Global media cultures among the stars: Formations of celebrity in outer space

Introduction: global celebrity beyond the globe

The thickening of media apparatus in the 20th and 21st centuries transformed our preoccupation with celebrity. As technologies sustaining cultural practice have evolved, so too have the circumstances and effects of collective renown; old notions of who or what makes a celebrity are reformulated as divisions between public and private, audience and performance, extraordinary and everyday are increasingly whittled away by the currents of mediated social life. While technological momentum conditioned the character of fame and facilitated its planetary reach – enhancing the possibilities for ‘the recognition of certain individuals on a global scale’ (Driessens, 2013: 6), or what has been termed ‘global’, ‘worldwide’ or ‘super-’ celebrity (Kellner, 2009; Redmond, 2016) – it also launched the public figure of celebrity in outer space. The advent of the space age reinforced the ‘global’ extent of media cultures surrounding the production and reception of celebrity and supported their migration outside the planet. Not only did technological innovations implemented in outer space such as satellite broadcasting, imaging and remote sensing forever change the parameters of mediation, connectivity and visibility on Earth, they also propelled cultural fascination with celebrity beyond the globe.

This is not to say that the extra-terrestrial unfolding of fame begins in the space age; a long and opulent history of cultural imaginings surrounding outer space has itself provided impetus for its technological conquest and continues to inscribe it with speculative voyages of discovery and fantasies of otherworldliness (Geppert, 2012; McDougall, 1997; Rosenberg, 2008). ¹ Nonetheless, the space age furthered the incorporation of our planetary exterior into cultural mores and transformed the ways in which it facilitated formations of celebrity. Aside from inspiring the creation of a popular host of fictional space characters and personas such as Captain Kirk, R2D2, E.T. and Ziggy Stardust, it also allowed celebrity status to be conferred on those from Earth who actually went into space – from Sputnik and Neil Armstrong, Pioneer and Voyager, to the space tourist Dennis Tito and the Mars Rovers. While imaginary journeys in space continue to progress alongside and overlap with its genuine exploration, these non-fictional ‘stars’ of the space age increasingly constitute a distinctive register of celebrity. We place these real-life space travellers and their exploits under the rubric of ‘space celebrity’ in order to explore how the ongoing spread and multiplication of public cultures of fame and recognition (Holmes and Redmond, 2012; Rojek, 2001; Turner, 2006, 2010) are steadily evolving an extra-planetary purview. As we note, this is a process that is still in its nascent stages – only a little more than a half century into as-yet-undetermined prospects, it has nonetheless already attracted various forms of celebrity currency and undergone a series of formative developments.

The space celebrity formation (as both a noun and a verb) is inseparable from a gamut of processes that structure human societies and configure our ways of life. It is conditioned by the systems of power, knowledge and wealth that underpin space exploration, which comprise space agencies such as NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and the European Space Agency (ESA), private companies such as SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, military complexes, international organisations and creative industries. Similarly to its terrestrial counterparts whose celebrity depends upon strategies of public performance and economies of visibility (Marshall, 1997; Turner, 2004), space celebrity crosses a range of media platforms in varied forms of popular science, entertainment, sensational images, outlandish news and awe-inspiring information, reaching a worldwide public and asserting its own social effects. Its operations are likewise grounded within the processes of construction and validations of identity through which ‘the individual self’ is produced ‘through the public world’ (Marshall, 2010: 46). Like celebrity on Earth, which performs the distinct social function of engaging individuals and gathering communities (Hartley, 1992; Marshall, 2010; Rojek, 2001; Turner, 2006, 2010; Wark, 1999), space celebrity continues to shape collective ways of thinking and feeling. However, the unforgiving setting of outer space – the Earth’s exterior, in which the human presence is necessarily dependent upon and determined by technologies – puts our cultural preoccupation with celebrity into relief, emphasising both its increasingly ‘global’ and mediated condition. Occupied as a popular site for public performance and recognition, outer space conditions the conferral of collective aspirations upon individual proxies, providing a platform from which they participate in the ongoing transformation of ‘representational culture’ (Marshall, 2010) at a planetary scale, extending the cohesive affinities of celebrity into our developing relations with outer space.

