Mark Piesing's Blog, page 2

Read my latest book review for The Spectator: Remembering Hiroshima 80 years on

Read my latest book review for The Spectator, and my first for the UK and Australian editions, in print above, in full below or the original here (UK) and here (Australia)

Read all my reviews for The Spectator World (US ed) here

In October 1945, towns and cities across the United States celebrated ‘A Tribute to Victory Day’ in celebration of the United States’s military victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The biggest event was held in Los Angeles and broadcast live across the country. In scenes ‘reminiscent of the pre-war Nazi rallies at Nuremberg’, Iain MacGregor writes, more than 100,000 people crammed into the Memorial Coliseum to watch the ‘cinematic legend’ Edward G. Robinson lead a massive cast on giant stage sets recreating key moments of the defeat of the Axis powers. For the evening finale, in the glare of searchlights, three Boeing B-29 Superfortresses flew low over the stadium and, as the audience gasped, a huge mushroom cloud rose behind the stage. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…Hiroshima!’ Robinson boomed.

Published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the first use of the atomic bomb as a weapon of war, The Hiroshima Men tells of the ‘quest’ to develop the bombin a gripping, challenging and sometimes provocative manner. With the help of new research and fresh voices, MacGregor traces the story from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 through to the decision to use it and the instant destruction of Hiroshima at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945.

The inclusion of Japanese voices is a vital ingredient often missed from earlier accounts. Readers of MacGregor’s The Lighthouse of Stalingrad will find much to admire in this new book, which benefits from his ability to reframe the grand narratives of earlier lengthy books into accessible ‘micro-narratives’ told through eyewitness accounts, describing scenes not easily forgotten. The author’s decision to begin with his interview of the 87-year-old Michiko Kodama, one of the few remaining survivors of 6 August, means that the bookopens under the pall of a mushroom cloud that is impossible to ignore.

MacGregor sweeps us through this epic tale by cutting quickly and sharply between the stories of key individuals – some familiar, some less so. There is Dr Alexander Sachs and his almost comic struggle to attract the attention of Franklin D. Roosevelt; and there is Einstein’s letter warning of the danger of Nazi Germany developing nuclear weapons and urging America to do the same. Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, decided to take a chance on the journalist and future Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Hersey and send him to cover his first war. Colonel Leslie Groves, after building the Pentagon, was given the job of directing the atomic bomb project (‘Oh, that thing’) against his will. The following month he appointed Professor J. Robert Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project’s weapons laboratory, against advice from the intelligence services.

MacGregor also has a gift for juxtaposition. In a chapter titled ‘The Role of a Lifetime’, he introduces us to Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets. He was an American pilot who had to be smuggled out of North Africa by his friends after he publicly humiliated the well-connected Colonel Laurie Norstad when he refused to fly a suicidal low-level raid on a German air base. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ Tibbets told his superior. ‘I’ll lead that raid myself at 6,000ft if you will come along as my co-pilot.’ Tibbets, we learn, went on to pilot the Enola Gay, named after his mother, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

In the next chapter, ‘The Good Mayor’, we meet Senkichi Awaya. He was a Christian, a career civil servant, loyal to the civilian government of Japan and distrusted by its military government – ‘many men had been assassinated for less’ – who relocated his family to Hiroshima to begin his role as mayor. ‘He didn’t know it yet, but it would be his final civic duty.’ In similar style, MacGregor tells the story of the B-29 strategic bomber and the rise of American air power in short segments, in effect turning the bomber into another character in the story.

The memory of the great Victory Day celebration was quickly buried when the terrible truths came to light

While MacGregor struggles at times to capture the fighting that Hersey witnessed in the Pacific and Europe, he is soon on firmer ground. As in The Lighthouse of Stalingrad, he evokes the chaotic and unrelenting nature of war in claustrophobic set-piece scenes that build to a climax – from the battle of Iwo Jima or the firebombing of Tokyo to the flight of the Enola Gay and the destruction of Hiroshima. But it would have been good to have included a voice from the military-dominated government of Japan that refused to surrender before and immediately after Hiroshima.

MacGregor is fascinated by the link between memory and emotion. So it is appropriate that the last story in the book, Hersey’s race to reveal the true extent of the destruction of Hiroshima and the horrific deaths and injuries caused, is one of the most gripping of all. He famously published his 30,000-word account, simply titled ‘Hiroshima’, in the New Yorker on 31 August 1946 to critical acclaim. The memory of the previous October’s ‘Tribute to Victory Day’ was quickly buried as the terrible truths were brought to light.

For the 80th anniversary of the bombing, it would have been easy for MacGregor to write a worthy but dull tome. The Hiroshima Men is anything but that. It is a impeccably researched and compelling account of the first use of nuclear weapons in war, and a timely reminder of the horror they unleash- ed on the world.

WRITTEN BY

Mark Piesing

I was asked to write this piece by History.com…How Drones Have Upended Warfare.

Since World War 1, unmanned aircraft have evolved to serve a variety of military uses – from gunnery training to stealthy surveillance to targeted assassinations.

Following my (now award winning!) feature for The Smithsonian’s Air and Space Quarterly on the Secret History of Drones, I was asked to write this piece on the history of drones for History.com, USA only. It takes the story of the drone up to 2001 and with a nod to the war in the Ukraine. It ended up being twice as long as originally commissioned. Thanks to the amazing editors at History.com who made this possible!

