The list of items the Apollo astronauts left on the Moon is long, surreal and disturbing. In addition to the plaque announcing that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin “came in peace for all mankind”, it includes six American flags, two golf balls, a Bible and a nauseating 96 bags of faeces, urine and vomit. All told, the one-dozen men who walked on the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s left behind an estimated 200,000 kg of rubbish. Throw in a handful of Soviet craft, the Chinese rover Yutu-2, and the (probably) dead tardigrades from a failed 2019 Israeli mission, and the situation becomes clear: the Moon is a mess, and landing more people on it is only going to make it worse.
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