Turning Fylingdales inside out: making practice visible at the UK's ballistic missile early warning and space monitoring station.l

RAF Fylingdales is the UK's ballistic missile early warning and space monitoring station. It is part of the UK/US nuclear deterrent, watching space for signs of missile activity, and it also monitors a swathe of northern hemispheric space. The latter function is vital for the maintenance of economic and social life around the world; RAF Fylingdales tracks the 1,700 operational military and civilian satellites in orbit, including those that enable technologies such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to function. It is part of the infrastructure that supports the International Space Station. It also monitors the 43,000 pieces of space debris which orbit earth.

This research aims to turn RAF Fylingdales inside out, making its practices and functions visible and demystifying its operations. The Royal Air Force, which operates this highly secure site, is acutely aware of the need for greater public knowledge and understanding about the station and its functions, and are project partners in the research. In the absence of wider public understanding, fictions and fantasies about the station dominate - that it hosts nuclear weapons, for example, or that it has privileged insight into extra-terrestrial life-forms, or it is involved in monitoring our electronic communications (it doesn't do any of these). The research team are motivated by a commitment to greater academic and public understanding of space monitoring and nuclear deterrence, which remain little known and poorly understood beyond specialist circles.

The research has three objectives: conceptual innovation, empirical discovery and public engagement. The conceptual objective is to understand RAF Fylingdales in a new way. Most conventional academic analyses of nuclear deterrence and space monitoring focus on the abstract international and national political systems that govern defence and security. However, these approaches completely obscure the reality that nuclear deterrence and space monitoring only exist because people, working in a particular place, make them happen. In this research, we focus on nuclear deterrence and space monitoring as socially constituted and produced. We will examine the daily workplace practices undertaken by a range of people employed at the site, from radar monitoring to grounds maintenance. We will consider how geography influences Fylingdales' siting, capabilities and functionality. We will investigate its varied space monitoring and nuclear deterrence operations, both in the present and historically, drawing on the station's archive of documents, photographs and objects explaining the site and its history. Ultimately, we want to consider and reveal RAF Fylingdales as an assemblage of social, technical, nuclear, military and industrial components that together bring nuclear deterrence and space monitoring into being.

The research will use three core methods. Creative arts practice will be used with the archive's documents and material objects, using drawing, sculpture and audio-visual multi-media experimentation to investigate how RAF Fylingdales' functions are constituted. Interviews and ethnomethodological observation will help us understand, from the people who work there, how the station operates by looking in detail at what its workforce do, individually and as teams. Cultural geography fieldwork in and around the site will give us access to the military geographies, landscapes and experiences of this place.

We will communicate our research findings through a programme of public activities, academic publications and research briefings for key organisations. We will work with our steering group to develop strategies for future sustainable and realistic management of RAF Fylingdales' archive and its resources. Subject to security clearance, much of the data collected will be made available for public use at the end of the project through deposition in digital format in publicly accessible archives.

The aim of this project is to open up RAF Fylingdales to greater public scrutiny. RAF Fylingdales is the UK's ballistic missile early warning and space monitoring station. Its core functions are to monitor a section of space over the northern hemisphere for missile activity, and to monitor the 1,700 operational military and civilian satellites and around 43,000 pieces of space debris that orbit Earth. RAF Fylingdales plays a key role in maintaining both communications on Earth (for example, maintaining the global positioning systems that we use daily) and in maintaining defence systems through its role in nuclear deterrence.

RAF Fylingdales are collaborating with the research team from Newcastle University as project partners. The project will turn Fylingdales inside out by making visible how the station actually works. We will do this by using a range of research methods to explore the RAF Fylingdales archive, and engage with people who work there to make space monitoring and nuclear deterrence possible. RAF Fylingdales is a highly secure site; its functions in nuclear deterrence and space monitoring mean that public access, though allowed by arrangement in certain circumstances, is not routinely possible. Our public engagement activities therefore have to focus on what is possible beyond the perimeter fence. We will do this through a high-quality professionally-produced project website to share the research, through exhibitions and associated public programming, through reports to the RAF and to various organisations with an interest in the station and its wider historic and natural environment, and through publications which will include a book written for a non-specialist readership.

Four distinct groups will benefit from this research:

Local, national and international archives will benefit. The project will involve a review of (and intervention as necessary with) the current RAF Fylingdales archive and its organisation, collecting and conservation practices. We will increase knowledge about this archive amongst key national archives (e.g. British Library, UK Data Archive, Imperial War Museum, English Heritage) and locally via the Whitby Museum archive. We will be able to contribute to loans, accessioning and acquisition discussions between RAF Fylingdales and other archives. Research data collected through interviews and other activities will be added to the RAF Fylingdales archive, enhancing its collection and also expanding its utility to other archives.

Cultural institutions (e.g. English Heritage, the Imperial War Museum), local museums (e.g. Hatton Gallery Newcastle), and international collections such as the Smithsonian Institution group in the USA, will benefit potentially through exhibitions emerging from RAF Fylingdales' collection. These in turn will enhance public understanding of the nature of the RAF Fylingdales and its functions, and will thus contribute to cultural institutions' respective core missions for public education.

People living and working in the locality, as individuals and as representatives of groups involved in social, cultural and environmental activities (e.g. National Park Authority, local historical societies, local amenity groups), will benefit through the availability of fuller information about Fylingdales developed through the research, and will be able to access this information and share their own experiences, through exhibitions and situated community engagement activities, and through interactive facilities on the project website. They will also be able to access interview recordings because our deposition practices for data sharing will facilitate this.

Defence specialists, working nationally and internationally on both nuclear deterrence and space monitoring will be interested in the site, and will be able to draw on the project research findings, on research data deposited in the archive, and on archive resources, to further their understanding