Read it in full below – or by clicking here USA only. (Readers outside the USA will need a VPN to read it.)

How Drones Have Upended Warfare

Since World War I, unmanned aircraft have evolved to serve a variety of military uses—from gunnery training to stealth surveillance to targeted killings.

Mark Piesing

Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma via Getty Images

When were drones invented—and how did they evolve to become aerial surveillance tools and weapons of war?

The 1895 invention of the radio transmitter and receiver by Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi sparked an engineering race for uses of the revolutionary new technology—including radio waves to guide aircraft. 

“The dream of pilotless aircraft was already alive in the imagination of numerous engineers by the time the Wright Flyer took off in 1903,” says Roger D. Connor, a curator at National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “The growth of unpiloted aviation and radio went hand in hand.” 

But radio waves were only the beginning. Below, discover key milestones in the evolution of drone development, the military objectives that drove them, the breakthrough technologies that enabled them—and the turbulence they encountered along the way. 

Archibald Low’s Aerial Target Drone

NEW TECH: Radio remote control

PURPOSE: Attack bombing

FLAWS/CHALLENGES: Unreliable signals

During World War I, British inventor Archibald Low oversaw a top-secret project to produce an “aerial torpedo”—or radio-controlled flying bomb—that would knock out the Germans’ U-boat pens and bring down their Zeppelins. The German Empire considered him such a threat that they twice tried to kill him—once with an exploding cigar, according to Michael J. Boyle, the author of The Drone Age: How Drone Technology Will Change War and Peace.

In March 1917, Low’s dragonfly-like monoplane (dubbed “Aerial Target” to try and fool German spies that it was being used for gunnery target practice) took off for the first time. Compressed air launched the tin-and-wood aircraft, which was briefly maneuverable under radio remote control. 

According to Flight magazine (now FlightGlobal), the first aircraft, launched at a demonstration for the army and navy’s top brass, crashed in the mud, prompting one major to complain, “I could have thrown my umbrella further than that.” The second aircraft’s engine shut down during a loop. Low also recalled seeing “a large concourse of brass-hats running for their lives. This mystified me for an instant until, with an appalling crash, the AT landed three yards from where I was sitting… But it had flown, and it had worked.”

Experts attributed the failures to the unreliability of radio signals and the craft’s instability. But the accomplishment eventually led Low to be called the “father of the drone.”

Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The First Mass-Produced Drones: Queen Bee, Radioplanes

NEW TECH: Telemetry downlinks

PURPOSE: Target practice training

FLAWS/CHALLENGES: Vulnerable to radio interference

The drone found its first practical military use in 1934, when the British navy developed the Queen Bee, a pilotless, radio-controlled de Havilland biplane that could be used as a low-cost flying target for training anti-aircraft gunners.  More than 400 of the buoyant spruce-and-plywood biplanes, which could fly as high as 14,000 feet, were built.

The U.S. Army, meanwhile, turned to World War I pilot, Hollywood star and radar-controlled model aircraft manufacturer Reginald Denny to build drones for military target practice. His Radioplane OQ-2A—launched by a catapult and flown via a control box from the ground—became the first mass-produced U.S. drone. Its successor, the OQ-3, had a maximum speed of 103 mph. More than 9,400 were built.

What made these drones succeed where Low had failed? They were built from cheap, disposable materials like wood, flew realistically and were designed to do one very specific job: to help anti-aircraft gunners learn how to shoot down fast-moving enemy aircraft. Most importantly, they had reliable radio transmitter and receiver technology, which was now being mass produced and miniaturized. In the Queen Bee, for example, new downlinks were able to transmit data like altitude back to the pilot on the ground or in the control plane.  

Radio interference did cause problems for the Queen Bee. In one incident, its receiver picked up a dance band program broadcast by Radio Paris and converted its signal into aerobatic commands “quite unknown” to the Royal Air Force.

DID YOU KNOW? Eighteen-year-old Norma Jeane Dougherty—later known as Marilyn Monroe—was discovered by a photographer while she was working 10 hours a day for $20 a week in a World War II defense plant making Denny Radioplanes.

Kamikaze Drone Bombers

NEW TECH: TV guidance

PURPOSE: Attack bombing

FLAWS/CHALLENGES: Mechanical faults, radio interference

The U.S. military still wanted to turn pilotless aircraft into weapons. So, during World War II, they packed worn-out B-17 and B-24 bombers with explosives and turned them into drones with new technology inside them: TV cameras. 

At first, they needed a human pilot for takeoff (who then parachuted out) so the drones could be guided by operators in planes flying nearby who would guide the drones via the rudimentary, blurry TV images. 

But the drones usually fell short of their targets or were shot down by anti-aircraft batteries. One such casualty: Lieutenant Joseph Kennedy Jr., the eldest brother of President John F. Kennedy, who was killed in action while piloting a B-24 drone that prematurely exploded before he and his co-pilot could bail out.

The U.S. Navy also used television to guide twin-engine kamikaze drones called Interstate TDRs, which were launched in the Pacific by ground crews that passed off control to planes in the air. The airborne controller then guided the drone to its target by viewing a screen with TV images from a camera in the drone’s nose.

From July 1944 onward, the Navy launched 50 TDR-1 drones against Japanese targets including anti-aircraft positions, bridges and airfields. Many missed their targets due to radio interference or mechanical faults. But 31 did attack in the face of anti-aircraft fire with no loss of American lives.

