Anthropology
Historic Preservation of
Apollo 11’s Tranquility Base
Dr. Antoinette Martinez, Chair, CSU, Chico Anthropology Department: Welcome to the Anthropology Forum, and we're... I'm very excited about having Lisa Westwood here today as a follow up on the very successful presentation by the astronaut, Stephen Robinson. Okay, then once again I'm very excited to introduce Lisa Westwood. Some of you may know her from online classes. Anybody in here have her for an online class? [Laughter] And in case you haven't had the opportunity to meet her, here she is. [Laughter] She's not a mystery.
Lisa Westwood: That's right.
Dr. Martinez: Lisa is a professional archeologist. She works for ECORP, and we've had the opportunity to know her for a long time. And today she's going to be talking about a very special project, historic preservation of Apollo 11's Tranquility Base, an archeological site representing the first human lunar landing. And Lisa will present an overview of her ongoing efforts to preserve the first lunar landing site on the moon. Lisa has spent many years ‐‐ and some of us have been tracking her many years ‐‐ of working with historic preservation officials, NASA, members of Congress, and the international community to designate Tranquility Base on the moon as a world heritage site. Tranquility Base became the first cultural resource not located on earth to be designated an historic registry. So now let her tell the story. Let's give her a welcome. [Applause]
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Anthropology
Historic Preservation of
Apollo 11’s Tranquility Base
Lisa Westwood: Thank you, Nettie. Thank you so much. This is so exciting to be here to see all of your faces again. It's not often that I get to be on campus, and this is a wonderful opportunity, and I love to have a willing audience to listen to me talk about space heritage and space archeology, which is a little bit of a departure from what you're accustomed to with the Anthropology Forum. So thank you for bearing with me, and I appreciate you being here. Now, as most of you know and as Nettie properly said, I'm not an astronaut. I'm not a historian or, you know, an international diplomat or a space law attorney. I'm a professional archeologist. So I bring a slightly different perspective to historic preservation on the moon, and that's what I'm going to be talking about today.
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Now most people when they hear that I study archeology on the moon kind of give me a little bit of a strange look at first. It's a little bit different than the usual archaeologist, and they wonder how I can do that considering I haven't ever been on the moon myself. And the way that I answer that is, "Well, it's really no different than what astronomers do when you think about it. You know, they study celestial objects and distant planets from afar, and not one of them has ever been to Jupiter. And, in fact, the study of human culture is oftentimes done remotely in time and space." So, to me, having a professional archaeologist study the human history of the moon actually makes perfect sense to me, and it makes a lot of good sense to my friend and colleague, Dr. Beth O'Leary, here, from New Mexico State University. She's with the Department of Anthropology, and she and I were working independently of each other for many years before we connected, and we crossed paths. And we've been working together ever since. For both of us the inspiration for our efforts came from our college students. So, for me, I had been teaching Anthro 112, Society Time and Archeology, here at Chico State for a number of years, and the equivalent over at Butte College, Anthro 16. And inevitably during the unit on cultural resources management in the modern world, we would have a discussion about what makes a site significant, and does it have to be old in order to be significant? So using the Apollo 11 lunar landing site as an example seemed like a natural case study, and so we used that as an example to talk about a modern site with extraordinary historical significance. 3
Anthropology
After having this discussion with my students for a number of years, I had an epiphany one day, and I even remember where I was at the time. I was at a conference in Arizona of all places, and it occurred to me how ironic it was that we have such an important part of human history here, an archeological site that, yes it's modern, but it's so important. It hasn't been afforded any level of protection whatsoever, and it hasn't been recognized in any way like archeological sites on earth are. So, clearly an oversight. So I decided I needed to rectify this, and so I began my efforts to try to preserve this important part of our history, as nontraditional as that effort may be of course. And along the lines I met Beth O'Leary from New Mexico State University, and we joined forces. She was trying to do the exact same thing, and in 2009 we formed and founded the Apollo 11 Preservation Task Force. We have a number of members now that have joined us from all over the world actually.
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Anthropology
Now, unlike most groups I speak to throughout the country about this topic, this is the first time I've had an opportunity to talk to anthropologists and archeologists specifically, which is wonderful. So I'm framing this in a way that I think is going to translate well to most of you. This is language that I think you can relate to. What I'm going to talk about today is... first I'm going to define the cultural resource, the archeological site that we are trying to preserve, and I'm going to talk about the cultural context and the site formation processes that led to its formation. I'm going to then talk about why it's important to try to preserve a site that's located a quarter of a million miles away. And I'm going to talk about what we've done and what we've accomplished to date and where we're going with our preservation efforts. I've cobbled together a lot of different slides from many different presentations that I've given. Most of them are pictures. You're not going to see very many words, but I have a lot to cover. So I'm going to go through this and give you a broad overview of what we're doing and what we're trying to accomplish, and at the end if you'd like, I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have ‐‐ or at least try, anyway. [Laughter]
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All right, so let's begin with the site itself. Tranquility Base is the name for the location on the moon where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped foot on July 20, 1969, and most of you already know the famous first words that were uttered by Neil Armstrong: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." It's in just about every grade school textbook. It was the first time a human ever stepped foot on another celestial body, and you'll hear me use that phrase, “celestial body,” a lot. I'm not an astronomer. I'm probably using that phrase incorrectly, but to me a celestial body is anything that is in the universe that has some sort of mass that can be landed on. So in the context of historic preservation, a celestial body would be a planet or a moon or an asteroid or a comet or something like that.