As space exploration increasingly becomes a vehicle of global desires and anxieties, its celebrities convey ideas about our collective future as a space-faring race and affirm the prospect of outer space as a ‘province of mankind’, as envisioned by the Outer Space Treaty from 1967 (United Nations, 2002). To socialise the extra-terrestrial space, to transform it into humankind’s domain, inevitably involves reproducing systems of signs and meanings drawn from a familiar culture. However, due to the ‘inhuman’ nature of outer space, this has not been straightforward – it is difficult to promote a place that is so socially distant and (as far as we know it), so devoid of life. It is assumed that outer space should be ‘discovered’, but for us to be galvanised into doing so, it first needs to be inhabited by recognisable characters. In this sense, a space explorer becomes a pivotal point in the broader processes of socialisation and enculturation that surround humanity’s extra-planetary ventures. The official status of astronauts in international space law is that of ‘envoys of mankind’ (United Nations, 2002). Such a definition absorbs the operative framework of celebrity and its attention to identity and identification into the social role of astronauts. It casts astronauts as privileged individuals who are representatives of us all, conferring on them a kind of global citizenship and offering the social coordinates and a configuration of cultural perspectives that suggest both the widening scope of public prominence and its extra-planetary inclination.

Yet in a space so rarefied that human ‘individuals’ are already metonyms of a global collective, an environment in which our presence is always and necessarily technologically mediated, it is not only human individuals who perform and impose a set of affects on the world at large. Terrestrial celebrity also involves animals, and ‘some “things”, places or entities’ (Goodman and Littler, 2013: 7), and the inauguration of space celebrity actually commences with non-humans. It starts with an object – Sputnik, and then proceeds with animals – dogs and monkeys among others, who were trailblazers for the human arrival in space. The many space technologies, in particular, have taken on aspects of celebrity capital, a situation in which these human-made ‘space objects’ (as they are officially classified in the Outer Space Treaty) themselves accrue forms of fame which figure in the wider social influences of celebrity cultures. Although non-human space explorers do not share the same legal status as astronauts (but, like astronauts, their presence in space is tied to particular nations and corporations), they too are humanity’s ‘envoys’ into the unknowns of space, global intermediaries whose ‘nonhuman charisma’ (Lorimer, 2007) underwrites the purview of their celebrity and facilitates the cultural absorption of outer space.

The story of fame in outer space is not a simple move away from humans towards non-humans; it waxes and wanes from living beings such as Ham the chimpanzee, the crew of Apollo 11 and Chris Hadfield to objects such as the golf-balls that Alan Shepard left on the Moon or the Lego figurine of Galileo on board the Juno probe. It contains myriad technical ‘things’ without which space celebrity would only be rendered in fiction – from relatively simple devices like the Sputnik and Vanguard satellites to the more complex Hubble and Kepler Space Telescopes. It also involves human-technological assemblages such as remotely operated robotic missions on Mars and ‘manmade closed ecological systems’ (Gitelson et al., 2003) such as the International Space Station. It spans sites such as Tranquility Base and Gale Crater, spectacular events such as New Horizons’ Pluto flyby, Rosetta’s landing on the comet 67P, and also disasters such as those that have befallen Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia. In outer space what P.D. Marshall (2013) describes as the ‘personification of agency’ – processes in which celebrity status distributes representative power to certain individuals – not only applies to particular human explorers who stand in for our entire species, but the parameters of global recognition broaden to potentially encompass all things of terrestrial origin.

Our presence in space is conveyed and convened by these privileged human and non-human actors, and the extraordinary events in which they participate – which all reflect back multiple traits of terrestrial societies, one of which is the activity associated with upholding only certain ‘individuals’ to both scrutiny and adoration. Over 500 people, thousands of technologies (including over 6000 satellites) and uncertain numbers of non-human animals have travelled into space thus far, and few are recognised as a common cultural reference. ² Space exploration itself is select, and space celebrity even more exclusive. Like terrestrial fame, admittance to the ranks of extra-planetary prominence is a matter for the elite. Media advances have been facilitating the admission of an ever-more diverse body of participants into the processes of celebrity creation and circulation (Hartley, 1999, 2008) but this tendency towards the democratisation of access is itself ‘demotic’ as its increasing openness to the ‘lived experience of “the ordinary”’ (Turner, 2010: 83) nevertheless preserves social hierarchies and perpetuates gradations between individuals and communities. In outer space, this simultaneous democratic receptivity and demotic incorporation of contemporary celebrity cultures is sharply apparent. Alongside its official designation as a shared province of human endeavour, the peculiar environmental context of outer space offers the circumstances in which its Earth-born explorers, be they human or inhuman, become upheld as exceptional individuals that represent ‘us’ (so far only to ourselves) as a single collective. This interplay between the elite and the egalitarian that characterises space celebrities, calibrates their potential contribution as productive participants in the social arena of life, reinforcing their role in the establishment of our relations with outer space and accentuating their function in reframing questions of public recognition and representation for the space age.

