44 | New Scientist | 13 July 2019geology during field expeditions to Arizona
and Iceland. Just one geologist, Harrison “Jack”
Schmitt, went to the moon, on Apollo 17,
though he also advised other missions.
Messeri says more inclusive lunar futures are
only possible if mission planners are clear
about what they want.
“If we are going for mining, then say that; say
this is what we want to invest in. If it’s to expand
human frontiers or inspire the next generation,
then great, send artists,” Messeri says. “We can
make the decision as a community to spend a
huge amount of money to send artists to space,
and that seems to me as legitimate and worthy
as sending a bunch of miners.”TWO GOLF BALLS
Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard
went to a lot of trouble to have a bit of
fun on the moon. When he boarded
the spacecraft, he brought with him
two golf balls and a specially designed
golf club head, which he attached to
the handle of a soil and rock sampling
device to forge a makeshift club. He
hit two shots: the first sliced to the
side and rolled into a crater, but the
second flew about 180 metres. Fore!A FALCON FEATHER
Galileo is said to have dropped two
balls of different weights off the
Leaning Tower of Pisa, provinggravity’s pull on them was unrelated
to their mass when they hit the
ground at the same time. Apollo 15
astronaut David Scott performed a
version of this experiment using ahammer and a falcon feather
(pictured left) taken from a US Air
Force mascot. The vacuum of space
eliminates air resistance and the
feather hit the lunar soil at the same
time as the hammer.With NASA and others eyeing a
return to the moon, it looks likely that
humans will return in the not-too-
distant future (see “The next moon
walkers”, page 42). This time we
ought to go forth with a cleaner
mentality, says Vera Assis Fernandes,
a lunar geologist at the University of
Manchester, UK.
We may as well leave the debrisfrom our past excursions where it is,
she says. “If we clean up the mess,
we will also be disturbing the lunar
environment.” So what is there can
stay as a kind of monument to
explorations past.
But we should take better care
over what we abandon there in the
future. The moon is a finite resource,
and we can’t just trash it and hope
that we won’t run into the same
problems we have seen on Earth.
“There’s a revival of interest in the
moon without a great pondering,”
says Assis Fernandes. “Do we want
to do the same damage there that
we’ve done to this planet?” ❚Last year, Japanese billionaire Yusaku
Maezawa made headlines when he bought
all the seats on a SpaceX capsule that the
company’s CEO Elon Musk wants to send
around the moon in 2023. Maezawa said he
planned to bring artists and performers, who
would be commissioned to create new works
inspired by what they see. “If John Lennon
could have seen the curvature of the Earth,
what kind of songs would he have written?”
he said at the time.
Maezawa’s plan contrasts with the way Musk
often talks about future space settlements on
the moon and Mars, says Lucianne Walkowicz,
an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium inChicago. She says she finds a lot of his rhetoric
objectionable, partly because it doesn’t
imagine an inclusive future and partly because
he uses inappropriate language. Using terms
like “colonising” space, for example, recalls a
violent history of colonial subjugation, which
continues to exclude people of colour and
women from the imagined future of space,
she says. “I felt it was not only harmful to the
way we imagine space exploration, but that
it whitewashes a lot of history on Earth.”
In a gesture towards inclusivity, NASA’s
administrator announced that the Artemis
programme to return humans to the moon by
2024, will include the first woman among itsNASALE
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