BALANCING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND CONSERVATION: PRESERVING HERITAGE AND TOURISM SITES ON THE MOON AND THE LESSONS OF TERRESTRIAL EXPLOITATION

摘要

Cultural relics from Apollo, as well as other wreckage, soft landers, and rovers currently exist on the Moon, undisturbed since their arrival. That does not mean that no one will do so in the future. With the Google Lunar X Prize offering a $20 million purse to the first team to land a rover on the Moon; with an added 5 million if the team could image a lunar landing site there is a race underway to return to the Moon with robotic spacecraft. How might preservation of historic sites on the Moon be assured into the future? This paper explores this difficult theme in historic preservation. It focuses on analogous situations in which there were no rules/policies/laws in place to enforce preservation. Those include the Antarctic experience, as well as the disturbance of such sites as the Titanic, the raising of space capsules from the ocean floor, and the wholesale destruction of Native American cultural sites in the 17~(th)-19~(th) centuries. How might those lessons be applied to the Moon? Progress has been made, most notably in the release on July 20, 2011, of "NASA's Recommendations to Space-Faring Entities: How to Protect and Preserve the Historic and Scientific Value of U.S. Government Lunar Artifacts," but much remains to be accomplished.