TIL we've already turned the Moon into a bit of a junkyard. Over 181 tons of human-made waste is sitting up there, everything from crashed satellites to abandoned equipment from the Apollo missions. But here's the weird part that a new legal analysis points out, under current international law, all that trash still belongs to whoever launched it.
Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty says ownership of space objects is not affected by their passage through outer space. Which means that broken Soviet rover from the 70s? Still Russia's property. Those abandoned plutonium generators from Apollo missions? Still belong to the US.
The study also mentions something that didn't get much coverage, on March 4, 2022, some unidentified man-made object slammed into the Moon creating two craters (18m and 16m across). Nobody seems to know exactly what it was or who's responsible. It scattered thousands of debris pieces, and there's minimal public information about what risks that debris might pose to future missions.
The UN Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines – our main international framework for space junk, explicitly only covers "non-functional manmade objects only in Earth orbit or re-entering the atmosphere." Celestial bodies aren't included at all.
The paper argues we need international regulations before the upcoming Artemis missions, China's lunar station, and private space ventures really get going. Otherwise, we're potentially setting up conflicts between different countries' missions, space tourism operations, and scientific research on the Moon.
The author is Aleksandar Milanov, an associate professor at Jindal Global Law School in India, and he's calling for urgent international cooperation on this. Worth a read if you're into space law rabbit holes. Source – https://ecohumanism.co.uk/joe/ecohumanism/article/view/3837
There's 181 tons of human trash on the Moon and we legally can't touch most of it
byu/Super_Presentation14 inspace
6 Comments
Laws are only valid if their makers can project the power necessary to enforce them, and are willing to do so.
Who’s going to stop anyone doing litter removal? The Moon police?
Poop on the moon.
They left poop on the moon.
96 bags of it.
MOON POOP.
I am all for cooperation between the space faring nations and this is certainly an issue we can cooperate on. I do not see how writing regulations will accomplish anything. Are we going to prosecute other nations for putting trash on the moon?
Those are not trash, those are archeological sites .
How about we handle the garbage situation on the Moon, when we can actually do something about it? No point being outraged that no one is sending a space garbage truck out there to collect, when that is not possible.