Corbis via Getty Images

A-Bomb Test Drones

NEW TECH: Scientific testing equipment

PURPOSE: Collect atomic blast data

FLAWS/CHALLENGES: Autopilot failure

In July 1946, at the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, the United States detonated the first atomic bombs since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a year earlier. Minutes later, a fleet of pilotless World War II Grumman Hellcats and Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses flew directly into the mushroom clouds to test levels of radioactivity, newspapers reported. The full fleet had been “droned” by the addition of a set of radio-controlled instruments; the B-17s had been additionally equipped with television cameras.  

For the first time, bombs and guns were replaced by instruments such as air scoops and collection bags, filter boxes, Geiger counters, radio-controlled cameras and electronic recording instruments. The goal: to sample the radiation in the mushroom cloud and to measure its effect on the plane itself.

The use of pilotless aircraft succeeded. The drones flew through the mushroom cloud, where it was too dangerous for humans to go. The droned Hellcats were launched by catapult from an aircraft carrier for the first time, and only one didn’t return when its controls failed before the test. As for the droned B-17s, “all takeoffs, flight and landings” took place for the first time without pilots and the aircraft completed their missions without significant incidents, according to the official historian of the mission, codenamed Operation Crossroads. 

On August 6, 1946, two of the B-17 drones returning stateside set a record for the longest unmanned flight, with a 2,174-mile journeyfrom Hawaii to California. The New York Timespredicted “push-button wars” in the air. 

Alan Band/Fox Photos/Getty Images

Jet-Propelled Target and Spy Drones

NEW TECH: Higher-resolution cameras

PURPOSE: Target practice, surveillance, dropping propaganda leaflets and decoys

FLAWS/CHALLENGES: Vulnerable to enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire. Short range and small payload.

The shark-like Ryan Firebee, one of the first jet-propelled drones, was also one of the first target drones designed for the new missile and jet age. Capable of launching from either the ground or from an airplane in flight, it was used to develop ground-to-air missiles and train pilots flying fighters equipped with missiles. Flown for the first time in 1951, the Firebee I became one of the most successful drones ever, with more than 6,500 built.

Then in 1960, Gary Powers was shot down by a surface-to-air missile while flying his U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union. Two years later, Rudolf Anderson, Jr. died when his U-2 spy plane was shot down while on a reconnaissance flight over Cuba. Together, these incidents accelerated the effort to mount high-quality cameras onto drones so they could be used for effective surveillance.

“In the late 1950s, there was already a big push to get cameras on board these Firebee drones because the U.S. Army wanted its own reconnaissance capability independent of the Air Force,” says Connor. “But this accelerated after the Cuban Missile Crisis… The vulnerability of the U-2 is a major precipitating event in the growth of the surveillance drone.”

Two years later, the Ryan Lightning Bug jet-powered reconnaissance drone flew for the first time. Ryan drones like these fooled air defenses (one of its innovations was radar-absorbing paint), dropped propaganda leaflets, eavesdropped on enemy communications and acted as decoys, flying some 3,435 sorties. 

On December 14, 1971, a modified Ryan Firebee drone launched the first air-to-ground missile from a remotely piloted aircraft in aviation history, but none was ever used in front line warfare.

Vietnam War Drones

NEW TECH: High resolution cameras, more advanced remote control, tethered landing systems, visual monitoring, stealthy reduced noise engines and ability to receive data from sensor on ground

PURPOSE: Surveillance, anti-submarine warfare

FLAWS/CHALLENGES: Reliability

The Vietnam War inspired development of a wide range of drones. The Beech QU-22B, for one, used a remotely operated Beechcraft Bonanza single-engine propeller plane as a relay platform to transmit information from 20,000 low-powered sensors disguised as small trees or bushes that had been dropped onto the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. Using a powerful on-board electric generator, the QU-22B collected the sounds and vibrations of North Vietnamese trucks picked up by the sensors in the jungle below, and transmitted them to its base in Thailand. The drone performed its duties well when the equipment worked, but needed a pilot on board for when it didn’t. The loss of several of these aircraft led to the program’s cancellation. 

By contrast, the supersonic, arrow-shaped Lockheed D-21 flew on a pre-programmed path at a maximum speed of over Mach 3, using technology developed for the SR-71 spy plane. Equipped with a high-resolution camera module, it flew several reconnaissance missions to China’s Lop Nor nuclear test site but proved too unreliable. (It undershot the test shot and crashed in China, or overshot and self-destructed over the Soviet Union.) Those that completed their mission dropped their camera module in the wrong place in the Pacific Ocean, or the film was unusable when recovered. 

Then there was the Gyrodyne QH-50 drone helicopter, built to carry torpedoes or a nuclear depth charge for ships too small for a conventional large helicopter. In his book Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution, author Richard Whittle writes that the QH-50 was “the most extensive armed UAV program in US history.” 

Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma via Getty Images

​​Desert Storm Predator Development

NEW TECH: Ku-Band satellite antenna, laser designator

PURPOSE: Long endurance, high-altitude surveillance

FLAWS/CHALLENGES: Reliance on satellite communication, not stealthy, vulnerable to attack by enemy aircraft and missiles

In 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, America and its allies were unable to find Saddam Hussein’s Scud missile launchers in the open desert. According to Connor, the resulting panic eventually led to the development of long-endurance and very high-altitude drones like the Predator to locate them so they could be targeted.

