Preservation
As the site of the first human landing on a heavenly body, Tranquility Base has cultural and historic significance. The U.S. states of California and New Mexico have listed it on their heritage registers, since their laws require only that listed sites have some connection to the state. Despite the location of Mission Control in Houston, Texas declined to grant similar status to the site as its historic preservation laws limit such designations to properties located within the state.
The U.S. National Park Service has declined to grant it National Historic Landmark status as it fears doing so would be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty's prohibition on any nation claiming sovereignty over the moon or any other heavenly body. It has not been proposed as a World Heritage Site since the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which oversees that program, limits nations to submitting sites within their own borders.
Interest in according the site some formal protection related to its historic status grew four decades later when the Google Lunar X Prize for private corporations that successfully build spacecraft and reach the moon. A $1 million bonus has been offered for any competitor that visits a historic site on the moon. One team, led by Astrobotic Technology, announced it would attempt to land a craft at Tranquility Base. Although it canceled those plans, the ensuing controversy led NASA to request that any other missions to the moon, private or governmental, human or robotic, keep a distance of at least 75 meters (246 ft) from the site.
Read more about this topic: Tranquility Base
Famous quotes containing the word preservation:
“The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.”
—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
“If there is ANY THING which it is the duty of the WHOLE PEOPLE to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity, of their own liberties, and institutions.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)