection of the person asking the question rather than a closer look at the questions raised. This is one way that culture works, of course, as a force for social conformity. Community members who have a problem with a technology that the group has determined everyone but an idiot should be able to operate risk their reputation. Problems with these technologies are commonly evaluated as “user error” or an individual deficit (the person is taken to not have enough or the right information). Thus it becomes a social norm to accept difficult time–­work relationships in most work environments, a fact that understandably underlies nonplussed responses to time-­management technologies that do not work well. Still, such norms do not contradict the fact that we can make dramatic, even alien, material and relationship changes to most human-­built technologies.

4



DREAMING OF SPACE, IMAGINING MEMBERSHIP

In the early days of NASA, building the technologies necessary to get people into outer space preceded fashioning the work of being in outer space.1 Any more substantive notion beyond the refrain that it would require people who were risk-­takers and could maintain focus in extreme conditions would have to wait until the work was actually happening. Among the first group of men given the opportunity to participate in the job of astronaut was military pilot Virgil “Gus” Grissom. He wrote about the preparation for becoming an astronaut, after flying twice in low Earth orbit on projects Mercury (1961) and Gemini (1965). In “How to Make a Gemini Astronaut,” Grissom pointed out the uniqueness of doing unprecedented work by comparing it to training for familiar work: “The carpenter’s apprentice must learn how to handle his saws and hammers. The college engineering student learns how to operate his slide rule long before he graduates. But how on earth do you train people for unearthly jobs; jobs that never before existed, in an environment that man has never known?”2 It was a good question but one that would take time to answer. Forty years after NASA’s first era of astronauts, another new type of work was in development, and again people were developing work procedures that no one had ever done before. MER’s remote robotic science work built on experiences from previous Mars missions, but none before had encompassed the same aspects of remote communication between people and space technologies, NASA deadlines and policies, public expectations, and funding. No other previous project had included remotely operating two robots on opposite sides of Mars for over 90 consecutive days according to Mars time while conducting scientific processes (e.g., questioning, data collection selection, and analysis). Six years before MER, in 1997, NASA’s Pathfinder mission took place at a single site on Mars with one lander and one remotely operable robot, Sojourner, following Mars time for less than one month. Some people working on MER had also worked on earlier Mars

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missions that involved no robots and no Mars time. Many were trained scientists accustomed to conducting their work on Earth, within a normal array of multiple temporal patterns particular to their lives. MER mission members were making time on Mars an inseparable part of creating how to conduct remote robotic science and exploration. For this work, however, as for early astronauts, they had little in the way of role models. Although it was not categorized as experimental, which would have indicated it was not ready for operation, MER’s time–­work relationship was an experiment in pushing the envelope (operating at a speed beyond normal). I figured that MER’s crafting of the new work of remote robotic planetary science and exploration would potentially yield information on the process itself, which could be used for developing next iterations (e.g., applying to future mission development). I found the ways that people on the MER mission talked about difficulties in the Mars time–­work relationship were incommensurate with a community enacting, and developing, a novel temporality. Time support issues were no secret; no one was just peeking at the “$20,000 clocks,” they had openly turned the MERBoards into temporal support technologies. But rather than expressing the difficulties of managing Mars time as problems, the arduousness of dealing with time management was represented as a mark of valor, among mission members and by media. Weathering the challenges of working, and living, according to Mars time for over three months was characterized as a hero’s tale, a noble act of suffering for science. And NASA provided the organizational discourse (context) to support this narrative. MER’s new community shared the cultural values of heroism and sacrifice that had been created and developed for decades since NASA’s first successful launch and return of astronaut Alan Shepard into space in 1961. The ability to document, in the interest of development, the ups and downs of MER’s unprecedented work system was encumbered by an organizational culture that drew inspiration from fictionalized and real feats of weathering extreme work conditions in the name of exploration. At the intersection of normal and strange responses to Mars time issues, I found an entanglement of actions, intentions, and cross-­purposes of the sort for which there is never a single identifiable reason. As I noted this entanglement and why mission members would be inclined to shoulder the Mars time issues and represent them as a badge of honor, I took a direction offered by mission members themselves—­popular media.3 Specifically, they used popular media representations of space exploration as explanatory devices for describing normative work identity (standards for good work performance).

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Learning about work before professionally engaging in it is traditionally considered a component of formal education, in the form of physical and intellectual training received through an apprenticeship, college, or on-­the-­ job training. Another source of information that can precede and accompany formal education is popular media depictions of work. Unlike formal training, popular media representations of work are primarily intended for entertainment and not necessarily intended to serve as “how-­to” guides for work. Still, popular media depictions provide accounts of work environments, organizational values, and professional identities that can inspire people to pursue a particular kind of work, or specific organizational settings.4 These accounts can shape preconceptions of normative work conduct and identity. Space exploration, even before the first lunar landing, was a familiar trope in film, literature, and popular science. Of the examples that often come up (e.g., stories by Jules Verne and H.  G. Wells and others have inspired imaginations of life on Mars and travel between Earth and Mars),5 popular media depictions are not known for expansive representations of work and identity. In the case of space exploration, how might the representations in popular media that inspire imaginations of conducting space exploration also inform people’s schemas of normative work conduct and identity once they have joined NASA? In other words, could preconceived notions of space exploration work such as the relationship between time and work and the identity of a successful member shape work conduct in situ? I propose that scientists opted to deal with breakdowns without notifying the organization in an effort to maintain a particular identity, one that had long been dreamed of and imagined through media representations of the work of space exploration and of NASA. When faced with a discrepancy between a preconceived notion and the actual experience of work practices, scientists’ responses could be seen as attempts to prevent displaying character stigmas that threatened to reduce their status and career opportunities. Stigma management, as explored by Erving Goffman,6 involves the work of refraining from a demonstration of attributes that deviate from the norm, that is, from the culturally established category of what is normal. I contend that this category of normal, in the case of the scientists on NASA’s MER mission, was informed by preconceptions of idealized membership and work practices constituted through media representations of organization membership. Many of the MER mission members described drawing inspiration from popular culture—­from literature and films about space and terrestrial discovery and exploration. Around the MER mission, references to movies

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and literature, fiction and nonfiction, were commonplace in conversations. Some pointed to the influences of the sociocultural landscape during their childhood as they grew up experiencing the space race, Sputnik, John Glenn’s Earth orbit, the Apollo lunar landings, and decades of shuttle launches. Significant literary influences were authors such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Jules Verne. And more than a few scientists were themselves science fiction or fiction authors (in addition to being published scientists); the first one I learned about (Dr. Geoffrey Landis) was described to me by another scientist as the author of the best science fiction book about Mars exploration.7 Often-­quoted films included Apollo 13, Ghostbusters, and Star Wars. Stories of space exploration authored by Jules Verne and Kim Stanley Robinson were practically required reading.8 They were sources of cultural knowledge that were present both in casual conversation, in the form of jokes, and in more formal capacities, in the form of passwords and Mars terrain identification naming schemas. These were some of the references that led me to reflect on the ways in which popular depictions of space exploration contributed to scientists’ expectations in terms of social rewards and guiding work practices. POPULAR MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL WORK, REWARDS, AND MEMBERSHIP Popular media representations of work are typically considered entertainment (i.e., no educational intent), not as “how-­to” guides. Film, television, literature, and news media all provide accounts of organizational work environments that may be the main story or simply a setting in which events plays out. Popular media provide a constant source of information about workplace production processes, rules of order, goals, good, bad and rogue work performance, professional identities, values, and language.9 Of course, the degree of accuracy varies by genre, writers’ knowledge, story form, and journalists’ access. Audiences receive representations of an organization’s who, what, where, when, and how: who works in the organization, what kind of work is conducted there, and the where, when, and how of the production process. Cultural values depicted in media accounts of organizational membership can inspire the imaginations of nonmembers by encouraging expectations of social relationships, material rewards, public approval, or group status that members enjoy to varying degrees. One popular example of the relationship between media depictions of work and audiences is “the CSI effect,” defined by one source as “a phenomenon reported by prosecutors who claim that television shows based

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on scientific crime solving have made actual jurors reluctant to vote to convict when, as is typically true, forensic evidence is neither necessary nor available.”10 The television series from which the phrase is drawn is CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a one-­hour crime drama televised weekly since 2000. A few years after the show began, “the CSI effect” emerged as law enforcement and courtroom lawyers began commenting that public expectations of forensic technologies and speedy analysis processing were out of sync with reality, owing in part to depictions on CSI. The CSI effect became a cultural phenomenon and a relationship between perception and enactment studied by researchers across disciplines.11 Popular media that take audiences inside organization workplaces are typically conjoined with narratives that focus on material and social rewards gained by organizational membership. Organizations are simply another backdrop or environment within which to tell traditional stories. Different workplaces are used as to convey characterizations with which they have become identified, given their cultural and historical settings. In the United States, certain organizations such as the post office, the registry of motor vehicles, social services, and high school connote human features that people do not typically aspire to such as slowness, indifference, and apathy. Working on Wall Street, on the other hand, has been associated with speed and greed.12 Indeed, one of the best examples of the relationship between the media’s depiction of organization work, rewards, and audience identification comes from a film about stockbrokers in Manhattan, New York. The film that gave life to the phrase “Greed is good,” Wall Street (1987) is a Faustian story about twenty-­something-­year-­old stockbroker Bud Fox, who aggressively seeks the mentorship of successful stockbroker Gordon Gekko, who demonstrates that enormous material rewards and social status come to those who are the best at market trading. All it takes is a “win at any cost” work ethic—­engaging in insider trading and corporate espionage. Although it is a work of fiction, writer and director Oliver Stone used his familiarity with Wall Street that came, in part, from growing up around it (his father’s workplace).13 The film was a popular example of the 1980s as an era of excess and high rollers (which was true for some); market crashes and news stories about illegal trading further kept the film in circulation as a reference point for the immoral and unethical lengths some people working in stock trading will go to for a profit. Despite the film’s conclusion that Fox realized the error of his pursuits and, in coming clean to the authorities, turned Gekko in as well, its presentation of the workplace and social rewards became a hallmark of inspiration. The actor who played Gekko (Michael Douglas) expressed surprise that

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fans thanked him for inspiring them to become stockbrokers: “I wouldn’t mind if I never had one more drunken Wall Street broker come up and say, ‘You’re the man!’”14 One of the most high-­profile personal accounts of work aspirations fostered by the film has come from a multimillionaire stockbroker convicted of money laundering and securities fraud, Douglas Jordan Belfort. While serving part of his prison sentence, he wrote a book in which he described how the film Wall Street changed his life. Once he saw it he knew that he wanted to be like Gekko, the ultimate Wall Street rich guy.15 Indeed, Belfort ran a company of brokers so profitable, slick, and sleazy that it earned him a prison term—­and a chance to write his memoir, which was later made into the film The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Media representations of space exploration and science work typically depict professional rewards that are far less material and far more social, such as receiving hero status, intellectual satisfaction for figuring out answers to complicated problems of public interest, or achieving a first in exploration or invention. Astronauts are not popularized as people who are rewarded with grand material rewards (in the way that successful movie stars and mafia are depicted). Popular media stories about science work lean toward the lesson that scientists seeking to commercialize their discoveries will meet with disaster (e.g., Brain Candy, Congo, The Invisible Man). Indeed, narratives of science exploration work often demonstrate that people are successful only if their goal is selfless (e.g., saving the world, or finding a cure for a disease).16 These examples are reminders of the popularly circulated standards of success for a professional community that, owing in part to its limited history, lacks alternative standards.17 Many MER mission members talked about knowing that they wanted to work in space science and exploration since they were children. It is a familiar origin story that is repeated almost without exception by people claiming long-­held status in the space exploration community. The narrative involves being small, looking up into the night sky at the stars, or looking up at planets, and dreaming of one day being up there. It is a narrative shared by rocket scientists, astronauts, scientists, engineers, space explorers, and journalists, a list that includes Saturn rocket booster scientist and NASA administrator Wernher von Braun; NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission manager Donna Shirley; NASA astronauts Scott Carpenter, Brian O’Leary, and Sally Ride; journalist Marina Benjamin; and the first female space tourist Anousheh Ansari.18 As I listened to MER members describe their moment of “dreaming of being in space,” alongside reading about the moment in personal accounts from members of the space work community, I looked for answers to “and then what?” In the (at least two) decades between

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identifying their dream and its professional community and becoming a member of said community, where did they learn about the values and habits for membership? Inspiring Space Exploration and the Work Conduct of Heroes Through film, television, news stories, and science fiction literature, the organization of NASA has been constituted as a domain for people who conduct work that defies nature and is accomplished in spite of nature.19 In short, it is a workplace for heroes. Hero status is typically conferred upon people for acts that require going against their instinct for self-­preservation (i.e., acts of courage, kindness, or generosity that may compromise one’s own well-­being). Both individuals and organizations can be identified as heroes. For an individual, this might include running unprotected into a burning building to save someone trapped inside or sitting inside a small container on top of tons of explosive rocket fuel and being jettisoned skyward at 17,000 miles per hour. The work of space exploration, whether or not one leaves Earth, can be dangerous and harmful to the human body. Furthermore, harm to the human body can both physically and emotionally affect individuals and their social groups (family, co-­workers, the public). Organizations can also be realized as heroic by supporting the work of heroes.20 NASA is famous for its achievements and for its special organization members—­astronauts. Organization scholar Howard E. McCurdy describes NASA’s early cultivation of a culture of competency through its use of its most magnetic members, the astronauts, as representative of the organization’s own attributes.21 Most accounts of the early days of the space race in the mid-­twentieth century and the first astronauts reference NASA’s formal arrangement with Life, giving the magazine exclusive access to the Mercury astronauts and their families.22 The first members of the astronaut corps were depicted as fun-­ loving, hard-­working, patriotic, dare-­devil, golden boys and were heavily promoted to inspire public support for NASA and American pride. Later, in the late 1970s, NASA added another dimension, long neglected, to shape its public image, when it hired African American actor Nichelle Nichols, famous for her portrayal of a space explorer known as Lieutenant Uhura on the television series Star Trek, to be an astronaut recruiter. Subsequently, the first African American woman astronaut in space, Mae C. Jemison, credited Ms. Nichols’s character as the inspiration for her career.23 Many representations of NASA depict its members as unwaveringly ­committed to personal sacrifice in the name of technological progress. These images of NASA have imbued the cultural consciousness with a standard of

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excellence known as “the right stuff,” qualities that demonstrate one’s ability to overcome any obstacle, be it human, machine, or nature. In popular imagery, NASA is a tireless competitor for occupying space with explorers and satellites. NASA itself supports drawing from fiction to inspire reality, as its own history is evidence of the scientific and technological achievements that were first conceived in popular media (e.g., one poster I regularly passed in a JPL hallway read: “From myth to reality,” with accompanying text that described the connections between science-­fiction stories of the past and space exploration in the present). There are numerous media representations of NASA, its members, and work practices, through which to consider how these representations (may) serve to constitute a category of normative work practice and membership identity. A twenty-­first-­century depiction of human sacrifice and space exploration is found in the film Space Cowboys, in which a shuttle crew encounters conditions that could keep them from returning to Earth alive. One astronaut volunteers to take on the one task that would allow the rest of the crew a safe return but at the cost of his own life. After some initial protest, the crew accepts his act of sacrifice. In this poignant moment, an astronaut’s sacrifice imbues his work with a highly regarded value—­personal sacrifice for the greater good—­giving up one life for the preservation of many so that they may live to give humanity new knowledge about outer space. It is a value that echoes a film from half a century earlier called Rocketship X-­M (1950). In this film, a crew successfully explores Mars, but on the return trip to Earth the entire crew dies. However, their ship makes it back to Earth, and, though grave, the mission manager declares the mission a success. Before 1967, the possibility that space exploration could lead to the loss of human life was an abstract concept in the United States (though sometimes highlighted in news of Soviet rocket science). The event that changed all that in the United States happened on January 27, 1967. During a simulation exercise, Apollo 204 caught fire on the launch pad and the three astronauts inside, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White II, and Roger Chaffee, died.24 These tragic deaths neither shut down the space program nor cleared out the astronaut corps. The sacrificial aspect of space exploration, however, became publicly realized. Grissom’s book Gemini, in which he reflected on the unprecedented work of being an astronaut, was completed and published for him a few months after he died, and included the observation that death was probably inevitable. The final chapter included, “we are going to lose somebody. … If it does [happen] I hope that Americans won’t feel it’s too high a price to pay for our space program.”

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One film favorite among MER mission members, Apollo 13 (1995), emphasizes the relationship between space exploration, ingenuity, sacrifice, and heroism. The film is a fictional portrayal of an actual event that befell the crew of NASA’s 1971 Apollo 13 mission. Oxygen tank failures made it too risky to land on the Moon, so instead they circled it and returned to Earth. The Apollo 13 mission, however, has been remembered not as a failed Moon landing but as an astounding feat of science and engineering that brought the astronauts back safely to Earth. Many steps of the process were unexpected and required working out solutions to problems that would normally take weeks and months. In the film, many small feats of perseverance are shown to demonstrate “the right stuff.” In one scene, following many hours of shuttle flight simulation, three astronauts climb out of the shuttle and learn that their simulation was a failure. Had their simulated operations been real, they would all have died. The astronaut commander directs the shuttle simulator controllers to restart the exercise and orders the other astronauts back into the shuttle, to carry on until they get it right. Everyone around him glances at one another with strained faces, then silently follow his commands. Conveyed but unspoken is the mantra that failure is not an option.25 HEROES AND MARS TIME How do heroes manage their time? In other words, how do heroes respond to temporal challenges? It is a question that draws attention to a temporal feature of acts of heroism, which is that traditionally they are “on the fly.” However, work that has been culturally established as heroic, such as firefighting and space exploration, involves training and routines. MER’s ORTs (Operations Readiness Tests) were precisely the moments when pioneers of remote robotic planetary science and exploration were participating in forming the temporal rhythms for their work. Although ORTs, as described earlier, did not include the key temporal features of the MER work environment, there was plenty of talk about time particularly during the assessment meetings. An ORT assessment meeting was a forum convened in the Callas Palace, the science operations meeting room, for participants to present successes and issues. These meetings were attended by a majority of mission members, science investigators, and engineering leads, and were scheduled for four hours, with no breaks. Usually it was only at the behest of members vocally reminding one another of the four-­hour countdown that kept meetings from running longer. Not every individual gave a presentation; some teams were represented by a team lead. Presentation content was displayed

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via PowerPoint presentation, while the presenter would read loudly (some assisted by a microphone) through the contents while adding details not captured in the document. The audience participated orally during presentations, as well as after. Mission members spoke up to agree, sympathize, laugh, question, disagree, or offer solutions. Members described how they completed their work while pointing out hiccups in the information flow and other concerns. Although all issues did not necessarily have immediate solutions, the meeting and team participation upheld the importance of capturing this information and provided opportunity (and enough time) to address them before the nominal mission.26 Rather than a prescribed list of topics that each person or team lead had to address, presentations reflected individual experiences and interpretations of what constituted an issue worth putting on a slide and reporting to the team. For example, one important outcome from the ORTs was the adjustments to the tactical timeline, giving more or less time to the activity schedule as realized from the opportunity to carry them out in situ. These meetings were also important events from a work ethnography perspective because they provided data to which I could compare my data on workflow.27 Temporality was among the issues consistently raised. While some people identified temporal issues in their presentations, the majority of comments were oral, a format that does not become part of the historical written account of a project.28 Some of the issues raised included the length of time allotted on the tactical timeline for task completion (not enough or too much by a small margin); information flow (speed); information exchanges (content of the handovers between shifts); and “just knowing what time it was.” One time issue was that even knowing the current time was difficult because Mars time was not on display (the MERBoards had not yet been co-­opted) and no one had a sense of the “40 ‘extra’ minutes a day” worked. Throughout the ORT assessment meetings, I watched approximately 25 percent of mission members give formal presentations that listed difficulties associated with time management. When making their points about time issues, other mission members verbally agreed, though they did not have the same issues listed in their presentations. More than three times as many members spoke up about experiencing time-­management issues than the number of members who made statements about time issues in their presentations. I noted the advice of experienced mission members that time issues would correct themselves once the nominal mission began. One common response was that “once the actual mission starts things will be different.” Mission members with prior mission experience assured others that once the actual mission began, the real-­time pressures of working

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on Mars science using remotely operating robots would drive mission members through the tactical timeline. One way of putting this response is as suggesting that the mission would temporally run itself. The organizational context, in full swing, would allow them to do things with their bodies, minds, and senses that currently they were unable to fathom doing. Later, I wondered why it was that some members who spoke up to say they had experienced time-­management issues had not included them in their presentations. Maybe they normally relied on other members to raise such an issue, or maybe they were not alarmed by fluctuating time tables (the degree to which may not have been interpreted as critical enough to signal publicly to their peers). Or, they may have been reluctant to report time management as an issue on a written document but were comfortable doing so orally, in agreement with others. One member, whose role did not include daily participation during ORT or the nominal mission, explained to me that the time issues were a condition specific to the incomplete state of the MER work environment during the ORT stage. He said that once the nominal mission began, with everything operational, time-­management issues would be remedied. In January 2004, however, when the nominal mission began, these issues not only remained but proliferated. The workspaces were complete—­tables, chairs, monitors, software, timetables were all in place. It took less than three weeks for the effects of temporal confusion to emerge in mission operations. For most members one week of constant jet lag, “Martian jet leg,” was manageable. At three weeks, physical signs of weariness and disorientation emerged: arriving late to meetings, missing meetings, dozing off during meetings, forgetting which direction one was going in the stairwell, losing track of which floor of mission operations one was standing on, and walking into walls. Even one of the workaround timepieces presented an issue. The special Mars time wristwatches transitioned into regular watches as the modified coil readjusted itself (and could only be reset by leaving it with the jeweler for a week). Mission members’ comings and goings from the MER workspace at JPL decreased as one strategy to stay in sync with time was to not leave the worksite if you did not have to. For the most part, time management struggles were not openly discussed in main science workspaces (e.g., science operations work rooms and the Callas Palace). Expressions of frustrations with Mars time were often masked by jest, and received with smiles and knowing laughter. Another form of expressing frustration with the time–­work relationship was humorous signs. One example was tucked in the lines of the Lord’s Prayer edited into an appeal to the rover (figure 4.1). It read: “Our Rover, which art on Mars, hallowed

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be thy suspension; Thy launch date come: Thy will be done on Mars as it was tested on Earth. Give us this sol our Presidential Panorama; and forgive those managers who had unrealistic schedules: and lead us not into terrain, but deliver us evidence of former life. For thine is the CEDL [Cruise, Entry, Descent, Landing], and the deployments, and the egress, for 90 sols. Amen.” Posted on a wall that could be seen by anyone walking through the team workspaces, it was a public verbalization on the difficulties of the time schedule and also an acknowledgment of the willingness to bear such difficulties. Otherwise, members avoided displaying their very human responses to a problematic work environment by keeping comments about time frustrations in the back stage area of mission operations.29 These areas were spaces for candid conversation, as access was limited. Unlike the front stage

FIGURE 4.1 A solemn prayer for MER mission success. Photo by the author.