First flown in 1994, the unarmed General Atomics SQ-1 Predator had a bulbous nose, sleek fuselage and long, narrow wings, allowing it to loiter 20,000 feet above targets for 14 hours unnoticed from the ground. 

“It was a huge achievement, but it is the Predator’s advanced electronics rather than airframe which makes that aircraft special,” says Connor. ”Its Ku-Band antenna was the real game-changer.” This allowed the Predator to connect with global satellite communications systems and fiber-optic networks to provide pilots with live video feeds anywhere on Earth with little delay. 

Arming the Predator

NEW TECH: Hellfire missiles, laser designator, advanced sensors

PURPOSE: Targeting individuals

FLAWS/CHALLENGES:  Reliance on satellite communications, identifying targets, vulnerability to enemy air defenses, missile arming problems

Whittle writes that special forces pilot Scott Swanson was flying the Predator that found America’s most-wanted terrorist—Osama bin Laden—in Afghanistan on September 27, 2000. But being armed only with cameras, and no missiles, he and his colleagues couldn’t take any action against their target, much to their great frustration. 

Senior Air Force leaders had never given up on arming pilotless aircraft,  and the hunt for bin Laden and al-Qaeda had helped accelerate the process. The failure to capitalize on the handful of sightings of the terrorist leader that autumn by the Predator, along with the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, upped the urgency. 

As for the right weapon, Air Force brass selected the U.S. Army’s Hellfire (Heliborne-Launched Fire-and-Forget Missile) because it was available immediately. It could be launched from under the wing of a Predator, and it used a laser designator to spotlight targets and guide weapons dropped from other aircraft. The problem was the time it would take to integrate the Hellfire into the Predator systems, and no one knew how the heat and thrust of launching a missile would affect the fragile Predator itself. At its hottest, its plume was 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit. But the Predator’s milliseconds of exposure to the plume means its tail, fuselage and wings will “see” a much lower temperature.

But on February 16, 2001, pilot Carl Hawes made history when he pressed the black launch button on his controller and squeezed the trigger. An unarmed missile flew for three miles and hit its target six inches right of dead center.

One month after 9/11 on October 7, 2001, Swanson was at the controls from Germany when they found bin Laden’s latest hideout, but this time their Predator was armed. He fired two Hellfire missiles to flush him out, but bin Laden escaped and remained in hiding until 2011, when U.S. special forces killed him in Pakistan.

The use of the Predator as an attack drone guided from so far away “was historic,” writes Whittle. “The Hellfire Predator was no longer a concept. A new way of waging war was inaugurated. Remote-control war and remote killing were no longer remote ideas. They were realities.” 

Read my latest piece for BBC Future: The ‘space archaeologists’ hoping to save our cosmic history

The infrastructure of humanity’s journey into space may only be decades old, but some of it has already been lost. A new generation of “space archaeologists” are scrambling to save what’s left.

Read my latest piece for BBC Future below, or the original, by clicking on this link.

Space is being commercialised on a scale unseen before. Faced by powerful commercial and political forces and with scant legal protections, artefacts that tell the story of our species’ journey into space are in danger of being lost – both in orbit and down here on Earth…

Like Stonehenge, these are irreplaceable artefacts and sites that have a timeless significance to humanity because they represent an essential stage in the evolution of our species. They are often also expressions of national pride because of the industrial and scientific effort needed to achieve them. Sometimes they are also memorials to those who died in the course of ambitious space programmes.

They also have another use. Studying these artefacts and sites helps researchers better understand how astronauts interact with new technology, adapt to new environments and develop new cultural practices. The conclusions of researchers can influence the design of future spacecraft and help future space missions succeed.

Can a new generation of pioneering space archaeologists like Alice Gorman and Justin Walsh help save our space heritage for coming generations, and how might their work change space exploration in the future? 

On 15 January 2025, the World Monuments Fund’s Watch List of 25 threatened heritage sites was released, surprising many by including the Moon, with a focus on the Apollo 11 landing site, in addition to the endangered sites on Earth.

It is rather ironic then, that same day, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander blasted off from Kennedy Space Center on board a SpaceX rocket to lay “the groundwork for the future of commercial exploration” of the Moon, according to the company.  Firefly became the second commercial company to land without difficulty or damage on the Moon when Blue Ghost safely touched down around 30 miles (50 km) away from the site of the Nasa LCROSS impactor, 90 miles (150km) away from the Soviet Luna 24 probe site, and in the neighbouring lunar sea, vast plains of solidified lava, to where Neil Armstrong’s footprints can be found.

The heritage that archaeologists want to protect includes the footprints left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and 70s (Credit: Nasa)

“We don’t know yet how to physically operate on the Moon,” says space archaeologist Justin Walsh, a professor at Chapman University in California. “Any mission that approaches or enters one of those historic sites is going to have consequences that we can’t yet foresee. Whatever precautions we can take, we really must take to keep that damage to a minimum.” 

But it isn’t just sites on the Moon that experts are worried about. Elon Musk wants Nasa to deorbit and possibly destroy the historically significant International Space Station sooner than the space agency intends.

“The window of time we must get procedures and protocols accepted by the international space community is closing,” says Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist and associate professor at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. 

