Plastics in Outer Space

The advent of mass-produced plastics coincided with the Space Age in the 1950s. Plastics were used in spacecraft manufacture from the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957. In the nearly 70 years since then, plastics have become distributed throughout the solar system, forming part of the archaeological record of space travel. Plastic use in space falls into two main categories: specialist engineering plastics used in space vehicles, and those used in human spaceflight missions for scientific and everyday activities. However, like all material culture, space plastic also has social and symbolic dimensions. This chapter looks at three case studies illustrating these aspects of plastics in outer space: the metallised plastic film developed in the 1960s for NASA’s Echo programme, Velcro and zip lock bags on the International Space Station, and plastic as an element in the social construction of astronaut identity.