Collecting Space Heritage

Supervisors:

• Professor Ross Parry ross.parry@leicester.ac.uk
• Professor Nigel Bannister nigel.bannister@leicester.ac.uk

Project description:

In 2026, after a wait of over 50 years, human beings will once again set foot on the surface of the moon. They do so, at a time when the volume of satellites orbiting the earth has intensified, when commercial spaceflight has transitioned from concept to industrial reality, and when human missions ‘Onwards to Mars’ (Moore, 2011) may now be only a generation away.

As humanity begins to reflect on the magnitude of the cultural, social, and political reality of life in space, it raises adjacent questions of what this means for those organisations that collect, reflect, and narrate human history and identity.

What, in other words, are the distinct challenges that face cultural organisations (such as museums, libraries, and archives) in the formal collecting, documenting, and conservation of the cultural heritage of space travel and humanity extension into space?

How, in other words, do we collect the living heritage of space? And is the idiom of ‘collecting’ even fit for this next unprecedented era of humanity.

Building on this emerging and growing field of space heritage (O’Leary & Capelotti, 2015), this doctoral project has the opportunity to consider a number of curatorial, ethical, and operational questions of collecting space heritage, including, but not limited to:

• What regulatory and professional processes and systems are in place currently to collect space heritage? 
• What distinct practical and ethical questions arise in the context of collecting the heritage of space exploration and habitation?
• How in the new paradigm and opportunity of extra-terrestrial heritage might cultural organisations confront (or indeed decline) practices of ‘colonisation’ and ‘extraction’ that have shaped many of their pasts and burdened their presents?
• And to what extent are existing curatorial workflows, skills, and policies fit for purpose for a future in which humanity lives and works more substantively and routinely beyond the earth?

These distinct dilemmas and anomalies of space heritage raise questions not just of how to engage with this new dimension of human experience, but they have the potential to speak to wider museological questions and ambitions of what museums can be for, how they might work, and where they might be, in the twenty-first century.

Working with their supervisory team to identify a focus and investigative direction that aligns to their own expertise, the candidate will have the opportunity not only to draw upon the UK’s new Museum Data Service, but also to work closely with leaders in curatorial practice around space heritage that form part of the collaborating team of the new Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space, including the National Space Centre, and the Science Museum Group.

This fully-funded PhD project also forms part of the anniversary celebrations that mark 60 years of global impact of Museum Studies at Leicester. During this time, the university of Leicester has acquired a global reputation for leading-edge thinking and experimental practice in Museum Studies.

This PhD candidate will join the University’s School of Heritage and Culture, where Museum Studies researchers, practitioners and postgraduate students come together to think creatively and critically about museums, galleries and heritage.

The successful candidate, for the duration of their project, will also become a Fellow of the Institute for Digital Culture. The Institute works globally with the culture sector as it adapts to a digital age. Its network of international partners, lead and support purposeful, inter-disciplinary, research action with cultural organisations around the world – in work themed around ‘Creative and Cultural Technologies’, ‘Inclusive Digital Design’, ‘Digital Skills and Leadership’, and ‘Cultural Informatics’.

Museum Studies at Leicester, and the Institute for Digital Culture, are also the home of the Museum Data Service (MDS), a joint venture between Art UK and the Collections, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Bloomberg Philanthropies (Parry, et al., 2025).

The MDS is a transformative new service that aims to connect and share all the object records across all UK museums, providing the raw material for anyone to work with this wealth of knowledge. This project will have the opportunity to work closely not just with the expansive and rapidly growing data of MDS, but the team behind its design and growth.

References:

O’Leary, B. L., & P. J. Capelotti (eds) (2015). Archaeology and Heritage of the Human Movement into Space. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. 

Moore, P. (2011). ‘Onwards to Mars’, University of Leicester, https://le.ac.uk/space/patrick-moore

Parry, R, S. D. Sabbata, A. Ellis, H, Hardy, M. Ridge (2025). ‘A Framework for Sustainable and Scalable Cultural Data Integration and Analysis: Using the Large Dataset of the Museum Data Service’, Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on System Security, Safety, and Reliability (ISSSR). 12-13 April 2025. Anshun, China. Available online at: https://hdl.handle.net/2381/30408313

Please refer to the funding and How to Apply information below before applying.