Asif A. Siddiqi is professor of history at Fordham University in New York. He writes and teaches on the history of science and technology as well as on modern Russian history. His books include The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 and the forthcoming Departure Gates: Global Histories of Space on Earth. Siddiqi is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015) and the coeditor of the Studies in the History of Science and Technology series at Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cosmic Fragments enlarges the purview of the history of space exploration, foregrounding those narrative fragments normally consigned to the edges—environmental damage, Indigenous dispossession, infrastructural entanglements, failed pathways, and cultural registers of ambiguity and rupture. This anthology is a significant achievement and is poised to make a valuable contribution to space history.