The International Space Station Archaeological Project (ISSAP), co-directed by Alice Gorman and me, is the first full-scale, systematic archaeological investigation of the material culture from a site of human activity in space. We started in late 2015, in response to a number of phenomena, including a growing desire to move the focus of space archaeology away from heritage studies and purely theoretical discussions and towards deep interpretation of material culture and more practical applications of archaeological effort. The obstacles to carrying out archaeological research in space have been discussed Alice Gorman elsewhere in this volume. This chapter tells the story of
ISSAP from concept to execution, providing a view into space archaeology as a social science in the early twenty-first century.