Sharing cultural heritage

The World Monuments Fund has cast  its gaze beyond our own planet

Lunar heritage

In its annual ‘watchlist’ of threatened heritage sites, the World Monuments Fund (WMF) has cast its gaze beyond our own planet and declared that the surface of the Moon represents a vulnerable cultural landscape. Bénédicte de Montlaur, the President and Chief Executive Officer of WMF, says that tourists visiting the Moon could wipe out the footprints left by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first and second people to walk on the Moon, while souvenir hunters could damage or steal such artefacts as the camera that captured the televised Moon landing in July 1969, or the memorial disk placed on the lunar surface by Armstrong and Aldrin with goodwill messages from 73 world leaders.

State-funded research missions to the Moon are less of an issue, since they visit new sites and potentially create new heritage assets, though the south polar region, where the craters are permanently in shadow and could hold frozen water, face being littered with discarded rocket parts because of the number of missions planned for the region in the next ten years. Russia’s Luna-25 mission attempted a landing in this previously unexplored area on 19 August 2023, but crashed onto the Moon’s surface. Four days later, India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission achieved a soft landing and did indeed find traces of ice.