One man’s crap is another man’s good stuff.
Throw in a Russian bed, and I know a guy…
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Woz has been to the moon?!!
Looking at the linked Catalogue of Manmade Material on the Moon, the empty space with the heading “Apollo 13” is kinda sad.
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… land!
One man’s garbage is another man’s priceless historical relic.
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Look at this. [holds out a pocket watch.] It’s worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless…like the Ark. Men will kill for it. Men like you and me.
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We should have a clause like in the Antarctic Treaty. Everyone should be obliged to clean up after themselves.
Fun fact: as far as I’ve been told, this is one reason why Concordia Station still exists. It would be more expensive to remove everything then just to keep going, year after year.
Except the bulk of the “garbage” is the lunar decent module which after landing is basically dead weight. And due to the very real limitations of going to the moon and back, removing everything brought is a luxury that we couldn’t have in 1969.
Still, its a handful full of sites on an other wise very large moon. It’s not in danger of being on a very special episode of Hoarders anytime soon.
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But going to the moon was itself a luxury. Saying “but oh, there’s no other way we could have done it” is
A) wrong, and
B) a cop out
Because going at all was a choice, and the manner of going was also a choice.
I’m glad we went, and wish we still were, but let’s not kid ourselves that leaving our crap littering the solar system like so many burnt out old cars down at the beach is blameless and harmless.
Ascent modules too, wherever they impacted when their orbits decayed.
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I think it is a huge leap stating that our lunar module and the items we left on the moon equate to…
leaving our crap littering the solar system like so many burnt out old cars down at the beach
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OH yeah. Gravity is a bitch.
Give me a break. The Saturn V rocket was the most powerful rocket EVER MADE - including today. It was literally the magnum opus of humanity. Yet if you had to add the extra fuel to bring back EVERYTHING it lifted off the earth, it would exceed the maximum payload of the rocket.
I suppose we are littering Mars with our rovers as well? And poor Titan, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Eros, and a couple comets.
Yeah, it is a choice, the logical one given the very complex problems of exploring our solar system.
Besides, the Earth gets about 60 tons of space dust landing on it per day and you don’t see anyone complaining about that. Turn about is fair play.
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HUGE fan of the Lukahod program. We had one of the last Lunakhods at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS!
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Hey man, let’s not pretend that physics aren’t a thing.
Calling science and discovery a “luxury” is the biggest cop out of all and does a great disservice to the women and men who have died in the pursuit of knowledge.
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Well, THAT’S some emotional bullshit. All the NASA astronauts who’ve died on the clock did so due to penny pinching and managerial incompetence. Trying to dress that up as heroic is fairly offensive. Astronauts are heros, but the way they die generally isn’t.
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Funny; I figured you’d go with meteor impacts rather than space dust. I guess in your world intentionality is irrelevant? Murder should be legal because, hey man, we’re all going to die anyway? Pollution doesn’t matter because one day the Sun’s gonna assplode?
Congratulations to the Liberian and Myanmar space agencies for also going to the Moon.
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