An inhuman environment, outer space is not conducive to the kinds of sociality indulged by the human species, nonetheless, as we advance the technical means of space travel we bring with us our own ‘stars’, cultural constellations to populate a common sky. In this sense, the extra-terrestrial trajectories of fame and its human and non-human protagonists emerge as a powerful expression of our public cultures and their global provisions, providing a unique lens though which to consider ideas about our shared ways of life and the status of those who represent these collective modes of being and belonging. In the following sections we probe into the extra-planetary prospect of celebrity, tracing the key points in its historical emergence and the ways in which it matures within evolving media cultures. Exploring the exchanges between ‘common’ and extraordinary, democratic and demotic that inscribe celebrity cultures, we suggest its formation in outer space indicates aspects of a technologically attuned collectivity that may influence the social horizon of our common world on and off the Earth.

Assembling space celebrity

On 4 October 1957, amidst the tensions of the Cold War, an unpreceded event forged a new direction in the course of human history – an artificial satellite developed by the Soviet space programme was successfully launched into low-Earth orbit, lifting the natural impositions of our terrestrially bound condition. The first human-made object placed outside our home planet – a small metal sphere equipped with four external antennae – Sputnik became a household name overnight. Capturing the public interest, the satellite precipitated the ‘space race’ and led to the foundation of NASA, the reordering of international politics and a repositioning of outer space on the global stage. These developments sparked a series of breakthrough achievements, prompting a range of Earth-born ‘firsts’ in space which garnered global recognition. A stray dog, Laika, soon followed Sputnik (in 1957), Yuri Gagarin entered history as the first human in space (in 1961), Alan Shepard completed the first human-piloted spaceflight (also in 1961), Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in orbit (in 1963) and Neil Armstrong the first to walk on the Moon (in 1969). These early space explorers galvanised worldwide media at the time, which firmly asserted their public image within endeavours to make outer space part of our shared world. Regardless of their nationality, species, sentience or social background, each of them attained the ‘representative power of celebrities’ (Marshall, 2010: 36) as emblems of humanity’s achievements, and together they transformed the ways in which we conceive of our presents and futures in space.

With an affective power drawn from a history of maritime and polar exploration, the image of the space pioneer encouraged interest in the discovery of our planetary outside. Profusely disseminated through television, magazines and newspapers, the exploits of the astronauts in particular revived the heroic figure of the explorer. The media spectacle of the human conquest of space culminates with the Apollo 11 maiden landing on the Moon in 1969. Through the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station in Australia, grainy black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface was broadcast to hundreds of millions of people, gathering them around an event of unprecedented magnitude. ³ At the edge of a televised era of mass media, their ‘giant leap’ on behalf of ‘mankind’ (despite planting the US flag) made them celebrity citizens of the world. The early astronauts became high-profile figures, and while Gagarin and Armstrong were both celebrated as national heroes and made part of the creation of patriotic narratives, they also became famous internationally (Launius, 2008; Rosenberg, 2008), over time reaching global stardom. Their publicity was in part a result of media wars that accompanied the space race and the assertion of ‘soft power’ deployed to build competing images of progress and domination, but the forms of influence they came to represent extended beyond geopolitics. Achieving their celebrities by assuming the role of our envoys in outer space, astronauts framed its exploration as an arena of collective human progress. They, as Roger Launius sums up, ‘put a very human face’ on space endeavours while themselves attaining the status of cultural icons (2008: 191), becoming globally conspicuous as the representatives and promotional agents of the species’ first extra-planetary forays. The mass distribution of their celebrity not only indicated tendencies to package their achievements into a ready-made product for the consumption of global audiences. It also suggested an awareness of the importance of media visibility as a means of facilitating cultural engagement with space exploration and reinforcing shared perspectives and values – an approach that became particularly important for space agencies such as NASA, which continues to develop a sophisticated, cross-media system of promotion designed to entertain and persuade, but also educate and inspire.

