On Tuesday 12th November 2024 at 12pm, Rachell Hill will consider the cultural, political and technical histories of Skynet 1. This talk will be hosted in-person at the RAF Museum's London site and virtually via Crowdcast.

First established in 1969, Skynet is a UK military communications satellite programme with over 50 years of successful operation in the space domain. Skynet 1 (the first iteration of the programme) was operated by No. 1001 Signals Unit from its nerve centre at RAF Oakhanger. BBC News visited Oakhanger in 1969 and broadcast footage of lab-coated operators, observing: 

"This is the new type of RAF man, pressing buttons on a computer control panel, dealing with a satellite 20,000 miles above the east coast of Africa. It’s a far cry from the Battle of Britain wizard prang sort of man."

 Immediately, Skynet is presented to the public in contrast with the Hurricanes and radar networks of WW2. Moving airspace into orbital altitudes, national defence is now represented through satellites and ground bases: the vestments of a cold war machine. Concomitant with this technological shift is the emergence of the “new type of RAF man,” incorporating computational power and space infrastructure into their remit. This intersection of communication, control and increasing automation, enabled by mid twentieth-century computation, is known as cybernetics. 

Accounting for the operator or “human in the loop” of these cybernetic systems, in 1960 Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline coined the term “cyborg.” Perhaps we might also usefully understand the new RAF man of Skynet as a form of cyborg. In explicitly bringing the Battle of Britain into conversation with Skynet, the BBC News segment encouraged viewers to believe that Skynet, and its cyborg RAF operators, would conduct the next technological giant leap for the nation. Looking at wider media coverage of Skynet 1 further demonstrates how the public were taught to think about space as a new, essential part of the UK. 

This presentation will consider the cultural, political and technical histories of Skynet 1 through the figure of the new RAF man, with primary materials including declassified documents, news footage, newspaper articles, in-house journals and photography. As the centrepiece of the UK’s spacepower, this presentation argues that a further investigation into the (largely untold) history of Skynet is crucial to understanding the UK’s escalating role in the space domain.

Rachel Hill is a AHRC funded PhD Candidate in the Science and Technology Studies department of University College London, where her research focuses on the history of the UK’s military satellite programme Skynet. She is a co-director of the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC) and explores the revolutionary potential of speculative fiction as a member of the feminist research collective Beyond Gender. She is a co-convener of the Centre for Outer Space Studies at UCL and the transplanetary ecologies reading group.

Lunchtime Lecture (London): A Far Cry from the Wizard Prang Sort of Man: The Cyborg Operators of Skynet 1