First article from ISSAP!

A cosmonaut on ISS with printed icons — Cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov displays printed icons in front of a porthole window on the International Space Station.

We’ve passed a major milestone today: the first of our articles to be published appeared in a special issue of the journal Religions – and it’s open access. Due to the vagaries of academic publishing, this is actually the fourth article we’ve finished! We have another one, on our methodology, accepted for publication (pre-print here), and two others under review (one pre-print here).

The article published today, “Eternity in Low Earth Orbit: Icons on the International Space Station,” was written by Wendy Salmond, Alice Gorman, and Justin Walsh. It’s based on work we started in 2017, observing visual display practices in the Russian module Zvezda. You can see our previous blog posts about it here and here. The special issue’s theme is “The Mutual Influence of Religion and Science in the Human Understanding and Exploration of Outer Space,” edited by Deana Weibel and Glen Swanson.