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Protecting the Apollo Landing Sites From Later Landings
R3d M3rcury writes "The Lunar X-Prize is a contest offering $20 million to the first private organization to land and maneuver a robotic rover on the moon. There is also a $1 million bonus to anyone who can get a picture of a man-made object on the moon. But one archeologist believes that 'The sites of early lunar landings are of unparalleled significance in the history of humanity, and extraordinary caution should be taken to protect them.' He's concerned that we may end up with rover tracks destroying historic artifacts, such as Neil Armstrong's first bootprint, or that a mistake could send a rocket slamming into a landing site. He calls on the organizers to ban any contestant from landing within 100KM of a prior moon landing site. Now he seems to think this just means Apollo. What about the Luna and Surveyor landers? What about the Lunokhod rovers? Are they fair game?"
We have a picture of it right? Seriously what if every time somebody did something new that spot was forbidden to be stepped on again? asinine. What if nobody as allowed to visit the beach of Columbus's first landing sites? BFD, send a plaque or something and stop wasting your time worrying about whether a footprint is going to disappear someday. It will.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Great, now we'll need to deal with the lunar version of NIMBYs. I was personally looking forward to Hydrogen 3 and titanium surface mining on the Moon. I want vast robotic factories on the Moon so we can start mass producing segments for cylinder-type space colonies. I want to be able to retire in one of those space colonies.
It is a shame that some people exist merely to hold the rest of us back from our ideal Star Trek future with green alien babes.
How many places would remain if all those spots are banned? There are only so much good landing sites on the Moon.
At the current rate there are enough landing sites to keep us busy for a couple of thousand years.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Heating and cooling once a month would expand and contract the soil, obliterating footprints eventually.
That must be what erased all the craters. Oh wait...
To be fair you did say "eventually"... but then our sun will burn out eventually too, that doesn't mean we shouldn't make wildlife preserves in the meantime.
This is ridiculous idolatry. It's not like there is something we *don't* know about these events, there is nothing to discover there, and hence nothing to protect, as opposed to an archeological site.
The first bootprint was likely obliterated by the lunar ascent engine exhaust on the way out. Hello!
Why not? I personally think that preserving the artifacts of the first moon landing should be considered important.
Though realistically.... Neil Armstrong's first boot print was most likely obliterated when the LEM blasted off.
There's a lot of moon up there. I see no reason to disturb the existing landing sites until we have the means to preserve them properly.
So, do you feel the same about Bletchley Park? It's not a simple question. There ARE things we sometimes like to see preserved for the awe inspiring value they have for posterity. I don't know about all the sites on the moon but I'd vote for the first landing site of anything ever (Russian?) and the spot where a human being first walked.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
whether a footprint is going to disappear someday. It will
If it hasn't been already destroyed. Wasn't the photo of where he first stepped on the moon next to the lander? Wouldn't the lander module have toasted the ground around it when it fired it's engines up to re-enter lunar orbit?
Of course, what is the point of preserving a site that nobody can really go to anyway? Sure, if someone went there, they could 'ruin' the artifacts that remain, but who cares? It's not like anyone can visit the site and appreciate it. The best you could hope for would be to preserve it for future generations' camera equipped robotic lunar rovers.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Obviously, we must protect the moon from this heating and cooling at all costs! I propose a tin foil wrapping suspended above the entire surface to block the sun.
"Heating and cooling once a month would expand and contract the soil, obliterating footprints eventually."
Unfortunately that same process will never have an effect on your nick.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
I propose that each new footprint be protected more so than the last.
Our ancestors who left Africa were as human as us. They may well have documented the event in their own way. Lets say they left cave paintings which made perfect sense to them. But in the intervening years most of the paintings have worn away and the meaning of the others has been lost. People 100000 years in the future aren't going to understand whatever we record beyond that is antelope.
But we can help archeologists of that time by preserving our important sites as much as possible.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Its sad that my first thought was this: the very first private venture to the moon will probably sell the Apollo and unmanned probes as the ultimate collectible artifacts to the highest bidder - and there is nothing that can be done about it. of course, I then started thinking more about the logistics as lifting a landing module off the moon and retuning safely and realized it was not going to happen yet, or any time soon. but the point remains that they could and there is nothing that can be done to stop them.
In a way this argument reminds me of Bill Gates about ten years ago talking about how some day people would have wall that could display art work from the great masters. Now, I think that's the good thing, but it's not the same as having an actual Picasso on your wall. Would you feel different about owning a baseball used by and signed by Jackie Robinson, or one that had his signature printed on it? Would you feel the same about touching an Apollo specification moon boot and touching the actual one used by Neil Armstrong?
Once in a college class I got to handle a human brain. It was, to me at least, an awe inspiring experience. The thing was pickled and pre-dissected so it came apart like a puzzle block. So far was we knew, the information that was once in it was gone forever. Yet somehow I had the feeling I was holding an entire universe in my hand, even though now it was only a thing.
That's the crux. We feel that things, authentic things connected to an event or person somehow connect us.
It's not a rational feeling.
But then again, it's not really an irrational feeling either. It's arational. It needs no justification other than it exists. It's a fact of life, a facet of human experience, one of the things that makes life worth living.
Where we run into trouble is when we have to put this human value into the scales with other kinds of values. Is a Jackie Robinson baseball worth a human life? Of course not. Is the Apollo 11 site worth sacrificing future human technological process? No.
But that's not what we have here.
We have a proposal to send a rover to one of the historic landing sites. Why? Because they're cool. The value in this proposal is predicated on the connection value of the place. But the ethical question is this: in exploiting that value, how much of it do they destroy? How much of it do they leave for the rest of the human race?
I think if scientific value is our touchstone, the rovers should go where no observers have gone before.
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