Sacred Places
There are places in the universe that humans consider sacred. How do we balance respect for this with the need to utilise resources and build?
At six places on the near side of the Moon, there lie small platforms, covered in gold foil. The descent stages of the Apollo lunar modules, undisturbed by Man for over half a century. Around them the experiments and waste bags left behind, and each one accompanied by a flag. Perhaps, though, these sites will be visited once again.
The only landing site on another planet revisited by subsequent missions was the Surveyor 3 probe, which Apollo 12 landed next to 3 years later
The probe was damaged by the regolith kicked up by the descent engine of Intrepid when it landed. Pieces of it were taken for analysis back on Earth, to see how the materials had fared in the lunar environment for several years.
How would Americans feel if a private or foreign spacecraft landed close enough to the descent stage of Apollo 11’s Eagle to spray it with regolith? How would they react if they saw a astronaut bounding through Neil Armstrong’s footprints, cutting pieces off the old lunar module, and taking them home?
The Navajo Claim
The recent attempted Moon landing by the Peregrine Lander contained some human ashes. This was objected to by the leader of the Navajo nation on the grounds that the Moon is sacred to them, and thus using it as a resting place for human remains was “disturbing and unacceptable” and an act of desecration.
David Livingston bought this up with me during my recent Space Show appearance, and I gave an off-the-cuff answer as I had not thought about it much. Here I have a more considered response, although my ultimate conclusions remain the same.
The legal standing of this argument seems to me, a non-lawyer, as very flimsy. The Outer Space Treaty is clear that there cannot be sovereignty claims in space, and so the Navajo have no right to claim such authority over the Moon. Technically the Navajo aren’t signatories of the OST, but the United States is and I assume that despite tribal sovereignty the Navajo are thus bound by it. I might be wrong about that, and perhaps this is a loophole that will allow future asteroid miners to buy flags of convenience from Native American nations in order to circumvent the treaty.
More seriously, the Navajo objection claims an exclusive cultural ownership of the Moon, or at least one only shared with other indigenous tribes. Every human culture looks up at the Moon though, and all of them tell stories about it. Why is the Navajo story supposed to determine what we can do with the Moon over, say, the Chinese story of Chang’e and her pet rabbit? It is the prerogative of any religious or tribal leader to assert the correctness of his or her mythology over that of all other groups, and it is the prerogative of secular society to ignore such arrogance.
Unfortunately, as often happens, opportunists will use this objection as a line of attack against the idea of space development. In one piece titled People Are Paying Big For Moon Burials And It Could Be Crossing a Concerning Line the author concludes
We cannot turn back the clock on private space enterprise, nor should we.
But this failed mission with ashes and vanity payloads exemplifies the unexplored questions in the legal and ethical infrastructure to support commercial activities.
It is worth pausing for thought on future commercialisation such as mining asteroids and the eventual colonisation of space.
With the defensive preamble about not turning back the clock, the author demands a pause on actual development. There is no real logic here - it is simply someone with a desire to veto something they don’t like grabbing an improvised rhetorical weapon. We must be wary of such compulsive blockers of progress and challenge them whenever they appear.
Finding Common Ground
But if the Navajo claim to hold the Moon sacred should not stop any missions, why should any sentimentality about the Apollo landing sites do so either? There is no particular scientific value to preserving a set of footprints in the dust. There may be some scientific value in taking one or more of the descent stages apart to see how it has fared in the hostile environment. It might be economically viable to cut them up into small pieces and sell them on Earth.
The difference is that NASA physically visited the Moon, rather than merely seeing it from Earth, and thus their concerns are more concrete. But this doesn’t mean that we can completely disregard weaker claims based on spiritual reasons.
Nothing that will be done in the Artemis project will be visible from Earth with the naked eye, and thus should not have an impact of any spiritual relationship with the Moon. It may be possible in the future to develop the Moon to the point where signs of industry might be present - lights on the dark side perhaps - and in that case, we should definitely have a conversation about how we might be changing the Moon when and if the situation arises.
We must not, however, submit to the notion of ‘collective property’, which in reality means bureaucratic property. Distributing too much veto power assures nothing gets done. For some people, of course, this is a feature not a bug. If you want to stop something without saying you want to stop it, just demand extra layers of bureaucracy. Hopefully, our actual exploration and development of the Moon and other celestial bodies can outpace these demands.
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Excellently put - the idea of every trive and sect to suddenly lay claim to our greatest objective in the near term is ludicrous.
Interestingly, one of the first questions I get from more materially minded people who lack a technical beckground, is whether mining the Moon wouldn't change its mass so much that tides and our orbits would be altered. An innocent and well intentioned question, to be sure, but I cannot but draw some kind of thread between it and the Navajo claim.
Preservation can't stand in the way of progress, but preserving the Apollo 11 landing site seems a no brainer. If we destroy the place where a human being first set foot on another celestial body we can never get that back.