Who is responsible for the heritage in space?

IIn the 1960s, the United States Apollo space flight missions have brought humans to the moon. After briefly entering another world, we then retreated into Earth’s orbit. Only orbiting and robotic rovers have visited for decades. Nearly 50 years after the last humans left in 1972, NASA said it will send the first woman and next man to the moon in 2024.

They will not go alone. The United States has invited other nations to sign a set of principles for the next phase of lunar exploration called the Artemis Accords (the name that recalls the twin sister of the god Apollo, Artemis). So far seven other countries have signed up. The Artemis Accords articulate “a shared vision of principles, founded in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, to create a safe and transparent environment that facilitates exploration, science and commercial activities for the enjoyment of all humanity.” One of these principles relates to cultural heritage, and the signatories to the Accords are also striving to preserve historically significant evidence of human engagement with space. On the Moon, this includes more than 60 locations where human and robotic missions have left their mark on the surface.

People often think of the space age as a recent and futuristic venture, but it began in the 1940s when the first rocket capable of reaching space was developed. This means that space technology is now 80 years old and starting to retreat into a past where we can have more perspective on what that means.

About 20 years ago I was part of a small group of archaeologists who began to think of satellites, space junk and planetary landing sites as an archaeological record. These included Beth Laura O’Leary, William Rathje and PJ Capelotti in the United States, Greg Fewer in Ireland, Randall Brooks and Robert Barclay in Canada and Australia, John Campbell, Dirk Spennemann and myself. I don’t know what led to this coalescence of archaeologists, but perhaps it had something to do with the association of the year 2000 with the future. At first the heritage and archeology community was a bit skeptical, but now space archeology is a recognized field.

Fortunately, the protection of space assets is starting to play a much more important role in planning future space missions. In 2011, with input from Beth Laura O’Leary, NASA created the first set of guidelines to prevent the negative impacts of lunar surface missions on the Apollo and other U.S. sites. At this stage, there were no definite plans for humans to return to the moon. The guidelines took into account what we know about the behavior of moon dust, which is easily agitated and very abrasive, and the fragility of tracks such as boot prints. The main recommendations were to place buffer zones around the sites to discourage unnecessary visits and to control the movement of rockets and vehicles to prevent excessive movement of dust. While not legally binding, the guidelines have at least given moral weight to the idea that human sites on the moon are worth preserving for future generations.

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 The lunar landing in 2019 catalyzed the space community’s interest in the heritage. As planned missions to the Moon and Mars have accelerated over the past five years, we find ourselves in a situation where some of the most extraordinary places in human history could be threatened. Recent international efforts to place some parameters around the exploitation of space resources – including, for example, The Hague Building Blocks for the Development of an International Framework on Space Resource Activities (2019) and the Vancouver Recommendations on Space Mining (2020 ) – recognize that natural and cultural heritage are important factors for the sustainable use of space. However, it is not simply a matter of transposing earthly principles into a new position. There are some unique issues in how space is currently governed that affect heritage.

So far the United States, the Soviet Union, India, China, Japan, Israel and the European Space Agency have sent missions to the moon. Under the terms of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, launch states retain ownership of their space objects. This means that the United States owns the materials that make up the Apollo moon landing sites, and is the only nation that has attempted to protect its assets. Items left at Apollo 11 site, for example, have been registered as heritage in the states of New Mexico and California, both of which have strong aerospace industries.

The sites themselves, as archaeologists and heritage managers would understand them, are not just the objects. They also consist of the traces, the ground surface, the subsoil and the environmental context, even if these are not part of the heritage register. The reason for limiting what is recorded is that the application of national heritage legislation outside the Earth could be interpreted as a territorial claim, which is prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty. The treaty divides the concept of “place” as used in heritage into “natural” and “cultural” in a way that is not useful. If the site does not legally exist as such, it is unclear whether the spatial arrangement of objects in relation to each other can also be protected.

Archaeologists consider features such as the footprints of astronauts’ boots to be part of the site, and many would agree that they are worth preserving. The Artemis chords state that “other evidence of activity on celestial bodies” should be considered as part of the space heritage, so perhaps this offers a way to protect the tracks in the lunar “soil”. It is clear that a multinational heritage agreement is needed to circumvent the limits of national legislation.