Tranquility Base was selected by NASA to be the landing location of the Apollo 11 crew because it seemed, at least from afar, to be relatively smooth and suitable for landing a craft. Unfortunately when the crew was coming down in the lander, they were going a little bit faster than they had planned, and they actually overshot the landing location by about a second and a half, which translates into 4 miles. So they actually landed on the slightly rockier edge of the Sea of Tranquility. So Tranquility Base is just the name for the location of where they selected to land.
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While Michael Collins, the lesser known of the three Apollo 11 astronauts ‐‐ he was up in the command module, orbiting the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the surface to walk around. And while he was up there, this was being filmed live. And in 1969 there were 600 million people watching this worldwide live, and that was a lot of people for 1969. That's nothing today. I think they've had probably more than that watching the Super Bowl this year, but at that time, that's pretty amazing. And they were from all over the world, and the images were very grainy, and so you've probably seen some of the video of how grainy it was. This was a very historic event, not just for Americans, but for humankind in general. When you think about it, the technological achievements that were necessary in the development of human culture that had to occur to get to this point is quite staggering actually. In terms of human innovations, it's, you know, in my mind, it's up there with the invention of stone tools and iPhones really. It was pretty amazing. And their mission was not only to send a man to the moon, but it was to meet President Kennedy's directive. And you might recall President Kennedy issued a directive in front of Congress and said that, you know, the Congress will send a man to the moon and bring him safely home again by the end of the decade. 7
Anthropology
That was one reason why they were up there, but the other reason they were up there was to gather, experiment ‐‐ you know, to conduct experiments ‐‐ gather information, gather samples, and bring samples back because we didn't really know at the time very much about the lunar environment. You know this was the first time that anybody had been there. So we had done all of our study of the lunar environment from afar. And all of this was being done so that we could hopefully return again, which we did on subsequent missions during the Apollo missions. This was a very risky mission for the astronauts when you think about it ‐‐ risky not just because of the dangers of human space flight, but because we really didn't know what was going on. We didn't know what the lunar environment was like. For example, was the lunar surface actually solid, or if you stepped off the lander, would you fall into a bunch of powder, 10 feet of powder, for example? We just didn't know. And, in fact, Neil Armstrong's, his instructions from NASA mission control at the time were to descend the ladder and not just jump off and walk around on the lunar surface, but to drop down, just touch the ground, and then jump back up again, because we didn't know what was going to happen at the time. So that first footprint was literally just one footprint, and then he hopped back up onto the ladder again.
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So in pursuit of answers about what the lunar environment was like, Neil and Buzz traversed an area over a period of about 90 minutes to 2 hours, over the size of an area about the size of the infield of a baseball diamond. So they didn't walk around very far. They actually only spent a little time on the lunar surface, and the rest of the time was actually spent in the lunar module. But what is amazing to me is the fact that they were able to get to this point using the level of technology that they had in 1969.
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I was fortunate recently – gosh, it's been now probably about 2 years ‐‐ I was invited to attend a ceremony and a presentation program in Oklahoma City that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy's directive to send a man to the moon and back. And there I was able to meet dozens and dozens of current and former astronauts and mission staffers, including the Apollo 13 astronauts were there. It was amazing. Apollo 10 was there. It was a really amazing experience, but one of the conversations that I had with one of the retired mission staffers was amazing. He said to me, "You know, there was more technology present in a singing greeting card than there was in the entire command module." [laughter] And, you know maybe that's true. Maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but the point is very valid, and it's relevant for a number of reasons, and that's because the technology, and therefore the artifacts that were generated, had to be designed... all of the equipment had to be designed with a lot of things in mind, most of which were unknown to us. They had to be... they were tested on earth. They had to be designed to operate in unknown conditions with unknown success rates and at an unknown weight. And weight is very important in this, and it does tie into our discussion of the artifacts here.