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areas, access was granted not by special badges but through the implicit understanding that only members of these workgroups and their intimates could work and hang out in these rooms (for example, when other members entered for official reasons, conversations would come to a dead stop until the “other” left the room). In trying to understand why some members opted to personalize temporal issues rather than address them to the organization, I considered their responses in relation to the cultural context. What organizational circumstances encouraged their responses as appropriate? Indeed, the marginalization of time issues was becoming a norm, an acceptable and preferred action for a work culture still in progress, with very little precedent to build on, and in which identified issues could be fruitful opportunities for innovation. Juxtaposing the emerging norm with the media representations that were part of the normal discourse brought me to consider whether the theory of stigma management was in operation. In this case, Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma management offers one grounded explanation for gravitating toward “heroic” responses rather than ones that may appear “unpleasant,” a demonstration that (unintentionally) flipped the roles of humans and robots.30 The Stigma of Being Human Stigmas—­community defined attributes that ascribe negative characteristics to people who display said attributes—­are deeply discrediting, according to Goffman.31 A discredited person is one who is reduced from normal group member status to one who is seen as unfit (not a good fit and beyond rehabilitation). Drawing on his sociological studies of organizations and members’ identity performance, Goffman categorized three types of stigmas: (1) physical, that is, relating to bodily features; (2) tribal, that is, relating to religion, ethnicity, nationality; and (3) character, that is, relating to individual psycho-­social dispositions (e.g., passive, domineering, or honest). Physical stigmas are identified as bodily signs that are placed (burned or cut) onto a person’s body to designate low moral status, a practice that began in ancient Greece. Goffman explains how the physical stigma, in Christian times, was broadened to include bodily signs that marked people born into low moral order as well as those imbued with holy grace. Tribal and character stigmas are visually less apparent. Tribal stigmas are characterized through lineage such as kinship, religion, and nationality. And a character stigma is described as a blemish of individual character perceived as a weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous or rigid beliefs, or dishonesty.

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Goffman describes the primary structural precondition as an established category of “normal” against which discrediting behavior is assessed. What is normal and the attributes of normalcy are determined by “ordinary” and “natural” society. In his example of a physical stigma, he wrote that if the standard set by society is that “normal” people have all senses and limbs intact then any person with physical attributes that deviate from this norm is stigmatized as “irregular.” Character stigmas rely on interpreting and assigning the community’s values to a person’s behavior. These stigmas are not apparent in the same manner as physical or even some tribal stigmas. Instead, they are inferred from current behavior or a record of past behavior. A wide range of imperfections can be imputed on the basis of a stigma and thereby increase the discrediting characteristics of the stigmatized. The reverse can also happen. On Goffman’s theory of stigma transmutation, a stigma can become a normative expectation, one that is valued by a community. In this context, a person who does not bear a particular stigmatized attribute is judged by the community as unfit. In other words, to be recognized as a full member one may need to possess a particular stigma. The preconditions and effects of stigmatization address the actions and relationships in an organization between it and its members. The harmful effects of stigmatization can be found in the varieties of discrimination that people exercise to reduce a stigmatized person’s life chances, described by sociologist Fred Davis in his work on stigmatization and social interactions.32 In an organizational context, the reduction of life chances can mean, for example, being barred from financial advancement, promotion, or social inclusion, or undergoing setbacks from being demoralized by contemptuous treatment. In a unique organization, one of only a few involved in a particular kind of work, such as NASA, members place a high importance on stigma management, given the limited opportunities for professional mobility. As one MER mission member put it, the competition among scientists for inclusion on the MER mission was fierce: “After all, how many times does NASA land remote-­operated scientific data collection vehicles on Mars?” Considering, then, how one’s performance or perceptions of one’s performance are valued both for the task at hand and potentially for future tasks as well, the importance of the practices involved in stigma management cannot be overemphasized. At NASA, performance on a successful mission can be indicative of the performance of individual members. Members still face the need, however, to distinguish themselves from other mission members, as not everyone can move on to the next mission at the

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same time. For some members, the goal was to leverage the success of the current project for moving on to a next mission (development stage). At times, one could read the membership status of those who leave a mission as successful. This is an example of a reward structure that can inhibit members from formally articulating problems, as those who are stigmatized as troublesome or uncooperative are not rewarded with advancement (at least not typically),33 which can carry the risk of stigmatizing them even further. Indeed, an organization and its members co-­construct schemas of normalcy used to evaluate what are or are not discrediting behaviors. As former NASA astronaut Colonel Mike Mullane described, the top of the hero hierarchy, the astronauts, worried about the potential consequences of displaying stigmatized behavior: “The line into space was long and nobody wanted to be at its end, or worse, banished from it altogether.”34 For the MER community, the emerging norm for dealing with Mars time issues in the work environment was to be, or appear to be, indefatigable. Sleep deprivation was undeniable, from a numerical standpoint and by individual accounts (shared privately) on the lack of time to sleep. But public comments about difficulties with the Mars time–­work relationship were scarce. To announce that there were time-­management breakdowns resulting from inadequate organizational infrastructure was to announce one’s own incapacity for heroic action. Bearing physical discomfort was the norm within the work culture at NASA. Indeed, suffering for science has been a long-­standing cultural value, both before and after the MER mission. It appears in the history of science and exploration from accounts of scientists using their own bodies for experiments, such as Nathaniel Kleitman and Bruce Richardson studying circadian rhythms by living without sunlight for twenty-­eight continuous days, Kevin Warwick implanting a computer chip in his arm, and the death tolls for teams accompanying Robert Peary and Adolphus Greely Arctic expeditions.35 Coupled with popular media representations of NASA’s most successful members, these adjacent sources of values and work habits were ready resources shaping MER’s work environment. As an example of Goffman’s transmutation of stigmas, dealing with Mars time issues was a mark of valor. It was a stigma that indicated whether or not a person possessed membership status, which was fully earned only by those who had worked on MER on Mars time, with the scars to prove it. For example, a typical exchange to determine this standard would go something like: “Are you working on MER?” “Yes.” “But are (were) you on Mars time?” To the answer “No,” the questioner might reply with a story of their own full status, including a description of what it was “really” like to work

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on MER. Answering “Yes” was given responses such as a smile, a nod, or further questions about how that status was gained (e.g., which workgroup, from which institution). This type of membership and status checking took place more often at get-­togethers outside the lab, when members would not wear their badges. Sometimes bodily features were more telling than a badge. As one mission member put it, “You can tell who is on MER because they are pasty, tired, and their skin has broken out from too much ice cream.” Status-­earning comparisons (i.e., one-­upping stories, pissing contests) included how many consecutive days spent inside the windowless work rooms, stories about being found sleeping on cots (or left to sleep only to awaken just in time to stumble down the hall into a meeting), local time and Mars time mix-­ups, daily living outside of MER that conflicted with living on Mars time (e.g., hotel staff bursting in before bed rituals for early morning cleaning; having a beer with dinner while everyone else in the diner is eating breakfast), and receiving sole nourishment from vending machines or the ice cream freezer. Members tried to avoid stigma by mitigating public discussion or brandishing the stigma to demonstrate membership in an exclusive community; both stigma-­related activities were acknowledgments of the difficulties of making time on Mars, on MER. Neither activity, however, lent itself to addressing issues formally (in an attempt to change the organizational infrastructure). In the daily team review meetings, it was uncommon for anyone to make comments about Mars time issues, which included purposefully writing down discussion items for follow-­up action or further off-­ line consideration. Without a formal record, print or digital, of the daily experiences with Mars time, there would be little empirical evidence to counter the cultural norm that managing Mars time was, all said, just fine (“just took some getting used to”). The informal comments about Mars time issues made outside of the formal meetings were important in that they were part of the community’s local knowledge—­a critical resource for future space exploration work. But that local knowledge is only as useful as it is accessible. This sort of important, informally shared knowledge all too often resides only in the individuals who are directly engaged in the matter of interest (and anything from politics, funding, market economies, and personality conflicts can effect personnel changes). Cultural norms value members who are “super” human, who will perform regardless of extreme conditions. Managing Mars time was an extreme condition in an organizational landscape where there is a single natural source (planet axial rotation) informing clock time. Given the

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transmutation, Mars time may have unintentionally provided a work condition harsh enough to warrant drawing on heroic identities. When the normative expectation is for people to refrain from demonstrating their human response to experiences affecting their basic needs, then they are being asked to be nonhuman, or robotic. To be robotic is to suppress, overcome, or ignore human physical or emotional needs. Robots were sent to Mars because humans cannot physically withstand the journey to Mars. Sleep is, still, one of the basic human needs we cannot avoid without consequences, such as fatigue. Various types of work routinely push the limits on how long a person can remain awake, alert, responsive, and responsible. Yet using robots instead of humans did not remove all need for sleep. Sleep and its consequential energy conditions were an ongoing topic of discussion for scientific decision making—­with respect to the robots. The robots’ need for overnight “power naps” was different from humans’ physiological need to sleep and the consequences of jet lag from managing multiple temporalities. Giving the robots’ human-­ like qualities, anthropomorphizing them was in and of itself not unusual, particularly in a work environment that required humans and robots to work together closely. The strange and interesting twist comes when this is turned on its head, informally and not intentionally. Expected to refrain from demonstrating any need for the kind of temporal support that was formally accorded to the robots, humans were required to put in a machine-­ like performance.

5



MEMBERING THE ROVERS: HUMANS AND ROBOTS AS COWORKERS

Unlike biological beings, the MER robots were not at risk of losing energy from the carbon-­dioxide-­rich atmosphere on Mars. Though they did not face corporeal dangers, they did face many dangers to their “bodily” systems. In their thirty-­five-­million-­mile journey, each could have gone off course and been lost, never to arrive on Mars. During descent to the planet’s surface, their parachutes could have failed to open. The air bags that gave them a bounce landing could have failed to inflate. A myriad of mechanical failures could have prevented their shells from unfolding, the robots from powering up, their wheels from turning. Meanwhile, NASA’s MER scientists and engineers, themselves unable to make the journey to Mars, remained safe from these conditions on Earth. The conditions of reaching Mars underscored the fragility of human physiology in space travel and the robustness of robot technologies. Centralizing the robots’ needs was a logical standpoint from which to orient mission operations. Safe on Earth, MER humans supported the robots as they faced unknown and some known perils (e.g., their own mechanical limitations) on a daily basis. Making Mars time was one of these supporting operational features that added a few twists to the inversion of machines supporting humans to humans supporting machines. Identifying the constitution of this work relationship through everyday activities, I found a special cohesion among the community that came from “membering” the rovers, a relationship that saw the robots as coworkers which grew out of the similarities between the robotic geologists and the human MER mission members. Additionally, the MER mission had not one but two primary workgroups, humans on Earth and robots on Mars, both essential to daily work cycles and organizational goals; neither could carry out their daily work activities without the other. Making the robots’ local temporal conditions set the temporal pace for the entire interplanetary team, however, made one workgroup take precedence over the other. In other words, the robots’

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local temporal experience was the primary set of conditions around which work was ordered. Their interplanetary round-­ the-­ Mars-­ clock work arrangement was an instance of traditional organizational shiftwork, albeit high-­ tech, with humans and robots as coworkers producing scientific knowledge within monitored temporal durations. The time–­work schedule set robots working during sunlight hours, the day shift, and scientists working during night hours, the night shift. It was a clear portioning of two time-­based work shifts between human and robot workgroups. During sunlight hours on Mars, the robotic geologists were hard at work, and in the evening they “went to sleep.” For the MER science teams at JPL on the night shift, the workday would end shortly before the rovers on Mars would revive to begin the next sol of work. MER scientists worked while the rovers were “asleep” and went to sleep when rovers were “awake.” Indeed, “awake” and “asleep” were used to describe when the rovers were carrying out data collection and when they were powered down. Viewing MER’s remote planetary science exploration as shiftwork can be disconcerting. Shiftwork traditionally evokes hourly wage employees rotating through work schedules in the course of a day (e.g., night shift, third shift, fourth shift). It is a category used to describe people working to cover around-­the-­clock operations in organizations where production never shuts down (e.g., as in some factories, hospitals, nuclear plants, or call centers). MER’s tactical timeline, followed every day for over three months, was used to coordinate people and robots to cover an around-­the-­clock work schedule in a work environment where production never shut down. That said, before and during the MER mission, the arrangement of remote planetary science work was not described as shiftwork, nor did I find it to be well received in some conversations. But if one can look beyond the categories of skilled labor, white and blue collar work, scientific elites, and so on, the infrastructure speaks for itself. It also requires a more inclusive understanding of workgroups such that humans and robots are both active in the knowledge-­production process of remote planetary science and exploration. As my familiarity with the work of remote planetary science exploration grew, so did my understanding that the MER mission humans were not the only ones whose actions and communications drove the work schedule. MER’s Martian science work was constituted through co-­reliant interactions between the scientists and the rovers, each waiting for the other to complete their portion of the day’s work, each reliant on their counterpart’s ability to wake up, process, deliver, and interpret communication. Neither could move forward without the other. I found that the shiftwork pattern

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was supported by and made apparent through the ways that the robots were imbued with human qualities (anthropomorphization).1 Finding that the rovers were as primary a workgroup as the humans was not a foregone conclusion but one that I could not ignore given the accumulation of data. I did not lock on to the use of the term “robotic geologist” during planning and in media accounts as evidence that the scientists intended this to be a literal interpretation. During my year of observing scientists, engineers, computers, and robots, I identified and then followed cultural aspects that blurred the boundary between human and machine and constituted their relationship as working together, coworkers, rather than a wholly dichotomous relationship with humans on one side and command-­and-­control objects on the other. It marked a shift in my research focus, as I was not predisposed to any fascination with robots. I did bring an acute respect for the tools of the trade—­technologies that are essential and specific to particular work activities and environments.2 Robots in the workplace, like humans, follow the rules of the workplace, take time to get to know, have quirks that are not in any handbook, and require time to respond to inquiries (and this response time can change based on age, setting, and other temporal relationships). They each have particular conditions for working, resting, refueling, and maintenance. They can each have particular ways of working (habits) that cannot be changed and instead have to be accommodated (worked around). Others have noted that the MER members embodied their robots—­they used their bodies to mimic a robot’s physical movements—­in order to do their work. I note that they were also expected to embody their robots’ temporality and sensibility of time, in order to personally fulfill mission goals. Also, the way they anthropomorphized the robots meant the latter team members were allowed to have “emotions” and exhibit bodily strain with respect to time in a way that humans institutionally were not—­in fact, they were culturally prohibited from doing so. Temporality is a key feature of human-­robot relationships; human scientists had to follow the robot’s sense of time. HUMANIZING ROVERS: FROM AN ARTIFACT TO TEAM MEMBER I got my first look at a rover as an image in one of the mission preparation presentations stacked twelve inches high on Roxana’s desk at NASA Ames. These were mission manuals, meeting notes, workflow charts, PowerPoint presentations on optional mission operations features (including using Mars time), floor plans for the science working rooms and work stations, formulations

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FIGURE 5.1 The black-­and-­white skeletal depiction of a rover indicating communication devices, data-­collection instruments, and mobility and power materials. The representation highlights the technical features of a technological assemblage including antennas, solar arrays, cameras (Pancams, Navcams, Hazcams), and, in the lower left corner, science “in situ instruments,” the Alpha Proton X-­ray Spectrometer (APXS), Microscopic-­Imager (MI), Mössbauer (MB), and the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT). The entire assemblage was itself an in situ instrument. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL.

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of scientific goals and science instrument descriptions, and various reports from the couple of years of field testing the rovers and planning the remote planetary science workflow. The image of the rover was a line drawing with labeled instruments and other mechanical features (figure 5.1). The skeletal image of the robot lent itself to knowing it through its parts, all or some of its instruments. The robotic geologist is here depicted as an amalgam of tools. The more widely circulated image of the rovers, most often used in mission materials and public media, was an image from the NASA/JPL, Dan Maas LLC animation of a rover’s journey to Mars. The animation depicts a “life-­like” rover, in contrast to a skeletal one, posed within its worksite (see figure I.1 for an example). In contrast to the black-­and-­white skeletal version, the Maas animation images have colors, light sources (we can see the rover’s shadow), and movement (via tracks left by its wheels). A third popular image depicted the rover as a robotic geologist by mixing the language of human features with instrument features. Such images were so numerous that they may need their own category. One depiction of the robot geologist was featured on the front page of the Los Angeles Times on January 7, 2004, four days after Spirit had landed.3 The feature story, “Surprises in Clearest Mars Photos Yet,” included a large drawing of the rover’s assembly, its PanCams and mast, which were described as having a “head” and “eyes.” Another example is from NASA’s JPL Mars Exploration Rovers website, shown in figure 5.2. These show the rovers with emotional features that reflect their operational abilities on Mars: they are given facial features (eyebrows, eyes, mouth) expressing happiness and distress corresponding with the presence or absence of a sun over its head.

FIGURE 5.2 These depictions of a rover on Mars appeared on JPL’s MER website during the mission. Photo by the author; image courtesy of NASA/JPL/Caltech.

