When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, the pictures sent to Earth captured a historical moment: It was the first time that any human set foot on another body in our solar system. Fifty years later, experts are debating how to preserve humankind’s first steps beyond Earth. Could a National Park on the moon be the solution to saving Armstrong’s bootprints for future archaeologists?
Flags, rovers, laser-reflecting mirrors, footprint—these are just a few of the dozens of artifacts and features that bear witness to our exploration of the moon. Archaeologists argue that these objects are a record to trace the development of humans in space. “Surely, those footprints are as important as those left by hominids at Laetoli, Tanzania, in the story of human development,” the anthropologist P.J. Capelotti wrote in Archaeology. While the oldest then known examples of hominins walking on two feet were cemented in ash 3.6 million years ago, “those at Tranquility Base could be swept away with a casual brush of a space tourist’s hand.”
Fragile Traces
Just how fragile humankind’s lunar traces are was seen already during Apollo 12. On November 19, 1969, Charles “Pete” Conrad and Alan Bean manually landed their lunar module in the moon’s Ocean of Storms, 200 meters from the unmanned probe Surveyor 3, which was left sitting on the moon’s surface two years earlier, in 1967. The next day, Conrad and Bean hopped to Surveyor 3. As they approached the spacecraft, they were surprised: The spacecraft, originally bright white, had turned light brown. It was covered in a fine layer of moon dust, likely kicked up by their landing.
Without Apollo 12 upsetting the moon dust, Surveyor 3 would likely have remained stark white. Unlike Earth, the moon has no wind that carries away the dust, no rain to corrode materials, and no plate tectonic activity to pull sites on the surface back into the moon. But the moon’s thin atmosphere also means that solar wind particles bombard the lunar surface, and harsh ultraviolet light has likely bleached the U.S. flag bright white. The astronauts’ first bootprints will likely be on the moon for a long time, and will almost certainly still be there when humans next visit—unless, by tragic coincidence, a meteorite hits them first. Had LunaCorp not abandoned the idea in the early 2000s, the company’s plan to send a robot to visit the most famous sites of moon exploration could have done a lot of damage. And with Jeff Bezos’ recent unveiling of a mock-up of the lunar lander Blue Moon, it is only a matter of time before corporate adventurers and space tourists reach the moon.