Three years ago, Nasa astronaut Kayla Barron conducted the first ever archaeological fieldwork outside the Earth (and in zero gravity) while orbiting the planet at about a height of 250 miles (400km). On 14 January 2022, she used bright yellow adhesive tape to mark out the corners of 1 sq m (10.7 sq ft) on a science rack in a module of the ISS – like an archaeological trench – and repeated the process in five other locations, ranging from the galley to the toilet.

Space archaeology had always felt rather theoretical – Justin Walsh

Archaeology is a “dirt discipline”, says Gorman in her book Dr Space Junk v The Universe. Archaeologists dig test pits to reveal a “snapshot” of a site’s history. On a space station, that is impossible.

Instead, Barron and her colleagues used digital cameras to photograph each square every day for 60 days. The goal of the exercise was to reveal how these spaces were being used, and how their use changed over time. 

“I was here in Los Angeles and Alice [Gorman] was in rural New South Wales in Australia, we were watching Kayla Barron put these pieces of tape out live on Microsoft Teams,” says Walsh. “It was like our giant leap.”

Walsh and Gorman are leading the International Space Station Archaeological Project (Issap) a joint venture that marks “the first large-scale space archaeology project”. Established in 2015, its goal is to study the crew of the ISS, to extend the discipline of archaeology into new worlds and even guide the development of long-duration space missions.

“Space archaeology had always felt rather theoretical,” says Walsh. “What would we do if we could go there? But digital technology has changed that. 

“There are many more photographs of the inside of the International Space Station (ISS) than of any previous space habitat because its inhabitation coincided with the growth in digital technology.”

It is already too late to save some important space infrastructure; this hangar at Cape Canaveral was demolished in 2008 (Credit: Alamy)

Their analysis of these existing photographs of the ISS showed how astronauts personalised areas on the space station to create a visual display that expressed their identity. It showed how astronauts filled “empty space” with – for example – religious icons, mission patches, space heroes and even a geocaching tag, like a fridge door back on Earth.

Last year, the importance of their work for space archaeology led to Walsh’s and Gorman’s inclusion in the Explorers Club 50 as two of “50 remarkable explorers” changing the world and extending the meaning of exploration. 

“We’ve actually been told by one of the companies designing a private space stationthat they used our research on how people adapt to living in space throughout the design of the interior of their space station,” says Walsh. “That was incredibly gratifying to hear.”

We picked Tranquillity Base because it was the first time humans had landed on another celestial body – Beth O’Leary

For many, the fight to record and save our space heritage began when Beth O’Leary, archaeology professor emeritus at New Mexico State University in the US, published the Lunar Legacy Project (LLP) report in 2000. Its first goal was to treat the entire Moon like an archaeological site and map every single object left by humanity. But, according to O’Leary, this task proved too vast for its limited funding. 

“We estimated that at that time [around 2000] there was 100 metric tons of material on the Moon,” says O’Leary. “I’d say it’s in excess now of 400 metric tons and that’s just a guesstimate. So, what is important? Which sites do you focus on?

“We might have chosen the site of the Soviet Luna 2 probe because that was the first human artefact to land on the Moon. Instead, we picked Tranquillity Base because it was the first time humans had landed on another celestial body, and it has an international significance comparable to that of Stonehenge.

“Unable to visit the Moon, we had to really dig in the archives to find out what was left on the lunar surface at Tranquillity Base.”

Firefly’s Blue Ghost spacecraft, seen here inside the SpaceX rocket which launched it, touched down on this Moon earlier this year (Credit: SpaceX)

The project has found around 106 artefacts and features left there (a feature is an artefact that cannot be moved, such as each footprint). These include the mundane, such as sample scoops; the emotive, such as footprints; and the poignant – an Apollo 1 Mission patch. The three Apollo 1 crew were killed in 1967 when fire swept through their capsule while still on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral.

There were also surprises. They discovered that medals from two cosmonauts, Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin, had been left there by the Apollo 11 astronauts. “Their widows had passed on the medals to the American astronauts at the height of the Space Race and the Cold War,” O’Leary says. “It’s very powerful, isn’t it?”

As the LLP website asks: “If this site is not protected, what will be left?”

Rather than digging in the dirt with a trowel, space archaeologists more often sift through scientific papers or engineering plans

Space archaeology essentially involves applying archaeological methods and theories to everything related to the era of space exploration. This can range in time from the launch sites of the rockets tested just before World War Two to a present-day drone flying in the atmosphere of Mars. It can also include wider culture, such as the expression of ideas about rockets in children’s toys.

Rather than digging in the dirt with a trowel, space archaeologists more often sift through scientific papers or engineering plans. They look for evidence in remote sensing data, satellite images of landers on planet surfaces and space probes in orbit.

“Space archaeology is about putting all this kind of data together and combining it, in a way that an engineer wouldn’t, to say something new about an object,” says Gorman. “What is the setting or the place of this artefact? How has it fared in that space environment? What does it look like? How would a person experience these kinds of things?

“It’s a bit counterintuitive because archaeology is such a physical discipline, that’s part of what we all love about it, but we can’t often do that.”

Blue Ghost made its historic landing far from the footprints left by pioneering astronauts (Credit: Firefly)

It is a natural progression to want to save what you have recorded. But is it real archaeology?

