Into the Extreme

"This captivating book tells the story of how 'outer space' is being reimagined and remade in the key of the environmental, as a cosmic ecosystem. Drawing on fieldwork with scientists at an undersea space-analog habitat, at NASA mission control, and at a center for space medicine, Valerie Olson artfully demonstrates how our human home planet is the scale and place from which a habitable cosmos is made and imagined."—Stefan Helmreich, author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond

"In this seminal ethnographic study, Valerie Olson offers nothing less than a new anthropological object: the system—solar, living, artificial, conceptual—for showing how ‘future space’ is being made on the horizons of the contemporary ecopolitical moment. Traveling alongside her, we come into close contact with knowledge that unEarthed entities are uniquely placed to reveal, and with questions that closed and semi-open systems pose to timeworn discliplinary limits."—Debbora Battaglia, author of E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces

The first book-length, in-depth ethnography of U.S. human spaceflight

What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extreme, revealing how outer space contributes to making what counts as the scope and scale of today’s natural and social environments. With unprecedented access to spaceflight worksites ranging from astronaut training programs to life science labs and architecture studios, Olson examines how U.S. experts work within the solar system as the container of life and as a vast site for new forms of technical and political environmental control. 

Olson’s book shifts our attention from space’s political geography to its political ecology, showing how scientists, physicians, and engineers across North America collaborate to build the conceptual and nuts-and-bolts systems that connect Earth to a specifically ecosystemic cosmos. This cosmos is being redefined as a competitive space for potential economic resources, social relations, and political strategies. 

Showing how contemporary U.S. environmental power is bound up with the production of national technical and scientific access to outer space, Into the Extreme brings important new insights to our understanding of modern environmental history and politics. At a time when the boundaries of global ecologies and economies extend far below and above Earth’s surface, Olson’s new analytic frameworks help us understand how varieties of outlying spaces are known, made, and organized as kinds of environments—whether terrestrial or beyond.

Valerie Olson is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.

Contents
Introduction: Space Systems
1. Metasystem
2. Connection
3. Separation
4. Transhabitation
5. Solar Ecosystem
Conclusion: Future Space
Acknowledgments
Bibliography