InstaPom

On July 20—part of the 42nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, for those of you who aren’t space geeks—NASA release its Recommendations to Space-Faring Entities: How to Protect and Preserve the Historic and Scientific Value of U.S. Government Lunar Artifacts (PDF link via the always entertaining CollectSpace). These guidelines are not limited to but are fairly explicitly aimed at the Google Lunar X PRIZE teams, many of whom are hoping to win extra prizes in the form of the Apollo Heritage Bonus or the Plain Ol’ Heritage Bonus.  NASA has been working on these guidelines for quite some time and, in the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I provided some input to these a long time ago (though I had nothing to do with this draft).

The release garnered some attention in recent days, e.g. this piece from MSNBC.  Today, blogger/podcaster and erstwhile GLXP-Scorecard-keeper Mike Doornbos posted his own thoughts on these guidelines, and they weren’t all positive.  Key graf:

An interesting question that the NASA preservation guidelines present is: who gave NASA the right to set those policies for anyone but themselves? [Emphasis in the original]

Mike was aiming to start a conversation, so I’ll bite. Here are my two cents (as always, these are my own personal thoughts, and were not solicited by and are not necessarily reflective of those of my current or former employer):

So long as these remain guidelines—that is to say, explicitly non-binding suggestions, rather that laws—I am fine with it. In fact, although I may have some modest differences with what the guidelines say, I view the publication of a set of guidelines as a net positive thing for several reasons.

The first is that there are valid scientific reasons for both requesting that new lunar visitors do not visit certain sites and, on the flip side, that those visitors do make a point of visiting other sites. Two key pieces of context inform my belief here. The first is that there are still active scientific instruments in place at certain sites, particularly the later Apollo sites. Given both the extreme expense of replacing, refurbishing, or repositioning those experiments and the high scientific value of having a experiment operate in one fixed location over a very long period of time, it would truly be a tragedy for any visitor to unknowingly disturb these sites; and guidelines such as these can be an extremely valuable tool to understand where those experiments are and how they should be dealt with or worked around on future visits.  The second piece of context is that there is high scientific value to revisiting sites of previous missions, even when (or perhaps especially when) they do not have active experiments. This was one of the main justifications for the selection of the Apollo 12 landing site—the Moon is the size of a couple of continents, so they didn’t land right next to an old Surveyor probe just by coincidence. Observing carefully how both the landscape at an old land site and how the hardware itself has changed over the intervening decades can tell us a great deal.  In my opinion, any complete set of these guides should include a healthy list of “please do” requests in addition the “please don’t” items. I was surprised to see that this “please do” aspect was not addressed in the July 2011 release; my hope is that this will be remedied in a future document.

The second reason is that these guidelines have the potential to greatly improve the social impact of any lunar heritage visits.  During my tenure at the helm of the Google Lunar X PRIZE, I was somewhat surprised by the strength of the negative emotional response to the Heritage Bonuses from a small subset of the population.  We received several letters, phone calls, and emails from individuals (almost always from elderly Americans) who were extremely concerned  that these bonus prizes would lead to the destruction or desecration of these unique historical treasures. While I don’t share that concern—knowing these teams personally, I can say with confidence that no group of people cares more about respecting these lunar heritage sites than the men and women who are dedicating several years of their life to trying to land something on the lunar surface for the first time in decades—it cannot be denied that this is a genuinely and firmly held belief that is shared by a non-trivial number of people.  This fact will in turn serve as a strong disincentive for teams to pursue these Heritage Bonuses, especially when those teams are partially or entirely dependent on donations and corporate sponsorship. If this disincentive dominates, we will have squandered an important and unique opportunity to realize great scientific and social benefit.

The final reason is that NASA has spent a lot of time and money—indeed, one can plausibly assume that they have spent more money than anyone else in the world or, quite likely, everyone else in the world combined—researching the issues like landing plume impingement, et cetera. If you read through that PDF, you’ll see there is a fair amount of technical detail in there, and most of it is fairly hard earned in terms of both analytical power and real world experiment data. I think these guidelines are a valuable way to disseminate that data out into the community.

A last thought: I hope future coverage will highlight the fact that these are recommendations (as the document indicates right in the title), rather than rules or laws.  That seems to be an area where there are frequent misinterpretations.