Since the Moon landing, fictional human space travellers have proliferated across popular culture, but actual astronauts have been gradually disappearing from the foreground. Several other Apollo missions returned to the Moon, but none of them made any revolutionary breakthrough that could reinvigorate a declining public fascination with lunar probes, with the last one, Apollo 17 in 1972, being ‘not even televised due to lack of interest’ (Parrett, 2004: 9). In the ensuing years, the presence of humans beyond the globe has been restricted to our orbital neighbourhood and a series of space stations that were placed there. ⁴ Various human ‘firsts’ in space have transpired – for example, Sigmund Jähn became the first German in space (1978), Mae Jemison the first African American woman (1992), and Yang Liwei and Aidyn Aimbetov the first citizens of China (2003) and Kazakhstan (2015) respectively – but none of them is widely known outside a national, scientific or military context. On the other hand, a range of ‘unmanned’ missions such as Mariner, Viking, Pioneer and Voyager continued to progress into the unknowns of space, ⁵ and have attracted considerably more limelight. On Earth, certain ‘things’ – objects and artefacts of historical, cultural, political and scientific significance – are themselves prone to distinction. In particular, objects that are related to those deemed to be ‘celebrities’, or what Sean Redmond refers to as a ‘celebrity-inflected thing’ (2012: 39) are considered precious. In outer space, where there are very few humans, some ‘things’ appear particularly disposed towards fame and famous performances, and can develop their own cultural renown independent of a human celebrity – with various technologies such as satellites, space telescopes, spaceships and rovers, achieving or accruing an affective weight and becoming ‘celebrity objects’ in their own right. Chris Rojek (2001: 196) suggests that the focus of celebrity culture upon harnessing attraction towards an ‘animate object’ makes it a powerful tool for ‘mobilizing abstract desire’. When placed in space this ‘animate object’ is not merely the ‘objectification’ of a person (or humankind), but rather it is literally an inanimate technical object that is socially ‘animated’ and afforded celebrity. If objects take an active role in sculpting the social ambits of life (see for example Appadurai, 1986; Daston 2000, 2004; Latour 1991, 2005), then space technologies and their ‘non-human charisma’ constitute productive agents in our public cultures of renown.

Voyagers 1 and 2 are twin examples of such prominent ‘things’ in space. Nearly 40 years since their departure, the Voyagers are now almost 20 billion kilometres away, continuing to communicate with the Deep Space Network and remaining a recognised metonym of global cultures. Both probes carry Golden Records engraved with data that are supposed to present life on Earth to an alien intelligence, if it ever comes across it. The records include coordinates of our galactic position, a variety of natural sounds like wind and whales, music from across cultures and periods, greetings spoken in 55 languages, images of DNA, architecture, and the everyday – all designed to portray a picture of life as we know it, with the human at its centre. While famous objects usually represent a slice of history in relation to a particular person or period, in the case of the Voyagers, the very essence of humanity is curated into two single objects. Through what Bernard Stiegler calls the ‘tendency to exteriorise memory’, humans embed their culture and a ‘social’ dynamic into the technologies they create (1998: 70). In this sense, a Voyager record functions as the technical object par excellence – it is a human-made media artefact which embodies our shared cultural memory in order to assert an image of humanity for itself, and facilitate its cosmic visibility. Providing their own celebrity summary of the human, the records inform the evolution of the idea of celebrity itself, bringing the meaning of the term back closer to its original roots, ⁶ when it referred to a condition, not a person – to a state of things as a way of ‘celebrity being’. If technologies are what makes society cohere and persist – if in fact, ‘technology is society made durable’ (Latour, 1991) – then celebrity objects such as Voyager give a public face to this persistence. Fated to wander forever in space, the Voyagers abbreviate the human condition, embodying a compendium of our collective ‘being in the world’.