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The audience can read this to mean that the rover is happy when there is sunlight and it can work. It was common for NASA and non-­ NASA media (news and popular media) to characterize the MER robots as having human physical, social, and emotional features.4 The discourse allowed for them to be “life-­like” robots, or robot geologists. There is more to this than a review of the subtle and striking ways in which the robots were anthropomorphized. The public discourse of the rovers provided external reinforcement for construing the rovers as more subject (or human) than machine. The rovers’ roles in remote planetary science work—­“they look around … they go to rocks that seem the most interesting,” according to a NASA/JPL press packet5—­were discursively shifted from those of a remotely operated instrument to those of a participating subject. Indeed, a pattern emerged of anthropomorphizing the MER robots by imbuing them with agency, as though the MER robots could literally act on their own without human involvement. In the work of remote robotic data collection, humans have to send instructions and receive the data; otherwise there would be no movement on Mars. As such, it is logical to identify humans as the primary subjects. But they are not the only workgroup that adds temporal durations of sending and receiving (and processing) communication to the knowledge production process. Scientists and engineers can plan how long it should take the robots to receive, process, execute, and return data, yet the actual temporal duration will fluctuate, given a host of environmental, technical, and social reasons. As such, they have to wait to find out whether or not their tools have enacted their instructions; they have to wait for the day-­shift workers to complete their shift; they have to go through the work of trying to come up with the best way to communicate their (science) needs while keeping in play the various particularities of their collaborators on Mars. The fact that the scientists produced the rovers themselves does not mitigate the process of having to learn how the rovers act and react once they have been set out on their own. The “robot as coworker” perspective was demonstrated in this communication relationship, the bidirectional flow of information, expectation, interpretation, and fragility. That one interlocutor is a robot, I argue, does not change the conversational features of the production of information such as pauses, misunderstandings, unfamiliar and familiar language, and assumptions.6 I extrapolated four anthropomorphizing themes of kinship, appendages, emotion, and agency from the ethnographic data. These themes concern the way in which the two rovers, seen as instrument assemblages

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and robotic geologists, were akin to human team members, both socially and physically. Traditionally, kinship is used to identify a familial relationship determined by lineage (birth) and social relationships (marriage).7 The MER community included scientists who fit the traditional meaning of kin through a blood relationship (e.g., father and son). Kinship is also established by cultural rituals and social relationships. This was true also for the rovers and scientists: the robots had a naming ceremony to christen them with proper names; the scientists referred to the rovers as their progeny and as “identical twins”; and the robots were given the professional status of geologists. The rovers were made up not of bells and whistles, as one might more commonly refer to high-­tech equipment, but of appendages. They had bodies, arms, heads, eyes, and necks. Their operational states were emotional states. Spirit’s and Opportunity’s operational statuses were often described using adjectives descriptive of emotional, physical, or affective states. Rather than a number or a color, their power or energy state was often described with words like “asleep,” “awake,” “dying,” “sad,” “sleepy,” “happy,” “temperamental,” and “stubborn.” Finally, bringing them to life was the narrative of death and birth. The space vehicles were imbued with human temporalities of creation and demise. Kinship, Appendages, and Emotions In the year prior to the launches of the rovers, the media shared images of  NASA scientists and engineers draped in gowns, hats, and masks that gave the appearance of medical doctors in hospital surgical gowns participating in the construction of the rovers (seen earlier in figure 1.4). Full-­ body jumpsuits and accessories protected the robot being assembled from human contamination (e.g., stray clothing fibers, sneezes, germs). The view of the lab shows humans assembling their robotic counterpart, their hands deep in the process of making an entity they hoped to work with one day. Following production, the robot was placed in a protective shell and warmed by propulsion for seven months, and only at that point would mission members learn whether or not the “infant” assembly would be able to communicate with them and to move on its own. In early and mid-­January 2004, during the designated landing days for each rover, MER teams and various members of the public waited together for confirmation that the robots had reached Mars. Some MER mission scientists paced the floors exclaiming, “This is just like giving birth!” People were using the analogy to convey nervous anticipation and the state of wonder one feels at the outcome of a long journey (e.g., “Watching the launch felt like giving birth” and “Watching the egress is like giving birth”). Fundamentally, the rovers

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were their creation; they made them with wires, panels, wheels, and years of managing multiple institutional relationships. These events share the theme of kinship. They are part of the multilayered origin story of the rovers and the social relationships between humans and their robots working together in remote science exploration. After their construction and before their figurative “birth,” a formal naming ritual took place. A naming ceremony was held to introduce the rovers to the world, transforming them from space vehicles MER-­A and MER-­B to Spirit and Opportunity. In November 2002, a “Name the Rovers” contest had been sponsored by NASA, the LEGO Company, and the Planetary Society.8 NASA looked forward to students competing “to name the next Mars rovers and become a part of history,” and LEGO hoped the contest would “help excite and inspire the next generation of space explorers.”9 The New York Times carried an announcement of the contest, which held that the winning names would be added to the list of “famous American partners,” followed by a list of film and television entertainers: “Fred and Ginger. Lucy and Desi. Thelma and Louise.”10 The contest was open to people between 5 and 18 years old, and attending a US school. Entrants submitted a pair of names for the rovers and a 50-­to 500-­word explanation. The rovers were given the names of the winning entry, and the winner received a trip for themselves and three family members to attend one rover launch in Cape Canaveral, LEGO products for themselves and for their school, a one-­year membership to the Planetary Society, and a Planetary Society poster.11 The winner of the contest, chosen from 10,000 entries, was Sofi Collis, a nine-­year-­old elementary school student from Scottsdale, Arizona. She submitted the names Spirit and Opportunity with an inspiring explanation that drew on her own origin as an adoptee who had come to live in the United States from an orphanage in Siberia. Her winning entry was widely announced and often included the following excerpt from her entry: I used to live in an orphanage. It was dark and cold and lonely. At night, I looked up at the sparkly sky and felt better. I dreamed I could fly there. In America, I can make all my dreams come true. Thank you for the “Spirit” and the “Opportunity.”12

A NASA program executive described reviewing the thousands of entries and finding Collis’s names striking on their own, without any knowledge of her background. He said, “They just fit so well to begin with but also talking about what the country is all about. What Americans can offer and especially what it can mean to children, who are growing up and want to get excited about science and technology and, most importantly exploration.”13 On

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the other hand, speaking directly Collis’s background, NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe noted that Collis had “in her heritage and upbringing the soul of two great spacefaring countries.”14 In the summer of 2004, a few days before the first launch of a rover, a ceremony was held to unveil the winning names (figure 5.3). From this point forward, the rovers would be known by their given names, Spirit and Opportunity. References to them as MER-­A and MER-­B would indicate material (or processes) produced before this ceremony. And, unlike names given to ships or space shuttles (e.g., Titanic, Challenger) these vehicles’ names have been standardly printed as non-­italicized text, as is the practice for names of people. Through this ritual of membership that takes place in families and organizations, the rovers shifted from names that identified their technical specs and launch order to names that gave them human backstories.15 They were made endearing by their connection with an orphan whose story of disconnection (from her biological family) included geographic displacement,

FIGURE 5.3 Sofi Collis meets with NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, a LEGO executive, and three MER robot models.

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solitude, and hope. The rovers, like Collis, would leave their place of conception to travel to a place where there would be hope for finding something (Martian science) that they could not ever find on Earth. Their next stage was launching and traveling to Mars (depicted in Maas’s animation), a journey that was also a rite of passage. Each rover’s rocket journey to Mars began on a launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Following the launch there was a period of travel into outer space toward Mars, during which time each rocket shed portions of its apparatus. Upon reaching the Martian atmosphere, further remaining components burned up upon entry, leaving the rover, ensconced in inflated white airbags, to drop to the surface of Mars. The rover then bounced and rolled to a stop, and its airbags deflated to reveal a metal cocoon that unfolded to expose the rover inside. Slowly it emerged to unfetter itself from cords and take its first steps. A “rite of passage” is an anthropological concept that describes a social transition from one period of life to another, from dependence to independence, from childhood to adulthood.16 It can take many forms (e.g., a ceremony, a journey), but a primary component is that it includes stages of transition so that one begins in one form and ends in another. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep described these three stages of the process as separation, liminality, and incorporation. These rite of passage stages align with the rover’s stages of launch, landing, and egress from its cocoon. In the first stage, separation, the subject is physically separated from their primary community, as was the rover when it was launched from its community of origin into orbit. This stage is also described as a period in which the subject is symbolically orphaned. The second stage is liminality, a period of waiting wherein the subject is neither here nor there. For the rover, this was while it was in orbit, as it traveled through outer space no longer in sight of Earth and never to rest until it reached Mars. Its community waited for news of the third stage. In this last stage, the subject emerges with a new status, marked by new knowledge or a new capacity to know, a new figure that is separate but connected, independent but not alone. For the rovers, this final stage also marked the beginning of the end, discussed later in this chapter. Another social process imbuing the rovers with social human qualities was that of pronouns. Their subject identities were fashioned through the scientists’ use of third-­person pronouns. Typically instruments like computers, satellites, hammers, pens, and printers are referred to using neutral pronouns: “it,” “they,” or “them.” During MER, the rovers were consistently referred to with both masculine and feminine pronouns, “he” and “she,”

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even though no standard gender referents had been used in their physical construction. They were identical twins; if one was referred to as “he” then both were male (i.e., identical twin brothers), and if one was female then both were female (i.e., identical twin sisters). The feminine pronoun is traditionally used for vehicles of transportation or vehicles used in exploration, such as ships and cars, which could explain their occasional female gendering. Their occasional male gendering could have been in reference to their design as “robotic geologists” by a group that was predominantly male. That the anthropomorphizing language included male and female gender assignments raises a further interesting question, though one that is not taken up here, on the possible effects of engagement with gendered technologies. The scientists were imbuing the rovers with agency, even if it was only “imaginary” agency, by referring to the rovers through the pronouns of “she” and “he,” “her” and “him.” Another move in the rovers’ shift from mechanical implements to subjects participating in the production of Martian science was one of talking about their mechanical construction in terms of human physiology. JPL’s home page for the MER mission gives one example of a depiction of the rovers’ tools as appendages: Each rover is sort of the mechanical equivalent of a geologist walking the surface of Mars. The mast-­mounted cameras are mounted 1.5 meters (5 feet) high and provide 360-­degree, stereoscopic, humanlike views of the terrain. The robotic arm is capable of movement in much the same way as a human arm with an elbow and wrist, and can place instruments directly up against rock and soil targets of interest. In the mechanical “fist” of the arm is a microscopic camera that serves the same purpose as a geologist’s handheld magnifying lens. The Rock Abrasion Tool serves the purpose of a geologist’s rock hammer to expose the insides of rocks.17

In this excerpt, each sentence describing the rover emphasizes its connection to human physiology or human work conduct. It is for each reader to consider, for a moment, how this description matters (to whom and for what). How is the image in one’s mind’s eye enhanced by the pattern of association? How does it become confusing? Indeed, it is not self-­evident that public representations of a remotely operated robot required an anthropomorphized version to communicate its functions and identity. Among MER scientists, it was employed as a discursive resource for conducting work for sharing information about work processes among workgroups, and for bringing a physical, human experience to extraterrestrial geology. Initially, the language of human appendages was necessary for scientists to describe what they needed the robots to be able do on Mars. Building a robot version of yourself doing geology requires answering questions such

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as: What tools would a human geologist take to Mars? Which of these tools can the MER robot take? How will the robot use the tools as a human geologist human would? Indeed, this was a novel work arrangement for scientists whose education and training relied on their handling instruments in fieldwork. But the analogy of robotic geologist was itself not a critical feature for conducting remote planetary exploration; rather, it was a cultural feature. As such, it becomes an important aspect of this work history and for future work of this type. It was a common sight in the SOWG (science operations workgroup) room to see a scientist stand up, move his arm around, and ask aloud, “If I were the rover, what would I do?” He would move his arm as the rover’s arm in order to talk through, in front of and with other scientists, the physical steps for collecting data, such as reaching out to pick up a rock. These embodiments took place in the ORT stage and continued throughout the nominal mission.18 Scientists, working out what a rover should do next and how, would prompt themselves with “What would I do next?” and “How would I do it?” This working through of steps, which tools to use and in what order, included physically acting like the rover, which was itself created to be able to act like a human. More than a heuristic, this was a layered imagining, a human embodying a robot built to embody a human. MER scientists imagined what they would do with their eyes, neck, arms, and fingers if they came upon a basalt rock. What tools would they use to poke it? What would they do if they could not taste it? One important feature to keep in mind was that while several scientists were asking and answering “What would I do if I was the rover,” the rover could only be given a limited set of instructions. Everyone could not “be the rover,” so to speak. One rover could not be everyone at once. All instruments could not be used at the same time or all in a single sol. And one instrument could not be quickly put aside for the use of another. Its speed was dramatically different from that of a human collecting geological data from, say, a rocky field on Earth. Temporality was an important consideration in the difference between how long it would take a human versus a robot to move their arm, pick out an instrument, use it, review the outcomes, and stow the tool away. It took the rover one day to complete the work a human geologist could complete in 30 seconds.19 Scientists were thus not only acting like a rover to figure out what they needed to request it to do but also giving a demonstration to their fellow scientists of the way that their particular request for data could be carried out (and presumably demonstrating that it was a better option than someone else’s suggestion). The scientists’ use of their physical similarity with

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the rovers as shortcuts to verbally explain instrument movements developed into an acceptable cultural norm of their work. The constant use of the human body as a referent for the rovers and the rovers’ instruments was an accepted way of creating the work of remote science exploration on Mars. These were not demonstrations behind closed doors, in individual work rooms. These were movements carried out in the main meeting space with other scientists and in the spaces where engineers were working to check and translate the science requests into commands to send to the rovers. We can consider how these activities complicate thinking about the scientists speaking for the rovers, as their ventriloquists in a sense.20 The normative view would be that the rovers served as devices for the scientists, devices that reported to Earth on the happenings on Mars. The scientists produced Martian science through their interpretations of data; their knowledge claims were grounded in giving voice to the silent data produced by the rovers. When we think about the scientists having to use their bodies as puppets, to simulate what the rover could or could not do, we have another image of the scientists acting as ventriloquist dummies of the rovers. Not everyone on the MER mission working with the rovers adopted the cultural norm of embodying the rovers, but they also did not reject it. Rather, their own work roles informed their relationship with the rovers and shaped their characterizations that fashioned them as something other than “just robots.” Many of the engineers, for example, in the workgroup responsible for writing and sending the technical commands to the rovers, were themselves referred to as “rover drivers.” Members of this group would often characterize the rovers as fast cars, hot rods that should be driven for speed. When they were asked what they thought the rover should do next, a common reply was “put the pedal to the metal.” Granted, speed was relative. The top speed of a rover moving on a flat surface with no hazards is 2 inches per second. In normal conditions, where there are hazards, the average speed is 1 centimeter per second. This likening of the rover to a fast car speaks to a language choice that carries the engineers’ interests in experimenting with mobility and speed. These are important considerations; however, they had to wait until the science goals were met, as plans of moving around at top speed put the rovers’ well-­being at risk. Moreover, the goal of covering the most distance could make it easier to drive past areas of scientific interest. Another example of characterizing the rover as more than an assembly of instruments comes from the workgroup in charge of the Rock Abrasion Tool, or “RAT,” the instrument described as the “geologist’s rock hammer.” It was almost always referred to by its acronym, which itself became a verb

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when scientists talked about “ratting” a rock to mean using the RAT to grind a rock surface. The RAT workgroup was a team from Honeybee Robotics (Honeybee’s cofounder Steve Gorevan was a MER science co-­PI). Known for having a good sense of humor, they could take jokes as well as play them on one another for the amusement of themselves or the whole MER team. RAT team members anthropomorphized the RAT not into a human but into an animal the acronym suggests. They would mimic the physical motions of a rat gnawing a piece of cheese when talking about grinding a rock, casually among themselves and also when describing their work to non-­MER mission members. These embodiments of being a rat and being the RAT were accompanied with knowing smiles and laughter. The RAT team kept their jesting about the RAT typically within the boundaries of their separate workspaces. This was in sharp contrast to their representations of the RAT in discussions with scientists outside the team, when they did not use anthropomorphizing language to talk about the RAT. Still, there are a few examples of MER mission members contributing to a community norm of anthropomorphizing the RAT and its representatives. For example, on the outside of the door to one of the RAT team’s workspaces someone had hung a picture of a Las Vegas marquee that displayed “the Rat Pack” (a famous foursome of entertainers), and beneath the marquee was an image of long rat with suckling baby rats that was altered so that faces of the rats were those of the RAT team members. Another example is a line drawing that someone (who was not a member of the RAT team) drew on the whiteboard inside the RAT team’s workspace (figure 5.4). In the image, the RAT, an instrument for sweeping surfaces, is depicted as a cartoon rodent pushing a broom-­like instrument. It is another layered imagining in that the RAT is being depicted as animal that is being depicted as a human (standing on two legs, wearing a shirt and a hat). Another theme in the discursive constitution of the rovers as subjects was the attribution of affective, emotional, and physiological states. The daily discourse surrounding the status of the space vehicles sounded like discussions about people rather than machines. There are many examples of the use of these states to talk about the rovers during the mission operations. Rovers were described as: going to sleep (shutting down the rover while the sun was down), waking up (turning on and warming up the solar batteries when the sun was up), burping (or hiccups referring to glitches in data), seeing (images taken by the cameras), touching (instruments that had direct contact with the surface of Mars), dying (when the solar batteries were weak or when they cease to charge), napping (pausing or temporary

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FIGURE 5.4 The Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) is shown as a mammal with a job. Photo by the author.

shut-­down while the sun was up), being temperamental (not responding to commands), being sad (delayed response), and even being lonely. The rovers were identical twins described as having different temperaments. Spirit, in keeping with the familial treatment of siblings, was the “older sister” that was sent first and arrived first on Mars. She was seen as the stronger of the two and sent to the potentially more interesting of the two sites. Opportunity would surprise everyone when her landing site surpassed expectations for interesting science exploration. Within the first month, Spirit faltered, dulling its lead and casting it as the “weaker” of the two rovers (though it was through no fault of its own that its flash drive problems had not been worked out before it began collecting data on Mars). Contributing to this reputation was the language used for its repair. An operation that had been planned for in case of emergency, it was unfortunately named “cripple mode.” Even though the issue was remedied, it took almost a week, which was more than long enough for people to become more attached to Opportunity, which continued to operate well during this time.

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Imbuing the rovers with emotional, affective, and physiological-­based states of being contributed to a work environment in which talking about the robots could sound like a discussion about people. Except this was not a work environment in which it was culturally acceptable to publicly discuss other people’s emotional states. As in many workplaces, these types of comments were for private conversations off-­site, in empty hallways, and behind closed doors. Giving the rovers emotional states of being can enhance the work relationship between humans and rovers but can also undermine it by masking opportunities for development. Describing the rovers’ conditions as emotional states conveyed a certain closeness or familiarity between the scientists and the rovers. While it was not typical for scientists to discuss one another’s emotional states publicly, it was typical and culturally acceptable to do so when speaking from a paternal or maternal standpoint. That is, scientists talking about the emotions of their human children, now and then, did not raise an eyebrow. By extension, and in agreement with the sense that some had of bringing the rovers to life, recognizing a rover’s condition as emotional could very well have been an act demonstrating a close relationship and authority. Of the several communities of scientists that I have worked with, MER scientists were fairly typical in their lack of emotional demonstrations; they were not an overtly warm bunch that would, say, end a meeting with hugs. This is standard professional comportment that does not preclude expressive warmth and friendly affection when outside the primary workspaces. The use of emotions as a shorthand for technical descriptions can make it difficult to discern whether a potential problem is being masked. An emotion can be used to mask one’s inability to explain or to discern a technical issue. It may be a simple matter worth noting and watching for a repeat occurrence, or it might be a technical issue that has long been tolerated because there is no good solution (“inherited limitations”). However, passing along a limitation is a habit that needs to remain explicit, as the technological context is always changing and may offer an opportunity for a solution. As such, keeping an eye on the use of emotional terms can lead to opportunities for innovation, but only if the community allows for descriptions of affective states, like “It’s sad today,” to be used as descriptions that are both acceptable and able to be challenged. Life, Death, and Agency: Coming to Life through Impending Demise After the rovers reached Mars and completed their rite of passage, they became subject to the human condition of life-­span. “The rovers land with a terminal disease, so we have to make the most of it,” as described by MER

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mission member Mark Adler, the JPL Mission Manager for Spirit.21 Adler’s statement was made for news media, but the conceptualization was one that circulated within MER as well. The twin robotic geologists were regarded as “terminally ill” because as soon as they began working their days were numbered. There were known conditions and unknown conditions that would lead them to end their work on Mars. Adler described some of the known conditions that could bring about the rovers’ demise: “The rovers are projected to have only three to six months of life before operational funding dries up or the rovers succumb to the harsh Martian conditions, where temperatures can dip to –­105 degrees Celsius (–­157 degrees Fahrenheit).” Everyone accepted that both or either one could suddenly shut down permanently. No one really knew exactly when. NASA’s MER team sent the rovers to Mars knowing that their power sources were not unlimited. The rovers’ energy came from solar-­powered batteries that needed to be recharged. Indeed, the rovers were not working at night (in part) because the temperature drop required additional energy usage to keep them warm and in operation. It was not a technical inability but a choice made by engineers. Even if the batteries held up there was the impending doom from Martian dust. The reason most often given for describing them as “terminally ill” was a local environmental condition that people were sure would impact the solar charging batteries. Dust-­storms on Mars were going to end the life of each rover. Thick dust on the rovers’ solar panels could block sunlight from recharging the batteries, which would effectively end the rovers’ ability to power on. The rovers’ terminal status gave the rovers life. Their impending death created the sense that the rovers were, so to speak, alive. Philosopher Martin Heidegger put forward the notion that the presence of death necessarily grants life status. Something cannot die if it is not first alive.22 By establishing the narrative of death to explain the loss of technical operability, a lifetime was created for each rover—­a lifetime for which the scientists were responsible. The physical experience of time for a person facing a known impending death functions differently than for a person for whom death is an abstract notion, nowhere on the immediate horizon. Knowing when you are going to die can dramatically shift your interpretation of what is or is not critical, what you want to experience in your remaining conscious time. Calendar time takes on an acute sense of preciousness, “of making each moment count.” Giving that sense of demise to an artifact contributes to a relationship with the object that mimics the relationships humans share with each other while negotiating the knowledge of the impending demise of one or both of them. And, in the case of the mission, such were

