Escapist Fantasies and SF Dreaming Apollo Visions . 1968 = first vision of Earth from moon . Jim Lovell: Earth appeared as grand oasis of terrestrial life floating in an empty universe, an eerie and wonderful manifestation of what people had already called spaceship Earth · Disrupted western cartographic imaginary ? "Man accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical Earth in a closed sphere of human activity" . These images were produced at the time of the Cold War, the looming spectre of nuclear war, colonial independence . This "Blue marble" image (1962) reveals this fragile, finite and seemingly harmonious planet devoid of these geopolitical contestations · Challenged the dominant geographical imaginary which would have Europe and America as the largest and most important areas, in this photograph is dominated by Africa and Indian ocean · Environmental icon: fragile but home · Reemergence of ideas such as 'Mother Earth' · "yearning for the physical sensuousness of a wet and blue-green Earth" (Haraway 1995: 174) Standard critiques: . Embedded in US frontier mythology and empire building. At the same time as this image appears neutral and given, its hiding the existing socio-technical apparatus (i.e. the competitive ideological space programme) . Goes back to essay written by Frederick Jackson Turner about the closing of the frontier in US 1893: the time when the US nation is no longer a geographical one of moving west, new frontiers had to be found to continue the exploring pioneering spirit of the US nation alive. space = final frontier? . Haraway likes the irony that of the emergence of the modern environmental movement relying upon the technologies of cold-war rivalry. . What she calls the God trick - disembodied view from nowhere · "Earth seen from space fixes a moment where the globe emerges as an eco-object. This world picture is delivered by the technology of a cold war superpower appropriated into environmentalist iconography" · Other critiques include this quote: o "The planetary image [may] . . . convey . . . a serene (some might say contemptuous) . . . disregard for the day-to-day environmental insults suffered by billions of the world's poorest citizens: dirty air, polluted water, inadequate sanitation, infectious diseases, damaged crops, loss of green spaces, and the decay of built environments." (Jasanoff 2001: 335) o Referable to Chakrabarty's 'rifts' o She concludes that maybe this image has actually accelerated anthropocene crises rather than slowing them down. Disrupts the idea of Earth as being inexhaustible of resources
. This image displaces "the pulsing detailed vitality of terrestrial life" with this impoverished static straction, a rearview of a different earth . The Anthrop has sort of made this image redundant . Bill Mckibben's 'Eaarth' suggests a wound in the flesh of the whole earth and the birth of an angry and superheated, inhospitable twin. One in which melting ice caps etc become the new norm Space Exploration . Seemed to stall at the end of the Cold War · Continuation of low-satellite orbits