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Weight was important because everything about the mission, including the descent to the lunar surface and going back up to the command module, everything factored in weight, and it was calculated using slide rules and portable calculators like this one that's now on display at White Sands Missile Range. Weight was extremely important because if they were too heavy upon liftoff, they wouldn't have enough fuel to get back up to the command module and get home. So they were also having to make room for a lot of soil samples and rock samples, which adds weight. Everything was in a delicate balance. It's a very scary risk for the astronauts, and all of this was being done within the context of the Cold War space race, which ‐‐ that context was incredible. It's nothing like it is today. It was the U.S. versus the USSR, and there was a race to go to the moon.
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So, just a few years earlier, actually in 1961, Bill Flemming, one of the staff members at NASA, was tasked with actually studying what would happen when a human actually steps foot on the moon for the first time. And he had to do this study called "A Feasible Approach for an Early Manned Lunar Landing," and he did this in 4 weeks. NASA spent 4 weeks of time studying what humans would experience when they actually landed on the moon for the first time. You can't even scope out an environmental impact report in California in 4 weeks, [laughter] let alone study what it would be like to send somebody to the moon. And this is what he had to say: "Very little study has gone into precisely what operations would take place on the moon or how they would be executed." So in retrospect, it's, I think, clearly a miracle that the lunar landing happened at all. It's quite amazing, but needless to say, it was not as simple as just grabbing the tongs off of your barbecue and raiding your toolbox and packing your bags to go to the moon. Everything that had to be done, all the equipment that had to be carried up there to collect samples, to weigh samples, to carry out experiments, all of this had to be designed specifically for the mission. 12
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So, for example, one of the missions was to collect rock samples. It's easy as an earthling on earth to pick up a rock off the ground, but imagine being in a bulky spacesuit with a bunch of, you know, tanks of oxygen on you and trying to operate something with big, bulky gloves. Well they had to design the tongs and the scoops and the scales and all of this to be able to function on the moon and in the lunar environment. So as a result, we have a lot of artifacts that exist only as one‐of‐a‐kind artifacts on the moon. They have maybe prototypes back here on earth or they may have replicas on earth. There are a number of them on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, but for some of these artifacts that are up on the moon, there are no others that exist anywhere, and so that's kind of important. Once they serve their purpose on the moon, it was not necessary to lug them back, especially when they had to make room for all the rock samples that they had to bring back.
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So as a result, just right before Buzz and Neil had to go back up to the command module ‐‐
and remember they didn't have much time on the moon itself ‐‐ they had to gather all the equipment that they had been carrying experiments out with, and they had to gather the rock samples, and they had to get rid of a bunch of stuff that they didn't need anymore. For example, they took a bunch of pictures with these fancy cameras. Well, once you take the pictures, you don't need to lug the cameras back. So they took the film canisters out, put them in the command module or up in the lander, and left the cameras on site. They left behind waste and wrappers and all sorts of other things. They did not participate in the leave‐no‐trace program. There's no question there. So in a few minutes right before they left doing all this material swapping, they created an archeological site at Tranquility Base on the moon. And there's a toss zone, and we've actually mapped this from actual records and reconstructing photos and videos and all of that to determine where things are. It's not as precise as an archeological sketch map would be if we were doing this here on earth, but it's pretty good considering it's a quarter of a million miles away I think.
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So most people when they think about the site of Tranquility Base think in their mind, we've got the flag. Everybody remembers the flag being planted, and it was being saluted, and then they see pictures of the lander itself. There's actually a lot more up at Tranquility Base. My colleague, Dr. Beth O'Leary, and her students were able to obtain several grants from NASA, and using this grant money, they went and did archival research at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. They went to NASA. They went to the National Archives. They interviews lots of mission staffers and astronauts, and they cobbled together an inventory. We know what artifacts went up with the crew, and we know what they came home with. The record keeping back then was not as good as it is now, but through lots of different sources and cross referencing, we've come up with an inventory of artifacts at Tranquility Base ‐‐ 106 to be precise. I think it's kind of an interesting number considering we deal with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. So I wonder if that's a coincidence. I don't know, but we now know that there's 106 objects and artifacts up there, and we've grouped them into five classifications ‐‐ and the first one being the only artifact in that ‐‐ or structure, in this case ‐‐ in that classification is the lunar module itself. The lunar module, actually half of it still remains on site. The upper half, if you can see it... I don't know if you can see it because of the table here, but there's a graphic down at the bottom. The lower half is the part that's shaded. That's the part that's still there on the moon right now. The top half is what they left in, and they detached from the bottom half, and it went back up to the command module that was orbiting around the moon at the time. That's the only structure at Tranquility Base. The rest of the objects are all artifacts.