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the relationships between rovers and scientists. Their terminal mortality emphasized the urgent nature of each “living” moment. Daily choices in how to engage in remote planetary science had to hold up against the possibility that there might not be another working day. On January 22, 2004, Spirit experienced a breakdown.23 The resolved problem, a memory-­management issue, was announced in a press release (February 6, 2004) that stated “NASA’s Spirit has returned to full health,” and, quoting mission manager J. Trosper, “Our patient is healed, and we’re very excited about that.”24 Spirit’s temporary breakdown was not the only time it was a patient. Referring to a rover as “our patient” was not an isolated attempt at giving a colorful description for media. The rovers’ status as “terminal patients” was a part of the MER cultural discourse during nominal operations. The rovers were diagnosed from their moment of landing as terminal—­as terminally ill patients. Scientists used this language to convey the urgent need to be careful. The terminal diagnosis made the rovers into patients and the scientists into their caretakers who had to be careful not to work the patients too hard and drive them into the ground before their time. Planning ahead, but not too far ahead, required balancing the scientists’ request for data and the physical health of the rovers. Herein was a source of ongoing tension among workgroups. The temporal rhythm created by impending death, of urgency to make the most of precious time, is constructed through the actions and attitudes of the terminal patients and their caretakers. It is not always the case that knowledge of coming death alters one’s attention to life. The point here, though, is that the knowledge of death presupposes a presence of life. Shaping the rovers’ technical limitations as their “death” allowed the employment of the temporal rhythm of urgency to drive the sense of time on the mission. Finally, another feature giving the rovers a state of being (alive) was their capacity to produce life. That is, the rovers’ goal was to find the life-­ supporting element of water on Mars. Collecting data on Mars made them integral to the knowledge-­production process that could yield life on Mars. They were gathering bits that could be turned into evidence of life, once the data were received and processed by their coworkers. To say that the rovers were akin to reproductive technologies may lean toward science fiction, but it is a worthwhile provocation. As well, their reproductive capabilities were located in the production of new narratives of Mars exploration. These narratives, found in accounts from news media to popular culture (including a cameo appearance in the 2007 film Transformers and a feature role in the 2008 film Wall-­E), were designed to attract public attention and encourage

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future interest in becoming or supporting people and robots in space exploration (e.g., producing new subjects for science and exploration). Locating the anthropomorphized rovers within the MER work process is an opportunity to understand how acknowledging the constitution of the rovers as such makes a difference in the knowledge-­production process. To support the claim that the rovers were more collaborating members than instruments, I am including an examination of the attempts to simulate mission operations in the weeks preceding the landing of the rovers. These events foreground how understanding the rovers as members during the preparation stage may have allowed for establishing a work process that attended to the relationships between the rovers and scientists as collaborators rather than as tools and users. They underscore the contribution that a “living” rover made to the success of remote planetary science work. Events that occurred during the simulation stage, such as communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, and unfinished sociotechnical planning, were arguably instances that reveal the impossibility of interacting with a rover that was not yet alive, as it had not yet started the clock ticking for its ascent to death. SIMULATING WORK WITHOUT THE TIME CONSTRAINT OF DEATH: MER ORTS As described earlier, in the fall of 2003, a series of work simulations took place (ORTs). These work simulations gave mission members the opportunity to see how their work processes (e.g., work schedule, communication) did or did not work, what adjustments were needed, what could be more efficient, and whether anything needed to be changed to effect a better workflow. MER mission members conducted their simulations of remote planetary science using a surrogate robotic geologist located at the lab. The surrogate rover, as it was sometimes called, was housed in a building different from but near the MER workspace building. Unlike its counterparts that would travel to Mars, the surrogate rover was powered with a tethered cable. Its location on “Mars” was a room about the size of a three-­ car garage outfitted with Martian terrain-­like conditions such as reddish dirt, camouflage-­pattern net wall hangings (for camera focusing needs), and small rocks. The surrogate rover may have had a name but it was commonly referred to by its location: “the rover in the sandbox,” or “the sandbox rover.” Figure 5.5 shows the “sandbox rover” and three members of the RAT team. In the upper left side, there are a bank of windows from which people could observe the sandbox. Scientists were instructed to stay

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FIGURE 5.5 The Mars “sandbox” at JPL with a “surrogate rover” and three RAT team members. Photo by the author.

out of the sandbox during ORTs in order to maintain a sense of distance between themselves and the in situ activity of data collection on Mars. And, as described earlier, a handwritten sign taped to a door read “MER Scientists Keep Out.” While scientists practiced conducting remote planetary exploration using their tactical timeline, an important contextual feature defied reproduction and made it impossible to engage in a full simulation of MER’s work processes. The missing element was time, vis-­à-­vis a rover on Mars that required Mars time for operations. According to some mission members, it was the absence of “a real” rover that made it impossible to fully practice MER work. There was no stand-­in for the missing momentum and no sense of the spectacular that came with the urgency of a mission timeline (deadlines) and the fragile state of the rovers. Many claimed that “when the rovers get there, it’ll be different.” There was, however, a “real” rover participating. The sandbox rover carried out

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data-­ collection commands. At the end of each workday, typically early evening, the scientists went home (to nearby hotels) while the sandbox rover carried out the commands. The next day, scientists started their work with data results from the rover’s overnight activities (or if the action had not been the collection of data, a verbal confirmation would sometimes be enough for the next day’s work timeline to move forward). This allowed the scientists to begin a new day of running through their tactical timeline with data produced from their prior work, as it would be during the nominal mission. During the daily meetings to discuss the rover’s approach to a rock target, scientists began by imagining how they themselves had collected data while doing fieldwork. Then, they would go through a verbal and physical imagining of the rover as themselves collecting the data. As described earlier, this process would continue during the nominal mission. Because the rover’s ability to move was limited to a few feet it could take two days for scientists to get the images they needed to assess the terrain. Rather than work through this temporal feature with this timeline, scientists sometimes agreed “to just wait until it really happened.” This meant that they would truncate what they knew would be the actual activity time in favor of having images ready the same day. The temporal element of anticipation that emerges during an information exchange, where one person has sent out a message and awaits response before reacting to responses, was more than a little anticlimactic.25 The anticipation and energy that comes from responding in situ to the unknown was dulled by knowing that the rover’s failure to carry out commands could be remedied by “the gremlins,” whether it was because of the scientists’ instructions or the robot’s ability to carry them out. The gremlins were the engineers who worked with the sandbox rover each night, physically manipulating the rover to follow scientists’ commands. Their work seemed like a reasonable way to ensure the ORT could go through each day with data. The gremlins’ moving the sandbox rover allowed it to avoid hazards that could have held up workflow. At the same time, this sandbox rover’s human-­aided ease mitigated the opportunity for scientists to practice what to do when their data-­collection commands led the rover astray (e.g., to get stuck in one place and thus need more time before moving again). The work of the gremlins was also explained by the analogy of “what a human geologist would do” (a human geologist can quickly abandon an investigation and move on) and “this isn’t really Mars” (working out a problem occurring on fake Mars on Earth would not necessarily translate to figuring out a problem on Mars). These helpful gremlins were actually mitigating the temporal urgency, the sense of unpredictability, and

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the threat of failure that would be present during the actual mission. As a result, there was no sense that the sandbox rover’s well-­being depended on the scientists’ accuracy during ORT. The scientists would wait for the team that really needed them, namely, the rovers on Mars. Some scientists said the simulation was “too pretend”; it was futile to think that one could anticipate all the absent work environmental features and relationships. Their phrase captures a response to an implicit work assignment for mission members making up for the absence of needed organizational infrastructure (the work of imagining everything that is not yet real, but will ultimately be in place, while testing work processes). There was good social support from experienced scientists who passed along the wisdom that things would be different “when we are really on Mars.” This group included mission members with experience going back to NASA’s Viking mission in the 1970s and members who participated on NASA’s (at the time) only other Mars mission, Pathfinder (July 4 to September 27, 1997), that included remotely operated robots. The most striking belief based on past experiences that was brought up during ORTs was the adage that “things always go wrong until they need to go right.” Even if all simulations failed, this would have no bearing on the success of the actual mission. If astro-­geologists find work simulation “too pretend,” then how can work processes be tested satisfactorily? If the work of this community is abstract, even fueled by imagination and science fiction, then how can we understand the comment “The work isn’t real until the rover is on Mars”? Technology considered as more than an artifact opens up the range of roles that it plays, a curious subject/object that engages, produces, sends, or receives information; a subject/object with whom/which meaning must be negotiated. Attention to the constitution of the rover as a collaborative member rather than a tool presents a way to open up and investigate the multiple sources that contribute to producing and maintaining a work community’s culture. Understanding the rover as a coworker, a mission member rather than a tool used on the mission, alters the way we look at the scientists’ inability to simulate work. It links this inability to the absence of a coworker, an unpredictable human, rather than merely the absence of a tool, a predictable object. To simulate their work with robots, the scientists needed to engage with an active coworker, one with different response times, work practices, and language habits. Furthermore, with this active coworker they would have had practice translating their human geologist ways of doing work into their robotic coworkers’ ways of doing work.

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The rovers were treated as members, sometimes with greater agency than the scientists, on the MER mission. As robotic geologists they instigated activities, prompted workarounds, and set the temporal pace for mission operations. The rovers were not solely respondents; they were interlocutors, participants whose responses were not always predictable. MER robotic geologists emerged as members, not artifacts; discursively and in action, they were constituted as collaborators rather than tools. They were mission members on Mars being led by and leading mission members on Earth.

CONCLUSION

Making Time on Mars makes the case that Mars time was rendered operable through cultural, social, and technological activities engaged by the MER community of humans and rovers. The choice to use Mars time was made for logical reasons. It provided a language for keeping track of nature–­robot interactions at the primary worksite on Mars. Some aspects about producing Mars time, however, were not factored in to the human work experience. In the version used on MER, Mars time carried assumptions about the relationship between time and work that contradicted important realities for people managing the multiple temporalities of an interplanetary work system. In addition to its nationally sponsored role as space exploration standard-­ bearer, NASA has a long-­standing role in the cultural consciousness, globally, as an exemplar for the large-­scale organizations of work coordinated across great distances. For this reason, it is important to examine closely some of the problematic social, technical, and cultural processes constituting Mars time; indeed, one can reasonably assume that it could (and will) have an impact on time–­work relationships both within and outside of NASA. Temporal relationships built on the same framework of assumptions about time and work that constituted Mars time will in all likelihood reproduce similar time-­management breakdowns, workarounds, and membership responses. Without significant recollection of the centrality of the human experience in the production of time–­work relationships, organizations may continue to support societal assumptions about clock time as natural time. The MER mission work environment encompassed an interplanetary landscape comprising remotely operated space vehicles, scientists, engineers, and administrators. To make this territory familiar to the reader, I set out some of MER’s key work processes, people, and artifacts within the context of JPL’s organizational history and landscape. Space exploration remains unique while also employing sociotechnical work practices that

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are not so different from those used in many types of workplaces. Breakdowns in the management of Mars time showed that within the custom-­ built workspace there were struggles to manage even the most basic and familiar of work processes—­telling time—­and that these were exacerbated by some of the cultural historical underpinnings of the time–­work relationship in organizations. Emergent breakdowns pointed out some of the inadequacies of the formal technologies and lack of support for a consistent conceptualization of Mars time. The absence of any significant attempt by the institution (writ large or by local management) to draw formal attention to the problems of time management led me to seek an explanation from mission members themselves. I examined the role of mission members in making Mars time with attention to individual and organizational contributors. These analyses were grounded in accounts of MER as members’ cultural processes. Using the participants’ perspectives as a starting point, I offered one possible explanation for the absence of formal acknowledgments of temporal breakdowns, the presence of informal workarounds, and the characterization of time-­management breakdowns as a question of individual fortitude and ingenuity rather than infrastructural (organizational) distress. Media representations of space exploration constituted my point of departure because such representations were first invoked by mission members as a source of knowledge about work and community (within the organization of NASA). Noting that such representations can initially attract people to particular organizations, I argued that they convey only a partial, abstract, and kinetically inadequate picture of how an organization and the individuals within it actually manage the relationship between time and work. Members’ expectations with respect to organizational temporalities are often formed prior to the actual experience of joining an organization, and this presents a problem, I suggest, for developing a sense of temporality that reflects the conduct of work in situ. In the case of space exploration this problem can be especially acute. And with respect, specifically, to the MER mission, the phenomenon of stigma management offers at least one explanation of why members responded to the experience of asymmetry between their preconceptions of the relationship between time and work and their actual experience within the organization. Of course, mission member responses to time management breakdowns cannot be entirely explained by the need to maintain their membership status in the organization. On MER, participant motivations for producing a successful mission were very high and concerns for addressing any problem that could threaten the outcome of the mission were, at times, palpable.

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An underlying assumption about Mars time was that the framework used for knowing time, for telling time, could be applied across any set of spaces. In other words, it was assumed that the social processes and technologies used to synchronize time between two intraplanetary time zones could be used between two interplanetary time zones. What this logic failed to appreciate was that the distinction between clock time and solar time carries with it physical implications beyond those that are present in the act of locating a numerical representation to answer the question, “What time is it?” To put this in another way: Mars time can be mathematically ascertained from a location in Pasadena, California. However, this abstract form of temporal information does not provide a sense of timing—­that is, a temporal rhythm—­for work in an organization on Earth. Central to the MER organization of work was the need to schedule the conduct of mission operations around the physical relationship between the rovers and sunlight on Mars. Terrestrial mission members were provided with numerical representations to track this relationship and around which to schedule and perform science operations. But the experience of solar time requires a sensorial relationship that includes being able to physically perceive situational cues such as the appearance of light, its gradations, and/or its absence as well as surrounding environmental responses. Numerical representations are not enough. Still, it appears that the process of knowing time through numerical representations is so inextricable from the cultural consciousness that even when given the opportunity to imagine and construct new organizations of work and temporalities, we tend to produce a naturalized version of clock time. Karl Marx’s cry to put the means of production in the hands of the workers comes to mind. Given the opportunity to reconceive and control not only time but the time–­ work relationship, the outcome was an even greater technological driver for production. The discursive construction of the rovers as members was due, in part, to their role in constituting the temporal rhythm of work. The rovers contributed to making Mars time beginning with their status as the only members with the capacity to physically experience solar time on Mars. Although the terrestrial mission members had designed and developed the remotely operated space vehicles, this relationship did not provide the humans with the absolute certainty of the temporal activities of their robotic collaborators. Unlike a biological relationship wherein humans entrain their offspring to temporal rhythms, or institutional social relationships that enculturate members to follow communication language and response time norms, the people working with the rovers were not afforded conditions that allowed

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them to acclimate to the time-­work rhythm to which their rovers were set to work. Each sol, the temporal rhythm of work included uncertain temporal durations such as waiting for a rover’s confirmation that scientists’ data collection commands were followed or its return of information on its operational response to local terrain conditions that scientists and engineers would have to take into account for subsequent work. Membering the rovers served as an explanatory device employed by mission members to manage durations of temporal and operational uncertainty. By constituting the rovers’ temporal responses as affective and physiological, terrestrial members were able to talk about temporal uncertainties without having to refer to the fallibility of the technology they created. Uncertainty, doubt, and fear are not popular characteristics of a space explorer, and avoiding the use of such language is another example of stigma management. In the absence of a culturally sanctioned language to talk about the sociotechnical uncertainties present in the temporal rhythm of mission operations or the affective responses they might have triggered, formal acknowledgment of either remained just beyond the parameters of work that was supported. Clearly, the inescapable conditions of clock time are not waiting to be discovered in extraterrestrial spaces. The organization of space exploration allows us and requires us to consider anew the introduction and constitutive assumptions of each sociotechnical process that emerges through or is brought to bear in the development of interplanetary work systems. This is and will be the case, whether humans or their robotic counterparts are sent on future space missions: attention to the temporal rhythm of work processes and to the on-­the-­ground experiences of mission members as they initiate, interface with, and elaborate these processes will be crucial. To date, within the organizational culture at NASA, time-­ management problems continue to be individualized: humans are expected to process the relationship between time and work like machines, while machines are continually updated and modified to process information more like humans. When we direct our attention to the choice of human or nonhuman exploration of space, cultural assumptions about the differences between these corporeally distinct organization members remain intact, while the similarities of the sociotechnical processes with which they operate remain in the background. Regardless of who or what is selected to take the extraterrestrial journey, the work of producing space exploration will continue to require the organization of work systems that support humans, machines, and their interactions. And no matter the destination, for coordinating work across places on Earth and in outer space, the problem of time management will remain central.

NOTES

Introduction 1.  Thomas Gangale, “Martian Standard Time,” British Interplanetary Society 39, no. 6 (1986): 282–­288. 2.  Timepieces were used in agrarian work, for instance, for coordinating with production and shipping of field goods. See Mark Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 3.  Dan Maas began working with Steve Squyres in 2001, while at Cornell University. The eight-­minute Mars Rover Animation, created as part of Cornell’s Athena public outreach program, was picked up and shown (in clips) prolifically in news media and was featured in National Geographic’s “Five Years on Mars,” which received an Emmy Award in 2009 for Outstanding Science, Technology, and Nature Programming. 4. The topographic map was produced using data from the MOLA instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. See F. Scott Anderson et al., “Analysis of MOLA Data for the Mars Exploration Rover Landing Sites,” Journal of Geophysical Research 108, no. E12 (2003). 5.  Steven Squyres et al., “Athena Mars Rover Science Investigation,” Journal of Geophysical Research 108, no. E12 (2003): 1–­21. 6. Matthew Golombek et al., “Selection of the Mars Exploration Rover Landing Sites,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 108, no. E12 (2003): 8072. In addition to the focus on landing site selection, this article gives a good account of a science community deliberation process with respect to organizing and assessing scientists’ proposed sites of study for remote science work. 7. Scholars from across the fields of communication, history, and sociology have produced multifaceted accounts of NASA; some focus on its internal operations and some on its role as a major institution. Among these accounts, for two edited volumes that balance demonstrate studying NASA and its accomplishments with critical

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insights, see Steven Dick and Roger Launius, eds., Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight (Washington DC: NASA, 2006), and Societal Impact of Spaceflight (Washington DC: NASA, 2009). For an inside look at communication practices within NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center during the Wernher Von Braun era, see Phillip Tompkins, Organizational Communication Imperatives (Los Angeles: Roxbury, 1993). On the politics of creating and supporting the new work role of NASA astronauts, see Matthew Hersch, Inventing the American Astronaut (New York: Palgrave, 2012); D. Mindell, Digital Apollo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); and Margaret Weitekamp, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004). On NASA in the geopolitical sphere, see John Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Walter McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 8. Organization management studies have focused on NASA as a case study for both organizational success and failure. See William Starbuck and Moshe Farjoun, eds., Organization at the Limit: Lessons from the Columbia Disaster (Malden: Blackwell, 2005); Guy Adams and Danny Balfour, “Organizational Dynamics and Administrative Evil: The Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA, and the Space Shuttle Challenger,” in Unmasking Administrative Evil (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998). 9.  Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 10. Two fictional accounts on the experience of clock time and institutional life that are good examples of looking at temporality as oppression and as freedom are Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (Berlin: A. A. Knopf, 2005), and Peter Høeg, Borderliners (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993). 11. Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For more on structural intersection of power, roles, and technologies, see Paul Edwards and Judy Wajcman, The Politics of Working Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 12. Roxana Wales and Zara Mirmalek, “MER Human Centered Computing, Work System Design and Evaluation: Supporting NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Mission” (2004); Roxana Wales, “Working on Mars,” presentation given at the Ethnographic Symposium/The Market Research Event (October 27, 2005). WSD&E members’ publications include Roxana Wales, Valerie Shalin, and Deborah Bass, “Requesting Distant Robotic Action,” Journal of the Association for Information Systems 8, no. 2 (2007): 75–­104, which focuses on nomenclature and the development of community specific language for new activities; Charlotte Linde, “Learning from the MER Mission” (NASA Ames Research Center, 2005), which situates the MER mission within the larger issue of organizational knowledge management; and William J. Clancey, Working on Mars (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), which offers an account of planetary science and how the MER mission shaped what it means to conduct remote

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planetary science and experiences of MER scientists and engineers. WSD&E member Chin Seah also contributed to WSD&E data collection and management. 13. An ethnographic research typology, for those who are interested in the differences between observation and participant-­observation, can be found in James Spradley, Participant Observation (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1980). 14.  Steve Squyres, interview by Sue Blumenberg, July 30, 2004. 15. Preceding the late-­ twentieth-­ century rise of anthropological studies of science and engineer communities, there is a history of sociology of work scholars studying in workplace settings, e.g., Nels Anderson, Dimensions of Work (New York: D. McKay, 1964), and sites such as medical and law enforcement institutions, e.g., Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1961), and Egon Bittner, “The Police on Skid-­Row: A Study of Peace Keeping,” American Sociological Review 32, no. 5 (1967): 699–­715. Sociologist Harold Garfinkel’s theory and method of ethnomethodology informs studies of people’s everyday activities in social settings including work environments; see, e.g., his Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1967). In the late twentieth century, organizational studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology expanded qualitative studies of work into the business school research arena. Ethnographic methods were employed in studies of work across various types of organizations and from entry points in upper level management to front-­line employees. See, e.g., Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-­ Bass, 1985); Gideon Kunda, Engineering Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); John Van Mannen, ed., Qualitative Studies in Organizations (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998). Also in the late twentieth century, anthropologists in California increased the use of ethnography in organizations. See, e.g., Julian Orr, Talking about Machines (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Helen Schwartzman, Ethnography in Organizations (Newbury Park: CA, 1992); Schwartzman, The Meeting: Gatherings in Organizations and Communities (New York: Plenum Press, 1989); Lucy Suchman, Human-­Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 16. Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Many qualitative studies on science and technology communities accompanied me in this and subsequent projects. In addition to others mentioned throughout this book, see Diana Forsythe, Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977); Park Doing, Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron: Biology, Physics, and Change in Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Stefan Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