“It’s something people have trouble with,” admits Gorman. “They say, ‘how can this be archaeology?’ It’s too recent. But when does the past start? According to [science-fiction writer] Isaac Asimov, the past can start a millisecond ago.” 

In 2010, Beth O’Leary and her colleagues succeeded in placing Tranquillity Base on the  California and New Mexico state registers of cultural properties-resources because of the role these two states played in the space programme. Five years later, the International Space Station Archaeological Project was launched.

Then space archaeology started to gain wider recognition. The job of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (Icomos) is to promote heritage conservation and advise the World Heritage Committee on sites to include on its list. 

The creation of the Icomos International Scientific Committeeon AeroSpace Heritage (ISCoAH) in 2023, which recognised the threat to archaeological sites on the Moon, “was huge” for the discipline, says space archaeologist Gai Jorayev, a senior research fellow at University College London, who is president of the committee.

There have been ideas of putting the most historically valuable objects into a stable museum orbit around the Earth that is relatively empty – Justin Walsh

Among other subjects, Jorayev studies what he calls the “dark heritage” of the Soviet space programme, such as the people who sacrificed their lives building the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the former USSR.

Many hope that the inclusion of the Moon on the World Monuments Fund’s 2025 Watch list will lead to further progress, such as an internationally endorsed list of space heritage sites and a space heritage charter. “So, I would say we were only really, after 25 years, getting started,” says Gorman. 

But the fate of historically significant spacecraft is even more uncertain.

“There have been ideas of putting the most historically valuable objects into a stable museum orbit around the Earth that is relatively empty,” says Walsh. “This could include Vanguard 1, the oldest object now in space.”

In January 2025, a paper suggested that Vanguard 1 should be brought back to Earth and exhibited in a museum.

The International Space Station Archaeological Project (Issap) marked out areas of the space station and investigated how they were used over its lifetime (Credit: Nasa/ Issap)

Similarly, it can be argued that the Hubble Space Telescope, which has transformed our understanding of the universe, and the International Space Station, the largest spacecraft ever built, should also be saved.

Research suggests that up to 40% of the space station could survive re-entry. “We need to think better about end of life for these craft,” he says. “If you can foresee that a mission is likely to be historic, then the preservation of the spacecraft should be part of the calculations.”

There is some good news in the battle to save the artefacts that tell the story of our species’ journey into space.  Archaeologist Thomas Penders can see the top of the Blue Origin rocket New Glenn from his archaeological laboratory at Cape Canaveral. “I can’t be there when they’re launching but I wish I could,” he says.

As cultural resources manager for the US Air Force/US Space Force at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Penders must balance the need for conservation with the needs of the growing commercial space industry. He looks after a 19,200 acre (7,800 hectre) area of Florida that encompasses what he calls the “most significant aspects of the US space programme’s history and future “, including the hallowed ground of Cape Canaveral. 

What I found is that in the ’50s and ’60s we were in such a race to develop rockets, and put a man in space… missile parts were just thrown over the fence – Thomas Penders

Penders spends much of his time consulting with the State Historic Preservation Office on whether it’s okay for these historic launch complexes to be reused. 

“Blue Origin has taken over Hangar S and they understand the significance of it,” he says. “They’ve been very cooperative with us in maintaining the integrity of the building and hangar.”

Hangar S was the home of the United States’s first human spaceflight programme, Project Mercury, and Blue Origin’s rockets are named after famous Mercury astronauts.

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There are new archaeological discoveries as well. “A contractor working on the Blue Origin launch complex found missile parts and called me in,” says Thomas Penders. “What I found is that in the ’50s and ’60s we were in such a race to develop rockets and put a man in space…missile parts were just thrown over the fence that surrounded the launch pad, and they were still there today.”

The commercialisation of space means this is a vital time to preserve space heritage. “These critical and extraordinary moments in the history of humanity deserve our attention, and they deserve a chance to exist into the future,” says O’Leary.

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I am AGAIN a finalist in the prestigious The Aerospace Media Awards this year – but in two categories rather than one!

I am stunned to be a finalist in the prestigious The Aerospace Media Awards & The Defence Media Awards AGAIN this year, and in two categories rather than one! For The Secret History of Drones AND How Active Volcanoes Can Put Airplanes in Danger. I wrote both for the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution Air and Space magazine. Thanks, too, to my brilliant editor Mark Strauss for all his support. But I am up against some tough competition. 

I was a finalist last year as well for this piece I wrote for BBC Future!

Great news, my latest feature for The Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine has been commissioned!

“Absolutely brilliant” Read my latest for BBC Future: Why Norway is restoring its Cold War military bunkers

Norway’s proximity to the USSR during the Cold War led to it building many military bunkers – some of them vast secret bases for planes and ships. Tensions with Russia have brought the bunkers back into focus.

“Absolutely brilliant” “Fascinating piece” “A fascinating look” “A great article”

Read my latest BBC Future piece in full by following this link.

I will post it in full on this website later.

Update: My new book proposal!

It is an intimidating location to research in!

Since N-4 DOWN was published, I have been head down in the time-consuming process of finding a new story to write about. In my research and imagination, this hunt has taken me from the frozen wastes of Antarctica to the top-secret Area 51 airbase and, finally, the sweatshops of London’s fashion industry. It’s been quite the journey.

I am excited by this story and if you loved my first book, the critically acclaimed N-4 DOWN the Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia, I think you will love it too!

