Digital twins as space media

NASA scientists have claimed that the rescue of the stricken Apollo 13 spacecraft in 1970 created the first digital twin system. In this article, I examine NASA’s narrative, which is gathering consensus as the origin story of digital twin technologies, with two main points of focus. First, through an examination of the dynamics of control and error, I scrutinise the ways in which the NASA ethos and worldview may be embedded within contemporary uses of digital twin technologies. Second, through an analysis of two subsequent NASA missions and the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey , I frame digital twin technologies as ‘space media’ which, Gál et al. claim, can ‘reorient our view [. . .] to “off-Earth” perspectives’. This approach reveals the potential of digital twins to propagate imaginaries beyond the managerial systems of control that constitute their dominant contemporary usages.