Apollo landing sites merit preservation
In his 1968 book. “The Promise of Space,” the late Arthur C. Clarke envisioned a time when people would find themselves “fighting tooth and nail to save the last unspoiled vestiges of lunar wilderness.” Clarke predicted that the battle would take place around the year 2218. However, as it turns out, lunar preservation has become a thing 200 years earlier than Clarke envisioned. The difference is that modern moon preservationists are more concerned about artifacts left by human beings rather than pristine wilderness.
For All Moonkind is a new organization that wants to preserve the Apollo landing sites, all six of them, as cultural historical preserves. The idea would be for the United Nations to declare them protected sites based on the efforts of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage Convention efforts to preserve sites of historical and cultural significance here on Earth. The signatories of the agreement would work together to enforce it. The United States cannot unilaterally declare the Apollo landing sites off limits because of restrictions agreed to in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
Few probes have landed on the moon since the last Apollo mission took off from the moon in December 1972. However, the lunar surface is about to become a busy place. A number of private groups, some participants in the Google Lunar XPrize, others working outside the competition, propose to land on the moon starting by the end of 2017 and stretching into 2018.
One of those groups, a German team called Part-Time Scientists, intends to set down two miles from the Apollo 17 landing site and send two rovers to approach the lunar rover left behind by the astronauts. The team has promised to conduct their operations with the utmost care and respect for the historical and cultural significance of the site. Hopefully no technical glitch, such as a landing accident, will cause damage to the area where Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt last walked on the lunar soil.
A new race for the moon is starting to take shape. Russia, China and the European Union have already expressed interest in returning astronauts to the lunar surface. NASA, with a group of commercial partners, is expected to join the race because of the recent change in presidential administrations. Sooner than many might imagine, boots will tread in lunar soil for the first time in five or so decades.
Without a clear agreement preserving the integrity of the Apollo landing sites, some of those boots may sully the ground where astronauts left their footprints that, barring interference, could be expected to stay for thousands of years. The equipment left by the Apollo astronauts would be a lucrative source of treasure for scavengers eager to sell it to the highest bidder back on Earth. A United Nations agreement, enforced by the international community, will go a long way toward preventing that tragedy.
Sometime in the far future, when people are working and living on the moon, the Apollo landing sites will become an economic asset, much like national parks are on Earth. Tourists will set out from lunar settlements in pressurized buses to visit one or more of the six places where men first walked on the moon. They will disembark at the visitors’ center on the edge of each of the sites. After passing through the gift shop, the lunar tourists will arrive at the observation deck where they can look upon where history was made a century or so ago. The current generation, on the edge of the next great age of lunar exploration, owes it to those future travelers to preserve that legacy.
Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration titled “Why Is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
A new race for the moon is starting to take shape. Russia, China and the European Union have already expressed interest in returning astronauts to the lunar surface.