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Sacred ground: Tranquility Base, the Apollo 11 mission's Eagle lunar lander touchdown site. Credit: NASA
I better not see any McDonald's up there... not soon, not ever. I think corporate greed needs to be silenced when it comes to expanding the human frontier beyond our own backyard. We don't need franchises clogging up the space lanes with about 6 Starbucks on one asteroid, 12 McDonald's on another and a whole orbit or WalMarts scatterd throughout the Asteroid Belt................MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — The moon is sprinkled with historical hardware hurled from Earth that signifies the pioneering steps taken over decades in robotic and human exploration of Earth's celestial next-door neighbor.
But numbers of spacefaring nations, including commercial enterprises, are readying their respective assaults on the moon. That fact has sparked growing concern about safeguarding lunar heritage sites, keeping them free of future "Kilroy was here" graffiti-like abuses.
This issue was aired at the NASA Lunar Science Conference staged here July 20-23 by the new NASA Lunar Science Institute situated at the space agency's Ames Research Center.
Wipe out
"The Apollo sites are, in fact, historic. They are treasures that need to be preserved," said noted author and authority on space exploration Andrew Chaikin. His books include the acclaimed "A Man on the Moon" (Viking, 1994), the impetus for the Tom Hanks HBO television miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon.
"We need to think very, very carefully about how we are going to revisit those sites and not destroy the record of the first human explorations of another world," Chaikin said. "But having said that ... not every footprint on every Apollo site need be preserved."
Chaikin pointed out that there's likely to be very interesting science to be gained from visiting Apollo landing spots, given safe approaches to those locales.
"We need to figure out which of the footprints you don't want to wipe out. That powdery surface is unlike any historical site on the Earth ... and the footprints could be wiped out at a moment's notice with our first revisits," he said.