But, as everyone involved in the protection of cultural heritage knows, heritage is inherently political. In 2020, three rovers of the Apollo 15, 16 is 17 the missions have received historic landmark status in the US state of Washington, home of their manufacturer, Boeing. Boeing is a competitor in contracts for the development of technologies for the return to the Moon. This action combined cultural heritage with “engineering heritage”, whereby a technology or company can demonstrate that it has experience in space. In the new space age, when commercial operators are starting to replace space agencies as the main proponents of space development, we can expect to see more. I think we should keep an eye on how the commercial sector uses space heritage to promote particular narratives of space.

Another tension is between science and heritage. In 1969, the astronauts of the Apollo 12 mission visited the robotic lander Surveyor 3 and removed some materials to return to Earth. Surveyor 3 had only been on the surface for two years at this stage. Analysis showed that the dust raised by the landing had caused abrasion and exposure to extreme UV radiation had obscured the white outer coating. Now that some of the lunar landing sites are over 50 years old, understanding the effect of the lunar environment on human materials will be very illuminating for future mission design. Removal of the samples will require regulation, likely in the form of permits granted only after the scientific benefit and research project have been thoroughly evaluated. Procedures that have been well established in archeology are a useful model here. The United Nations is the most obvious body to administer this process; but this may also be something that, as the legal owner of many of these sites, the United States could administer under the Artemis agreements.

However, the sites are more than just technological hardware sitting on the dusty, rocky surface of the Moon. The engineering heritage and historical significance are not enough to truly capture the significance of these places. A framework widely used around the world for assessing cultural significance is the Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance, known as the Burra Charter. The charter was first drawn up in 1976, as European heritage charters had proven ill-suited to the indigenous heritage and built environments of the colonial colonial nations. The Burra Paper works equally well for space. It defines five types of cultural significance: historical, scientific, social, spiritual and aesthetic. Setting and environment are an important part of these, for example, if you have removed the file Apollo 11 artifacts and placing them in a museum on Earth would no longer be the same site, as part of its significance is its location on the Moon.

It is easy to list the reasons why the Apollo sites have historical, social, spiritual and scientific significance. (We may laugh at the lunar conspiracy theorists, but their firm belief that humans never left Earth is a form of spiritual meaning.) Aesthetic meaning is a little more difficult. People are used to thinking of the Moon as a gray, dead rock devoid of color and life; and spacecraft such as cold, numb and hard industrial robots. This is a view that I have opposed for years. When I started thinking about how lunar mining activities might affect heritage sites, I looked at the buffer zones in NASA’s 2011 guidelines to see if they really understood the sites they were supposed to protect. Some things seemed to be missing. The views seen by the astronauts as they roamed the surface were also part of the site. They overlooked a landscape strewn with boulders and craters and a black sky that met the horizon in a brutal line. Yet the landscape glowed with full sunlight. Reading the astronauts’ tales of stepping into the deep dark shadows cast by the landing modules and looking at the striped boot prints to measure the depth of the dust, I realized that another critical factor had been omitted in thinking about the lunar heritage (and in fact to the terrestrial heritage): the aesthetic environment created by light and shadow – or chiaroscuro.

Shadows are not the same everywhere in the solar system. Each celestial body offers an interpretation of the light of the Sun according to its atmospheric, geological and chemical characteristics. Without an atmosphere to diffuse light, lunar chiaroscuro is very different from what we know on Earth. Light from the sun and stars is reflected and absorbed by the lunar “soil” created by billions of years of cosmic ray and meteorite impacts, producing a fine dust filled with tiny shards of glass. Shadows are blacker and colder than on Earth and have their own microclimate.

Human intervention in the lunar landscape has increased the shadow population with new species. The shadows cast by the angular, textured bodies of human artifacts are different from those of the craters and natural boulders around them. Long after the moonwalkers are gone, the changing shadows as the sun passes by animates these silent outposts of human aspiration. The Moon is anything but a dead world when it lives so vividly in our imagination.

From the December 2020 issue of Apollo. Preview and sign up here.