Martin Collins in September 2024. © Alexander C.T. Geppert.
Some academics choose to delve into a narrow research area early in their career and pursue that interest all throughout their professional lives. Others adopt a broader, more eclectic approach. Martin Joseph Collins (1951–2025) combined both: remaining true to a research area identified early on while gradually expanding his intellectual pursuits, always staying abreast of the ever-evolving academic conversation, not only within the history of technology but across an expansive range of fields and disciplines. Martin was a curator, a historian, an editor but, above all, an intellectual.
Martin’s wide-ranging interests, paired with a cultivated taste for the unconventional and a calling for exploration, were evident from an early age. Born in Flint, Michigan, on July 3, 1951, Marty—as he was known to family and friends—studied engineering at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, switched majors midway through and eventually graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in General Studies with a concentration in chemistry in 1977. During this period, Martin worked in an automotive manufacturing plant, on a Mississippi riverboat, and with the tent crew of a traveling circus. He also moved to Washington, DC, where he would reside for the remainder of his life. Subsequently, Martin earned three more academic degrees: a Master of Library Science, a Master of Arts in history and philosophy of science and a PhD in history of technology, all from the University of Maryland in College Park.
Meanwhile, an internship had brought Martin to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM), where he began his career in 1983, initially as a librarian. He subsequently became director of the Glennan-Webb-Seamans Oral History Project in 1987 and held this position for the next two decades. In 1993, Martin was appointed curator of civilian application satellites. During his tenure—he retired in July 2021, over 38 years later—Martin expanded the satellite collection to include weather, remote sensing and communications satellites, acquiring altogether over 300 artifacts, and engaged in a wide range of curatorial activities, including inter-institutional programs with the aerospace industry and the federal government, collaborations with universities and corporations, and the creation of the Artefacts Consortium. This transatlantic and still thriving worldwide association of historians of science and technology, mostly working in museums and academic institutions, was established in 1996 in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the Science Museum in London.
Several of Martin’s curatorial achievements at the Smithsonian stand out. In 2012, he initiated a partnership with the non-profit Al-Nayzak to bring STEM education to Palestinian high-school students. Three years later, after extensive negotiations and in recognition of his long service on the board of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, he and archivist Patti Williams succeeded in acquiring the so-called Clarkives, the comprehensive personal papers of the noted British science fiction author, futurist and outspoken spaceflight advocate Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008). Held at Clarke’s long-term home in Sri Lanka, 188 boxes were shipped to Washington, DC. Quite fittingly, on the fiftieth anniversary of the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 2018, Martin helped to bring “The Barmecide Feast,” a full-scale reflection of the iconic neo-classical hotel room featured in the movie’s penultimate scene, to the museum. Martin’s final act, and possibly his most enduring curatorial legacy, however, was the establishment of a new gallery, One World Connected, which opened in fall 2022 as part of the museum’s ongoing renovation. By that time Martin had already departed amid apparent dissatisfaction with the museum leadership’s reluctance to showcase critical content on climate change and the impending climate crisis.
While employed at NASM, Martin completed his doctoral dissertation, “Planning for Modern War: RAND and the Air Force, 1945–1950.” Supervised by noted historian of technology Robert Friedel, he defended in 1998. The dissertation formed the basis of his first monograph, Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945–1950, published in 2002. An institutional and political history of the establishment of the RAND think tank within an early Cold War context, Cold War Laboratory demonstrated how postwar “permanent preparedness” for future warfare linked military needs, industrial expertise and academic research, helping to legitimate and operationalize systems analysis and related “scientific” approaches to strategy and bombing in the emerging military-industrial complex. Given that it was RAND that published Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship in 1946, then the most comprehensive engineering study of satellite spacecraft ever undertaken, the broad parameters of Martin’s scholarly interests were laid out at this point: Cold War science, global communications and the cultural politics of spaceflight, originally in an American and later in an increasingly global, if not planetary context. Time and again, Martin’s historiographical work funneled scholarly attention to infrastructure, systems thinking and the transnational flows of information, capital and power that defined the twentieth century.
Martin proved a pioneer of satellite history. Concurrently with his curatorial work, all along he had been contemplating the function, role and significance of communication satellites for the making of the present. Initially an obscure and niche field within the history of science and technology, satellite history is only beginning to grow in global prominence today, as the number of objects launched into Earth orbit during the past ten years has surpassed the combined total during all six decades prior. Despite our long-standing dependence on these omnipresent and ubiquitous, yet largely invisible infrastructure systems that circle the Earth every moment in the thousands, research in this area remains limited to a handful of studies of varying quality.
