11 minute read
Imagining Astraeus
by UF_CLAS
By Kathryn Pizzurro
Imagination and innovation are inextricably laced in many human endeavors, perhaps none more so than when we look to the stars.
The ability to imagine has given the human species the power to create, problem solve, empathize, and theorize. In fact, creative imagination can be found at the origin of every modern development throughout time. From medical advancements and the formation of governments to the establishment of the internet and the creation of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 — all at first were simply imagined.
So, it is not a leap to think that in establishing a space institute at the University of Florida, collaborators would continue to anchor the institution in the human element of imagination. That’s where space exploration began.
Ancient Greek philosopher Thales, later known as the father of Greek science and mathematics, questioned the true origins of the universe. Introducing deductive reasoning, Thales sought answers beyond the stories of gods and heroes. Three hundred years later, Aristotle theorized the geocentric layout of the universe with Earth at its stationery core and celestial bodies revolving around it.
In the early 14th century, the Italian poet Dante told the story of a vertical journey through the universe, reaching the stars in what he described as paradise. And in the fall of 1609, Galileo began observing the heavens with instruments he created to magnify his view up to 20 times beyond what the natural eye could see. Through his telescope, Galileo observed mountains on the moon, rings around Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter, all evidence that the universe did not revolve around the Earth, but the sun.
Inspired by words written in 1865 by Jules Verne in his novel, “De la Terre à la Lune” (From the Earth to the Moon), a 10-year-old Russian boy questioned, could travel be possible beyond the Earth’s atmosphere? Could Verne’s 900-foot-long space gun propel humans — or anything for that matter — through the bonds of gravity and into outer space?
Maybe not, but it was that thought, that very human characteristic of curiosity that drove that boy — eventually a high school math teacher, to create what is argued as the basic mathematical equation for space flight. Today, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is known as the grandfather of modern rocketry.
Some 30 years later, this time in Worcester, Massachusetts, another young boy read H.G. Wells’ science fiction classic, “The War of the Worlds.” The next year, at the age of 17, after climbing a cherry tree to cut off its dead limbs, he became fascinated with the sky.
“I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet,” he later wrote. “It seemed to me then that a weight whirling around a horizontal shaft, moving more rapidly above than below, could furnish lift by virtue of the greater centrifugal force at the top of the path. I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended. Existence at last seemed very purposive.”
These imaginings led engineer, professor, physicist, and inventor Robert Hutchings Goddard to create and build the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket. And upon his work, modern rocket innovation was born.
First formed in the minds of ancient philosophers, poets, writers, astronomers, and mathematicians, the idea of a world beyond our own and its potential exploration came to be. With the imagination ignited by the human element of curiosity and the advancement of science, humankind has made yesterday’s fiction into today’s reality and, potentially, tomorrow’s quest.
If we are to believe certain narrow-minded people — and what else shall we call them? — humanity is confined within a circle … from which there is no escape, condemned to vegetate on this globe, never able to venture into interplanetary space! That’s not so! We are going to the Moon, we shall go to the planets, we shall travel to the stars just as today we go from Liverpool to New York!
— The Annotated Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon. Edited and translated by Walter James Miller, Gramercy Books, 1978
Forming Astraeus
In January 2024, UF announced that $2.5 million of funding received from the Florida Legislature for the advancement of interdisciplinary scholarship and enhancement of the student experience would be earmarked for the development of a space-related institute.
Managed by UF Research, the UF Astraeus Space Institute was formed with Rob Ferl, distinguished professor who studies biology in space, named as its inaugural director. When first developing the idea of a space institute at the University of Florida, Ferl seized the opportunity to make humanities an integral part of the conversation.
“In starting a space institute here now, we have the benefit of being able to look back and say in this new era, the commercial space era, the space station era, the era when more and more people are going into space, if we were to re-imagine what a space institute could look like, what would we want to do now?”
“One of the things that we bring to the table at the University of Florida is that we have the breadth of expertise here — the human element, what the very idea of space means to us as a people, what does it mean to our various cultures, is the moon different for different people, what about how we consider space overall,” Ferl said.
As director of Astraeus, Ferl brought a humanist on board as one of his first tasks. Terry Harpold, associate professor of English, is a scholar of science fiction literature and film and is one of five assistant directors with Astraeus. Harpold is charged with advancing the conversation and collaboration across the disciplines of science, the humanities, and the arts.
“To his credit, Rob Ferl’s vision of the space institute goes beyond a massive bureaucratic effort to coordinate projects and seek large grants. It is about understanding not just the how of space exploration, but also the why of it, in all the forms that question takes. This is not merely a technical enterprise or a commercial enterprise, but it is also a cultural enterprise, an imaginative enterprise,” Harpold said.
Enabling the Conversation
“My role is to create opportunities for others to have the conversations that move us forward intentionally, collaboratively, in a way that cross-pollinates our disciplines,” Harpold said.
