Submission as part of the Geopolitics Special Issue: ‘Critical Geopolitics of Outer Space’ Geopolitical Imaginaries of the Space Shuttle Mission Patches Andrew S. Maclaren Department of Geography & Environment, University of Aberdeen
[email protected] University of Aberdeen School of Geosciences, Department of Geography & Environment St Marys Elphinstone Road Aberdeen AB24 3UF 01224 547299 Keywords Outer Space; Nationalism; Iconography; Space Shuttle; Popular Geopolitics; Mission Patches Acknowledgements I would like to thank the special issue organisers Julie Klinger and Danny Bednar for inviting me to contribute. I would like to thank all the those involved in the special issue, Rory Rowan, Julie Saperstein, Katherine Sammler, Casey Lynch and Oliver Dunnett, for their useful comments during the workshop process which helped to develop my arguments. Franklin Ginn and Jan Penrose helped to shape this research initially, and I am grateful to them for their guidance. Conversations with Fraser MacDonald, Dan Sage, Jonathan Prior and Dan Swanton were very useful in talking through the ideas of this paper and associated research. My thanks also go to Jacob Barber, Leslie Mabon and Ross Young for comments on previous drafts related to this research, and Lorna Philip and Mags Currie for their encouragement in continuing this interest. I am grateful to the organisers, chairs and audiences of the 'Domesticating Geopolitics' session at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference (September 2015), at the University of Exeter, UK, and the 'Cold War Geographies' Symposium (January 2017), at The Eccles Centre for American Studies, The British Library, London, UK where this research was initially presented. Three reviewers, along with editorial guidance from Sarah Mills, provided enormously useful feedback in developing this paper for final production and I would like to thank them all for their generous input.