When, after many years of research and writing, Martin’s second monograph, A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age, finally appeared in 2018, it won the Middleton Award annually presented by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Surprisingly, its field-changing nature was unacknowledged by otherwise enthusiastic reviews in the American Historical Review (John 2019), Technology and Culture (Slayton 2019) and other journals. A Telephone for the World exemplifies what can be achieved by combining a detailed historical inquiry into a specific world-spanning technical system with the posing of big questions, in this case the interwoven globalization processes of markets, imaginaries and ideologies during the 1980s and 1990s and the creation of the category of the global. Based on two dozen oral history interviews, a deep dive into the archives of a multinational corporation and a wealth of visual sources, A Telephone for the World masterly charts the entrepreneurial rise, precipitous collapse and military resurrection of the 66-satellite system Iridium. It presents the zealous implementation of a world-encompassing communication technology in order to understand how a plethora of historical actors coalesced in invoking the global as a category. In Martin’s hands, a skillfully drawn picture of a space-based communication system morphs into a pre-history of our contemporary world, neatly tracing a crooked line to present-day globalism. Martin first sketched that argument in “One World . . . One Telephone: Iridium, One Look at the Making of a Global Age,” a much-celebrated article published in History and Technology in 2005 which would earn him SHOT’s IEEE Life Member Prize in Electrical History. In essence, Martin recognized two decades ago what we are witnessing today: that the making of the Global Age was subtended by the technological infrastructure of the Space Age, and that the concept of the planetary is crucial for distinguishing between the two. Martin, unsurprisingly, comprehended my incipient ideas about the scholarly necessity to historicize planetarity and to planetize history better than anyone else—including, at that point, myself.
In addition to these two monographs, Martin authored numerous scholarly articles, if never quite as many as one retrospectively wishes. He was responsible for the publication of NASM exhibition catalogues such as Space Race: The U.S.-U.S.S.R. Competition to Reach the Moon (1999) and After Sputnik: 50 Years of the Space Age (2007). He also co-edited several scholarly volumes, including A Spacefaring Nation: Perspectives in Space History (1991) with then NASA chief historian Sylvia Freis and Showcasing Space (2005), together with his Science Museum colleague Doug Millard. Martin was a historians’ historian, more well-read and more aware of ongoing debates and disputes in other disciplines than many of his colleagues in the sometimes narrowly defined history of technology field. He was deeply invested in historiography and well-versed in anthropology, cultural studies, sociology and political science. His ability to pull individual cases and arguments out of their seemingly natural contexts and make them resonate within analytically distinct frameworks made Martin not only a sought-after commentator, critic and discussant at conferences and workshops worldwide but also a gifted journal editor. Following the publication of his 2005 Iridium article in History and Technology, the journal’s long-term editor John Krige invited him to become his editorial successor. Subsequently, Martin took the helm from 2009 to 2017. During those eight years, he oversaw the publication of eleven special issues in addition to twenty-five regular issues. Contributors who worked with him will attest to his exceptional editorial skill and meticulous care. Eventually, museum duties forced him to step down from his editorship, if reluctantly.
Within Martin’s own scholarly production, a series of four independently published yet interrelated essays stand out. Three appeared in consecutive volumes edited by another NASA chief historian, Steven J. Dick, while the fourth was published in my European astroculture trilogy. These short essays remain among the most provocative and insightful contributions to space historiography. Earlier and more cogently than others, Martin grasped and theorized the cultural significance of all attempts to leave Earth behind, whether in science or in fiction. Just as spaceflight compels humans to reflect on their place in the cosmos, space history, if done right, can raise questions that transcend those considered by other subfields of historiography. Each of these four pieces was, respectively, dedicated to a central analytical issue in space history: explanation, periodization, representation and the 1970s as a transitional decade. “Culture is not a side motif in space history, but a central explanatory problem,” Martin postulated in the first essay and thus addressed the concept of astroculture avant la lettre. Rejecting oft-used notions such as “impact” and “popularization” as insufficient, in the second essay he critiqued a general lack of explicit theoretical grounding in space history and advocated for placing spaceflight in history instead. Martin being Martin, he offered a “gentle imperative”: “Be attentive to the possibilities of thought in the humanities that has seen production and culture as a historical problem of the first rank.” Drawing from his own empirical work on GPS and Iridium, the third essay demonstrated how spaceflight “as exploration” had been superseded by spaceflight “as application” that “helped make this world,” while the fourth offered an intellectual-history foundation to re-assess the 1970s as an “in-between decade,” with spaceflight a central motif to both production and politics. (Collins, 2006, 612; Collins, 2007a, 628; Collins, 2008, 201; and Collins, 2018a, 43.) Evoking regularly and with ease the likes of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Marshall McLuhan, Daniel J. Boorstin, Raymond Williams, Jean-François Lyotard, Alain Touraine, Clifford Geertz, Fredric Jameson, Langdon Winner, Paul Forman and others, Martin called for a greater emphasis on methodology, theory and self-reflexivity in space historiography. Time and again, he encouraged fellow space historians to be more vocal in their contributions to present-day debates on modernity, globality and the planetary condition. Taken together, these 65 pages are essential readings for any newcomer to space history, a rapidly developing historical discipline of its own—and not, as Martin would rightly insist, a mere subject specialty.