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The second classification is the commemorative artifacts, and this is one that we're going to come back to later, but there are just a couple of things. There's the flag, and an interesting story about the flag, you've probably seen it in photos standing upright, and it's literally in position. It's not limp, and that's because what they had to do at the last minute, they realized that, gee, there's no atmosphere, the flag can't fly without any wind. So rather than having a really bad photo moment having the flag all limpy, they found a rod and they sewed this fabric strip around the top of it, and they slid this rod in so that it would actually stand upright and it would look like it was flying in the wind when it wasn't. Unfortunately, when the ascent module lifted off so they could go back to orbit, the plume ejecta and the blast actually obliterated the flag. So we think that the flag actually is in pieces right now or at least blown over if nothing else. Anyway, the other two things that are kind of important in this…on the leg of the descent module there is a plaque that has been placed there, and it was put there before it went up, of course, and it's a commemorative plaque, and it says, "Here men from the planet earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." The other thing that's up there that's a commemorative object is a silicone disk, and that silicone disk is actually a very old‐school disk, has messages of support from the leaders from 73 nations on earth. These two things in particular really speak to the international significance and how this was an event that was important to all of mankind, not just to the Americans. There are a number of other commemorative objects there, too. There's a patch that commemorates the Apollo 1 astronauts that perished on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral years earlier.
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The third classification would be the experimental objects and artifacts. These are the pieces of equipment that they set up. This was the scientific purpose equipment. One of the ones that is particularly interesting is the laser ranging retro reflector, and this is a piece of equipment that is basically a fancy mirror that they set up, and it's designed to work in tandem with facilities on earth. So there is actually a facility on earth in New Mexico that's still doing this right now at Apache Point Observatory. It aims a laser beam towards the moon, and the laser, the light photons, hit the reflector, and it bounces back, and it hits the telescope again, and the time that it takes to go from the observatory to the laser ranging retro reflector in the back can be used to calculate the distance between the earth and the moon at any given time. Any guess as to how long that takes to do? Twelve (seconds)? Nope, too high. [Background conversation] It's two and a half seconds round trip. It's amazing how fast that goes. It's incredible. We're going to come back to the laser ranging retro reflector here in a minute. [Laughter] That's a mouthful, isn't it? You don't want to say that one three times fast.
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The fourth one is mission tools and gear, and actually most of the artifacts that are at Tranquility Base fall into this fourth category. These are the cameras, the scales. Once they weighed the moon rocks they didn't need to carry the scale back. They wanted to carry the moon rock back, and they have cameras. And Buzz Aldrin threw out his space boots at the last minute, and he said since then that he and his wife both have regretted that tremendously that he threw his space boots out to make room. All sorts of hammers, all of those one‐of‐a kind objects that I told you about that were designed specifically for that mission fall primarily in that category, where there are no other examples that exist on earth.
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The last category is waste, and this is actually the smallest amount, the least represented category, but it seems to be the one that people like to focus on the most for some reason. You know they have wrappers and food bags and packaging and things that allow the human body to survive in an environment that it wasn't designed to survive in. It's all part of the human experience, and in my mind, these last two categories are really important for a lot of reasons ‐‐ one of which, they provide this incredible cross section of human culture. It's not just a snapshot in time of 1969 technology, but it's everything about how humans work, and it speaks to the human body, and it speaks to human evolution, it speaks to our, you know, our ability to adapt to another environment. And that's what humans have been doing for millions and millions of years, and that's how we've got to the point where we are is we've adapted to our changing environment, and this is a classic example of how we've been able to do that.
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So, thanks to a number of theses ‐ theses, Masters theses, the first of which being done by Ralph Gibson ‐‐ we have an inventory now, and I'm just going to flip through this There's just two slides of it here.
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But you can see that we have a fairly detailed description of what is out there on Tranquility Base.
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Now what's left behind actually is the physical remains of human activity that represents human activity for humans that are no longer there. So essentially you have an archeological site at Tranquility Base, and what's really wonderful about this particular site is that all of the artifacts are in situ for the most part, which means that they have not been moved since they were last used. They're in their primary context. So when the astronaut was done with the scale, he tossed it aside and left, and it still remains in that precise location to this point. No one's been back to Tranquility Base, not even the subsequent Apollo missions, and no one has been there to pick it over or pick them up and take them away and sell them on eBay ‐‐ yet. [Laughter] But we know that's coming someday. This is extremely unusual for an archeological site when you think about it. Most of the time archeological sites on earth have seen some kind of an impact from human visitation. Think about Civil War battlefields, for example. In a lot of cases, the only way that you know that you're standing on a historical site is because of the plaque that tells you that you are. You wouldn't know otherwise. Here we have artifacts that are left in place by the people that last used them. That's pretty amazing. Another thing that's wonderful about Tranquility Base is that we actually have video documentation of the site formation processes, and we actually have a real date. We don't need radio carbon dating, which is wonderful. [Laughter] It's a luxury for archeologists. although I have to admit as being one myself that if we had that information for everything, it would be out of business. So probably...probably not a good idea.
