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Lunar tourists and ambitious space agencies could jeopardise vital research on the Moon by ruining locations needed for telescopes, experts have warned.
Growing human activity on the Moon is creating exciting new opportunities to unravel the universe’s history, but there currently are few internationally agreed rules about who can do what, and where.
Dr Martin Elvis, a British-born astrophysicist working at Harvard University, said coordination was desperately needed to protect sites of scientific interest.
He said: “Although the Moon is big – bigger than Africa’s total surface area – the number and size of places that we want to go is really not that big.
“It’s a sort of first come, first served situation, which encourages people to rush in and do things without thinking too hard.”
China plans to establish an International Lunar Research Station by the 2030s, and the US Artemis program has several missions scheduled with the aim of eventually building its own base.
There is also growing interest from companies wanting to cash in on opportunities for tourism or mining of vital lunar resources.
Dr Elvis said: “There’s a desire from the billionaire class – ‘I’d love to spend a week on the Moon’. You don’t need many billionaires to start adding up to real cash.”
“Then there’s actual products. The water on the Moon certainly enables human settlement because you now have enough water there that you don’t have to transport it at vast expense.”
Such activities could benefit science, as spacecraft can also deliver telescopes that enhance our ability to observe and understand the cosmos.
But Dr Elvis added: “The big question is, who decides whether this is going to be for astronomy or for water mining? And what’s to stop some other country or company coming along and saying, ‘I don’t care, this is my favourite spot for digging and mining water, so I’m going to do it.’
“There isn’t really a definitive answer to that right now.” So-called “peaks of eternal light” are popular landing locations because high levels of sunlight are a useful energy source.
Another important site is the far side of the Moon. Having a radio telescope there could enable the study of the cosmic “Dark Ages” – a period after the Big Bang but before stars or galaxies formed.
Meanwhile, “pits of eternal darkness” – areas that are consistently in shade – offer advantages for far-infrared astronomy.
Dr Elvis co-chairs a working group of the International Astronomical Union, which is trying to persuade international leaders “that they should be looking out for science as much as they are looking out for commercial interests or human exploration”.
Some 115 countries are parties to the Outer Space Treaty and another 23 have signed it. It states that no country can claim ownership of the moon and it must only be used for peaceful, non-military purposes.
But speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Boston, Dr Elvis said more detailed rules and coordination was needed to ensure we do not “lose these unique opportunities to do science on a scale that we couldn’t possibly imagine”.
He added: “At the same time that having people on the Moon enables us to do great new things that will make today’s best telescopes look like toys, the activities of humans can actually disturb the very environment that we’re going there for.
“So it’s a balancing act. We need this kind of activity on the Moon to make building big telescopes feasible. But we just want to say, ‘not everywhere’.”
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