> Now that humans had successfully defied the strictures of planetary life by techno-scientifically engineering ways to live beyond its bounds, the possibilitie

> Now that humans had successfully defied the strictures of planetary life by techno-scientifically engineering ways to live beyond its bounds, the possibilities for subjecting the natural world to total human control seemed boundless. Really? > ... the machinic and biological relations attendant to spaceflight—whether real or imagined—yield a disjunctive meeting point between the quotidian practices of daily cabin life and the historical processes of erasure deployed to enact particular techno-culturo-imperial fantasies. Oh... > Underpinning the rhetorical bravado of the preternatural cowboy-astronaut are a host of interspecies and sociotechnical maintenance practices that sustain a biologically feeble human in the extreme, and extremely threatening, environment of outer space. Indeed, as Peter Sloterdijk reminds us, “perfect smoothness” is only possible in idealization, while in reality, “the rough and the real converge”: considered through its practices, the history of spaceflight becomes one riddled with precarity, instability, and fallibility. Isn't that why NASA invented "space food sticks"?