First of all - when I say space history, what does that mean to you?
Wow, lots of engagement with this tweet - clearly space history has an important place in people’s hearts!
There’s a lot of focus on missions (particularly US missions), and the women involved in them are out of focus.
There’s a lot of focus on missions (particularly US missions), and the women involved in them are out of focus.
My research is a bit different: I look at British space history, which gets a lot less attention. I do look at the science, but I also look at engineering, computing and women’s labour. (These aren’t mutually exclusive.)
This is because while we have some written records of the science - especially in scientific papers - information about other aspects of space history is either stored in internal documents (that might get lost), or not written down at all.
That makes the info harder to recover and leaves us with a distorted record of what actually happened, and why and how it happened.
I work on the history of @MSSLSpaceLab, the largest university space research group in the UK. It’s not like many other university research groups - for a start, it’s in a Victorian mansion in the countryside. The first time I tried to visit, we thought we got lost! 
I’ve been privileged enough to have some conversations today about the space history stories we tell. One of the reasons I’m so motivated to research and communicate the stories of people at MSSL is that you *can* go beyond talking about a handful of “great men”.
Instead, you can talk about how the lab as a whole functions, you can contextualise its role, and you can uncover the parts of space science that get overlooked.
I talked about this last time I had the account, but scientific papers tend to leave a lot of things out, such as things that went wrong and social dynamics. This makes sense - scientific papers are there to report on results - but it leaves historians with incomplete records.
Some people write memoirs, which is helpful. But they might well distort things, leave things out, or just be a dry account of events.
Internal memos can be really useful...that is, if you can get your hands on them. They’re not easy to find and sometimes a lab won’t have enough space for them, so they’ll get thrown away. On the other hand, they sometimes turn up randomly during a clean-out, which is cool!
For example, this is an opening programme from 1967 and an internal plan of the building from the 1990s.
But my preferred method of doing history is oral history - I like to sit down with people and interview them about their lives. Usually the majority of my week is taken up with preparing for interviews, doing interviews, and now with transcripts, so it gets pretty intense.
Last time I was on this account, we had some really productive conversations about oral history! I, personally, like it because people will tell you things in an interview that they won’t necessarily be able or willing to tell you in writing.
Oral history also gives you a lot more information to play with, in terms of being able to capture people’s dialects and vocal inflections in a way that written records don’t. Video interviews can give you even more information, but I’m not a very good videographer.
On the other hand, people might leave things out, forget, or they might be filtering their memories through various rose-coloured (or mud-coloured) lenses.
That doesn’t mean you can’t use oral testimony - if anything, you can actually learn quite a bit. The Italian historian Alessandro Portelli wrote several articles about how people misremembering events tells you a lot about how they thought and felt.
One thing I wish people had told me about is that yes, science and engineering are jobs - but they’re jobs people care deeply about, and ones that bring up strong emotions. People feel very, very strongly about their successes and failures.
That means you can do great things for people, taking them back to their youth. But it also means that you can bring up painful memories. How people react isn’t necessarily your fault, but it can leave both of you shaken. blog.oup.com/2017/05/oral-h…
Interviewing people is challenging but rewarding. It’s been humbling to see how many people have wanted to come forward and tell me their stories of @MSSLSpaceLab, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything!
Tomorrow I hope to start talking some more about my results! Stay tuned...