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Now to address integrity, this is something that is really important when we're looking at historical significance of a resource. In order for something to be significant and eligible for inclusion in the National Register, it has to meet a number, one or more, of four criteria. We'll talk about that in a little bit. In addition it needs to retain integrity. And one of the funny things that happened when I first talked with then‐State Historic Preservation Officer, Wayne Donaldson, about this, and I'll talk more about that in a little bit, but he said, "Well, how do you know that it retains integrity?" [Laughter] He said, "Have you gone up there?" And I said, "No." Of course he laughed, too, because he knows that satellites have actually captured Tranquility Base from above, and so we've had a number of satellites pass over in recent years. This is the LCROSS satellite that went over a couple of years ago, and you can see that it captured the Eagle Lander, remember the bottom half of that lander that's still there. It also caught the laser ranging metro reflector. That's that one piece of equipment that's, you know, reflects the beam of light coming from the earth, and then there's other seismic equipment, and you can see astronaut tracks. 23
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Now at this level of resolution you can't see the actual footprints, but you can see the footpaths, and this is a great example of using remote sensing technology. Now in addition scientists believe ‐‐ scientists that are smarter than me about this kind of stuff, so I have to take their word at it ‐‐ believe that because the lunar environment is so stable and there's a lack of atmosphere, that probably the only indication of the passage of time is probably a thin coating of lunar dust. So the artifacts at Tranquility Base are probably coated in lunar dust at this point. How much we don't know. Someday I hope our descendants will go back and find out, but because I know you are all thinking about it, no, the lunar landing was not faked on a sound stage in Hollywood. [Laughter] In 1969 we had the technology to get to the moon, but we did not have the technology to fake it, and that's something that's really important to understand. Millions and millions of dollars of federal money went into this program, and there's a wonderful documentary that's now up on YouTube that I highly recommend you watching this. You have to search for... the title is "Moon Hopes Not," and there's a filmmaker who spent 30 years in the industry, and he understands all the nuances of filmmaking, and he knows what you can fake and what you can't fake, and it is worth 10 minutes of your time. It is the best response I've ever heard to that, you know, that theory that the moon landing was fake. It's definitely worth it.
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Okay, I promised I wasn't going to have a lot of words. This is just a few. This is really the only slide we're going to see a lot, but, you know, it usually goes without saying that Tranquility Base is significant historically. I mean, everybody knows that it is an important part in human history, but significance is defined in other ways as well in terms of the regulatory context. Significance is also tied to criteria that make it eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. And this means that Tranquility Base has to satisfy one or more, and then it has to have integrity... [cough] integrity, excuse me, which I said already it has. Number one, Tranquility Base is associated with important persons in our history. It's associated with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who the first people to ever step foot on another celestial body. Number two, criterion “B,” they were ‐‐the Tranquility Base is associated with an important event in human history or American history. Obviously the first time anyone had stepped foot on a celestial body. It is very important. 25
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It's also significant under criterion three, because the objects and artifacts that are up there at Tranquility Base represent one‐of‐a‐kind artifacts that are the works of masters, definitely. And it also possesses the ability to provide important information in history, thereby satisfying criterion “D” of the National Register. That's because, again, we have information potential in these artifacts that is up on Tranquility Base right now that does not exist anywhere else. Without those artifacts, without this site, we could not recreate that down here on earth. So that's very important. So it's an extremely important site for that reason, but it's also important for human evolution of technology in general, when you think about it. Humans had to finally, over millions of years, figure out, learn how to understand, and then overcome the physics of our environment to propel a human, go outside the gravitational force of the earth, take that human to another planet, or a moon in this case, in an environment that is unfriendly to life as we know it and bring him back safely again. The technology and the human genius that was necessary for that to happen is just...it's staggering. And this actually was ‐‐ I don't want to say a culmination ‐‐ but it was definitely a milestone in human cultural development over the past several million years. And it really started with the first control of fire, which, of course, was the driving force that allowed the jet‐assisted technology to work in the first place to get humans up to the moon.
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So, why preserve it? It's a quarter of a million miles away. What possible danger could it be in? [Laughter] Well, we now recognize that we have an extremely important historical resource, an archeological site, that's untouched. And along with the pyramids of Giza and the Great Wall of China, Tranquility Base is mentioned in just about every grade school textbook, and if you're anywhere in your mid to late 40's, you probably know where you were at the time that this event occurred, and everybody talks about it. "I was with my grandparents," or "I was at the... walking down the street, and they had all those TV's in the window, and we were watching it there." Everybody knows that, and there is a growing consensus among the public and among the international community and the historic preservationists that we really need to do something now to preserve this. This is a very unique part of our history. And we believe that, and I firmly believe that humans as a whole are invested in our history. I mean, when you think about it, millions of people go to museums and historical sites every day all over the world. Clearly the public appreciates history.
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It's just that this is so recent, and sometimes when you remember the site actually being made, it's harder to think about it as a cultural resource initially because you can actually associate with it. You remember when it was formed, or a lot of people remember when it was formed.
