Q: What's the difference between trash and important archaeological artifacts?
A: About 100 years.
Where people tossed their garbage a century ago, archaeologists can often find revealing remnants of culture. On the Moon, the transformation from trash to treasure took less than 4 decades.
U.S. astronauts left a lot more behind on the Moon than their footprints as they took small steps for man and giant leaps for mankind. The detritus at Tranquillity Base, where the first humans landed on the Moon July 20, 1969, includes boots, backpacks, brackets, cameras, and cables — more than 100 discrete objects. My personal favorite is the Lunar Equipment Conveyer, a clothesline-like device for transferring equipment to and from the lunar lander.
Where some may see junk, anthropologist Beth O'Leary and several colleagues and students from New Mexico State University see historically significant artifacts that need protection from vandalism by future space tourists. As in, "Hey, buddy, stay behind the rope! And get your mitts off that Lunar Equipment Conveyer!"
O'Leary spoke this week about protection of space heritage sites at a meeting of the Australia International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in Cairns, Queensland.
The web site of the Lunar Legacies Project puts it this way: "Our goal is to preserve the archaeological information and the historic record of Apollo 11. We also hope one day to preserve Tranquillity Base for our planet as a World Heritage Site. We need to prepare for the future because in 50 years many travelers may go to the moon. If the site is not protected, what will be left?"
This is a great idea. If humans ever inhabit the Moon, even as a permanent scientific base, what greater thrill for people of the next century than to visit the sacred site of humanity's first step off the home world?
The only thing that makes me a little uncomfortable is O'Leary's intention to nominate various lunar sites for inclusion in the United States National Register of Historic Places. It occurs to me that Neil Armstrong did say, "One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for Americans." The Moon is not a United States territory.
The folks behind the preservation project are aware of this, of course. They argue that, although we do not own the Moon, Article VIII of the 1967 United Nations' "Moon treaty" — shorthand for the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies — confers "jurisdiction and control" of objects sent into space or to the Moon to the country that launched them there. Hence, Tranquillity Base can be interpreted as a historically significant site over which the United States should have jurisdiction.
In other words, we don't own the Moon, but we do own the Lunar Equipment Conveyer and have a right to keep it from ending up on the mantelpiece of some future space tourist. And don't forget the damage tourists could do posing for pictures on top of the Viking landers on Mars.