Moon Museum: Our History Written on an Extraterrestrial Surface

The decision of the World Monuments Fund to include lunar artifacts among the monuments to be protected invites a… terrestrial reflection.

BY EMILIO COZZI AND MATTEO MARINI

The inclusion of historic sites on the Moon in the list of World Heritage sites to be protected has been widely reported.

Certainly, the fascination of the topic plays a role; however, it also brings together both a warning and a vision, each capable of inspiring dreams: the prospect of frequent visits to the lunar landscape and even the possibility of spending a vacation there.

One cannot say that the World Monuments Fund has acted too late. While so-called space tourism remains an exclusive privilege of billionaires or the lucky few who win the right lottery ticket (as was the case with the Inspiration4 mission), and lunar missions are still rare, the New York based nonprofit, headquartered at the Rockefeller Center, is already concerned with the historical heritage at risk. These risks come from both public and private missions, which are not only set to explore the Moon’s surface but also to investigate opportunities for survival and commercial ventures.

The First Footprints

The organization has identified more than 90 “landing or impact sites” that bear witness to human activity. Of course, there are the places where astronauts from the six Apollo missions landed, walked, and even drove on the lunar surface.

“Tranquillity Base here, the Eagle has landed.” The voice crackling over the radio link with Nasa’s control center belonged to Neil Armstrong, marking the first time humanity established a new outpost beyond Earth. There, the lunar module remains, along with the American flag (which, after more than half a century, is likely bleached white by solar radiation) and everything else the astronauts left behind, including their trash.

Alongside the first site, other locations preserve the original traces of human presence, and yes, so far, exclusively male, on another world. The three Moon buggies, or rovers, with which the first explorers roamed for dozens of kilometers in some cases, the tools they used, and even the feather and hammer employed by Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott to prove Galileo’s principle that in the absence of atmosphere, two objects of different mass fall with the same acceleration and velocity.

Then there are the footprints, now a pop icon, a symbol. They should be preserved just as we protect the fossilized prints of early hominins on Earth. They are, after all, the first steps on an uncharted world, just as significant in 1969 as they were 150,000 years ago.

There are plaques too. One is bolted to the leg of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, inscribed for eternity with the message of humanity’s first arrival at the Sea of Tranquility, “in peace for all mankind.” Another honors fallen astronauts and cosmonauts, starting with the three from Apollo 1, who perished in a fire during a test when a single spark turned their oxygen-saturated capsule into a deadly trap. There is a family photo left behind by Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke and even the golf balls hit by Alan Shepard in what will always be remembered as the first extraterrestrial sport.

The Moon Museum is a tiny plaque made of semiconductor material, slightly larger than a smartphone SIM card, onto which several artists etched their own “works of art.” Andy Warhol, for instance, sketched a crude phallic drawing. It is believed to have been smuggled onto the Moon aboard Apollo 12.

Bullets and Wreckage

There are probes and rovers that have been surveying the surface for almost 60 years, as well as objects that have impacted, either as intentional projectiles or not. For example, there’s Beresheet, which was supposed to mark Israel’s historic first landing on another world but, most likely, ended up creating a new crater in the lunar topography. On board, it also carried a small crew of tardigrades, possibly the first true “colonists” from Earth on the Moon (if any survived, maybe one day they will be revived).

Since the historic impact of Luna 2, the first probe to strike a non-Earth surface, there have been dozens of spacecraft shot (literally), landed, and crashed. Even on the far side of the Moon, though there are only a few, some American wrecks are there, as well as the landers and rovers from the only two missions to land and explore the surface of that hemisphere: China’s Chang’e missions.

These are all pieces of our civilization, both Western and Eastern (with the Global South notably absent), ready to testify to humanity’s exploratory drive, the desire to learn, to understand. Where we’ve left our first traces, it’s important to preserve the memory, which is always both a warning and an awareness. Of evolution, to measure ourselves against what we were; of pride, for the new milestones to reach; and of mistakes not to repeat.

A Laboratory of Peace

Once, we believed that outer space was infinite and that the sea would take our trash without causing any problems. We were convinced that we could launch any satellite we built, without limits or fear. Yet, now we suffer from a syndrome, Kessler’s syndrome, and we find microplastics everywhere.

The surface of the Moon spans about 38 million square kilometers; it seems vast, but it is not.

“The signatories intend to preserve the external space heritage, which they consider to include human or robotic landing sites, artifacts, spacecraft, and other evidence of activity on celestial bodies, according to standards developed by mutual agreement,” reads a passage from the Artemis Accords, the text proposed by Nasa to regulate future lunar exploration. An exploration that must be economically and ecologically sustainable. Simonetta Di Pippo also reminds us of this in her important book titled Luna, laboratorio di pace.

It would be wise to start from here.