Alice Gorman is a space archaeologist who works on space debris in Earth orbit, deep space probes, and planetary landing sites. She explores what we can learn from these items and places as material objects, and also their heritage importance, what they really mean to people and communities on Earth.
Alice appears in The Conversation To the Moon and Beyond podcast series, released to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the July 1969 moon landing. This is an edited excerpt from Alice’s interview with Sarah Keenihan of The Conversation, published as part from our occasional Zoom Out series.
There is a lot of documentation on what was left on the Moon, but it’s surprising how much we don’t know.
There are things that have disappeared, such as part of a thermal blanket that was ripped from a lander. There are things that may have gone up there that we didn’t know. An Apollo test module went into solar orbit and was only recently found again.
I don’t think, for example, that anyone has fully documented the position of all Apollo astronaut footprints on the Moon.
We know how they look. We know they are there. They are reproduced in countless photographs of the Apollo sites.
But has anyone ever cataloged them? Has anyone studied them for what they can tell us about how these human bodies moved through the lunar landscape, how they adapted to this environment so different from Earth?
What archeology does is observe the difference between what people say they do and what they actually do. Those footprints may reveal that the astronauts were doing things that they did not even consciously recognize, as they did not speak about or record them.
If I did an archaeological study of those footprints, we would expect to see differences from Apollo 11 to Apollo 17.
We should be able to see the evidence of how each crew of astronauts incorporated the knowledge from the previous one, and how the design of the suits and equipment was changed or adapted from each previous mission. We should be able to trace this using physical evidence.
Protecting the heritage of the moon
We must be strategic in how we protect our heritage on the Moon.
In 1969, the Apollo 12 mission landed just 180 meters from Surveyor 3, a robotic landing ship that the US sent to the Moon in 1967. Astronauts approached Surveyor 3 and took a camera and some other parts from it. to bring them to Earth.
When NASA analyzed the materials, they found that the Surveyor 3 landing plus the Apollo 12 landing right on the rim of the crater had blown up moon dust, which had worn away the surfaces.
This gave us an idea of the dangers of moon dust for human-made materials.
Many of the new missions being planned right now are talking about going to Apollo and other sites, and removing samples for analysis that they can use to measure the impact of the lunar environment on human materials.
Obviously, this is extremely useful for planning missions in the future, but at the moment there is no systematic way to do it. They could get closer to the Apollo sites and in the process completely erase all those tracks and cause more damage by removing the moon dust again.
There is an archaeological principle that you never dig an entire site. You always leave a deposit without digging, or leave rock art on the walls. You leave material for future scientists to display because we don’t know what techniques will be available in the future.
If we consider this from an archaeological perspective in the first place, we should be sitting and thinking: OK, what materials do we really need to collect? We have the Surveyor 3 baseline: what are the best materials to compare with that?
We may not need to take physical samples. We may have techniques that we can use to collect data from these sites remotely without being destructive.
We must also consider access to data. Let’s say a Space X lunar mission visits a previous landing site, perhaps one of the Apollo, and removes samples, studying them now. These objects are the property of the United States government under the Outer Space Treaty. But SpaceX is a private company. Are they required to share the results of this analysis with their competitors?
This is something I haven’t seen much discussion about yet, but it needs to be resolved as everyone plans to return to the Moon.
Cemeteries in space
It’s been 50 years since humans went to the Moon, and now people are so focused on reaching Mars.
But what happens when another planet becomes home, when the first generations are born, live and, most importantly, die in space?
I often think that the first death in space is going to be a big turning point in how we relate to it. There really haven’t been any until now. There was the unfortunate mission of the USSR Soyuz 11 to Earth’s orbit, where three cosmonauts died when they left the spacecraft, but were recovered on Earth. [The crew died on their descent back to Earth after a technical fault caused their Soyuz capsule to depressurise.]
There have been other deaths, for example in the tragic space shuttle accidents, but they have not actually been in space.
It is something that people often overlook when talking about the possibility of settling on Mars. The risks are very great. People are going to die. They will probably die if there is any human settlement on the Moon as well.
So how will that affect the way we look at space?
The first living beings already died on the Moon. The recent experiment on the rover deployed by China had tiny seeds inside that sprouted and then died.
Death is already “off Earth,” and we can expect more deaths in the future.
This is going to have to change how we feel about space. When we look at those planets in the sky and think that there are cemeteries there; perhaps there are human bodies that are incorporated into the lunar regolith or red Martian dust.
How do these places make us feel if they become cemeteries?
The moon in 2069
In terms of sites on the Moon right now, there are around 50 different places where human culture has landed, and they are quite diverse. A lot of things from the USSR, a lot of things from the United States, but also Japanese, Indian, and Chinese.
If we look 50 years into the future, I hope that the landscape is even more diverse. We will have many countries that may not be considered navigators at this time, but will have sent their own missions to the Moon. Or maybe they have had experiments that are part of other people’s missions. Perhaps they have sent their own astronauts.
I think the Moon will be culturally very diverse, with an archaeological record that reflects all of those different cultures as well.
We can also expect there to be mining facilities. These are likely to focus on the lunar poles, on craters where the Sun has not shone for 2 billion years. They have been in deep shadow all this time. They are full of this valuable resource that people can use as fuel: water ice. Therefore, the craters could be the industrial centers of the future lunar industries.
We may not see all of this from Earth’s surface, but there will be satellites constantly transmitting images from the surface, so that we can see what is happening there.
We might have our particular astronauts that we like to follow. There may be constant updates on social media about what they are doing on the Moon.
We can be very intimately involved in the daily lives of these astronauts.
There is likely to be a form of lunar tourism, which implies that we project ourselves into robots and make small excursions across the lunar surface.
But I suspect that the lunar tourism industry may not take off entirely the way people imagine, simply because there will be too much at stake to protect proprietary information about technologies and resources on the Moon.
In the future it will no longer be rare to think about being an astronaut. So far, more than 500 people have been in space. Only those very few Apollo astronauts have been to the Moon.
Looking forward, there will be hundreds of people who have been to the Moon and back, perhaps even thousands. These experiences may no longer be rare and extraordinary.
We could get tired of listening to people tell their stories about the work they did on the Moon. Perhaps this is commonplace. The Moon will be like thinking about Antarctica. It is remote, but it is still part of our world.
Alice Gorman, Associate Professor of Archeology and Space Studies, Flinders University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