“The vision of Astraeus that is beginning to emerge is, for example, one in which a poet and an aerospace engineer can develop a more nuanced understanding of what a satellite represents in the imagination as it moves through its orbit. Or a human performance researcher studying the effects of weightlessness on the body might work with a dance choreographer to catalogue the strangely aesthetic qualities of astronauts’ everyday movements in a microgravity environment. You don’t know what’s going to happen to your perception of something when you start dialoguing about it from multiple, even inconsistent, perspectives. And that creates new forms of knowledge.”
A series of public-facing speaker events co-organized by Harpold and Jordan Callaham, Astraeus’s assistant director for administration, kicked off in the fall 2024 to do just that. Speakers included Christian Davenport, a reporter with The Washington Post who covers space and author of “The Space Barons: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos” (2018); a seminar on the search for extraterrestrial life with astronomer and former NASA Chief Scientist John Grunsfeld, a veteran of five space shuttle flights, including three to repair the Hubble Space Telescope; a presentation on geospatial intelligence by Byron Knight, a distinguished UF alumnus and chief scientist in the Advanced Systems and Technology Directorate at the National Reconnaissance Office; and a lecture on “Our Moon, Ourselves” by science journalist Rebecca Boyle, author of “Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are” (2024).
In creating these opportunities for varied, interdisciplinary conversations, Ferl hopes the Astraeus community can help overcome the perceived divide between the humanities and the disciplines of science. Creating an environment of understanding and appreciation for both approaches is crucial for a successful discussion, he said.
“I can never master my colleagues’ fields. Everyone in this community is specialized in what they do and it might seem at first that they don’t have many interests in common,” Harpold said. “But I can be their ally in every sense of the word, and they can be mine, and we can do stuff together that is innovative and beautiful.”
Creating Pathways for Students
Amy Williams, associate professor of geology and an astrobiologist and geo-biologist within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, also serves as an assistant director for Astraeus. Williams sees Astraeus as a vehicle to bring together people who did not have that common space, that common umbrella to unite them previously.
“I see it from the scientific perspective, but I have been so encouraged that from its inception, the space institute is meant to be a place for everyone by everyone, and what excites me is thinking about how the humanities do play a role in our exploration, perception of and respect for space,” Williams said. “The human component does sometimes get ignored. But CLAS has gone above and beyond to bring that human perspective to both the challenges and the things that we celebrate as a group.”
Within Astraeus, Williams focuses on student experience, engagement, and perception of the space program. “The number of students who reach out to me on a daily basis wanting to do astrobiology research or planetary science — which is just one corner of what we do just even at UF, is tremendous,” Williams said.
Her goal is to expand the community to answer the enormous demand and serve the students who are interested in working in the space industry, in whatever capacity that may be. By potentially expanding the course offerings, providing students help with navigating internships and developing relationships with industry partners, we can, in turn, feed the growing space workforce and the Florida economy.
Preparing for Deeper Impact
With a global space economy estimated at $630 million in 2023 and projected to reach $1.8 billion by 2035, the opportunity for growth is near limitless.
Erika Wagner, senior director of emerging market development with American aerospace manufacturer and space technologies company Blue Origin, said the integral incorporation of the humanities into the UF Institute is what distinguishes it among its peers.
“While we often think of space through a lens of science and technology, it has always been a field deeply intertwined with people, history, policy, culture, design, and storytelling,” Wagner said.
“A program that gives students the tools to think about this holistically will position them for deeper impact. And a research portfolio that grapples with this in a transdisciplinary way will understand the motivations, possibilities, and challenges of our future in space far better than any narrow lens can.
“Space exploration has always taken all of us — not just engineers and scientists and technicians, but policymakers, designers, accountants, lawyers, writers, human resources, and on and on. Professionals who couple a liberal arts education with a robust understanding of the field will unlock enormous possibilities,” Wagner added.
The Mission at Hand
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said at Rice University, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Less than seven years later, that goal was met. But is the Astraeus goal quite as finite?
“We want to have an organically developed and eventually defined community of people that looks at the broad aspects of space exploration in ways that are curiosity driven, that are informed by the breadth of the university and that catapult any of the university efforts beyond what any individual might be able to do,” Ferl said.
Astraeus, Ferl said, will strive “to create a culture of broad-ranging input where if somebody raises their hand and asks the question, what happens to music in space? We ought to be able to talk about that, wonder about it and see if there is a question that we can start to answer.”
In five years, Ferl imagines a “community of a few hundred students, and a couple hundred faculty, where engineers are sitting down with biologists across the table from lawyers and philosophers. Where an idea is explored and analyzed from not just the scientific perspective but economic, social, philosophical and environmental.”
UF’s Astraeus Space Institute stands poised to blend the human elements of imagination and curiosity with critical analysis and scientific reasoning as we step into the new era of space exploration and inspire generations beyond our own.