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17.  This is a hallmark of the field of science and technology studies (STS). It is a way of thinking about things in the world that drew me to graduate work in the Science Studies Program at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Reviewing STS literature and key ideas is beyond the scope of this book. I can, however, identify that my points of entry into STS first came through Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); and Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1985). These works demonstrated critically engaged investigations on technologies that did not attribute success or failure to a single “great” person, action, or material item. Furthermore, these works brought together, rather than glossing over or ignoring because of traditional disciplinary lines, aspects that inform technology construction and use (e.g., history, political economy, philosophy, anthropology, communication, professional culture, popular culture, political movements, regimes, and power). 18. Roxana Wales, John O’Neill, and Zara Mirmalek, “Ethnography, Negotiated Interactions, and Customers at the Airport,” IEEE: Intelligent Systems Special Issue on HCC at NASA (2002): 15–­23; John O’Neill and Roxana Wales, “The Myths of Reliability and the Perfect Air Travel Experience: Designing an Airline to Pro-­actively Manage Delay Situations,” report submitted to NASA and United Airlines (2000); John O’Neill and Roxana Wales, “A Human-­Centered Computing Study of Delays at United Airline’s San Francisco Operation: Initial Findings from Shuttle Operations,” report submitted to NASA and United Airlines (2000). In my report, “Inside a Minute and a Half: Customer and Employee Perspectives in Work System Design,” RIACS 01.03 (2001), I focused on highlighting the multiple trajectories of information, and exchanges between people and between people and technologies, which come together in the less than two-­minute interaction between lobby counter employees and travelers. My ethnographic research at United Airlines also informed my thesis on organizational subcultures formed around employee hierarchy and technical experience, Zara Mirmalek, “Navigating Subcultures: The Formation of Subcultures in an Organizational Landscape” (California State University East Bay, 2001). 19.  Time was another consideration. As an ethnographer, I take seriously the importance of sharing data and analysis to benefit the community of study; human subject data is not something to simply extract and carry off to discuss with others. This often translates to an increase in data collection, longer timelines for fieldwork, and a longer period between collecting data and final analysis. I had experienced the ­temporal rhythm of nine months of fieldwork and then the processing of data, analysis, and write-­up, alongside participating in meetings and presentation for United Airlines, and writing technical reports. Indeed, this type of research calendar was a great deal longer and more involved than what was normal for doctoral research in either degree requirements I had to complete at UCSD. Prior to and while in the field, I was fortunate to have the support of graduate advisors Leigh Star, Ed

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Hutchins (who came for a memorable visit to JPL), and Yrjö Engeström, each of whom demonstrated through their own work that it was possible and generative to move back and forth across institutions, work domains, languages cultures, and social forces. 20.  Kim McQuaid provides a historical and cultural study of gender and ethnicity at NASA in “Racism, Sexism, and Space Ventures: Civil Rights at NASA in the Nixon Era and Beyond,” in Societal Impact of Spaceflight, ed. Steven Dick and Roger Lanius (Washington, DC: NASA, 2007): 421, through an account of Ruth Bates Harris, an African American woman hired in 1973 to lead policy changes that would redirect the demographic trends at NASA. See also Paul Delaney, “Top Black Woman Ousted by NASA,” New York Times (October 28, 1973); Ruth B. Harris, Harlem Princess: The Story of Harry Delaney’s Daughter (New York: Vantage Press, 1991). For accounts of women and the selection of NASA astronauts in the mid-­twentieth century, see Martha Ackmann, The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight (New York: Random House, 2003); Stephanie Nolen, Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Weitekamp, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex. For accounts of work at NASA conducted by women, see Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures (New York: HarperCollins, 2016); Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars (New York: Little, Brown, 2016). 21.  For an ethnographic account on MER’s extended mission stage, as well as a study on the processes by which Mars’s images were rendered visible for scientific knowledge production, see Janet Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 22. This level of commitment was supported by take-­out meals from Heidar Baba and Euro Pane. After moving to a rental unit on North Bonnie Avenue between East Walnut Street and East Colorado Boulevard, I met a JPL engineer working on the MER mission who lived on the same block at that time. Having a neighbor who was also working on Mars time helped a bit with the radical schedule. 23. On the purposeful combination of science and technology studies with ethnographic fieldwork and social studies of work communities, see Susan Leigh Star, “Infrastructure and Ethnographic Practice,” Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 14, no. 2 (2002): 107–­122. 24.  Donna Haraway, “Apes in Eden, Apes in Space,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), exposes the complex interconnectedness of hegemonic conceptions of nature and culture, technological optimism and power relationships vis-­à-­vis the role of primates as cultural tokens of strength and stand-­ins for humans in space. Sheila Jasanoff, “Image and Imagination,” in Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance, ed. Paul Edwards and Clark Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), connects

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the images of the Earth captured by NASA’s Apollo missions to the rise of environmental stewardship as a standpoint. Jasanoff demonstrates the sociotechnical production of a globally recognized symbol that provided earthbound humans the sense of being able to see from above. See also Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledge,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–­599. 25.  Eviatar Zerubavel, Patterns of Time in Hospital Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Zerubavel’s sociological studies of time include examining temporal experiences in historical (e.g., monasteries) and contemporary organizations (e.g., hospitals). On the phenomena of time as sociological theme, see Paul Blyton et al., eds. Time, Work, and Organization (New York: Routledge, 1989); John Hassard, ed., The Sociology of Time (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990). Anthropological studies on time speak to studying temporal experiences in relation to a specific community and its culture; resulting research frames others and their time-­reckoning habits, and often seeks to create categories that define generalizable experience of time. See, e.g., Edward Hall, The Dance of Life (Garden City: Anchor, 1983); Alfred Gell, The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images (Dulles: Bloomsbury, 1992); Nancy Munn, “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 93–­123. Although I conducted my research with methodology used in (but not exclusive to) anthropology, I did not situate my examination of the relationship between technology and social time among this professional community vis-­à-­vis traditional anthropological studies of time. 26.  Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Dreyfus makes this point in relation to the failure of the early artificial intelligence (AI) notion that computers could be made to think just like humans. Anthropologist Edwin Hutchins, in Cognition in the Wild, makes this point in relation to ship navigation and human (distributed) cognition.

Chapter 1 1.  Larry Wilson, “Rose Parade Economic Impact Is Huge, Even Minus $38 Million,” Pasadena Star-­News, October 15, 2013. Parade float construction begins over a year in advance. Each float has a sponsor who contributes anywhere from several tens of thousands to several hundreds of thousands of dollars for materials and design. Most of the labor is done by volunteers. Economic impact of the Tournament of Roses for the city of Pasadena is estimated at about $200 million. 2. I draw from research in the field of organization studies that has elevated the importance of an organization’s history as a primary source that informs its contemporary work culture. Some of the essential texts that informed my studies in this area, particularly during my graduate work in public administration (resulting in Mirmalek, Navigating Subcultures: The Formation of Subcultures in an Organizational

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Landscape [CSUEB, 2001]), include: Peter Frost et. al., eds., Reframing Organizational Culture (Newbury Park: Sage, 1991); Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization (London: Sage, 1997); and Pasquale Gagliardi, ed., Symbols and Artifacts: Views of the Corporate Landscape (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990). Informed by sociology, history, dramaturgy, anthropology, and qualitative methods, texts such as these are more often found circulating in organization and management studies (than in social studies of technology) in the United States (e.g., Academy of Management, Critical Management Studies), the UK, and Scandinavia. 3.  Infrastructure, as a focus of study by science and technology studies scholars, is both structural and cultural rather than either/or. See Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, “Steps to an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces,” Information Systems Research 7, no. 1 (1996): 63–­92; Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out. Infrastructure has become a keyword in political platforms, particularly in the twenty-­first century, typically in reference to roads, highways, and power grids (and occasionally internet access); popular use of the term, however, does not denote deep social or cultural critique, unlike that which can be found in critical studies of infrastructure in the twenty-­first century. See Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism (New York: Routledge, 2001). 4.  Theodore von Kármán, The Wind and Beyond: Theodore von Kármán, Pioneer in Aviation and Pathfinder in Space (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967). William Bollay’s participation may have been brief, given that most historical accounts describe his only involvement as passing Parsons and Forman along to talk with Malina and von Kármán. Von Kármán himself in his autobiography does not describe Bollay in the origin story of his work with Parsons, Forman, and Malina. However, in the Harvard University archives, Bollay’s files, from 1941, show that he continued with research developed earlier at GALCIT and later worked for a rocketry organization in southern California. These later activities led me to wish for more material on the organization of knowledge production in von Kármán’s lab and movement from the lab to other institutions. 5.  John Carter, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (Venice: Feral House, 1991). 6.  Franklin O’Donnell, JPL 101 (Pasadena: California Institute of Technology, 2002). 7.  Edward Forman, “Edward S. Forman Collection,” in the Sacramento Archives and Museum Collection Center (Sacramento: City of Sacramento, 2005). Remote archival access was made possible by Patricia W. Johnson, Senior Archivist, Center for Sacramento History and Sherry A. Winn, Caltech Alumni Association. 8. Frank Malina, interview by Mary Terrall, California Institute of Technology Archives (Pasadena: California Institute of Technology Archives, 1978). 9.  I did not come across any material describing the personal relationships among them. Outside of rocketry, Foreman’s and Parsons’s personal and work paths

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diverged. In later years, Foreman would go on, without media attention, to work in a number of aero-­engineering organizations throughout California. Parsons remained local and never far from the media spotlight. George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Jack Whiteside Parsons (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006). On the other hand, there is an account of Malina and Parsons working closely together outside of rocketry. For a short time, they collaborated on a science-­fiction screenplay that they hoped to sell to raise money for their experiments (Carter, Strange Angel). The screenplay included a character of a scientist who accidentally died by blowing himself up in his garage, which is how Parsons himself would die twenty years later. Among the Squad and GALCIT, the closest personal relationship may have been between Malina and von Kármán, a relationship that by Malina’s account was one of father and son. Frank Malina, “Rocket Pioneers,” Engineering & Science 31, no. 6 (1968): 9–­13, 30–­32; Malina, interview by Mary Terrall. 10.  While it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the history of rocketry and missile technologies during this period in the US, I want to acknowledge that there are competing invention claims between Robert Goddard and the figures at GALCIT. For a recent history on this period and the development led by Robert Goddard, see J. Hunley, The Development of Propulsion Technology for U.S. Space-­Launch Vehicles, 1926–­1991 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007). 11.  Malina, “Rocket Pioneers.” 12.  Malina, “Rocket Pioneers,” 32. 13.  Von Kármán, Wind and Beyond. 14. Parsons and Foreman had access to the lab and would appear sporadically, according to Malina. Hsein would lose security clearance under the suspicion that he was a spy. In 1955 he and his family were deported to China where he would become known as the “father of the Chinese space program,” see Iris Chang, Thread of the Silkworm (New York: Basic Books, 1995). A.M.O. Smith went on to work in aeronautics for private companies, as did Bollay and Forman, see Turner Cebeci, Legacy of a Gentle Genius: The Life of A.M.O. Smith (Long Beach: Horizons Publishing, 1999). 15.  Bernie Dorman, Aerojet: The Creative Company (Aerojet History Group, 1995). Aerojet’s origin story and company history were collected and written up by “TEJOREA (AREOJET backwards), a group of people who regularly gathered to reminisce and keep up with one another, a group that only allowed former employees who had been fired or who had retired. … Later this stricture was relaxed to include all former employees.” 16.  Malina, “Rocket Pioneers.” 17. John Parsons, Freedom Is a Two-­Edged Sword (Tempe: New Falcon Publications, 1989). 18.  Von Kármán, Wind and Beyond.

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19.  Malina interview by Mary Terrall. Aerojet was not a financial success, and within ten years four of the five founders would depart from the company. In 1952, General Tire gave buy-­outs to all but Malina, who held on to his interest until years later when the company profits grew. Later, von Kármán would refer to this transaction as “How I ‘Lost’ $12,000,000.” The 1952 sale, however, was the final dissolution of collaboration among the remaining members of the Squad. Forman went to work at Lockheed. Bollay went from Caltech to Harvard to North American Aviation, a company that would become the direct competitor of Aerojet. See Robert Kraemer, Rocketdyne: Powering Humans into Space (Reston: AIAA, 2006). 20.  Another Suicide Squad member A.M.O. Smith was asked to join Aerojet. In 1942, while working for Douglas Aircraft, he went to work on loan at Aerojet but found the company “unstable and crazy in their actions.” He got “fed up” and returned to Douglas, Cebeci, Legacy of a Gentle Genius. 21.  The launch of Sputnik gave the appearance that one country had outperformed others in rocket science. German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, however, attributed the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the first orbital spacecraft to institutional focus. In the United Stated, pre-­NASA, rocket development was taking place within the Navy and the Army, two branches that competed for resources and did not work in collaboration, compared to the Soviet Union where rocketry was developed and organized within one agency. Von Braun does not mention in this comparison that his own experience and success in rocketry came within a fascist state; the political undertones would have otherwise been more pronounced. 22.  Roger Bilstein, Orders of Magnitude: A History of the NACA and NASA, 1915–­1990 (Washington, DC: NASA, 1989). JPL as a NASA center is distinct for its robotic missions. NASA’s other centers across the United States include Ames Research Center, California; Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center (formerly Dryden), California; Glenn Research Center, Ohio; Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland; Johnson Space Center, Texas; Kennedy Space Center, Florida; Langley Research Center, Virginia; Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama; and Stennis Space Center, Mississippi. Additional NASA sites include NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, and international sites in Australia and Spain that host the deep space network. For more on JPL and its role in Mars exploration, see JPL historian Erik Conway, Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). 23. Bilstein, Orders of Magnitude. 24.  Clarence Lasby, Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War (New York: Atheneum, 1971). Wernher von Braun and Frederick Ordway, History of Rocketry and Space Travel (New York: Crowell, 1966). Werner von Braun is both an iconic and infamous NASA figure. He shaped the discourse of space exploration in the United States not only for his work as head of NASA’s Marshall Space Center, where they

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designed the Saturn rockets used to put Americans on the Moon, and his role as a scientist working for Hitler (and using concentration camp labor), but also for the communication and media (e.g., Walt Disney) he used to generate public support for space exploration. 25. M. G. Lord’s book Astroturf includes an archival photograph of JPL’s open-­ diorama reproduction of the Nativity scene using mannequins. 26.  The club’s origin story is one of wealth, politics, and special interests, as described on its website, in 2014: “The idea of a private family riding club began in 1922 when four prominent local families decided to create a club where they could enjoy fellowship and equestrian pursuits. Robert Fullerton, Jr., Reginald D. Johnson, S. C. Fertig and John E. Marble located the perfect site. They then invited to dinner landowner Senator Frank Flint, for whom Flintridge is named. On that evening, the founding group purchased ten oak-­covered acres from Senator Flint and then Flintridge Riding Club was born. The Club was formally incorporated on October 9, 1923” (https://­ flintridgeridingclub​.­org​/­). 27.  Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, is a social study of the technology of classification. It illuminates its uses for sorting and identifying things in the world, including people, practices, and nature, and some of the political undercurrents that produce entanglements, for individuals and institutions, which are not always visible to everyone. Example of entanglements that can position people in between membership include conflicting institutional membership requirements (e.g., citizenship, socioeconomic status), and regional and institutional categories of ethnicity. 28. This list covers seventeen pages in the appendix. Steve Squyres, Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet (New York: Hyperion, 2005). 29.  JPL Mars program director was Dr. Firouz Naderi, the JPL MER project manager was Peter Theisinger, and the JPL MER project scientist was Dr. Joy Crisp. The JPL MER mission administrator was Dr. John Callas and the deputy administrator was Dr. Deborah Bass. 30.  NASA/JPL, “Marsapoolza and Mars Education Programs: Inspiring the World One Student at a Time,” Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Spotlight, 2004, https://­mars​ .­jpl​.­nasa​.­gov​/­mer​/­spotlight​/­marsapalooza04​.­html​.­Marsapalooza was “a special initiative designed to reach out to students in underserved communities, to present the M-­Team as role models to inspire the next generation of explorers, and to raise public literacy” about the MER mission. The five-­city tour was supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation, Passport to Knowledge (a media production company), “and several museums, planetariums and science centers.” The M-­team is an example of an additional public role for MER mission members that was formally established and managed, of which there were few. The MER team’s official spokespeople were designated by the management hierarchy (e.g., JPL management and MER mission managers) and lead scientists (i.e., Athena science team co-­investigators).

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31. Squyres, Roving Mars. 32.  Since the MER mission, I have conducted ethnographic research among scientists using robots for remote presence in extreme environments. In some cases, scientists have been co-­located and required to engage in deliberation and decision-­making within temporal durations even shorter than on MER. In another case, scientists have been distributed across distances and required to deliberate using telecommunications. 33. Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Chicago: Aldine, 1967); A. Strauss, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Adele Clarke, Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005). Memos are part of the grounded theory method. During data collection, the researcher conducts ongoing analysis of daily field notes to keep track of activities that may suggest further inquiry directions or, with time, suggest patterns. 34.  Because I was working in northern California (at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose) the summer the rovers launched, I had only a few days to fly down to Pasadena to find an apartment and to move some stuff from storage in San Diego, California. I found a place that was one of four units in an older house (pre-­1940) surrounded by tall leafy trees that showed well in the summer months. The unsettling features did not appear until after I signed the lease and moved in. In the unit below lived several dogs that sounded feral. They would run the length of the apartment’s wood floors sending up noises of barking, collars jangling, and nails hitting the ground almost every time a car, a person, or an animal made a sound outside of the house. The apartment’s single-­paned windows did little to keep out the constant noise of LA police helicopters. The shotgun-­style layout meant that there was a front and rear door at each end of a long hallway. Even when shut, the doors would let in gusts of wind that would shoot down the hallway and rattle the doors and windows. Though I quickly regretted the choice, moving would have cost a lot, both in money and time, neither of which I had to spare. Since I was spending most of my time at JPL or hanging out in other people’s places, I was not there too often. Moreover, the location was good and put me close to the freeway, food, libraries, and the temporary housing in which others were staying. Although my neighbor who was also working on MER and I did not share work schedules because of the different nature of our work, we had some overlapping time off that we spent on a number of activities, including hosting a party for the Persian New Year. 35.  It cannot be taken for granted that conversations taking place outside of a worksite are any less formal than the accounts given on site. Some researchers are quick to assume that conversations taking place “in the bar” are the conversations from which you learn “what is really going on.” This may be true at times, however, but it is not a reliable approach. It is a perspective that presumes that the presence of the researcher has no bearing on the shape of the conversation; in other words, while a

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workgroup may talk about their work to one another differently off site, they may modify their conversations when a researcher is present. Also, researchers can be expected to speak “more freely,” which can be a misguided attempt to gain trust at the sacrifice of maintaining professional boundaries, the maintenance of which continue to be the ethnographer’s work, even off site. One key reason for long-­term rather than short-­term fieldwork is that the research timeline allows for building relationships and for work following information and actions, memoing, and identifying patterns and anomalies. 36.  After learning that the Mars Society hosted a monthly movie night, I attended one with my roommate. We arrived at the listed address near downtown San Diego and were buzzed into a private studio workspace where we joined a group of about ten people. There were no requirements for entry. The offering was Battle Beyond the Sun, a 1962 film made by combing two Soviet films, Nebo Zovyot (1959) and Planeta Ber (1962), by Francis Ford Coppola (using the pseudonym Thomas Colchart) and Roger Corman. The Mars Society is a nonprofit organization founded by Robert Zubrin in 1988 for promoting public interest in and research for human exploration on Mars. It has chapters worldwide and the number of space exploration research projects it has operated are too numerous to list here. A few MER mission members, and more than a few NASA members, have institutional kinship ties with the Mars Society. 37.  The listed year for each mission reflects the first year of successful operations, orbiting Mars (orbiter), after landing on the surface of Mars and collecting data from a fixed position (lander), or landing and moving around Mars terrain (rover). 38. One reason for two pairs of space vehicles was redundancy. Commonplace in engineering, redundancy refers to having a duplicate system in place so that in the event that the main system fails there is a second one to maintain operations with little to no interruption. Nuclear power plants, for example, have systems where redundancy is critical (a prolonged interruption in operating systems can result in major catastrophe with enormous environmental and human costs). While setting up a system with redundancy increases initial costs, the total cost is less than setting up an entirely new system to replace one that fails. Applying this to the exploration of Mars, producing and sending two space vehicles for the same mission costs less up front and increases the chances that at least one of them will be successful in carrying out the mission. Attention to increasing the chances of a successful robotic landing on Mars was heightened after NASA’s three Mars mission failures from 1998 to 1999 (1998 Mars Climate Orbiter lost on arrival; 1999 Mars Polar Lander lost on arrival; 1999 Deep Space 2 Probes lost on arrival), following the 1996 success of NASA’s Pathfinder mission. Note that redundancy did not extend to all aspects of the mission. While the robots were redundant, all of the people were not. Many of the scientists and engineers had unique training and expertise. As one co-­PI put it, “If X were to be hit by a bus tomorrow we wouldn’t be able to do anything further [work on their

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instrument].” He was describing that no one else on his team had X’s expertise that was needed for their instrument. 39.  J. Bell et al., “Mars Exploration Rover Athena Panoramic Camera (Pancam) Investigation,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 108, no. E12 (2003). The PanCams were used to assess “high-­resolution morphology, topography, and geologic context of each MER landing site, to obtain color images to constrain the mineralogic, photometric, and physical properties of surface materials, and to determine dust and aerosol opacity and physical properties from direct imaging of the Sun and sky.” 40. P. Christensen et al., “Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer for the Mars Exploration Rovers,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 108, no. E12 (2003). The Mini-­TES was used to “(1) determine the mineralogy of rocks and soils, (2) determine the thermophysical properties of selected soil patches, and (3) determine the temperature profile, dust and water-­ice opacity, and water vapor abundance in the lower atmospheric boundary layer.” 41.  S. Gorevan et al., “Rock Abrasion Tool: Mars Exploration Rover Mission,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 108, no. E12 (2003): “Serving primarily as the geologist’s rock hammer, the RAT will expose fresh surfaces of Martian rocks to other instruments on the payload. The RAT also brushes dust and debris from an excavated hole or unaltered rocks.” 42. G. Klingelhöfer et al., “Athena MIMOS II Mössbauer Spectrometer Investigation.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 108, no. E12 (2003). The Mossbauer was used to “identify mineralogical composition and to measure the relative abundance of iron-­bearing phases and the distribution of Fe among its oxidation states.” 43.  R. Rieder et al., “The New Athena Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer for the Mars Exploration Rovers,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 108, no. E12 (2003). The APXS was used for “determining the major and minor elemental composition of Martian soils, rocks, and other geological materials at the MER landing sites.” It produced X-­ray spectra “to show elements starting from sodium up to yttrium” and provided data on carbon and oxygen.” 44. On Mars, the MER robots each used three antennas to send and receive data. These included one to send X-­band radio waves, a UHF antenna for sending and receiving information to Earth via an orbiter, and either the low-­gain antenna or high-­gain antenna for sending and receiving information to a Deep Space Network (DSN). NASA’s three DSN antennas are in Australia, Spain, and the US. Sending and receiving information was faster via orbiters (128,000 bits per second) compared to the direct-­to-­Earth data rate (which varied from about 12,000 bits per second to 3,500 bits per second). 45.  For a detailed account of individual Athena team scientists’ interests working on MER, see Clancey, Working on Mars.