Another prominent technology of the early space age was the spaceship, with the space shuttle becoming an instant synonym for extra-terrestrial travel. The innovation of the shuttle programme saw NASA develop several reusable spacecraft – Columbia (1981), Discovery (1984), Challenger (1986), Atlantis (1985) and Endeavor (1991). Operating until 2011, they were used on a total of 135 missions to support various operations, including satellite launches, the Hubble Space Telescope servicing, and the transportation of people and goods to and from the International Space Station. Until their retirement, the shuttles were perhaps more famous than the many human crews that they carried. Yet what possibly resonated most strongly in their public lives was one accident that introduced another kind of drama into the global theatre of space exploration. In 1986, Challenger experienced major failure on its mission to deploy the TDRS-B satellite; it broke apart upon its take-off disintegrating off the coast of Florida and killing the seven aboard in front of CNN cameras. The event was broadcast live, the footage repeatedly shown to the world, along with a restless and comprehensive coverage and focus on individual crew members, including a female civilian participating in NASA’s Teacher in Space program. The media made Challenger’s last journey a public tragedy, notoriously gathering a worldwide audience together in a mediated experience of collective mourning. While this was not the only space disaster involving humans, ⁷ the shuttle’s spectacular explosion put the spotlight on its ill-fated crew, for a moment drawing attention back to human explorers and the perils of their technologically dependent presence in space. What remained culturally visible in its aftermath is the spectacular image of the exploding shuttle, recurrently replayed on its anniversary in online and offline media, with the object itself accruing the historic infamy of the incident.

Another space explorer, the Hubble Space Telescope has also developed a particular reputation and conspicuousness. Launched into low-Earth orbit in 1990, not only was it a state-of-the-art device distinguished for its technical capacity, but also its turbulent history – including the delays of the Challenger accident and the discovery that its primary mirror was flawed, earned Hubble a certain global notoriety: another form of celebrity (Rojek, 2001). Soon after arrival in space, the fault in its optical system became apparent and it was in part through this ‘monumental’ failure that the telescope became famous, publicly mocked and compared to the Titanic (Tatarewicz, 1998). With a celebrity capital developed from its bad reputation, the telescope, finally fixed, has maintained its public place, becoming known as the greatest space explorer thus far. While the Voyagers took the image of the human outside the terrestrial, Hubble has been capturing the reflection of distant stars and galaxies that existed thousands of years ago. Its images, and the ongoing publicity surrounding them, have allowed humanity to time travel into deep space, and continue to inspire awe and give the telescope significance beyond being a bundle of technical equipment. Yet, Hubble’s tendency towards the notorious or transgressive aspects of celebrity continues – reflected in the nature of its participation in the social networks that form around our observations of the stars.

Hubble images saturate the public domain and, while freely disseminated, they are not free of the imprints of terrestrial cultures; the ones that reach the public are carefully chosen, heavily processed and enhanced (Hanisch, 2000), and their doctored portrayal of outer space apparently perpetuates a myth of the ‘frontier’ (Kessler, 2012). Through its Hubblesite, NASA has packaged the telescope’s revelations into many consumable media forms. Hubble’s affect-laden images are churned into social life as reference material for ideas about our shared cosmic origins and destiny. The telescope is itself ‘instrumental’ in these processes of recognition; it not only mediates the cosmic, it also encourages the active participation of its terrestrial audiences. The opportunity to operate Hubble is open to everyone, as NASA announces, ‘potential observers, whether professionals or not, can apply for time allotments on it through an open peer-review process’ (Crawford, 1997: n.p.). Through this double-bind egalitarian potential Hubble demonstrates celebrity’s capacity to rearrange the elite hierarchies of the public sphere and democratise access to the production of culture (Hartley, 1999), to adjust the direction of our collective gaze towards stars. At the same time, this shift may also suggest processes that are less democratic than demotic, as Graeme Turner (2004) suggests, more about the structuring and ‘industrial incorporation’ of the ordinary and everyday that is now possible through new technologies for mediation of the social. In this context, the clear dominance of NASA over our representational cultures of outer space should not be ignored; the character that celebrity adopts in its encounters with outer space might indicate both the ‘democratic’ openness and imposed ‘demotic’ order that will condition the extra-planetary extension of our media cultures.

