The Moon belongs to all of us — not just countries that can afford to reach it
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A bag of human waste was captured in the first photograph taken on the Moon.Credit: NASA/ullstein bild via Getty
On 1 April, four humans left Earth to swing around the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Many people will be watching during the ten-day mission. Flags will perhaps be waving. The word historic might well be on many lips. What almost no one will be talking about is stewardship.
Humanity doesn’t have a great track record from our limited interactions with other worlds so far. Between 1969 and 1972, Apollo astronauts left 96 bags of human waste — urine, faeces and vomit — on the lunar surface, to shed weight so that the lunar module could lift off with a cargo of Moon rocks. The first photograph Neil Armstrong took after setting foot on the Moon captured one of those bags. Astrobiologists now want to retrieve them, worried about possible biological contamination of the Moon’s surface.
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