The Moon is about to get busier, and a group of heritage experts just got together in Pisa, Italy to talk about keeping our favorite night-sky object from looking like a junkyard. The International Scientific Committee on Aerospace Heritage (ISCAH) convened in September to develop guidelines for how spacecraft should be deorbited onto the lunar surface, which is a topic made urgent by the crash of a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage into the Moon last August. As lunar traffic ramps up, controlled crash-landings of retired orbiters and spent rocket stages are becoming an attractive end-of-mission disposal strategy, and that’s precisely what worries the committee.
For amateur astronomers, the concern is very real: every impact leaves a visible scar. There have already been 51 hard spacecraft impacts on the Moon (including nine rocket bodies and 19 lunar orbiters), each one churning up sticky, abrasive dust and creating new craters that alter the surface’s appearance. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to erase these marks, they persist essentially forever. As archaeologist Alice Gorman put it, we’ve hit “an inflection point where spacecraft craters aren’t just new archaeological sites, they’re an environmental hazard that may cause irreversible damage.” For those of us who enjoy sketching the lunar surface or tracking subtle albedo changes through our scopes, a growing constellation of fresh impact marks and dust plumes could gradually change the look of familiar features we’ve observed for decades.
The good news is that the ISCAH group, working alongside the World Monuments Fund, plans to move into a stakeholder dialogue phase in the coming months and reaching out to space agencies, private companies, heritage experts, and even communities with cultural or spiritual ties to the Moon. The resulting guidelines are slated for presentation at the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 2027, with the goal of eventually becoming internationally recognized standards of behavior. The ultimate aim, in the words of committee member Forassiepi, is a lunar future that is sustainable not just operationally, but also in preserving “the earliest traces of human presence in the history of space” and, as any backyard observer would agree, the quiet, pockmarked beauty of the Moon itself.