This heightened potential for affective relations between technologies and audiences of space exploration takes on a new phase with Sojourner, the rover sent to the Ares Vallis on Mars in 1997 as part of the Pathfinder mission. Remotely operated from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Sojourner captured and transmitted images of the red planet across millions of kilometres of interplanetary space. From the computer screen at JPL, the images were broadcast as they arrived, which enabled their audience a telepresence on the red planet, allowing the experience of ‘arrival’ and the impression that ‘we were on Mars’. As with the first Moon landing, the rover’s Martian activities were live-streamed to Earth for all to witness. However, unlike the Moon landing, this space event did not involve a full human presence, and its demand for an individual, a celebrity face, was entirely supplied by the rover, this privileged technical object through whose eyes we explored another planet. If the Moon landing was a kind of reality show in space, the Sojourner landing was like a space reality with no human participants. It was an object-centred media spectacle that admitted Sojourner as a productive participant into our social ambits – a tendency which continues in space exploration and the cultural production of its celebrities.

Into the 21st century

The turn of the century reinvigorated the evolution of space celebrity. The rapidly accelerating social centrality of online media deepened our domestication of the extra-terrestrial and expanded the breadth and intensity of our interactions with space exploration – parenthetically refining the inclusive and participatory character of its celebrity. The International Space Station has been the major production hub of the current ‘enculturation’ of outer space. Jointly operated by NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency, it is perhaps the most distinguished orbital outpost of its kind and has been continuously occupied by humans since the arrival of Expedition 1 in 2000. The station is a sophisticated scientific laboratory designed to fortify our presence in space. It hosts myriad experiments and research aimed at finding ways of sustaining life as we know it outside its original planetary setting. Life aboard the station is a perennial media event in itself; the everyday conditions of orbit – the requirements of a rarefied microgravity environment, what it means to eat, sleep, use the toilet – are a source of fascination and entertainment on Earth. The public nature of life aboard the station has increasingly made it an integral part of our world. With news outlets and social media regularly reporting on the many discoveries and activities aboard the ISS, audiences tracking its path via webapps such as ‘Heavens Above’ and viewing live-streamed footage from its many cameras, the station facilitates manifold social exchanges with Earth while itself acting as a productive locus of culture.

Aside from its own celebrity status, the ISS has provided a stage from which to launch a new breed of celebrity in space – becoming a destination of civilian space explorers, those travelling to space in a private capacity, or what is called ‘space tourism’. The first space tourist, an entrepreneur and former scientist for NASA Dennis Tito received notable media attention around the world when he paid $20 million to the Russian Federal Space Agency for the adventure of spending eight days aboard the station in 2001 (Wall, 2011). Tito inaugurated the extra-planetary variety of celebrity where the sudden fame of ‘common’ individuals is amassed not through talent and skills, but through participation in an event or activity that has been deemed extraordinary enough to gather social value (Marshall, 1997; Rojek, 2001; Turner, 2004). In a reversal common to celebrity cultures, here billionaire space tourists enter the world stage to stand in for the ‘ordinary’ person, just as superstars play the everyman. The ironic complexity of this celebrity disposition appears more dramatically against the backdrop of outer space, where elitism is presupposed, the everyday is a precious rarity and the value of the ordinary and of the human rises exponentially. Yet the space tourist is hardly an average human. While increasingly generated from the media performances of ordinary citizens (Hartley, 1999), its ‘demotic turn’ (Turner, 2004, 2010) sustains this celebrity as ‘a systematically hierarchical and exclusive category’ (Turner, 2010: 16). Like space exploration itself, space celebrity operates through various forms of elitism that maintain social partitions and fragmentations but which are nevertheless presented as standing for society as a whole. A space tourist straddles such contradictions sold to the world; as celebrities they are perhaps only echoes of ourselves and are thus unable to ‘extend our horizon’ (Boorstin, 1962: 61), but at the same time, they do literally widen the scope of human possibility.