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46.  Golombek et al., “Selection of the Mars Exploration Rover Landing Sites.” 47.  Jeffrey Norris et al., “Mars Mission Science Operations Facilities Design,” in Aerospace Conference Proceedings (Big Sky: IEEE, 2002). 48. Gagliardi, Symbols and Artifacts explains, by way of organizational theory and cultural anthropology, what it means to study organizations through the artifacts of which they are made. He theorizes that artifacts have “pragmatic dimensions … (the relationship between artifacts and organizational action)” and “a hermeneutic dimension (what and how may artifacts speak to us when we are seeking to interpret the culture of an organization.” And his edited volume includes empirical research (his own and that of other organizational cultural scholars) utilizing this theoretical approach, in a number of corporate and governmental institutions (including NASA). For me, this was a foundational text that shaped how I approached conducting research and analysis at United Airlines, before the MER mission. It continued to inform all subsequent research in large part because I found it intellectually in keeping with science and technology studies, particularly in the area of social studies of technology. 49. For detailed accounts on this process, written by participants themselves, see John Bresina et al., “Activity Planning for the Mars Exploration Rovers,” in Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Automation and Scheduling (Monterey: AAAI, 2005); Andrew Mishkin and Barbara Larsen, “Implementing Distributed Operations: A Comparison of Two Deep Space Missions,” in AIAA Space Ops Conference (Rome: AIAA, 2006). 50.  An important feature of ethnographic fieldwork is having a sense of when it is okay to interrupt and when you could be getting in the way of someone’s work. As this was the first time I was face to face with members of the Athena science team, I was hyperaware (even more than usual) of social cues. It was a challenging combination of formal and informal cues. If they were meeting casually, then it would have been acceptable to approach one of them for an introduction or to ask if we could pull up some chairs to join them. In some formal situations, these approaches can be breaches of the sort that may not get one removed from the premises but could leave a bad impression. An essential point in intercultural communication is that body language and clothing can be misread in assessing the formality of a gathering. Both are features that need to be interpreted vis-­à-­vis the community’s particular culture. Professions and workgroups have different standards for what is acceptable clothing for a formal discussion. Some workgroups require formal dress (e.g., business casual). For other groups, jeans and T-­shirts are equivalent to suits on Wall Street (e.g., workplaces like car repair shops and high-­tech companies in Silicon Valley). 51.  The MER mission workspace at JPL no longer today exists as it did during the nominal mission. While some of the workspaces would remain in use until the end of the summer 2004, there was a gradual shift to distributed operations, with scientists

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participating in meetings from their primary organizations via teleconferencing by video or phone. Before the end of the year, the MER mission completely transitioned to distributed operations. For accounts by MER mission members from the nominal mission, see Justin Wick et al., “Distributed Operations for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission with the Science Activity Planner,” in Proceedings 2005 IEEE Aerospace Conference (Big Sky: IEEE, 2005): 4162–­4173. The RAT team’s transition was captured in a New York Times article; see Kenneth Chang, “Martian Robots, Taking Orders from a Manhattan Walk-­Up,” New York Times, November 7, 2004. 52.  Norris et al., “Mars Mission Science Operations Facilities Design.” 53. This was not the first time that I had conducted work in a place that would become inaccessible. For example, in 2001, I had completed a report, the second of my two ethnographic research studies of United Airlines (UAL) in cooperation with RIACS, NASA Ames. Before I could meet with UAL managers in Chicago to walk through the findings (together in the airport), the tragedy of 9/11 happened. As some can recall, airlines grounded their planes and all focus was on security. Of course, plans for my meeting were canceled. I had no further plans for ongoing research requiring inside access at the airline, but the situation also curtailed my ability to consider follow-­up conversations from the research already conducted. Moreover, the manner in which I presented research from this project changed. Presenting an outsider’s inside access to an airline that was part of the events of 9/11 now necessarily carried with it a dark tone, on which even research audiences were quick to fixate. 54.  Susan Leigh Star, “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions,” Sociological Review 38, no. S1 (1990): 26–­56; Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss, “Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice,” Computer Supported Cooperative Work 8 (1999): 9–­30. 55.  I am again describing a research approach that is a hallmark of technology studies in STS (also anthropology, history, and sociology of technology). Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979) is a study of scientists and laboratories and one of the core STS texts on this approach and reasoning. STS provides a discursive space for critical questioning of technology relationships among actors both human and nonhuman, local and global, economic, institutional, political, and cultural. There are too many significant texts to list here. I will, however, reference several that can speak for the many (and via their reference lists can lead readers to the many more): Wiebe Bijker and John Law, Shaping Technology/Building Society Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Sheila Jasanoff et al., eds., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2001); Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump. 56.  Jay Trimble et al., “NASA’s MERBoard,” in Public and Situated Displays, ed. Kenton O’Hara, Mark Perry, Elizabeth Churchill, and Daniel Russell (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2003).

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57.  Diana Forsythe provides an ethnographically informed examination of “blaming the user” in medical informatics. She argues that the “the problem of use acceptance is to a significant extent the outcome of values and assumptions that the scientists [AI scientists designing medical informatics] bring to their own research and development process.” Forsythe, Studying Those Who Study Us, 3. 58.  While researching customer service agents at UAL, I decided to “jump the counter” so I could go back and forth (literally stepping over the baggage weighing station sometimes) to see what was happening from each side of the counter between customers and agents. After taking the agent training course, from this method of comparing communication information I was able to identify disconnects between the software fields of inquiry, the passenger normative order of giving information, and the agent training. From the customer side of the counter, the disconnects that the agents are managing appear as a flurry of typing, an activity that unfortunately appears in popular culture as the butt of jokes and deserving of customer contempt. In fact, agents managing the disconnects are exercising expertise and maintaining professional composure by not telling the customer about the problems they are working through. Wales et al., “Ethnography, Negotiated Interactions,” 18. 59.  Ergonomics and human factors research (also anthropometrics and biomechanics) focus on measuring human bodies for the design of work technologies such as flight decks, office workstations, and astronaut spacesuits. Literature in this area is extensive as sources include industry—­see, e.g., Louis Harris, The Steelcase National Study of Office Environments: Comfort and Productivity in the Office of the 80s (Grand Rapids: Steelcase, 1980); and academia and government research—­see, e.g., Stephen Pheasant, Bodyspace: Anthropometry, Ergonomics and Design (Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1986); Dava Newman et al., “Astronaut Bio-­Suit System for Exploration Missions,” presented at the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts Meeting (Seattle: NASA, 2004); Robert Kinkade et al., Human Factors Guide for Nuclear Power Plant Control Room Development: Final Report for Electric Power Research Institute (Palo Alto: Electric Power Research Institute, 1984). For an STS informed study on the relationships between ergonomics, people, and workspaces, see Jeon Chihyung, “Technologies of the Operator: Engineering the Pilot in the U.S. and Japan, 1930–­1960” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010). 60.  Comparing an organization’s full-­time employees and temporary employees (or contractors) is one way to consider what I refer to as “organizational infrastructure.” An organization with goals that require full-­time employees to work onsite provides a site, from physical structure to lighting, seating, facilities, etc. It may also employ people hired to work off-­site, which can sometimes mean that they become responsible for providing these same provisions for themselves. The difference is not always recognized or prepared for and it is sometimes used strategically by organizations. I draw a simple example of the former from an exercise I used while teaching undergraduate classes on organizational communication. I asked students to describe a job

Notes 161

they had had, what they had needed to do that job, and of those items what was paid for by their employer. Many described summer jobs that came with some infrastructure but also for which they had to come up with the rest (e.g., transportation, paint, computers, electricity). There are examples of the latter to be identified in the use of contract employees by Silicon Valley start-­ups. Contract employees are excluded from organizational provisions such as health benefits and advancement. As such they “cost less” to employee and the company is to be able to show less money spent on infrastructure (a move often used as an appeal to investors). 61. Squyres, Roving Mars. 62.  Michael Allison and Megan McEwen, “A Post-­Pathfinder Evaluation of the Areocentric Solar Coordinates with Improved Timing Recipes for Mars Season/Diurnal Climate Studies,” Planetary and Space Science 48 (2000): 215–­235. 63.  JPL, “Mars Exploration Rover Project Plan.” Pasadena, CA: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, February 12, 2001. On page 10 of the document, it reads: The project will be judged successful if it accomplishes the following. Full mission success. 1. Launch two identical lander/rover missions to Mars during the 2003 launch opportunity, from the Eastern Test Range aboard separate Delta II-­class expendable launch vehicles. 2. The MER-­2003 rovers shall each acquire science data and conduct in-­situ analysis for 90 sols, and shall be designed for operations independent of the lander. 3. At each landing site, operate the Athena instrument suite (i.e. Pancam, Mini-­TES, APXS, Microscopic Imager, and Mössbauer spectrometer) during the 90-­sol operational phase of the rover mission. 4. At each landing site, acquire at least one full-­color and at least one stereo 360° panoramic image of the landing site with the Pancam, with a resolution of less than 0.3 mrad per pixel. Acquire at least one image of a freshly exposed Mars rock that is also analyzed by another Athena instrument (i.e., Microscopic Imager, Mini-­TES, APXS, or Mössbauer spectrometer). 5. Drive the rovers to a total of at least eight separate locations and use the instrument suite to investigate the context and diversity of the Mars geologic environment. Every reasonable effort shall be made to maximize the separation between investigation locations to increase site diversity, without compromising overall mission safety or probability of success. 6. To investigate complex science operations on remote planetary surfaces, the MER-­A and MER-­B missions shall operate simultaneously on the surface of Mars for a period of at least 30 sols. 7. At least one of the rovers shall demonstrate a total traverse path length of at least 600 meters, with a goal of 1,000 meters.

A list (and descriptions) of the MER science and technology objectives can be found in Joy Crisp, Mark Adler, Jacob R. Matijevic, Steven W. Squyres, Raymond E. Arvidson, and David M. Kass, “Mars Exploration Rover Mission,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 108, no. E12 (2003): 8061. 64. Spirit operated on Mars until 2010, traveled 4.8 miles, and collected 124,838 images; Opportunity operated until 2018, traveled 28 miles, and collected 217,594 images. In February 2019, to great fanfare, NASA officially called an end to the MER mission, after having received no further communication from Opportunity since June 2018.

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65. Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms. 66. A recording of John F. Kennedy’s speech at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, MA, is available at http://­www​.­jfklibrary​.­org​/­​. 67.  Mission operations is a broad category that describes the multiple science, engineering, and administrative sociotechnical processes that make up the interplanetary work system for doing Martian science. Science operations for MER, simply put, involved daily analysis of the Martian terrain—­data collected by the rovers was examined and interpreted using software and sight. A number of questions need to be asked about training oneself “to see” on Mars, to imagine one is seeing Mars through the images taken by the rovers. The coloring of Mars requires a selection process, and the positioning of camera angles and relative spatial relationships must be taken into consideration for analysis. Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover.

Chapter 2 1.  Portions of the chapter appear in Zara Mirmalek, “Working Time on Mars.” KronoScope 8, no. 2 (2009): 159–­178. The International Society for the Study of Time (ISST) is a professional society advancing the importance of multidisciplinary explorations on time; its annual journal KronoScope and published conference proceedings disseminate the most extensive range of topical studies on time. 2.  For first-­person accounts of the NASA Pathfinder mission, see Andrew Mishkin, Sojourner (New York: Berkeley Books, 2003); Donna Shirley, Managing Martians (New York: Broadway Books, 1998). 3.  A Field Integrated Design and Operations (FIDO) rover was used by science, engineering and operations teams to develop and test the workflow for MER, see Robert Anderson, A. F. C. Haldermann, James Dohm, and Terry Huntsberger, “A Dress Rehearsal for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers,” in Mars Analog Research, ed. Johnathon Clarke (San Diego: American Astronautical Society, 2006), 117–­128. 4.  Scholars who have studied the role of time in the industrial, postindustrial, and digital ages concur on how challenging it is to denaturalize industrial-­ era-­ based interpretations of clock time. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964); Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1964); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); E. Thompson, “Time, Work, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (December 1967): 56–­97; Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1971); Wajcman, Pressed for Time. 5. Wajcman, Pressed for Time. 6. Truman Abbe, Professor Abbe and the Isobars (New York: Vantage Press, 1955); Ian Bartky, “Adoption of Standard Time,” Technology and Culture 30, no. 1 (January

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1989): 25–­56; James Jespersen and Jane Fitz-­Randolph, Time and Clocks for the Space Age (New York: Atheneum, 1979). On the social phenomenon of daylight savings time, see Michael Downing, Spring Forward (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005); David Prerau, Seize the Daylight (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005). 7. Abbe, Professor Abbe and the Isobars. 8. James Green et al., “Eyewitness Reports of the Great Auroral Storm of 1859,” Advances in Space Research 38, no. 2 (2006): 145–­154. 9.  Bartky, “Adoption of Standard Time,” 35. In addition to Bartky’s rich material in text and footnote on Abbe’s advocacy for standard time to support science and commerce, see Abbe, Professor Abbe and the Isobars, 142–­150. 10.  Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). White’s historical account on the development of transcontinental railroads in the United States features the relationships among private and public organizations and economic interests. 11.  Bartky, “Adoption of Standard Time,” 33. 12.  Bartky, “Adoption of Standard Time,” 33. Bartky’s statement of a simple solution was a statement based on the then advice given to passengers for dealing with time differences. 13.  “Railway Association of America,” New York Times, May 15, 1873. 14.  “Railway Association of America,” New York Times. 15. Abbe’s efforts built on earlier exertions made by Charles F. Dowd. In October 1869, Dowd (1825–­1904), president of Temple Grove Seminary for Women in Saratoga Springs, New York, presented a plan to a New York convention of rail trunk lines. His concern was with the rail traveler’s confusion with multiple times: “These variations are governed by no general principle which would enable a person familiar with them in one locality, to judge of them in another. Any traveler, therefore, upon leaving home, loses all confidence in his watch, and is, in fact, without any reliable time.” Dowd proposed a “System of National Time” as the solution. See Bartky, “Adoption of Standard Time,” 32. 16.  Bartky, “Adoption of Standard Time.” 17.  The adoption of uniform standard time faced some public opposition. One group of dissenters were priests who decried the move as a rejection of God. The mayor of Bangor, Maine, vetoed an ordinance in favor of the new time on the grounds that it was unconstitutional and was an attempt to change the immutable law of God, not desired by the people, and would be hard on workers by changing day into night. See Robert Riegel, “Standard Time in the United States,” American Historical Review 33, no. 1 (1927): 84–­89.

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18.  On another technological reproduction of a natural phenomenon that shaped the factory work environment in the early twentieth century, see Gail Cooper, Air-­ Conditioning America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 19.  The theme of time studies in an industrial workplace was a popular area of interest in the mid-­twentieth century in relation to economic structures and social relationships. See Anderson, Dimensions of Work; de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure; Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1963); Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); Donald Roy, “Banana Time,” Human Organization 18 (1959):158–­168. 20. Frank Copley, Frederick W. Taylor, Father of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1923), 1:13. 21. Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management. 22. Frederick Taylor, “A Piece-­Rate System,” Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 16 (1895): 861. See also Frederick Taylor, Scientific Management: Comprising Shop Management, the Principles of Scientific Management [and] Testimony before the Special House Committee (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972). 23. Taylor, Scientific Management, 48. 24.  The hearing took place on January 25, 1912. See Taylor, Scientific Management. 25. Copley, Frederick W. Taylor, 2:50–­51; Upton Sinclair and Frederick Taylor, “The Principles of Scientific Management: A Criticism by Upton Sinclair and an Answer by Frederick W. Taylor,” American Magazine 72 (1911): 243. In his letter, Sinclair also comments on the disdain with which Taylor describes the workmen in his study—­a point that reminds readers that Taylor’s view of employees was not charitable. The contrast in status between Taylor and the pig-­iron handlers can be seen in their wages: Taylor worked for a daily rate, as he wrote in a letter to a potential factory client in 1898: $35 per day plus expenses. 26.  While references on the study of Taylorism are too numerous to include, here are a few that highlight another feature, which is the cross-­disciplinary interest in this theme: Mats Alvesson and Hugh Willmott, Studying Management Critically (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003); Jong Jun, Public Administration (New York: Macmillan, 1986); Thompson, “Time, Work, and Industrial Capitalism.” See also, in the history of technology, Thomas Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–­1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 27. Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 167. Buroway’s study included ethnographic research in a factory workplace that he conducted following ethnographic research conducted in the same place by Donald Roy. Roy’s

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study yielded the phrase “banana time,” which was an example of the factory workers’ naming of time durations. Banana time was the period of time designated for playful distracting jest. 28.  James Walsh and Gerardo Ungson, “Organizational Memory,” Academy of Management Review 16, no. 1 (1991): 57–­91. Walsh and Ungson describe various definitions of organizational memory by organization scholars, which are not in conflict but emphasize different aspects (e.g., structure, history, culture) of an organization. See also Joanne Yates, “For the Record: The Embodiment of Organizational Memory, 1850–­1920,” Business and Economic History 19 (1990): 172–­182; Yates, “Creating Organizational Memory: Systematic Management and Internal Communication in Manufacturing Firms, 1880–­1920,” Working Paper 2006-­88 (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998). Yates provides a historical account of a transition from reliance on individuals to the organization itself (e.g., record-­keeping). 29. Barbara Levitt and James March, “Organizational Learning,” Annual Review of Sociology 14, no. 1 (1988): 319–­338. 30. A 2007 class action lawsuit filed against a large corporation by some of its employees provides an example of work activity that may have benefited from more timekeeping, and of an organization asserting the legitimacy of clock time data over employee experience. Employees of the Tyson Corporation sued for compensation for time spent donning protective gear that was required for performing the task of slaughtering hogs. Part of Tyson’s resistance to compensating them for this time was an absence of data on the exact length of time it took to put on the protective gear. The case was settled in 2017 in favor of the employees. Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Upholds Worker Class-­Action Suit against Tyson,” New York Times, March 23, 2016. “The workers should not suffer because Tyson failed to keep records, Justice Kennedy added, citing a 1946 precedent, Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery. ‘Where the employer’s records are inaccurate or inadequate and the employee cannot offer convincing substitutes,’ the court said in 1946, it is enough for workers to rely on ‘sufficient evidence to show the amount and extent of that work as a matter of just and reasonable inference.’” 31.  Currently there is no calendar for Mars. NASA Mars missions begin with sol 1 for each mission. It has been suggested that the first year of a Mars calendar should be the same as the year of the first NASA Mars mission. There is a lot of literature on Mars that addresses Mars’s position in the solar system. For sources in the social and natural sciences, see Eric Burgess, Return to the Red Planet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); William Hoyt, Lowell and Mars (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976); Jespersen and Fitz-­Randolph, Time and Clocks for the Space Age; Justine Kaplan, “Of Mars and Men. (Mars Exploration),” Omni 10 (1988): 18, 102; Hugh Kieffer et al., Mars (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992); Oliver Morton, Mapping Mars (London: Fourth Estate, 2002); Gérard de Vaucouleurs, Physics of the Planet Mars (London: Faber, 1954); von Braun and Ordway,

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History of Rocketry and Space Travel; John Wilford, Mars Beckons: The Mysteries, the Challenges, the Expectations of Our Next Great Adventure in Space (New York: Knopf, 1990). 32. Wilford, Mars Beckons, 14. 33. Kieffer, Mars. 34. Ernest Stuhlinger and Frederick Ordway, Wernher von Braun Crusader for Space (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1995); J. Telotte, “Disney in Science Fiction Land,” Journal of Popular Film & Television 33, no. 1 (2005): 12–­20; Bob Ward, Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2005); Mike Wright, “The Disney–­Von Braun Collaboration and Its Influence on Space Exploration,” presentation (Huntsville: Marshall Space Flight Center, 1993). 35.  Walt Disney Productions, Mars and Beyond (Syracuse: L.W. Singer, 1959): 12. The book is an adaption written by Willy Ley of a Disney film of the same title that featured Werner von Braun. In the preceding years, Ley and von Braun coauthored a book Exploration of Mars (New York: Viking Press, 1956), which includes detailed comparisons between Mars and earth including orbits, seasons, length of days, and also a detailed plan for a spacecraft to reach Mars with a scenario of a trip made by humans to and from Mars. 36.  Michael Allison, “Accurate Analytic Representations of Solar Time and Season on Mars with Applications to the Pathfinder/Surveyor Missions,” Geophysical Research Letters 24 (1997): 1967–­1970. 37.  Allison, “Accurate Analytic Representations of Solar Time.” 38.  Marietta Baba, “The Globally Distributed Team: Learning to Work in a New Way, for Corporations and Anthropologists Alike,” Practicing Anthropology 23, no. 4 (1999): 2–­8. 39.  Reena Patel’s ethnography of a call center community in India describes how the daily lives of some of the employees were affected by the organizational requirement for the call center’s work schedule to follow local time in a different country. The requirement, which best suited the primarily nonlocal customer base, required call center employees to travel to and from work during evening hours, which locally had negative connotations for women. Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in India’s Call Center Industry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 40. Squyres, Roving Mars, 100. 41.  Timothy Monk and Simon Folkard, Making Shiftwork Tolerable (Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis, 1992). 42.  Wales and Mirmalek, “MER Human Centered Computing, Work System Design & Evaluation: Supporting NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Mission 2003”; Wales, Shalin, and Bass, “Requesting Distant Robotic Action.”

