10.30.25 | Gretchen Heefner: Sand, Snow, and Stardust
On Thursday, October 30, 2025, Gretchen Heefner, will give a book talk about her latest publication, Sand, Snow, and Stardust, organized by AU’s Center for Security, Innovation, and New Technology and the Historical International Studies Research Cluster.
Speaker: Gretchen Heefner
Date: Thursday, October 30, 2025 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm
Location: School of International Service’s Founders Room, located at 4400 Massachusetts Ave, NW.
Gretchen Heefner, professor at Northeastern University, teaches and researches the history of the US in the world, with a focus on militarization, the environment, and the surprisingly intimate relations between national security regimes and the everyday. Her latest book, Sand, Snow and Stardust: How U.S. Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments (University of Chicago, 2025), explores how the U.S. military has acquired and used information about extreme environments since the 1940s. Her first book, The Missile Next Door (Harvard University Press, 2012), was a Choice Outstanding Academic title.
About Sand, Snow, and Stardust: Deserts, the Arctic, outer space—these extreme environments are often seen as inhospitable places at the edges of our maps. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, spurred by the diverse and unfamiliar regions the US military had navigated during World War II, the United States defense establishment took a keen interest in these places, dispatching troops to the Aleutian Islands, North Africa, the South Pacific, and beyond. To preserve the country’s status as a superpower after the war, to pave runways and build bridges, engineers had to understand and then conquer dunes, permafrost, and even the surface of the moon.
Sand, Snow, and Stardust explores how the US military generated a new understanding of these environments and attempted to master them, intending to cement America’s planetary power. Operating in these regions depended as much on scientific and cultural knowledge as on military expertise and technology. From General George S. Patton learning the hard way that the desert is not always hot, to the challenges of constructing a scientific research base under the Arctic ice, to the sheer implausibility of modeling Martian environments on Earth, Gretchen Heefner takes us on a wry expedition into the extremes and introduces us to the people who have shaped our insight into these extraordinary environments. Even decades after the first manned space flight, plans for human space exploration and extraplanetary colonization are still based on what we know about stark habitats on Earth.
