Could the United States declare a National Historic Landmark on the moon? It seems like a far-fetched idea, but the anthropologist Beth O'Leary hasn't given up hope in her nearly twenty-year quest to get Americans to preserve their footprint, metaphorically and literally, in space.
As a National Historic Landmark, O'Leary reasons, Tranquility Base — the site where the Apollo 11 mission landed in 1969, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk the moon — could then be offered to UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The challenge is how to do it legally and not upset the rest of the world.
"Our laws don't really cover space, per se, so the preservation really falls in a kind of gray area," says the retired New Mexico State University professor, who helped found the field of space archaeology and heritage.
O'Leary recently published The Final Mission: Preserving NASA's Apollo Sites, a book she co-wrote with several authors, including Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford, the former NASA astronaut who commanded Apollo 10. The book, her third title on space preservation, surveys the landing sites, man-made items and footprints left by Americans on the moon through the Apollo project, which landed six successful missions between 1961 and 1972, as well as the design, test and command facilities in Texas, New Mexico, California and Florida that made it possible.
The authors say these items and sites should be recast as artifacts and preserved for their historical and archaeological value. O'Leary recently spent several days last month in Washington, D.C., making her pitch to audiences at the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
"Let's think about what humanity wants to save for future generations," she says. "I think that's really what we're trying to do here, is to make people aware of space heritage."
BUT AT least one space lawyer and a preservation expert say that O'Leary's approach is all wrong: It's senseless to think we can reach so far beyond our borders to name a National Historic Landmark.
"You can't do it," says Harry Butowsky, an adjunct professor at George Mason University and former historian for the National Park Service. At the park service, his job was to research and recommend sites for landmark designations — including the Apollo Mission Control Center at Houston's Johnson Space Center, which was approved in 1985. "I worked for the National Historic Landmark Studies for 16 years. I know all about it. Impossible."
Both Butowsky and Michelle Hanlon, a corporate attorney-turned-space lawyer, say it's the United Nations that needs to claim authority in space, then shepherd any preservation efforts.
"Making it a U.S. site is just illegal, period," says Hanlon. "I think we need a committee of international people that will say, 'Okay, U.S., we see that you think that landing spot is special. But let's make a balance here.'"
Hanlon, who recently obtained a master's degree from McGill University's Institute of Air Space and Law, founded the nonprofit called For All Moonkind, Inc., which aims to work with the U.N. to preserve all six of the Apollo human landing sites – plus whatever the U.N. deems valuable from the other countries that have left marks on the moon.
"These are questions we have to debate and deal with," she says, "and right now, there's no venue to do that whatsoever."
SPACE PRESERVATION raises an interesting tangle of issues.
About 100 objects – including an American flag and Aldrin's boots, which he shed to lighten the return flight – presumably remain at Tranquility Base, as well as the actual footprints of the astronauts as they pattered about for two and a half hours shooting photos, setting up experiments, and collecting rocks and dirt. Once they loaded the Eagle lunar module and left, O'Leary says, the objects turned into artifacts, and the place became an archaeological site that can provide insight into human behavior.
"They're very important aspects, because they're going to tell you about what happened there," she says.
She offers some questions an archaeologist might pose: "How were the approaches of the Soviet Union different than the U.S.? How did the common requirements to survive in space override cultural differences? Was the behavior very similar?"
Although the site isn't immediately threatened — "the remoteness really protects it" — the race for commercial space exploration has made scientists worry that projects like Google's Lunar X contest to send a robotic rover to the moon, or promises by Elon Musk's SpaceX and others to shuttle private citizens into space, could eventually spell trouble for the sacred artifacts.
To ward against this, in 2012, NASA released a 93-page document laying out guidelines for "space-faring entities" on how to preserve lunar artifacts.
But O'Leary sees a National Historic Landmark designation as a way for the United States to officially protect its objects there.
She's quick to acknowledge a few problems. A NASA lawyer her group once consulted warned her that the world would perceive that as a claim of sovereignty over the moon — and a 1967 U.N. treaty prohibits any country from appropriating outer space, even though the country continues to own the objects it leaves behind. The keeper of the National Register of Historic Places also told her he didn't have jurisdiction outside the U.S.
Hanlon, the space attorney, agrees that a national landmark would violate the U.N. treaty and "make a lot of people very uncomfortable."
She is equally dismissive of the World Heritage Site idea: "I've been informed that UNESCO wants nothing to do with the moon. And, frankly, at this stage, I don't blame them. There's so little certainty about what's going on in space right now, from a legal standpoint."
Instead, her group plans to raise funds and organize an international team of lawyers that can research and draft a legal proposal to the United Nations, in the image of the 1972 World Heritage Convention, the international agreement that protects natural and cultural resources.
Hanlon is presenting her ideas to the Starship Congress in Monterrey, Ca., next week.
MEANWHILE, BUTOWSKY, the former National Park Service historian, thinks a more urgent need for advocacy remains.
He says a lack of interest in historic preservation among the U.S. government agencies tasked with space exploration is endangering the last of the remaining sites and facilities associated with the Apollo program.
In the 1980s, following a Congressional law that required the National Park Service to study all the resources related to man's efforts to reach the moon, Butowsky says he spent seven years struggling to gain access and full cooperation from NASA and the U.S. Air Force. NASA resisted the historical designation of facilities that were still in use, fearing the agency would be hamstrung in modifying them to fit its needs.
"NASA and the Air Force — especially the Air Force — simply have no historical consciousness," he says. "They're only interested in the future, and what they're going to do. They have no interest in their history at all."
He pointed to the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California's Simi Valley, which NASA is in the process of demolishing. Butowsky says it's "the best remaining example of this large infrastructure that we had in place that took us to the moon."
"It's important that we preserve these resources to tell the story of how the United States was able to mobilize itself over a period of nine years, and go from the Kennedy speech to landing a man on the moon," he says. "It's a great story."
Cecilia Ballí can be reached at email@example.com.
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