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The problem is that our fascination with history sometimes can cause damage to archeological sites, and we've seen this at sites all over the world here on earth. And that's concerning because when you ask anybody where they would want to go if they were able to go to the moon, they're going to say Tranquility Base.
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I mean, that's where I would go. I mean, it was the first time somebody landed there. It's a pretty cool place for having... there we go…and I believe, firmly believe, that most people don't intend to do damage to archeological sites like this, but sometimes I think – maybe in a lot of times ‐‐ people don't realize that their footsteps, their actions can actually cause damage to archeological sites, and this is a concern. I mean, how many of you, well, those of you that have taken my classes, know that I talk about “Uncle Ed.” Uncle Ed is the uncle that used to collect arrowheads that he calls them “arrowheads,” and he puts them in a can on his mantle, and he thinks that he's excited about it. But he doesn't realize that he picked over an archeological site. And the important thing about artifacts is not just the artifact itself but its three‐dimensional location in space. It's its association. It's what it's with. It tells a story. 30
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These are not just objects, but they are packets of information, and that's how I look at them. And then you've got other cases where if you've ever been walking in the Southwest or hiking, I used to work in the desert Southwest, so I saw this a lot. You walk down a path, and there's a tree stump, and the tree stump has magically collected a potsherd collection that rivals most museums, and it's a little scary, [laughter] and you have to realize that, you know, I think people are going to behave in the same way at an archeological site elsewhere that they do on earth. So that's something that I always want to bear in mind. And at Tranquility Base you have added problems. You have lack of supervision, you have blast zones, you have plume ejecta, people don't know how to walk in space boots. But, you know, this is starting to sound like a science fiction novel, and I'm the first person to admit this is not happening today. This is probably not ever going to happen in my lifetime. It'll probably happen in my daughter's lifetime, but it's happening sooner than we think, and the chance....the return to the moon is actually coming a lot faster than people realize.
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I'm sure you've been following the news, and you know that NASA abandoned plans to go back to the moon, and so that void has been filled by private endeavors. And we're really kind of in the middle of a new space race right now. This is the spaceport in New Mexico that's under construction right now. It actually finished phase one. They dedicated the runway in October of 2010. So this has been an operational spaceport. I mean, most people don't realize this is going on. It's amazing to me. These are actual pictures of the facilities. These are not artist's renditions. But Virgin Galactic has been booking flights. You can actually book a flight right now for $200,000. You can go up into a suborbital plane, and you only need a deposit of $20,000. So play the lottery, and then you can go up on a space plane, but I think that it's important to understand...
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Here's the website in case anybody's interested in booking a flight right now. The more immediate threat, people are not going back to the moon now, and like I said, it probably won't happen in our lifetimes.
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The more immediate threat would be robotic probes. Google has put up 30 million dollars for the Google Lunar X PRIZE. And this is a prize that will give 30 million dollars to the first team to send a robotic probe to the moon, travel 500 meters, collect high definition video, send it back to earth. There is bonus money of 5 million dollars for that team, for any team that will go to an Apollo site and drive its remote control vehicle from earth. I don't know if any of you have tried to drive those little remote control cars. They're hard enough when you're standing like 30 feet away. I can't imagine how hard that would be when you're a quarter of a million miles away, but it's a reality. In fact, there's 29 teams that are competing for this prize, and they're mostly run out of universities and institutions. The one that seems to be in the lead is called Astrobotic, and it's out of Carnegie Mellon University. And I did have a conversation with the head of the Astrobotic team about a year ago, and I can say with absolute certainty, based on my conversation with them, that there is not a sliver of historic preservation in the minds of these engineers. So that's a little concerning because they have federal funding and they've teamed up with other entities like Space X to actually take their equipment to the moon, and they were supposed to do it last year. So they're a little behind schedule. They're thinking now this December is when this is going to happen. 34
Anthropology
So it's kind of exciting in some ways that this is going to happen during our lifetimes, that we're actually going to be able to experience this. It's already started to happen. You probably heard about the Dragon Flight, the Dragon capsule that just restocked the international space station for the first time last fall. That is a vehicle that was developed by Space X, and Space X is run by the founder of PayPal, and Space X has a contract with the Astrobotic folks to take their stuff up there to the moon. So it's going to be interesting to see how this works, but I think the interesting thing though about the historic preservation aspect of this is that both Astrobotic and Space X are federally funded. And we all know what that means. If they're federally funded, that means that a federal agency before they issue the permit or issue approval or provide federal funding, they have to comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which means they have to assess their project and make sure that what they're doing isn't going to cause harm to a significant cultural resource. And we know that Tranquility Base meets all four criteria for inclusion in the National Register. So we have been encouraging the federal agencies to be diligent about their responsibilities under Section 106, and this is a whole other tangent that we could spend a lot of time on, but in the interest of time we'll pass for now.