Notes 167

43. Organization studies scholars have described Dilbert comics in the workplace as demonstrations of employee cynicism directed at an organization where work requirements are absurd, as are the ways in which people respond to them. Sharing Dilbert comics can be interpreted as a way of giving public expression to frustration using an indirect, inactive approach. See Tom Brown, “The Deeper Side of ‘Dilbert,’” Management Review 85, no. 2 (1996): 48; Cliff Cheng and Robert Dennehy, “Terse Organizational Storytelling at Its Best: An Interview with Cartoonist Scott Adams of Dilbert,” Journal of Management Inquiry 5, no. 3 (1996): 207–­213; Julie Davis, “At the Mercy of Sadistic Cats and Megalomaniacal Dogs: Dilbert as a Reflection of and Vehicle for Organizational Cynicism,” ERIC (U.S. Department of Education, 2002); Elizabeth Doherty, “Joking Aside, Insights to Employee Dignity in ‘Dilbert’ Cartoons: The Value of Comic Art in Understanding the Employer—­Employee Relationship,” Journal of Management Inquiry 20, no. 3 (2011): 286–­301; Daniel Feldman, “The Dilbert Syndrome How Employee Cynicism about Ineffective Management Is Changing the Nature of Careers in Organizations,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 8 (2000): 1286–­1300. For reflections on the role of Dilbert cartoons in an engineering environment, see Edward Yourdon, Death March: The Complete Software Developer’s Guide to Surviving “Mission Impossible” Projects (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1999). 44.  NASA’s Deep Space Network is made up of three satellite facilities (United States, Spain, and Australia) and Mars-­orbiting spacecraft. These locations (and planetary rotation) affect the timing of communication passes. 45. Henry Bortman, “Living on Mars Time,” Astrobiology Magazine (December 15, 2003). 46.  George W. Bush, “President Bush Announces New Vision for Space Exploration Program,” speech presented at the NASA Headquarters (Washington DC, January 14, 2004). President Bush’s mandate included the creation of an office for missions to the Moon, which introduced new funding requirements with which even the MER mission members had to contend, despite the fact that they were engaged in a successful mission. The ongoing turnover at the top of the organization, at NASA HQ, had direct implications throughout NASA centers. Indeed, at this point in the MER mission, members from NASA Ames were tasked with the additional work of writing up justifications for their current projects and proposing new projects. These proposals were only proposals to propose—­they had to be reviewed by NASA HQ and only a portion of them would receive an invitation to submit a proposal, which was again subject to a competitive process. By the fall of 2004, people began leaving NASA Ames in part because of the administrative processes that interrupted and sidelined conducting their science and engineering research. At the time, the increasing number of exits was most visible via daily emails from departing members to say goodbye. 47. Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms.

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Chapter 3 1.  His statement was part of an article by the JPL Press office that appeared on the JPL website in 2004. 2.  Bortman, “Living on Mars Time.” 3.  Monk and Folkard, Making Shiftwork Tolerable, 79. 4. John Caldwell and J. Lynn Caldwell, Fatigue in Aviation (Brookfield: Ashgate, 2004); Jules Friedel, Night Work in Industry (New York: National Industrial Conference Board, Inc., 1927); P. Lavie, “Sleep-­Wake as a Biological Rhythm,” Annual Review of Psychology 52 (2001): 277–­303; Monk and Folkard, Making Shiftwork Tolerable; Alexandra Whitmire et al., “Risk of Performance Errors due to Sleep Loss, Circadian Desynchronoization, Fatigue, and Work Overload,” in Human Health and Performance Risks of Space Exploration Missions, ed. Jancy McPhee and John Charles (Houston: NASA, 2009), 85. 5. Robert Estrada et al., “Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) Human Factors Management Plan” (Moffett Field: NASA, 2003). 6.  Lavie, “Sleep-­Wake as a Biological Rhythm.” 7.  In any work environment, the relationships between form, function, and placement of technologies play critical roles in supporting or hindering work activities. From factory production lines to the placement of cubicles, built-­space studies proliferate in fields such as architecture industrial psychology and organization studies. A human-­centered approach pays particular attention to multiplicities among people and cultural contexts. See Rob Kling and Susan Leigh Star, “Human Centered Systems in the Perspective of Organizational and Social Informatics,” Computers and Society 28, no. 1 (March 1998): 22–­29. Traditional ergonomics studies focus on typifying body types and work habits; see Pheasant, Bodyspace. 8. Infrastructure maintenance work are forms of technology modifications and social processes neces­sary to maintain and support work within an organization, and which were either not included in the formal set of social arrangements and technologies provided or infrastructural provisions were inadequate and required employees to contribute workarounds. I wrote of this concept in a book chapter on interdisciplinarity and work process among scientists. Sophia Efstathiou and Zara Mirmalek, “Interdisciplinarity in Action,” in Philosophy of Social Science, ed. Nancy Cartwright and Eleonora Montuschi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 243. 9. Mumford, Technics and Civilization. 10.  Claudio U. Ciborra et al., From Control to Drift: The Dynamics of Corporate Information Infrastructures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 11.  Trimble, “NASA’s MERBoard.”

Notes 169

12.  This is a direct quote from a one-­page MERBoard flyer that included a photograph of MER scientists working out how to conduct their collaborative work during a mission-­planning phase. 13.  Louise Chan et al., The MER/CIP Portal for Ground Operations (Moffett Field: NASA Ames, n.d.); Joan Walton et al., The Mars Exploration Rover/Collaborative Information Portal (Moffett Field: NASA Ames, 2003). 14.  Elaine Huang et al., “When Design Just Isn’t Enough: The Unanticipated Challenges of the Real World for Large Collaborative Displays,” Personal Ubiquitous Computing 11, no. 7 (2007): 537–­547. 15. Zara Mirmalek, “Inspiring Innovation: On Low-­ Tech in High-­ Tech Development,” Interactions 24, no. 4 (2017): 50–­55. 16.  The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum began a podcast in 2018 called Airspace Podcast. The first episode was “Mars Time.” 17.  Another timepiece that was created was a digital alarm clock reconfigured to run according to Mars Local Solar Time. It was made by a Mars enthusiast working at another NASA center. He created about ten of these clocks and gave them as gifts to the lead scientists. He also posted the process of production on the internet for free. 18. JPL, “Watchmaker with Time to Lose,” Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Spotlight (January 4, 2008). 19.  The full version of the watches displayed with prices included text that the prices shown were approximate and may be about ten dollars more. The image of some finished versions appeared in Caltech’s magazine in a short write-­up by Douglas Smith, “Random Walk,” Engineering & Science 66, no. 4 (2003). 20.  Charles DeRoshia et al., “The Effects of the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) Work Schedule Regime on Locomotor Activity Circadian Rhythms, Sleep and Fatigue,” report 214560 (Moffett Field, CA: NASA Ames Research Center, 2008). 21. Subsequent missions have used Mars time for short periods of mission operations, and it has been spoken of as a nonproblematic work feature by people who themselves worked on Mars time. See Deborah Bass, Roxana Wales, and Valerie Shalin, “Choosing Mars-­Time: Analysis of the Mars Exploration Rover Experience,” IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings (Big Sky: IEEE, 2005). 22. Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms. 23.  Studies on time experience (management) organizations are not exclusive to efficiency studies; they include research that uses qualitative accounts of the everyday experiences of employees managing time schedules distributed from the top down (the organizational hierarchy model is a pyramid structure in which managerial personnel are on top tiers and nonmanagerial, front-­line employees are on the lower

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tiers). See Stephen Barley, “On Technology, Time, and Social Order,” in Making Time: Ethnographies of High-­Technology Organizations, ed. Frank Dubinskas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 123; Louis Bucciarelli, “Engineering Design Process,” in Making Time, 92; Wanda Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates, “It’s about Time,” Organization Science 13, no. 16 (2002): 601–­740. For a contrast with organizational time studies from the top of the hierarchy, see Elliott Jaques, Nancy Lee, and Charlotte Bygrave, “Aligning Multiple Time Horizons and Multiple Functions in Strategic Planning and Budgeting,” International Journal of Organizational Analysis 9, no. 3 (2011): 257–­271; Mary Crosnan et al., “Time and Organizational Improvisation,” Academy of Management Review 30, no. 1 (2005): 129–­145. A combination of the two points of entry can be found in the account on the temporal rhythms of engineering work in Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-­Month (Reading: Addison-­Wesley, 1995). For scholarship that couples multiple intersections of time studies and global social forces (e.g., the political economy), see Barbara Adam, Time and Social Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); B. Adam, Timewatch (London: Polity Press, 1995); B. Adam, “The Gendered Time Politics of Globalization: Of Shadowlands and Elusive Justice,” Feminist Review, no. 70 (2002): 3–­29; Allen Bluedorn, The Human Organization of Time (Stanford: Stanford Business Books, 2002); John Hassard, “Time and Organization,” in Time, Work, and Organization, ed. Paul Blyton et al. (New York: Routledge, 1989), 35. 24.  Bass, “Choosing Mars Time,” 4. 25.  Walter Adams, “The Founding of Mount Wilson Observatory,” Astronomical Society of the Pacific 66, no. 393 (1954): 267–­303. The Mount Wilson Observatory has a webcam feed that produces images of the telescope towers atop Mt. Wilson: see http://­www​.­mtwilson​.­edu, http://­obs​.­astro​.­ucla​.­edu​/­towercam​.­htm​. 26.  Estrada et al., “Mars Exploration Rovers Human Factors Management Plan.” 27.  Laura Colletti, “Sleep/Wake Cycles of Personnel Working a Mars Day (24.65H)” (master’s thesis, San Jose State University, 2007). 28.  “Seeing” has been studied as an important activity in the production of scientific knowledge of Mars with respect to creating digital images for MER scientists (Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover) and maps (see K. Lane, Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011]; Lisa Messeri, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds [Durham, Duke University Press, 2016]; Morton, Mapping Mars). Social studies of science and technology examine the relationships between visual representations (image and text) that are circulated to bring about agreement on scientific facts, among scientists and nonscientists, within laboratories. See Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, ed. Elizabeth Long and Henrika Kuklick (Greenwich: Jai Press, 1986), 1; Gordon Fyfe and John Law, “Introduction: On the Invisibility of the Visible,” in Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations, ed. Gordon Fyfe and John

Notes 171

Law (London: Routledge, 1988), 1; Karin Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Michael Lynch, “Discipline and the Material Form of Images: An Analysis of Scientific Visibility,” Social Studies of Science 15, no. 1 (1985): 37–­66; Trevor Pinch, “Towards an Analysis of Scientific Observation: The Externality and Evidential Significance of Observational Reports in Physics,” Social Studies of Science 15, no. 1 (1985): 3–­36. Outside laboratories: see Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). In courtrooms: see Sheila Jasanoff, “The Eye of Everyman: Witnessing DNA in the Simpson Trial,” Social Studies of Science 28, nos. 5–­6 (1988): 713–­740. As well, this theme has been taken up with technologies employed to access and make visible the remote space that is interior of the human body; see Morana Alac, Handling Digital Brains (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Joseph Dumit, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Valerie Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 29. Estrada et al., “Mars Exploration Rovers Human Factors Management Plan,” 8–­14. The section titled “Signs and Symptoms of Fatigue and Stress” provides three categories: physical, mental, and emotional. The physical symptoms include “muscle tension” and “lethargic”; mental symptoms include items that can be associated with tired eyes such as “decreased attention to detail,” “poor abstract thinking,” “slow reaction time,” and “memory impairment.”

Chapter 4 1.  An earlier version of this chapter was published as Zara Mirmalek, “Dreaming of Space, Imagining Membership: The Work Conduct of Heroes,” Management & Organizational History 4, no. 3 (2009): 299–­315. 2.  Virgil Grissom, “How to Make a Gemini Astronaut,” in Gemini: A Personal Account of Man’s Venture into Space (New York: Macmillan, 1968). 3.  Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Geertz offers the classic instruction for ethnographers to follow subjects’ interpretations over their own externally imposed interpretations. 4. Leah Vande Berg and Nick Trujillo, Organizational Life on Television (Norwood: Ablex, 1989). 5.  Robert Markley, Dying Planet (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), offers a comparative examination on the discursive treatments of Mars across literature, film, and science. 6.  Erving Goffman, Stigma (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1963). 7.  Geoffrey Landis, Mars Crossing (New York: Tor Books, 2000).

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8. Kim Robinson, Red Mars (New York: Spectra, 1993); Kim Robinson, Green Mars (New York: Spectra, 1994); Kim Robinson, Blue Mars (New York: Spectra, 1996); Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1969). 9. Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (New York: Macmillan, 1933), gives an account of research on whether or not people become acquainted with aspects of life and develop schemas of conduct with regard to perceptions of work through media accounts. The research was conducted among high school students regarding their post–­high school job directions and the reasons motivating their choices. Work in sociology has focused on the concept of anticipatory socialization, the process of gaining knowledge about work that begins in early childhood and continues until entering the workforce full time. See also Kenneth Levine and Cynthia Hoffner, “Adolescents’ Conceptions of Work,” Journal of Adolescent Research 21, no. 6 (2006): 647–­669; John Hassard and Ruth Holliday, Organization-­Representation (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1988); Ella Taylor, Prime-­Time Families Television Culture in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); John Van Mannen and Edgar Schein, “Toward a Theory of Organizational Socialization,” in Research in Organizational Behavior, ed. B. Straw (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1979), 209. The degree to which audiences are affected by the tele-­visual medium is a long-­ standing debate and research subject in field of Communication, known as “strong effects” vs. “weak effects.” Hadley Cantril’s 1940 study “The Invasion from Mars”—­ whether or not Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of a fictional invasion on Earth by aliens from Mars actually incited panic and hysteria in the listening audience—­is a good example of research on this theme. Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008). 10.  Nolo’s Plain-­English Law Dictionary (2009), s.v. “CSI Effect.” 11. Simon Cole and Rachel Dioso, “Law and the Lab: Do TV Shows Really Affect How Juries Act? Let’s Look at the Evidence,” Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2005; Stefan Lovgren, ‘“CSI” Effect’ Is Mixed Blessing for Real Crime Labs,” National Geographic News, September 23, 2004; Elayne Rapping, Law and Justice as Seen on TV (New York: NYU Press, 2003); Paul Rincon, “CSI Shows Give ‘Unrealistic View,’” BBC News, http://­news​.­bbc​.­co​.­uk​/­1​/­hi​/­sci​/­tech​/­4284335​.­stm (February 21, 2005). 12.  The day-­to-­day (or minute-­by-­minute) human experience with clock time is a central component in film that can portray humanity’s complicated relationships with one another, bureaucracy, capitalism, and clocks. Some films that have used clock time as central protagonist as a plot driver include Run Lola Run (1999), Three O’Clock High (1987), and Clockwatchers (1997). 13.  Charles Kiselyak, director, Money Never Sleeps (Twentieth Century-­Fox Film Corporation, 2000). 14.  “Greed Still Good as Douglas Returns to Wall Street,” Guardian, May 8, 2007. 15.  Tom Leonard, “Jordan Belfort,” Telegraph, February 25, 2008.

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16.  One film, Battle Beyond the Sun (1975), uses two countries racing to Mars to demonstrate that the winner is the one whose motivation was scientific discovery, as opposed to planetary domination, the motivation of the losing country. 17. In contrast to popular accounts, academic research offers insight on scientists’ training and work life situated in particular disciplines, historical time periods, and political systems. On scientists, national identity, and state politics, see Jacqueline Fortes and Larissa Lomnitz, Becoming a Scientist in Mexico: The Challenge of Creating a Scientific Community in an Underdeveloped Country (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1994); Chandra Mukerji, A Fragile Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Harry Collins has authored several books that study knowledge production and competition among physicists, including Gravity’s Ghost and Big Dog: Scientific Discovery and Social Analysis in The Twenty-­First Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Lisa Messeri’s Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, while focusing on space as a location and imagined concept, includes details on twenty-­first-­ century work life among planetary scientists across a number of institutional work environments. Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), offers an ethnographic study of microbiologists and microbes in twenty-­first-­century ocean research institutions. 18.  Anousheh Ansari and Homer Hickam, My Dream of Stars: From Daughter of Iran to Space Pioneer (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010); Marina Benjamin, Rocket Dreams (New York: Free Press, 2003); Scott Carpenter, For Spacious Skies (New York: New American Library, 2004); Brian O’Leary, The Making of an Ex-­Astronaut (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970); Shirley, Managing Martians; Linda Wade, Sally Ride: First American Female in Space (Hockessin, DE: Mitchell Lane Publishers, 2003). 19. Benjamin, Rocket Dreams; De Witt Kilgore, Astrofuturism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Bettyann Kevles, Almost Heaven (New York: Basic Books, 2003); McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth; Constance Penley, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: Verso, 1997); Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979). 20.  It is a common trope for an organization to play a main character in a film, similar to the role a city can play. See Martin Parker and Robert Cooper, “Cyberorganization,” in Organization-­Representation, ed. John Hassard and Ruth Holliday (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 201. In Fritz Lang’s 1929 film about travel to the Moon, Frau un Mond, the space vehicle itself drives the story as much as the humans. This film was written with the participation of renowned rocket scientist Hermann Oberth. 21.  Howard McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington: Smithsonian History of Aviation Series, 1997). For a discussion of the relationship between organizations, members, and organizational identity, see Mary Jo Hatch and Majken Schultz, “Scaling the Tower of Babel: Relational Differences between Identity, Image, and Culture in Organizations,” in The Expressive Organization, ed. Majken Schultz et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 11.