Intellectual, historian, curator, author, editor, contributor, critic and commentator: The list of Martin’s personal and professional achievements could continue but would still not fully convey an accurate impression of why interacting, collaborating and co-thinking with him was such an extraordinary joy and privilege. Ironically, it was Martin’s manifest modesty that made him stand out. Martin was humble, gentle and humorous, mild and unassuming, but also precise, sharp and critical, while never dismissive. He was soft-spoken and possessed a serene demeanor—what I used to call his “Zen attitude.” And yet he was perfectly capable of speaking up when necessary. Martin demonstrated intellectual generosity and warmth not only with professional colleagues, but also with students, early-career scholars and, in particular, the museum’s visiting fellows. After he co-taught or spoke with my classes, whether in New York, Shanghai or at Caltech, he would often maintain contact with seminar participants and provide them with advice on their own research papers and ongoing projects long afterward. Martin showed genuine interest in others, nurtured their scholarship and, through his mentorship, fervently advocated for the future of critical historiography.
In retirement, Martin returned to two of his long-term passions: oral history and his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Despite his reticence about his private life, Marty’s writerly return to Flint gives some indication of his deep devotion to his family, above all to his beloved sons Adam (Gus) and Flynn. He loved food and was a fine cook, with his specialty being the thickest apple pie one could make. For many years, Marty was an avid gardener and found a particular sense of calm in the lushness he cultivated around him. He enjoyed traveling and encountering other cultures, and he read voraciously throughout his life. His sister Anne recalls how, one day during their childhood, she walked into the living room and found Marty sitting on the sofa with a large dictionary on his lap. “Are you reading the dictionary?” she asked. He seemed puzzled by the question and simply replied, “Yes.” Reading the dictionary was a habit for much of his life. While still based in Maryland, Martin began a thoughtful excavation of the history of Flint in the period of his childhood, conducting interviews and documentary research, examining a city characterized by racial divisions and systemic inequality. After a brief illness, Martin Collins passed away on April 4, 2025, at the age of 73. With his death, the history of technology community has lost one of its most discerning members, a model, mentor, friend and secret hero to many.
Alexander C.T. Geppert, Professor at New York University/NYU Shanghai
Here republished with courtesy of Taylor & Francis, this is a revised and slightly expanded version of “Martin Collins (1951–2025): Curator, Historian, Editor, and Intellectual,” History and Technology 42, no. 1/2 (2026): 123–28, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07341512.2026.2665928.
Collins, Martin, and Sylvia D. Fries, eds. A Spacefaring Nation: Perspectives on American Space History and Policy. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.
Swenson, Loyd S. Review of A Spacefaring Nation: Perspectives on American Space History and Policy ed. by Martin J. Collins, Sylvia D. Fries. Technology and Culture 34, no. 4 (1993): 971–73. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.1993.0040.
Collins, Martin. Space Race: The U.S.-U.S.S.R. Competition to Reach the Moon. San Francisco: Pomegranate Press, 1999.
Collins, Martin. Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945–1950. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002.
Collins, Martin, and Douglas Millard, eds. Showcasing Space. London: Science Museum, 2005.
Collins, Martin. “One World . . . One Telephone: Iridium, One Look at the Making of a Global Age.” History and Technology 21, no. 3 (2005): 301–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341510500205449.
Collins, Martin. “Afterword: Community and Explanation in Space History (?).” In Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, edited by Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, 603–13. Washington, DC: NASA, 2006.
Collins, Martin. “Production and Culture Together: Or, Space History and the Problem of Periodization in the Postwar Era.” In Societal Impact of Spaceflight, edited by Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, 615–629. Washington, DC: NASA, 2007a.
Collins, Martin, ed. After Sputnik: 50 Years of the Space Age. New York: Smithsonian Books/Collins, 2007b.
Collins, Martin. “A Second Nature Rising: Spaceflight in an Era of Representation.” In Remembering the Space Age, edited by Steven J. Dick, 185–202. Washington, DC: NASA, 2008.
Collins, Martin. “A Note from the New Editor.” History and Technology 25, no. 1 (2009): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341510902738559.
Collins, Martin. “Editor’s Note.” History and Technology 28, no. 3 (2012): 217. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2012.741374.
Collins, Martin. “The 1970s: Spaceflight and Historically Interpreting the In-between Decade.” In Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture after Apollo, Vol. 2 of European Astroculture, edited by Alexander C.T. Geppert, 29–49. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018a. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36916-1_2.
Collins, Martin. A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018b. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/book.59133. [Winner of the Middleton Award annually presented by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).]
Collins, Martin. “Making the Pacific, Making Japanese-U.S. Relations: Science and Technology as Historical Agents in the Twentieth Century.” Pacific Historical Review 88, no. 4 (2019): 511–23. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2019.88.4.511.
John, Richard R. Review of A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age, by Martin Collins. American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1479–80. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz950.
Slayton, Rebecca. Review of A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age, by Martin Collins. Technology and Culture 60, no. 3 (2019): 928–29. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0080.