Although space tourism shows prospects of growth, any human presence in outer space is still incredibly rare. Lacking a constellation of human stars, the contemporary production of space celebrity mainly continues in other guises, and perhaps reaches its present zenith with several robotic rovers that have followed Sojourner to Mars – Spirit and Opportunity in 2003 and Curiosity in 2012. While the Mars rovers have garnered substantial popularity, their fame has not only been generated by their proximity to Mars, it is also a result of NASA’s strategic bolstering of their media presence. The activities of rovers have been used to engage global audiences through a profusion of streaming images and information, such as the live webcast of Curiosity’s landing that was watched by over 3 million people, constant Facebook, Twitter and Reddit updates, news briefs and opportunities for ‘real-time chats with each other and mission experts’ (NASA, 2013). As media cultures develop their emphasis on interactivity and shared experience, celebrity formations adjust to these new preoccupations – on Mars, this has meant incorporation of rovers as relational entities into the mediated production of social life. Each successive Mars Rover has been progressively made to look more like a ‘living’ creature; the technical components from which they are constructed resemble body parts characteristic of living beings – such as arms, head and eyes – and they are often referred to by NASA, and the rest of the world, as animate entities. Although not strictly a gesture towards the anthropomorphisation of space technologies this conferring of ‘personality’ perhaps makes them more culturally accessible, but it is only through their public performance in social media that they are given not only a human-like, but a celebrity disposition.

At present, Curiosity is the most socially productive rover; with over 2.2 million followers of @MarsCuriosity (Curiosity Rover, n.d.) and over 1 million likes on Facebook (NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover, n.d.), it captures attention mainly through its activities on social media, behind which there are human ghost-writers at NASA. Curiosity’s public interactions are purposefully performed in the first person, presenting a distinctive, carefully crafted personality and a skilful ultilisation of online vernaculars and commonplaces of popular culture; the rover, as one of its voice-givers describes, ‘litters her twitter feed with pop culture references, tweetspeak, and a bold attitude’ (cited in Knapp, 2012). Here the extraordinary of space enters the terrestrial everyday as the rover mingles with the people – and also with other social-tech savvy spacecraft such as ESA’s Rosetta with ‘whom’ Curiosity exchanges messages on Twitter. ⁸ With a human ultimately fashioning ‘her’ interactions with global audiences to fulfil a yearning for authentic social contact with current envoys on Mars, in a culture where recognition of individuality is an elusive but valuable asset, the contrived communications of Curiosity maintain her global celebrity within a proliferation of aspiring online personalities.

Forms of celebrity shaded by contemporary media also continue to develop in space through what could be called an emerging return of the human. At present, Chris Hadfield, Commander of Expedition 35 on the International Space Station is perhaps the lone human celebrity in space. Hadfield became known for his engaging media performances aboard the ISS. Described as ‘the most social media savvy astronaut ever to leave Earth’ (Kantrowitz, 2013), Hadfield chronicled life aboard the space station through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and one of the top Reddit AMA threads of all time (Woods, 2013). He made videos and talked about how to make a sandwich, cut your hair, and described space life in simple terms that brought the orbital everyday to Earth. He also sang and played the guitar in a rendition of David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, which has thus far had over 30 million views on YouTube (Hadfield, 2016). Already receiving significant media exposure during his time on the space station, on return, the astronaut was a guest on television news and talk shows, gave TED lectures, and his exchanges with William Shatner and other Star Trek actors received substantial attention. Hadfield’s global celebrity draws upon a similar cache to that of the tweeting rovers, it is developed through a model of shrewd social media use and pop culture references.