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But the good thing is that NASA has finally stepped up and realized that the return to the moon, even though it's not going to be by NASA, is coming soon. So a couple of years ago they issued, on the actual anniversary of the Apollo 11, issued these recommendations and guidelines, for non‐governmental agent... or non‐governmental entities, commercial or private sector flights to give them some guidance on how to protect and preserve and not damage archeological sites on the moon. This was huge. To date, NASA had simply acknowledged that they retained ownership to the artifacts on Tranquility Base, but had taken kind of a neutral stance on historic preservation. So the fact that they released these guidelines is really, really wonderful, and they should be commended for that. They did consult with us on this, and my colleague, Beth O'Leary, had spent quite a bit of time on phone calls and conference calls with NASA in trying to make sure the artifacts were given proper consideration in this. The problem with these is that they are exactly what they say they are. They are guidelines, and so there's really not a lot of teeth in the guidelines.
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What Beth and I and our colleagues have been fighting for is actual historic preservation of Tranquility Base. And the most aspect challenging aspect of doing preservation on the moon is not figuring out significance or mapping or looking at integrity like you might think. It's actually trying to deal with the mechanics of historic preservation law, laws that were designed on earth to deal with earthbound cultural resources. and trying to take those laws and apply them to the moon. Not quite a perfect fit, kind of like a square peg, round hole kind of thing. It takes a little bit of effort. My position all along has been that if we as a human species were smart enough to figure out how to get humans to another celestial body and back, surely we can figure out a way to preserve the site that formed as a result of it. You would think that it's easy. [Laughter]
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I'm finding out that it's not quite as easy as that. The solution that we think is going to work best for this and what we've been pursuing and making progress towards is designation as a World Heritage site at the very top of the list. World Heritage List sites are managed by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, and these are sites that are important to all of humanity, all of mankind. No matter what nation that you're from, these are important – these are the things like the pyramids of Giza. These are very important sites to everybody. And remember when I talked about the artifacts at Tranquility Base there was some commemorative artifacts speaking to the international significance of how this was a mission for all of humankind, that this was not limited to the U.S. Here's another picture of that plaque at the leg of the descent module there. 38
Anthropology
Now in concept the route to getting to the World Heritage Listing is quite simple. You start out with State Historical Register listings, and then you nominate it for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places, and then you elevate it to a National Historic Landmark, and then you bring it to the U.S. tentative list, and then it goes up to the World Heritage Commission and gets voted to be a World Heritage site. It sounds simple, but actually it's not quite as simple as it looks. We initially started this process at the National Register level. Beth and I both did. And we hit a few, you know, roadblocks because of these earthbound laws. Some of the laws that we're working under were written and enacted before Apollo 11. So it's really hard to even think that there is even anything in their minds. National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 is a good example. It was signed three years before Apollo 11. So it was a little bit difficult. And we realized very quickly that this is a very politically charged issue, and it needs to be done carefully, and we need to look at the law. We need to consult with everybody that we can consult with, and it has to be done slowly. So we circled our wagons, and we started with California.
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So in 2009, Ralph Gibson and I ‐‐ who he's... Ralph Gibson was one of the original Masters thesis students that worked with Beth O'Leary and did the inventory ‐‐ he and I went to meet with then‐State Historic Preservation Officer Wayne Donaldson. And we said, "This is what we're trying to do. We want to nominate this thing." Actually I had already nominated it at that point to the National Register. I said, "What do we do? How do we do this correctly and in a way that's actually going to stick?" And he suggested that we start with the California Register of Historic Resources. And California is one of five or six space states where, you know, there's a really strong tie between the space program and the state, and California is one of them. And you can see on the slide I've listed a number of the facilities that are associated with the space race, and, in fact, the command module that I was talking about that was orbiting the moon while the Apollo crew came down to the lunar surface, that was manufactured in Downey, down south in Downey, California by North American Aviation. So there's a lot of connections between California and because of that connection, the association between California and Apollo 11, and because state law in California does not require the resource to be physically located in the state's boundaries, we were actually able to nominate this to the California Register of Historical Resources. 40
Anthropology
At the time, in 2009, that had never been done before, so a little outside of the box for a lot of people. At that time there had never been any cultural resource anywhere in the world that was not located on earth listed on some kind of registry. So it just hadn't been thought of before. So the following January, in January 2010, I stood before the State Historical Resources Commission more nervous than I have ever been before in my entire life in public speaking. The news media had already been alerted to it, NASA's attorneys were on it, the state's attorneys were reviewing it, and it was watched pretty carefully. And Ralph and I gave it our best shot. We talked about the significance of the site. We talked about the incredible ties between California and the Apollo 11 program, and learned so much along the way. It's amazing how many ties California has, like most people think about Apollo, as being associated with Texas and Florida because that's where mission control was and Cape Canaveral where they launched. But there's a lot more going on in California than most people realized. So after a couple of hours, the California resources, or the Commission, voted unanimously to list it on the California Register, which – I was ecstatic. That was the first time any cultural resource not located on earth was listed on the registry, and I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the Commission that day. I mean, they really...they took a controversial, nontraditional situation, and they took a stand. and in favor of historic preservation, and that, I think, is incredible. And in doing that, they made history themselves. It was incredible.
