Turning Fylingdales Inside Out:

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.