Profile

Jordan Bimm is a historian of science, technology, and medicine focused on the human and biological aspects of space exploration. His forthcoming book, Anticipating the Astronaut, examines the surprising history of pre-NASA space medicine test-subjects contributing to early visions of an ideal spacefaring body, including push-button soldiers, high-altitude Indigenous people, mountaineers, women pilots, and animals. His current project, Putting Mars in a Jar, recovers the forgotten military origin of astrobiology—the study of potential extraterrestrial life—through a history of U.S. Air Force life-on-Mars simulations in the 1950s. He holds a PhD in Science & Technology Studies (STS) from York University in Toronto, and was most recently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.

He holds a Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. The prestigious fellowship provides the opportunity to work with NASM's curators and collections to further his project about the military origin of astrobiology, the search for life in the cosmos, and Mars environmental simulators called "Mars Jars."