Justin Walsh
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jstpwalsh.bsky.social
Justin Walsh
@jstpwalsh.bsky.social
6.2K followers 500 following 3K posts
Space archaeologist, hab consultant, ancient Mediterranean, heritage | Prof at Chapman U | Fellow at USC | Explorers Club 50 | https://issarchaeology.org / http://brickmoonspace.com | He/him | Settler on unceded Tongva land (LA) | avi by Zach Weinersmith
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My "Neferkare is established and living" cartouche is raising a lot of questions already answered by my cartouche
Okay, but how is that different from anything else right now?
I've never met anybody so completely certain of his own genius before, but I don't have a lot of SV contacts
Reposted by Justin Walsh
⚠️ Job Alert ⚠️

We are looking for a Post-Doc in Digital Provenance Studies (2 years, FT, TV-L 13). Note: German language fluency essential.

Deadline: November 19, 2025.

More info at the link.

Thank you for sharing and spreading the word.

🙏🏼
Wissenschaftliche*r Mitarbeiter*in Digitale Provenienzforschung (PostDoc)
www.leuphana.de
The ISS Archaeological Project studied the phenomenon of crew-created visual displays in two articles (both open access): www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... and www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/11...
Reposted by Justin Walsh
THREAD: 25 years ago today, the first crew of the International Space Station for a four-and-a-half month stay. Two cosmonauts - Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev - were joined by NASA astronaut William Shepherd. Since that moment, the ISS had had at least two people onboard.
There are approximately 50 posts in this thread and of course I left out the verb in the first sentence
THREAD: 25 years ago today, the first crew of the International Space Station for a four-and-a-half month stay. Two cosmonauts - Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev - were joined by NASA astronaut William Shepherd. Since that moment, the ISS had had at least two people onboard.
Congratulations to everyone who has worked on the ISS project. It is an absolutely amazing thing, and it deserves all the recognition we can give it. (And maybe a new table.)
Our work reinforces the comments of the crew: astronauts want and need a table. It's hard to think of a simpler or more useful technology. ISS has functioned to teach us how to live better in space.
Here's a photo from our experiment on the ISS showing the table on the US side on a Saturday, with a leftover Russian pastry in a Ziploc bag at lower left.
Eating around a table is so important that the crew has consistently maintained a group dinner of the entire crew every Friday night. Sometimes this happens on the Russian side, sometimes on the US side.
At the same time, it's highly notable that there has never been a professionally-designed table on the NASA side of the ISS. For as important and useful as the crew's social bonding around a table is, the NASA engineers who planned the station never prioritized something so simple.
This table has continued to be used ever since. It is a social hub of the ISS. It has certainly served its function, perhaps far beyond the dreams of its student creators.
Note that the table is perpendicular to the wall again. Paolo Nespoli noticed this, too, when he came back to the ISS in 2017. He said, "When I went back up to the station, I thought Dammit, not again!”
In consultation with NASA engineers and astronauts, students from Clear Lake HS, right near Johnson Space Center, designed and built a table that was launched and installed in Node 1 in 2016 www.hunchdesign.com/uploads/2/2/...
www.hunchdesign.com
Nothing will spill in space, so this was a good solution. With Paolo's modification, the table stayed there until 2016, when the US Orbital Segment of the ISS finally got its own table. This one was a product of NASA's HUNCH program to engage with high school students.
This situation was seen as suboptimal by some crew, though. It stuck out into a space that it wasn't designed for, and people hurt themselves bumping into it. ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli solved the problem by tilting it at 45°. www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-ma...
But that original table also did not go in the waste stream. Instead, it was installed in the US Node 1 module, because it seemed like a second table was needed for the larger crew.
So then everyone ate at the Russian table in the Zvezda module. And the ISS grew, over 10 years until it more-or-less reached its present dimensions. And the crew grew from 3 to 6. By 2009, the Russians replaced the original "real" table with a new one.
That table stayed for several more missions, until the proper one finally arrived. The bricolage one was not destroyed, though. It made its way back to Earth and into the collection of the National Air and Space Museum. airandspace.si.edu/collection-o...
Table, International Space Station (ISS) | National Air and Space Museum
airandspace.si.edu
The various ISS mission controls did not like this, because the drilling and screwing needed to make the table generated metal bits that could be inhaled in a microgravity environment. The crew didn't care. They had a table.
Tables are important; they're how you build a society. Anthropologists and astronauts agree: we build and maintain relationships around tables. The crew decided to build their own table. They used leftover materials that were packed around other items.
When the first crew arrived, ISS was just a trio of modules, with most work happening on the Russian side. The crew expected to find a table to eat at, but the Russian space agency had to cancel this so they could send other equipment.