I will let you know when I have more news that I can share

I was recently asked to write an article for The History Channel in the USA. I will let you know when it comes out!

I was recently asked to write an article for The History Channel in the USA on one of my favourite topics. I will let you know when it comes out!

I have some good news. Last year, I wrote book reviews for the US ed. of The Spectator magazine. Now, my first book review for the original The Spectator has been commissioned!

A selection of the books I reviewed for The Spectator World

Over the last or so, I have had the opportunity to write several non-fiction book reviews for the The Spectator World magazine and contribute to their Books of the Year 2024. You can read the reviews here and my Books of the Year 2024 here.

Now, I have my first commission to write a book for the original British edition The Spectator magazine. I can’t tell you which book I am reviewing. But it is a great one to have for my first review! The Spectator is the oldest magazine in the world.

Read my latest piece for BBC Future… Pathfinder 1: The airship that could usher in a new age

Pathfinder 1, bankrolled by a Google billionaire, is an attempt to revive the airship. A century after terrifying disasters, is it a safe-enough bet?

Read it in full below – or the original by clicking on this link.

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On 24 October 2024, a brief post was shared on the social media network LinkedIn. In it Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s airship company LTA Research finally announced Pathfinder 1‘s first if brief untethered flight at Nasa’s Moffett Field in California, part of the space agency’s Ames Research Center. “This morning, Pathfinder 1 reached another milestone: untethered outdoor flight. This successful test marks another important step in our journey, and we are excited to build on this achievement through our rigorous testing program.”

Airships are hard to hide. Despite the secrecy, one YouTuber filmed it from the road and uploaded it to the video-sharing site. 

“Pathfinder 1 is a pretty amazing vehicle,” says Alan Shrimpton, editor of the Airship Journal. “It is the first fully rigid airship, certainly of that size, for a very long time, and there was a great expectation that it would fly shortly after it began its outdoor testing programme….

“But Alan Weston [founder and former CEO of LTA Research] always said the biggest fault with rigid airships was that people in the past rushed their development and they were not going to make that same mistake. They were going to check it and check it again – and they did.”

Designers are having to use new techniques to solve some of the issues around rigid airships (Credit: LTA Research)

The understated tone in LTA’s post belies the historic achievements of Brin’s company so far. This was the first flight of the first airship built by the Google cofounder’s company, the first time a classic rigid airship of this size had flown since the 1930s, and the first of a new generation of airships. The last giant rigid airship Graf Zeppelin IIflew for the final time on 20 August 1939, 12 days before World War Two started, and was scrapped the following year. Rigid airships have a complex metal framework that supports a huge envelope filled with enough hydrogen or helium to lift a sizeable number of passengers, or cargo such as disaster relief, for days at a time. 

Hydrogen-filled airships are also symbols of the Golden Age of the airship. The era between the world wars when the promoters of the technology beguiled the public with promises of scheduled commercial passenger services between destinations like Europe and North America, and North America and the Pacific, and in some cases delivered on these promises. The Graf Zeppelin flew “the first regularly scheduled, nonstop, intercontinental airline service in the history of the world” between Germany and South America, and was far faster than ocean liners that plied the route.

But the crash of the airship Hindenburg in 1937 – which killed 36 people including one person on the ground – showed the drawbacks of the flammable gas used as buoyancy. The airship faded into obscurity; just as conventional aircraft design surged ahead.

Eighty-six years later in November 2023, Pathfinder 1 emerged for the first time from the historic Hangar Two at Moffett Field to begin its outdoor flight-testing programme. But the largest aircraft in the world stayed stubbornly tethered to the ground to the frustration of many aviation enthusiasts. Its expected first flight just didn’t happen.

But thanks to the Google co-founder’s deep pockets, LTA Research appears to  have the freedom to wait-to-get-it-right that others have not always had.

They have used this freedom to, for example, find better materials than lightweight aluminum alloys like duralumin to construct the giant frame of a rigid airship from, and cotton-composite materials and even cow guts to make the envelope out of, and gain a much better understanding of aerodynamics involved in flying very large airships. And it seems like they have  been able to cautiously flight test their creation, without the over confidence and pressure from investors that have been a problem in the past.

Pathfinder 1 is not a historical replica

“People said that they could not do it and that it was impossible,” says Janne Hietala, CEO of Kelluu Airships, whose 10 autonomous drones, each of which can be transported in a 12m (40ft) sea container, are currently “the world’s largest” fleet of airships. “This is a brilliant, very bold attempt to do the hard work, the engineering that is required, to mass-manufacture big airships. I don’t think they will build hundreds of those because of the difficulties in mass-manufacturing airships of that size, but it’s still possible.”

Pathfinder 1 is not a historical replica. It is a proof-of-concept airship designed to see if a rigid design can be updated with new materials. 

In particular, LTA Research wants to solve the thorny problem of how to mass produce aircraft of this size. It wants to build production models in Goodyear Airdock in Akron, Ohio, where the great US rigid airships of the 1930s were built.

“I’ve been down to Moffett Field to see Pathfinder 1 twice, and it is really an amazing thing to see in person,” says John Geoghegan, author of When Giants Ruled the Sky. “It’s very impressive to be able to see the learning they have made from the past even from the outside.” 

The fact that the giant rigid airship does not have tail fins in the traditional cross shape, but at an angle, is an example of such learning, because airships float up and down on a mooring mast and the bottom tail fin used to get damaged. Likewise, the airship’s engines are no longer inline but staggered along its length to reduce the wind, drag and vibration that they used to cause. Like many other new designs, it uses helium as a lifting gas to prevent the infernos that doomed the Golden Age of the airship.

Germany led the way in airship design in the 1920s and 30s, thanks to examples like the long-haul Graf Zeppelin (Credit: Getty Images)

Helium is less flammable than hydrogen, but there is a trade-off for this increased safety. It generates less lift than hydrogen, and it is in short supply. This makes it very expensive to fill the envelope of an airship with.

“There’s a lot of baggage around airships, and a lot of people who have pre-set ideas about them, and so these guys are being incredibly careful and extremely cautious about the information they release,” Geoghegan adds. “They do not want to do anything to contribute any more negative publicity. For the public always remember the airship disasters and not the successful flights.”

Pathfinder 1’s first untethered flight also has significance for the wider lighter-than-air community, which has for a long time had little more than glossy CGI graphics of large airships to show investors. That it has occurred at a time when high-profile airship companies such as Flying Whales “appear to be struggling to… build a flagship production facility” is a good morale boost for the sector, says Shrimpton.

“Investors tell so many people going out to try to get funding for their lighter-than-air projects that yes, it’s interesting, I can see the benefits of it, but show me one that is flying today… now they can.”

Aviation is an industry desperately looking for a decarbonisation solution and airships are part of that solution – Diana Little

“It is fantastic that LTA Research is making so much progress using modern technology to solve these problems,” says Diana Little, co-founder of airship startup Anumá Aerospace. “It reminds people about the capabilities of lighter-than-air flight.

“Aviation is an industry desperately looking for a decarbonisation solution and airships are part of that solution,” Little adds.

The first flight of Pathfinder 1 has been at least 12 years in the making. Brin’s interest in airships seems to have begun in 2012 around the same time as a modern semi-rigid Zeppelin NT (New Technology) airship began tourist flights from Moffett Field.

The following year he founded LTA Research Ltd and in 2017 his airship company began to lease space at Moffett Field and research began at the Akron Airdock. There they built a 12-engine, 50ft-long (15m) electric “baby airship” to test their technology.

Pathfinder 1 has tail fins at an angle because aerodynamic knowledge is much more refined than in the 1930s (Credit: LTA Research)

No one had built aircraft like these giant rigid airships for decades. So, it took time for the engineers to learn how to do this, particularly with a focus on safety and not repeating the mistakes of the past. In the 1930s, the materials used to create the such rigid airship’s framework and envelope which were simply not strong enough to deal with the stresses of flight.  

The use of computerised controls, new and much stronger lightweight materials like carbon fibre and titanium to construct the complex skeleton of the rigid airship are just some of the ways the giant rigid airship has been brought into the 21st Century. So too are the use of flame-retardant synthetic materials for the envelope of the airship, sensors to monitor the helium and engines that can be rotated to provide vectored thrust.

The knowledge and skills of the great engineers of the past had to be relearned by LTA – together with the latest research and technology – in order to design the airship and work out how to mass produce even larger craft in the future. Rather than expect their engineers to work at the top of unsteady 85ft-high (26m) ladders to build these ships like they did in the 1930s, LTA have designed a massive cradle-like structure that allows the workers to stay on the ground while the giant ships are slowly rotated in front of them. To do this they needed to find the skilled workers who were willing to join a risky project that may one day make aviation history, and are continuing to seek them today.

In 2017 work started at Moffett Field on LTA’s smallest airship Pathfinder 1, and planning began in Akron on the Pathfinder 3, its successor which is planned to be one-third-larger. (There is no Pathfinder 2.)

Interest in airships is cyclical – John Geoghegan

But a fully-fledged return of large airships is not yet a given. “I am crossing my fingers,” says Shrimpton, “but if Pathfinder 1 suffered a failure in flight everybody would point to it and say, ‘See once again, a large airship crashes – it is not safe,’ which would provide an almost insurmountable hurdle for the whole passenger/cargo-carrying airship industry.”

The same applies to other airship companies, such as Flying Whales, whose airship has not even been built yet. “They need to get over that same hurdle and prove to the public that they have a vehicle that is safe, like LTA Research is doing.”

Pathfinder 1 will pave the way for an even bigger concept design called Pathfinder 3 (Credit: LTA Research)

Geoghegan is more sanguine about it. “Interest in airships is cyclical,” he says. “Every 10 or 15 years a company comes along that is working in the airship category and a couple more sprout up. Some get prototypes flying. But none of them ever pan out.

“So, there is a lot of skittishness among the investor community about building these things. It is in part about the technology, is it robust enough to work. Then, second, what is the business application? Is there a market that exists that would financially support airships on this scale?

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“We keep hearing the same things trotted out. One is for tourism. One is for disaster relief. One is that it will be a green, non-polluting alternative to conventional aircraft, and the fourth one is specialised cargo.

“But I remain to be convinced that there’s an economic case for these things.”

The engineering challenges that LTA faces certainly remain significant.

“In the end, for LTA Research it is proof that their design worked, and a milestone for their staff, who worked tirelessly for three or four years to bring the design to fruition,” says Shrimpton. But Pathfinder could have much wider implications if it successfully takes to the skies. “It is really important. It is something the whole airship industry needs – to be seen in the sky.”