Shortly after 5 pm Eastern time, if all goes according to plan, a private U.S. spacecraft will land on the moon spaceflightnow.com/.... That is an achievement that we in the U.S. haven’t managed to replicate during the preceeding 50 years, and it will and I think should be celebrated as an achievement.
When the celebration is over and the mission has demonstrated or sufficiently tested its technology, we should then ask how much longer these sorts of missions should be designed and carried out in a way that leaves a bunch of hardware behind.
The Moon, Mars and near earth orbit are slowly but surely becoming junk yards — cluttered with single use hardware that at least in the case of the Moon and Mars, will likely remain there forever. We really ought to be having a public conversation about how we are going to treat the wilderness landscapes on the Moon, Mars and the Moons of Jupiter and the ethics of space junk.
As an archaeologist, I have a particular appreciation and even a reverence for non-perishable artifacts left by ancient cultures — most of which were never intended to be recovered. That said, I find myself questioning the trajectory of space exploration that involves leaving stuff behind, in places where it will remain for perhaps tens of thousands of years. Footprints and tire tracks on the moon will remain there almost forever, because there are none of the geologic processes that remove or erase them here on earth. Likewise with the hardware left behind from this mission and all the others preceeding it. That stuff will remain until someone collects it, either a space archaeologist or a trash hauler, or a recycler and none of them are coming anytime soon.
I suppose I should just accept that accumulation of debris as just part of who we are and what we do as a species. It’s what we’ve always done — we make and use stuff and leave it behind when we’re done using it. On planets that have virtually no chemical or physical weathering and (presumably) no mico-organisms to breakdown manmade materials that pattern of behavior needs to change — some day sooner rather than later we should at least be thinking about the long term consequences of the junk we take and leave behind in space.
It begins to look a bit like the folly of dumping garbage in the ocean. That was so cheap and easy and because the ocean wasn’t owned by anyone, who could make a legally compelling complaint against it. NYC wasn’t compelled to stop that practice until 1992. It was too easy to believe that dilution in the shear vastness of the ocean would never be noticable.
Bringing space junk back to earth (or back to burn up in the atmosphere) is clearly an enormously costly and problematic idea. So spacefaring nations and corporations particularly are unlikely to make it a priority or a policy. While I’m hopeful that this latest return to the Moon by the U.S. is a success. I think that someday soon we need to start to revere the Moon and Mars and the Moons of Jupiter and the other places we might go, and value them enough to adopt the same approach we do when visiting the few areas of remaining Wilderness here on earth, and insist that visitors pack out their trash.