Space archaeology

• 1. Introduction

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  Space archaeology asks a question that most people have never considered: what happens to the things humanity leaves behind in space? Not rockets in flight, not satellites still transmitting, but the silent objects drifting in orbit, the hardware resting on the Moon, the launch complexes standing empty on Earth. These are artifacts. And a growing field of researchers believes they deserve the same care archaeologists give to ancient ruins.

  In January 2025, the World Monuments Fund added the Moon to its World Monuments Watch. It was the first time the Watch had ever recognized heritage located off of the Earth. That announcement pointed to a question that has been building for decades: who is responsible for the objects humanity left on other worlds, and what does it mean to preserve them?

• 2. Heritage Above the Earth

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  The World Monuments Fund's decision to add the Moon to its Watch in January 2025 came at the nomination of the ICOMOS Aerospace Heritage International Scientific Committee, an organization founded in 2023. The Fund cited the cultural significance of the Apollo landings and other lunar missions, as well as the growing pace of public and commercial spaceflight reaching the Moon.

  Behind that formal recognition lies a deeper concern: that artifacts in space are being lost because no one has assessed them in time. Experts in the field argue that continuity and connection to the past are vital elements of survival in the modern world. Space tourism, they note, could affect archaeological artifacts on the Moon before any protection is in place.

  One proposal that has circulated is the idea of a "museum orbit," where historically significant spacecraft could be preserved rather than allowed to decay or re-enter. A model for international cooperation already exists in the management of Antarctica, and researchers have suggested that framework could be adapted to space sites. Anthropologists have taken particular interest in what that kind of cooperation would look like across nations.

• 3. Satellites as Artifacts

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  Vanguard 1, launched in 1958, is the oldest human-made satellite still in orbit. It lost communication in 1964, but the satellite and the upper stage of its launch rocket continue circling Earth, carrying with them evidence of early geodetic measurement work and capability testing from the dawn of the space age.

  Asterix-1, the first French satellite, was launched to test the French Diamant Rocket. Its transmission lasted only two days. Yet Asterix-1 remains in orbit and is expected to stay there for centuries, making it a long-duration artifact of French space ambition.

  Skynet 1A was launched over the Indian Ocean in 1969 to provide communication to Middle Eastern forces. No longer in operation, Skynet 1A has an estimated orbital lifetime of more than one million years. That figure alone reframes what it means to leave something in space: these are not temporary deposits. They are, in some cases, permanent additions to the solar system. Each of these satellites represents a specific technological moment, a national effort, and a human story that space archaeology treats as worthy of documentation and interpretation.

• 4. The Legal Gap

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  Harrison Schmitt and Neil Armstrong, two of the astronauts who walked on the Moon during the Apollo program, outlined the legal situation governing space sites. The primary framework is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which drew its principles from experience in the Antarctic. Under that treaty, space objects remain under the jurisdiction of the state that launched them, and the civil and criminal laws of that state apply to private parties both on the Moon and in activities leading up to lunar activity.

  The Moon Agreement of 1979 went further but failed to gain ratification from many spacefaring nations. Schmitt and Armstrong identified the source of that resistance: disagreement over language stating that the Moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind, which some interpreted as blocking private activity. Objections also arose over wording about disrupting the existing environment.

  That gap in legal coverage is precisely where a non-profit called For All Moonkind, Inc. has been working. The entirely volunteer group includes space lawyers and policymakers from around the world. In January 2018, their advocacy led the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to agree to consider creating a universal space heritage sites program. For All Moonkind has since shifted to preparing drafts of implementing regulations and protocols.

• 5. A Question in a Seminar

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  During a graduate seminar at New Mexico State University in 1999, Ralph Gibson asked whether federal preservation law applies on the Moon. That single question led to Gibson's thesis on lunar archaeology and the application of federal historic preservation law to the site where humans first set foot on the Moon. It also led to a grant from the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium and to the creation of the Lunar Legacy Project.

  In 2006, Dr. O'Leary, working with New Mexico State Historic Preservation Officer Katherine Slick and the New Mexico Museum of Space History, documented the Apollo 11 Tranquility Base archaeological site on the Moon. A NASA and ESA manuscript in 2004 had already raised the possibility of preserving Apollo landing sites for future astroarcheologists.

  The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, though not primarily an archaeological mission, later imaged all of the Apollo landing sites. It also rediscovered the location of the first Lunokhod 1 rover, which had been lost since 1971. The orbiter's images of the Apollo mission sites revealed that all the U.S. flags left on the Moon were still standing, except for the one left during Apollo 11, which was blown over during that mission's lift-off from the lunar surface.

• 6. Hunting for Snoopy

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  British amateur astronomer Nick Howes proposed assembling a team of experts to locate the Lunar Module from Apollo 10, nicknamed Snoopy. The module had been released during the mission and was believed to be in a heliocentric orbit. The search was encouraged by the re-sighting in 2002 of the Apollo 12 third-stage rocket, which showed that long-lost space hardware could be found again.

  In June 2019, the Royal Astronomical Society announced a possible rediscovery of Snoopy. Researchers determined that a small Earth-crossing asteroid designated 2018 AV2 is likely to be the spacecraft, with 98% certainty. That finding illustrates a wider capacity that space archaeology has developed: using observation and archival data to locate specific objects that have been drifting, untracked, for decades.

  The Snoopy search points toward a field that is finding its objects not through excavation but through orbital mechanics, satellite imaging, and detective work across decades of records.

• 7. Inside the Space Station

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  The International Space Station Archaeological Project, led by Justin Walsh and Alice Gorman, began in late 2015. As of 2021, the ISS had been visited by nearly 300 people from 25 countries and had been continuously occupied since November 2000. ISSAP is the first large-scale archaeological investigation of a space habitat, examining not just what objects are present but what they reveal about social meaning and daily life.

  Funded by the Australian Research Council and connected to Chapman University, ISSAP uses methods suited to a site its researchers cannot visit directly. Those methods include more than two decades of photographs stored in space agency archives, observation of cargo-handling processes when items return from the ISS, and experiments designed by the archaeologists for the crew to carry out on their behalf.

  On the 14th of January 2022, ISSAP launched SQuARE, the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment. NASA astronaut Kayla Barron placed adhesive tape to mark the boundaries of six square sample areas in various parts of the station. The ISS crew then photographed those areas every day for sixty days. The project was sponsored by the ISS National Lab, with help from Axiom Space. When the ISSAP team published the first results from SQuARE in 2024, they found that a maintenance workstation was actually being used for storage of a wide mix of objects, and that an area near exercise equipment and a latrine with no designated function was being used for body maintenance and cleaning. Those findings show that human behavior in space reshapes designed spaces in ways no one planned.

• 8. Earth and the Spacecraft Cemetery

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  Space archaeology on Earth has focused on the sites where the space age began. Alice Gorman has documented launch sites including Woomera, in Australia, treating them as cultural landscapes shaped by the ambitions and decisions of the mid-twentieth century.

  The South Pacific holds a site of a different kind. Point Nemo is the most remote oceanic location on Earth, so distant from land that astronauts in orbit are often the closest humans to it. Because of that remoteness, space agencies have used the area to de-orbit spacecraft safely, letting them break apart and sink. The region has acquired the name spacecraft cemetery, and researchers have identified it as a future site for terrestrial space archaeology.

  The field also draws on archival research, data archaeology, and digital archaeology to recover historical insights from records that were never intended as archaeological sources. Taken together, these approaches suggest that space archaeology's scope keeps expanding: from the Moon to low Earth orbit to a patch of the South Pacific ocean floor, every place humanity has touched in its first decades of spaceflight is becoming a subject of study.