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22.  Mary Jane Chambers and Randall Chambers, Getting Off the Planet: Training Astronauts (Burlington, Ontario: Apogee, 2005); Henry Cooper, Before Lift-­off: The Making of a Space Shuttle Crew (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Patricia Santy, Choosing the Right Stuff (Westport: Praeger, 1994); Wolfe, The Right Stuff. 23. Kilgore, Astrofuturism. For literature on NASA’s efforts to include African American women in positions of management, see Harris, Harlem Princess; McQuaid, “Racism, Sexism, and Space Ventures.” 24. Erik Bergaust, Murder on Pad 34 (New York: Putnam, 1968); James Kauffman, “Adding Fuel to the Fire,” Public Relations Review 25, no. 4 (1999): 421–­432; Erlend Kennan and Edmund Harvey, Mission to the Moon (New York: Morrow, 1969). The Apollo 204 fire was the public’s first exposure to an organizational failure at NASA. The design of the escape hatch and the use of highly flammable materials were cited as causes of the fire and the inability of the astronauts to escape. 25.  A critical (and poststructuralist) account on the construction of masculinity in Apollo 13 is offered by Dario Llinares, “Idealized Heroes of ‘Retropia’: History, Identity and the Postmodern in Apollo 13,” in Space Travel and Culture: From Apollo to Space Tourism, ed. David Bell and Martin Parker (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 164. 26.  While NASA rules are such that any changes to a mission (technical or otherwise) require formal reviews (which are necessarily time-­consuming) and strict deadlines after which no changes can be made to hardware, some room is often allowed for minor workflow adjustments. 27.  This type of meeting (review, assessment, debrief, formal “after-­party dish”) highlights the importance of repetition, unlike in other discussions where it can be tiresome. In an assessment meeting, repetition helps to identify a variety of contexts in which an issue might surface, details that are not captured with the simple awareness that many or a few acknowledge an issue. 28.  The preservation of meeting contents is often overlooked. Future projects seeking to build on previous experiences, particularly about Mars time, or looking for opportunities for innovations would have an incomplete complete source of information. Presentations might be collected, shared, and used to inform future mission planning; oral accounts may only be remembered anecdotally (except when there are work ethnographers present). Beyond compiling accounts, synthesized and brief descriptions of contents with searchable terms are critical for collected materials to be of value for future studies and project development. This is a matter studied under the rubric of knowledge management, on which there is a particular focus at NASA. 29.  Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1973). Goffman’s categories, front stage and back stage, are an application of stage performance language to everyday behaviors motivated by degrees of formal and informal self-­presentations. Front stage typically means an audience is present

Notes 175

that requires conducting oneself according to a set of formal (culturally specific) values. Back stage typically includes other people as well but ones among whom a person can be informal, relaxed, and not subject to keeping up a particular appearance. For most people, public media about NASA and the MER mission is the front stage view and being inside the MER mission workspaces at JPL is the back stage. Inside the MER mission, however, these categories have another iteration. The main science work room, for example, was a front stage area and the workspaces for various instrument team were backstage areas. 30.  In 1974, a time management issue spurred revolt onboard America’s first space station, NASA’s Skylab, described by journalist Henry Cooper. Skylab astronauts went on strike to protest the work timetable that required them to do too much work in too little time. Activities within the space station took longer than mission control expected. During the stand-­off, Cooper described, their reactions to time management issues were characterized as “unpleasant” and their complaints as “bitchy.” Words that denote the strike were grounded in personal emotional dispositions rather than organizational time-­work reasoning. Henry Cooper, “Life in a Space Station-­I,” New Yorker, August 30, 1976; Cooper, “Life in a Space Station-­II,” New Yorker, September 6, 1976; Cooper, A House in Space (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976). 31. Goffman, Stigma. 32.  Fred Davis, “Deviance Disavowal,” Social Problems 9, no. 2 (1961): 120–­132. 33.  It also sometimes happens that people who are troublesome or uncooperative are promoted when it is considered the only means by which to remove them from a workgroup. 34. Mike Mullane, Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006): 93. 35.  On Nathaniel Kleitman and Bruce Richardson, see Nathaniel Kleitman, Nathaniel Kleitman Papers 1896–­2001 (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2007). For a video of their activities from 1938, see Studying Mystery of Sleep, Scientists Live in Month in Cave, https://­www​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v=xMH9eF5Bq70​&­feature=youtu​.­be​.­ On Kevin Warwick, see Rebecca Herzig, Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005). On Peary and his methods for reaching the North Pole, see Cyrus Adams, “The North Pole at Last,” American Review of Reviews 40 (1909): 420–­433; Donald MacMillan, How Peary Reached the Pole: the Personal Story of His Assistant, Donald B. MacMillan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934); Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). On Greeley’s expedition and rescue, see Michael Robinson, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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Chapter 5 1.  In other qualitative research conducted on MER, we find differing viewpoints. W. Clancey, also a NASA WSD&E researcher, found that the MER robots were not like human geologists (Clancey, “Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers,” San Jose Tech Museum lecture, August 28, 2012). His position was that the robots were wholly mechanical objects, vis-­à-­vis a traditional dichotomy of human versus tool. However, this fails to take into account the hundreds of activities and interactions in which scientists themselves drew on this relationship explicitly. In a public talk, Clancey recounted how, when he first heard PI Squyres use the term “robotic geologist,” Clancey immediately lamented the use of the term; indeed, he began the project with the stance that the robots were mechanical with no capacity for social relationships. Another ethnographic study on the MER mission, by J. Vertesi (Seeing Like a Rover), offered an analysis of the robots as totems, an anthropological term for a sacred object within a tribe that holds spiritual value and enjoins the holders to a personal relationship, some even say kinship. Vertesi’s analysis recognizes the social relationship between MER scientists and robots; however, construing the robots as totems does go far enough to convey the robots’ actions as interactions within a work environment. 2. For a collection of research papers on tools and science work, see Adele Clarke Joan Fujimura, eds., The Right Tools for the Job (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 3. Thomas Maugh and Charles Pillar, “Surprises in Clearest Mars Photo Yet,” Los Angeles Times, January 7, 2004. 4. The literature with MER-­related images that I collected during and since MER include the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Pasadena Star Tribune, Space​ .­com, National Geographic, Pravada, the Guardian, NASA, JPL, and Caltech newsletters. 5.  NASA/JPL, “Mars Exploration Rover Launches,” press kit (June 2003). 6.  Conversation analysis involves the close observation and transcription of speech acts using a suite of notations for word and sound utterances, turn-­taking, and pauses. See Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-­Taking for Conversation,” Language 50 (1974): 696–­735; Charles Goodwin and John Heritage, “Conversation Analysis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 19, no. 1 (1990): 283–­307. It has been used to bring attention to the effects of gender construction in workplace conversations; see Yumiko Ohara and Scott Saft, “Using Conversation Analysis to Track Gender Ideologies in Social Interaction,” Discourse & Society 14, no. 2 (2003): 153–­172; Elizabeth Stokoe and Janet Smithson, “Making Gender Relevant,” Discourse and Society 12, no. 2 (2001): 243–­269. Communication research has included discussion on the peoples’ social relationships with media; see

Notes 177

Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003). 7. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 8.  Donald Savage and Teresa Martini, “NASA Selects LEGO Company to Run Mars Rover Naming Contest,” press release, NASA Headquarters, LEGO Company (November 4, 2002). 9.  Lego website publicizing the contest, http://­www​.­nametherovers​.­org (2003) (URL no longer active). 10.  Henry Fountain, “Observatory,” New York Times, November 19, 2002. 11.  http://­www​.­nametherovers​.­org​. 12.  Guy Webster, “Girl with Dreams Names Mars Rovers ‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity,’” NASA/JPL press release (June 8, 2003). 13.  Tatiana Morales, “An Orphan’s Dream Lands on Mars,” CBS News, https://­www​ .­cbsnews​.­com​/­news​/­an​-­orphans​-­dream​-­lands​-­on​-­mars​/­(January 28, 2004). 14.  Webster, “Girl with Dreams Names Mars Rovers.” 15. Naming the rovers came at a much earlier stage than for preceding stand-­ins for humans that were sent into space. Forty-­two years earlier there was H.A.M., the chimpanzee sent into suborbit, whose naming did not take place until his return trip to Earth in order to avoid providing the public with an identifiable astronaut to worry about. Naming the rovers after rocket launch but prior to landing on Mars may have done the work of granting the mission a certain measure of success. Landing the rovers on Mars could be heralded as a partial mission success, salvaging a total mission failure in the event that the rovers did not survive the journey. After all, the construction of the rovers and a successful launch were still quite an achievement. The speculation of success was realized in January 2004, when both rovers landed on opposite sides of Mars, emerged from their carriers, and began exploration of the Martian terrain. 16.  Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge, 1960). 17.  NASA/JPL, “Mars Exploration Rovers Mission Summary.” 18. J. Vertesi described these movements continued during distributed operations and called them the “rover dance.” Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover. 19. Squyres, Roving Mars. 20.  On surrogate relationships between humans and technologies, see Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary

178

Notes

Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 295; Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions. 21.  Mike Rogers, “Flights! Cameras! Mars!” Caltech News (Pasadena: Caltech, 2003). 22.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). 23.  David Chandler, “Mars Rover Recovering from Memory Problems,” New Scientist (January 28, 2004); Leonard David, “Mars Rover Spirit Update: ‘Our Patient Is Healed,’” Space​.­com (February 6, 2004). 24.  Guy Webster, “Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Press Releases,” NASA/JPL press release (February 6, 2004). 25.  One core issue with using simulation exercises for learning work processes is the difficulty in creating the “realness” of two active interlocutors with different sets of information and knowledge. In previous ethnographic research that I conducted among airline employees and customers, I found similar issues in the employee training process. The airline employees were trained to manage customer relations, which include the variety of regular travel breakdowns, through scripted handbooks and software. However, the absence of active interlocutors to provide elements of urgency, along with unknown reception and return of information, provided a false sense of workflow. As a guide to dealing with this, experienced employees encouraged trainees not to worry about this issue because when dealing with “real” customers there would be experienced employees to show them how things “really get done.”

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INDEX

Page numbers followed by an “f” indicate figures. Abbe, Cleveland, 55 Aerojet, 23, 24f Air Corps Jet Propulsion Research Project, 22 Allen, William F., 56–­57 Allison, Michael, 63 American Magazine, 59 American Meteorological Society, Committee on Standard Time, 56 Anserlian, Garo, 89–­90 Anthropology, of organizations, of science and technology, 10–­11 Astronauts, 99 Athena science team, 6, 28–­32, 36, 29f Bartky, Ian, 56 Beer, Wilhelm, 62 Bethlehem Steel Company, 56 Blackout shades, 79–­80, 94 Bumper guards, 47–­48 Bush, George W., 74 California Institute of Technology (Caltech), 20–­21 Callas Rainbow, 87, 88f, 89 Challenger, 8 Childhood dreams, 33 Ciborra, Claudio, 82 Circadian rhythms, 78–­79

Clock time organizational structure and, 53, 144 sociology of time and, 53 standardization, 54–­55 work environment and, 57–­61 Collaborative Information Portal (CIP), 81–­87, 84f Collis, Sofi, 124–­125, 125f Communication, time latency, 73–­74 Communication constraints, 70–­74, 72f Coworkers, robots. See Robots as coworkers CSI effect, 102–­103 Culture, cultural norms, 2, 8, 11–­20, 30–­31, 41, 53–­54, 60–­61, 100–­105, 111–­114, 141–­144 Data collection, analysis, 13–­14, 61–­62, 70, 148 Day, 48 Deadlines, 49–­50 Dilbert, 167 Disney, Walt, 62 Displays, watches, rainbows, 81–­82 Ethnography, 10–­11, 14 data collection, analysis, 13–­14, 30n33, 44, 61–­62, 70, 148

198

Index

Executive Jewelers, 90 Eye strain, fatigue, 96–­97

Ley, Willy, 62 Los Angeles Times, 121

Formal gatherings, informal cues, 158 Formal vs. informal technologies, 81 Forman, Edward Seymour “Ed,” 20–­21

Maas, Dan, 5 Mädler, Johann, 62 Making the sausage, eating at buffet, 61–­62 Malina, Frank, 21–­23 Mariner missions, 34 Mars axial rotation, 62–­63 length of day, 2 life on, 1 sol, 2, 38, 48–­49, 62–­63 time zones calculation, conversion, 3, 64–­66, 81–­94 topographic map, 7f Mars and Beyond (Ley), 62 Mars Rover Animation (Maas), 5 Mars Society, 156 Mars24 Sunclock, 63, 63f Mars watches, 89–­92, 90f, 92f Mars yard, 51–­52 Martian jet lag, 109 Meal service, 79–­80, 80f Media representations, 17–­18, 74, 101–­105, 172 literary influences, 102 popular culture, science fiction, 102 Meeting types, content preservation, 174 MER Callas Palace, 42–­43, 43f landing sites, 5–­6, 6f managerial competency, 29–­30 mission, science operations, 162 mission goals, 33 mission members, 28–­31, 29f mission purpose, 1 mission success criteria, 49 mission workspaces, 14–­16, 41–­42 organizational infrastructure, 46–­47 Project Plan, 161

Gagliardi, Pasquale, 158 General Time Convention, 56–­57 Glennan, T. Keith, 23 Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), 63 Goffman, Erving, 101, 111 Grissom, Virgil “Gus,” 99 Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), 21 Gusterson, Hugh, 10 Handovers, 70 Human Factors workgroups, NASA, 78 Human-­technology relationships, 4, 30, 44–­48 Huygens, Christiaan, 62 Informal technologies, 86–­92 Infrastructure, 20 Infrastructure maintenance work, 80, 151, 168 Institutional experience, 30 Institutional kinship, 31 Jet-­assisted-­take-­off (JATO) units Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), 1, 6 interplanetary workspace, 36–­37, 37f location, 19 origins, 20–­25 temporal distances, 37 the lab, 25–­28 Kennedy, John F., 8, 49, 75

Index 199

seating, 39–­41, 39f, 40f, 45 sequencing room, 41 work organization, scheduling, 4 work room layout, color code schemes, 38–­40, 39f, 40f workspace setup, 43–­46 MERBoard, 45, 81–­87, 83f, 84f, 85f, 86f MER time, days/sols, deadlines, 48–­50 Multiple temporalities, 9–­10, 9f, 16 Mumford, L., 81 NASA, 23–­26, 33, 35, 51, 60, 74, 82–­83, 99–­100, 112–­113, 145–­146 cultures at, 2, 12–­13, 141–­144 Human Factors workgroups, 6, 18 media and, 7, 105–­107, 122–­125, 138, 141–­142 work environment, 16, 100 National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), 23 Normative temporal order, 5 Nuclear Rites (Gusterson), 10 Operations readiness tests (ORTs), 51, 135–­139 Opportunity. See Robots Organizational infrastructure, 10, 15, 20, 46, 53–­54, 57, 60–­61, 86, 88, 113–­114, 138, 160 Organization memory, 60 Parsons, John Whiteside “Jack,” 20–­23 Pasadena, 19–­20 Pathfinder Mission, NASA, 99 Piece-­rate-­system (Taylor), 58–­59 Pragmatic vs. hermeneutic dimensions, 158 Professional identity, media messaging, 17–­18 Rail time, 55–­57 Railway Association of America (RAA), 56

Redundancy, 34n38, 156 Remote communication, robotic science, 99–­100 Robots, 5 animated depiction, 121 antennas, 157 anthropomorphization, 18, 34, 119, 121–­135 assembly, 35f instrumentation suite, 34–­35 movement rate, 35 naming, 124–­125, 177 as robotic geologists, 121, 121f robot time, working in, 72–­73 sandbox rover, ORTS, 135–­136, 136f skeletal depiction, 120f technology robustness, 117 Robots as coworkers centralized needs, 117–­118 co-­reliant interactions, 118–­119 emotional states, 132 kinship, appendages, emotions, 123–­132 life, death, agency, 132–­135 organizational shiftwork, 117–­118 rite of passage, 126 Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT), 129–­130, 131f Schedules, 49, 61–­62, 66, 67f, 71f, 94–­95 Schmunk, Robert, 63 Science Technology Studies, 10n15, 11n17, 15n23 Scientific management, 57–­59 Security, security checkpoints, 26–­28 Sinclair, Upton, 59 Skylab, 175 Sleeping quarters, cots, 79, 94, 95f Sociotemporal rhythms, 74–­75, 94–­95 Sol, 2, 38, 48–­49, 62–­63 Space exploration, heroic responses, 104–­111

200

Spirit. See Robots Sputnik, 23, 102, 153 Squyres, Steve, 6, 10, 28, 64–­65, 89–­90 Standard clock time, cultural habit, 8, 16 Stigma types, management, 111–­115, 142 Suicide Squad, 20–­25, 22f, 24f Taylor, Frederick W., 57–­59 Technological drift, 81–­92 Temporal relationships, 8, 37, 143–­144 Time management, 6, 48–­50, 57–­61 Time-­related questions, 13, 16 Time-­work relationships, 4–­8 breakdowns, 113–­115 clock time and, 53 scientific management and, 57–­59 structural, cultural support, 53–­54, 100 support technologies, 81–­86 tactical timelines, 51–­52, 61–­62, 66, 68–­73, 69f Taylorism, 57–­61 Time zones calculation, conversion, 3, 64–­66 Uniform time standard, 163 United Airlines, 11–­12 Values, culture, 11 von Braun, Wernher, 62 von Kàrmàn, Theodore, 21 Wajcman, Judith, 8, 53 Wales, Roxanne, 11, 43 Watches. See Mars watches Work simulations, 51–­52 Work Systems Design and Evaluation (WSD&E) workgroup, 10–­11 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 49, 74, 81

Index

Inside Technology Series Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, W. Bernard Carlson, and Trevor Pinch David Demortain, The Science of Bureaucracy: Risk Decision-­Making and the US Environmental Protection Agency Joeri Bruynincx, Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong Edward Jones-­Imhotep, The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War Jennifer L. Lieberman, Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882–­1952 Jess Bier, Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: Occupied Landscapes of International Technoscience Benoît Godin, Models of Innovation: The History of an Idea Stephen Hilgartner, Reordering Life: Knowledge and Control in the Genomics Revolution Brice Laurent, Democratic Experiments: Problematizing Nanotechnology and Democracy in Europe and the United States Cyrus C. M. Mody, The Long Arm of Moore’s Law: Microelectronics and American Science Tiago Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism Teun Zuiderent-­Jerak, Situated Interventions: Sociological Experiments in Healthcare Basile Zimmermann, Technology and Cultural Difference: Electronic Music Devices, Social Networking Sites, and Computer Encodings in Contemporary China Andrew J. Nelson, The Sound of Innovation: Stanford and the Computer Music Revolution Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power: The Pre-­Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry Casey O’Donnell, Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators Christina Dunbar-­Hester, Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes, editors, Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America Anique Hommels, Jessica Mesman, and Wiebe E. Bijker, editors, Vulnerability in Technological Cultures: New Directions in Research and Governance Amit Prasad, Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India Charis Thompson, Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, editors, Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society Catelijne Coopmans, Janet Vertesi, Michael Lynch, and Steve Woolgar, editors, Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited Rebecca Slayton, Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949–­2012 Stathis Arapostathis and Graeme Gooday, Patently Contestable: Electrical Technologies and Inventor Identities on Trial in Britain Jens Lachmund, Greening Berlin: The Co-­Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature Chikako Takeshita, The Global Biopolitics of the IUD: How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women’s Bodies

Cyrus C. M. Mody, Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology Morana Alač, Handling Digital Brains: A Laboratory Study of Multimodal Semiotic Interaction in the Age of Computers Gabrielle Hecht, editor, Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War Michael E. Gorman, editor, Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise: Creating New Kinds of Collaboration Matthias Gross, Ignorance and Surprise: Science, Society, and Ecological Design Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity Wiebe E. Bijker, Roland Bal, and Ruud Hendricks, The Paradox of Scientific Authority: The Role of Scientific Advice in Democracies Park Doing, Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron: Biology, Physics, and Change in Science Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II Richard Rottenburg, Far-­Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe, Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, editors, Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users Deborah G. Johnson and Jameson W. Wetmore, editors, Technology and Society: Building Our Sociotechnical Future Trevor Pinch and Richard Swedberg, editors, Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies Christopher R. Henke, Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California Helga Nowotny, Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City Joshua M. Greenberg, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores tand the Invention of Movies on Video Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa, editors, Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities Christine Hine, Systematics as Cyberscience: Computers, Change, and Continuity in Science Wesley Shrum, Joel Genuth, and Ivan Chompalov, Structures of Scientific Collaboration Shobita Parthasarathy, Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care Kristen Haring, Ham Radio’s Technical Culture Atsushi Akera, Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers and Computers during the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

Geoffrey C. Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930–­1970 Anique Hommels, Unbuilding Cities: Obduracy in Urban Sociotechnical Change David Kaiser, editor, Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives Charis Thompson, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technology Pablo J. Boczkowski, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers Dominique Vinck, editor, Everyday Engineering: An Ethnography of Design and Innovation Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, editors, How Users Matter: The Co-­Construction of Users and Technology Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio, Biomedical Platforms: Realigning the Normal and the Pathological in Late-­Twentieth-­Century Medicine Paul Rosen, Framing Production: Technology, Culture, and Change in the British Bicycle Industry Maggie Mort, Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines Donald MacKenzie, Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences Charles Bazerman, The Languages of Edison’s Light Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet Herbert Gottweis, Governing Molecules: The Discursive Politics of Genetic Engineering in Europe and the United States Kathryn Henderson, On Line and On Paper: Visual Representation, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering Susanne K. Schmidt and Raymund Werle, Coordinating Technology: Studies in the International Standardization of Telecommunications Marc Berg, Rationalizing Medical Work: Decision Support Techniques and Medical Practices Eda Kranakis, Constructing a Bridge: An Exploration of Engineering Culture, Design, and Research in Nineteenth-­Century France and America Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America Donald MacKenzie, Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change Louis L. Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers Geoffrey C. Bowker, Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920–­1940 Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, editors, Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change Stuart Blume, Insight and Industry: On the Dynamics of Technological Change in Medicine

Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance Pamela E. Mack, Viewing the Earth: The Social Construction of the Landsat Satellite System H. M. Collins, Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris, Sulphuric Utopias: The History of Maritime Fumigation Zara Mirmalek, Making Time on Mars http://­mitpress​.­mit​.­edu​/­books​/­series​/­inside​-­technology