Yet, while the Mars Rover is an extraordinary object, Hadfield appears in many ways a remarkably ordinary human – a white, middle-aged man with a lampshade moustache whose celebrity charisma seems light years away from that of David Bowie, and perhaps even less than the personalities of the Mars rovers. Hadfield’s public showcasing of his life in space works towards habituating the image of the astronaut as an everyman through what Daniel Boorstin (1962) called a ‘human pseudo-event’. While his celebrity is certainly facilitated by a major breakthrough in space exploration, this advance is not focused upon scientific discovery, but instead revolves around his deliberately manufactured public persona. His ‘ordinary’ celebrity is a social product of audiences and in this sense ‘[h]e has been fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectation of human greatness.… He is made by all of us’ (Boorstin, 1962: 57–8). However, this involvement of audiences highlights an increasing participatory metamorphosis in the public cultures forming around outer space. Unlike early astronauts, who were only presented to audiences as almost more-than-human, Hadfield’s ‘common’ celebrity is almost exclusively produced though his media acts and social exchanges with audiences. Unlike Hubble, which will only respond to our commands, or Mars rovers whose social ability entirely depends on humans, Hadfield compounds the ordinary and the extraordinary into a celebrity whose public life is essentially made by the public (Hartley, 1992). Variations of celebrity reflect the media forms through which they are conveyed – television encouraged kinds of intimacy, film presented more out-of-reach heroics, while social media increasingly involve the everyday interactions of people. Apparently reliant upon these emerging forms of cultural mediation, the ‘space celebrity’ of both humans and non-humans might suggest the negotiations of an ‘ordinary’ life shared in space.

Prospective formations of space celebrity are dependent upon the ways in which our extra-planetary undertakings continue. That said, the ongoing future of space exploration is also dependent upon how the affective products of the social are incorporated into these ventures. Hadfield’s recent popularity might signal the increase of human faces among space celebrity. As space tourism grows, terrestrial celebrities might themselves go out into space – Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Bieber are among those who have tickets for a private orbital flight on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Lady Gaga has been attempting to organise a performance in outer space. There are also new objects currently being developed that will be drawn into the mediated spectacle of space: the James Webb Space Telescope is set to replace Hubble in 2018, a new generation of ESA and NASA rovers will arrive on Mars in 2020, and the Voyager journeys continue. Space exploration also remains an inspiration for media cultures, although, as indicated by recent films like Gravity (2013) and The Martian (2015), the narrative and design of fictional space journeys increasingly engage with the sobering realities of human advances in space. This tendency perhaps suggests that the ways in which we imagine the places and inhabitants of other worlds can no longer be simply coloured by ‘make-believe’, but rather through reference to the actual relationships we develop with the extra-planetary.

On the other hand, fictional and real space exploration also intersect in new forms of participation in, and popularisation of, space exploration. A recent example is NASA’s addition of a special function to its freely available Mars Trek application to support the promotion of the film Martian. The application, which includes a range of scientifically accurate maps of the red planet, with special reference to its historical exploration, was updated with an option which enables users to accurately track the imaginary survival journey of the film’s protagonist Mark Watney, against a depiction of the planet’s topographic features based in actual scientific data. As the cultural synthesis of new technologies continues and humans and non-humans increasingly participate in productive social exchanges, these mediums, media products and cultural activities are opening new trajectories in our real and imaginary exploits in space that may further inscribe our social interactions with the terrestrial outside. At the same time, the undefined futures of space exploration (including the uncertainties surrounding preservation of outer space as a shared province of humankind) may, in turn, facilitate a radical restructuring of the ways in which we, as inhabitants of the Earth, currently construct, perform and partake of a collective ‘space-faring’ identity.

The history of space celebrity disperses in many directions, it saturates popular culture, politics, markets, techno-science and the everyday, colours our social domain and drives our aspirations in outer space. While actors and emphases may have shifted, exploratory directions in outer space have continued to develop alongside terrestrial media cultures, changing arrangements between audiences and performers, and shifting hierarchies of common access to the production of, and participation in, the social. In interplays between what is elite and participatory, common and extraordinary, individual and collective, celebrity in outer space indicates potential shapes of respect and relationality that may grow from the extra-planetary extension of social life. As outer space becomes the repository of culture, its celebrity explorers become vital nodes in social networks, objects acquire ‘followers’, groundbreaking events inspire awe and catastrophic failures join us in horror – the idea of the species exploring space brings us together. It hones our perspective and presents us with a potential singularity of purpose, but it is formations like ‘celebrity’ that gives it extra-planetary impetus. As the affects of fame adjust and transform beyond Earth, they suggest wider changes in the ways in which humans and non-humans participate together in our mediated social lives. Celebrity cultures in outer space might become a means of rethinking what establishes an individual – a way of refocusing questions of what it is to be recognised and make a claim to fame. But above all, the rise and fall of space celebrities will continue to shape our mediated interaction, extending and defining the prospects of who we are and may become.