Far Beyond the Moon

This is quite easily the best book on … waste management in space yet written and an excellent addition to the space historiography, currently undergoing nothing less than a renaissance.

* H-Net Reviews *

Throughout the book, Munns and Nickelsen weave an entertaining and readable story, supporting their arguments with a balanced blend of technical sources and autobiographical accounts, seasoned with a sprinkling of thought-provoking science fiction references… . As greenhouse gases suffuse the Earth’s atmosphere and plastics churn through the planet’s oceans, we would all do well to reconsider our own relationships to waste in the magnificent life support system we inhabit. For this exercise, Far Beyond the Moon offers excellent food for thought.

* FASEB Journal *

The first book-length historical treatment of the topic, this frank, unflinching look at an unglamorous, sometimes embarrassing, yet absolutely essential aspect of space technology aims to remove what the authors convincingly argue has been a limiting stigma. We need to talk about shit in space, and Far Beyond the Moon is a thought-provoking conversation starter… . An engaging and broadly focused read, Far Beyond the Moon gathers a clutch of important but nearly forgotten stories, and Munns and Nickelsen succeed in their mission to break the cycle of silence surrounding waste in space.

* Technology and Culture *

David P. D. Munns and Kärin Nickelsen dedicate themselves to the problem of extraterrestrial excrement with a pointed pen and a palpable lust for the tasteless… . . The authors present an extremely instructive book, which is also to be welcomed for the fact that it draws the attention of the ‘daredevil men’ and their ‘flying rockets’ to a hitherto neglected, seemingly profane, but hardly less exciting field of the history of space technology.

* H Soz Kult *

This book tells an intriguing and salient story of the history of planning for humans living in space with zero provisioning and zero gravity, from the golden age of space flight in the 1960s to the tentative culmination of ecological life support in the project of Biosphere 2 in the 1990s. The narrative is entertaining and immensely educating. Far Beyond the Moon offers a witty and accessible story that holds all the answers to one of the most interesting questions about space flight: what to do with human waste in space.

– Sabine Höhler, author of Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960–1990

This book is a powerful and much-needed antidote to ‘macho’ histories of the Space Age. In place of shining rockets and square-jawed astronauts, Munns and Nickelsen give us a masterful guide to the earthier aspects of humankind’s attempts to live in space. Insightful, witty, and richly detailed, this study shows us that the problems of sanitation and waste management have been every bit as important to our conquest of space as rocket technology and moon walks.

– Joshua Nall, author of News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860–1910

In telling the history of human space flight from the ‘bottom up’—from a focus on human waste as opposed to human wits—Munns and Nickelson offer an insightful look at Soviet and US experiments in interstellar sustainability. They describe experiments with closed systems in refreshingly open ways that illustrate how this unglamorous research captured imaginations beyond space agencies, including science fiction authors and projects like Biosphere 2.

– Lisa Messeri, author of Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds

This book explores fascinating overlaps in personnel, facilities, and concepts between exobiology (later astrobiology) research and the fascinating, practical efforts to create life support systems for human long-term survival in outer space.

– James Strick, Journal of the History of Biology

This is a richly illustrated and often fun book, as well as a telling one about the limits of scientific knowledge and the kind of serialized failures endemic to a technological pursuit that is characterized by untrammeled optimism. The authors clearly enjoy their naughty subject, but the lines of good taste are seldom crossed, which is more than anyone can say about the products of some of their actors’ deep-space contraptions.

* Isis *

Far Beyond the Moon makes an essential contribution to historiographies that are too rarely connected.

* Journal for the History of Astronomy *

David P. D. Munns (Author) David P. D. Munns is associate professor of history at John Jay College, City University of New York.

Kärin Nickelsen (Author) Kärin Nickelsen is professor of the history of science at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany.