Apollo 11 Space Trash

Major Tom's Junk

One of my earliest memories is of stepping into my back garden with my dad in the summer of 1969, and looking up at a full moon. It was very late for a four-and-a-half-year-old to be up. Well past my bedtime. But my parents didn't really care too much about children's bedtimes and, anyway, I had been so fascinated by the entire Apollo 11 mission that summer that staying up late had become somewhat passé. I was glued to the BBC - the colour coverage was on BBC2, while BBC1 only had black and white - and was almost hysterical when I heard that they would be broadcasting all night waiting for Neil Armstrong to take that first step. All night. Incredible. Sadly, only fragments of the coverage still exist, as the BBC either lost or wiped the tapes. Some say they were wiped immediately and covered with horse racing. Who knows.

James Burke (who later in the 1970s was to host another one of my favourite TV events, the series Connections) was the main man. Patrick Moore was there, obviously. And Cliff Michelmore, who I didn't like at all. I fell asleep on the couch on the night of the actual moon landing but dad woke me up. It was around 4am. Ever since then I've always thought that is the latest time you can possibly stay up at night without it becoming morning.

In the garden my dad lit another Embassy and I looked up at the moon.
"Just think, people have walked on that." I was in awe. I couldn't stop looking at the moon. I loved the space race. I loved the rockets. I loved the astronauts. I loved the moon.

So it came as something as a shock to learn that, over the next six manned moon landings between 1969 and 1972 we basically turned the moon into a giant dustbin. The first mission alone left a heap of stuff, all still there, perfectly preserved in the moon's blank atmosphere.

They left a Passive Seismic Experiment for measuring moonquakes. They left an American flag and an Apollo 11 mission patch (I want one of those). They left a plaque which depicts two drawings of  Earth, an inscription ('Here Men From The Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind') and the signatures of the astronauts and President Richard Nixon. They left a memorial bag containing a gold replica of an olive branch (not sure why they couldn't leave a real olive branch). They left a 'silicon message disc' with goodwill statements from 73 leaders around the world. They left a pair of Buzz Aldrin's space boots and a whole spacesuit belonging to Armstrong. They left a Defecation Collection Device (called 'toilets' back on Earth). They left the bottom bit of the Lunar Module Descent Stage. They left a bunch of rubbish.

So, who's going to clean it all up? Who is going to pick up the TV camera, the scales, the tongs, scoops and trenching tools? Who will tidy away the Hasselbad camera, the hammer and the insulating blanket? The answer is: nobody soon. Nobody is going back to the moon for a good long while. Been there, done that, left it looking like a squat.

Now when I look at the moon at night I don't think of the heroes and the excitement. I think of the twenty tonnes of crap we dumped there before abandoning it, and our dreams.