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Not long after, we approached New Mexico, and the state of New Mexico stepped up as well. The state of New Mexico is near and dear to my heart, and that's because I went to graduate school in New Mexico, but New Mexico finally...they also stepped up, and they listed it unanimously on their state registry when Beth and her students went before their commission. We quickly got on the phone with other state SHPO's. Beth and I flew to Washington, DC and presented to all of the SHPO's that had gathered for their national conference, and the support that we received was really incredible.
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And in the interest of time, I will expedite this a little bit, I think. We're getting a little low on time. [Background conversation] There's a class in here? Okay, so maybe I'll just skip forward, and basically where we're at now, what happened was, we got everything on. We got California and New Mexico listed. The next step was National Register. There are two types of National Register sites. There's one site that is the National Register itself, and then there's the cream of the crop. These are things that are even more significant than your typical National Register site. National Register sites are like Bidwell Mansion, Honeyrun Covered Bridge, things like that. Those that are even more significant are the National Historic Landmarks. These are things like Cape Canaveral, Mission Control, the first discovery of gold in Coloma. These are National Historic Landmarks. That is a prerequisite. We have to get it on a National Historic Landmark listing in order to get it to the World Heritage List. And three's two routes. The first route is through the National Park Service and the Secretary of the Interior. It's a little bit cumbersome because we're dealing with all of those earthly laws. The short cut...the short cut is through Congress.
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And so in 2010, I actually sat down with Congressmen Wally Herger and Dan Lundgren and had a number of meetings with the Congressmen, and they were very supportive of this mission. Wally Herger was just ecstatic because he just says so many wonderful things about Chico State, and then with Mr. Lundgren, he actually knew the Apollo 1 astronauts. So he wanted to help memorialize this. He agreed to sponsor a bill. So with input from Beth O'Leary, I sat on my lazy boy recliner with a Chihuahua on my lap, and I wrote the National Historic Landmark Act Bill for Tranquility Base. And that was my first time at doing any kind of bill writing. So it was a challenge. It was making its way through the process. There's a pipeline that it has to go through, and it goes through legislative counsel, then it goes to committee, and it gets, you know, voted on and so on. Mr. Lundgren lost his reelection bid this past fall. So now we're in a position where we're having to now find a new sponsor for our bill. So it's a little disappointing. We feel like it's a setback.
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But it's not a major setback because we've been dealing with the international community all along. And in terms of the international community, the support that we're receiving right now from the international community is even stronger than what we're seeing stateside. We're seeing people from all over the country, all over the world, that are stepping up to this. I'm going to skip over the discussion of the international treaties that are pertained in historic preservation, but if any of you are ever interested, this is the fun part. So maybe we can talk about it later, or maybe a part 2 to this forum would be in order.
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But the head of the Russian Space Agency just came out in public, and this is a news article. The head of the Russian Space Agency has actually called upon the preservation of the Apollo sites on the moon, which is fantastic because the original space race was all about the U.S. versus the Soviet Union. So the fact that now we've got the Russians supporting this is wonderful. So people are really starting to take this very seriously.
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Assuming that we're successful in getting this to the World Heritage List designation, we're looking at a couple of options. Right now it looks like a trans‐national or trans‐boundary serial nomination to the National... to the World Heritage List, which I don't have time to go into in detail on now, but it's essentially like a district that spans multiple nations and multiple planetary bodies. This has been tested in the World Heritage system. It works on earth. There are a number of trans‐national serial nominations on earth, but they haven't been done using another celestial body. If any of you are coming to the SAA meetings in April in Honolulu, I will be there. This is the topic of my paper. So I hope to see some faces there because that's what I'm going to be talking about. We're having a huge symposium, an international symposium that is covering space heritage.
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So in conclusion, just in the nick of time, it's important to understand that Tranquility Base is a historically significant archeological site representing an extremely important part, a milestone, in human history and cultural development. Right now it remains untouched. It is in jeopardy, and it needs preservation, and I feel that we have an ethical obligation to our descendants to make sure that we do something now to protect this part of history while we still can. even though we're doing it remotely. I don't want future generations to look back at us with a critical eye. I would rather them look at us and go, you know, and smile and say, "Wow, you know, they did a great job, and, you know, this is clearly one small step for man, one giant leap for historic preservation. So, thank you very much.
[Applause]
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