It's time to talk about preserving historical sites on the Moon

It has been nearly 50 years since the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and Neil Armstrong’s footprint is still there — along with more than 100 items in the Sea of Tranquility, which includes shovels, rakes, television cameras, a plaque, human waste and more. “In archaeology, you can go back 100,000 years and look at Homo sapiens,” Beth O’Leary, an anthropologist at New Mexico State University who leads the Lunar Legacy Project, told Salon. “ isn’t in a cultural vacuum — we have taken our culture to another place; the Apollo 11 site is probably the most extraordinary site of human behavior in humanity.” Apollo 11 is not the only mission that left things behind on the Moon. remoteness has preserved it to a great extent,” O’Leary told Salon, adding that her colleague has described what has been left on the Moon as “time capsules.” The Outer Space Treaty, in effect since October 1967, is the foundation of space law, and holds that nations that left objects or structures on the Moon retain ownership of them. “As time passes, things break down.... one thing to think about if you have commercial interests and you have tourism and places that people want to go and activities that are going to happen, and when that happens, even inadvertently, things could be lost,” O’Leary told Salon, pointing to Antarctica as an example.