Footprints on the Moon: An interview with space archaeologist Alice Gorman

International News
Perhaps in 50 more years we will be sick of hearing stories from people who have travelled to the moon and back. tdlucas5000 / AAP, CC BY Alice Gorman, Flinders University
Alice Gorman is a space archaeologist working on space junk in Earth orbit, deep space probes, and planetary landing sites. She explores what we can learn from these items and places as material objects, and also their heritage significance – what they actually mean for people and communities on Earth.
Alice features in The Conversation’s podcast series To the Moon and beyond, published to mark the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing of July 1969. This is an edited extract from Alice’s interview with The Conversation’s Sarah Keenihan, published as part of our occasional series Zoom Out.
There is a lot of documentation about what’s been left on the Moon – but it’s amazing how much we don’t know.There are things that have gone missing, like part of a thermal blanket that got ripped off a landing module. There are things that may have gone up there that we didn’t know about. An Apollo test module went walkabout in solar orbit and has only recently been found again.
This is actually where archaeology becomes interesting. I don’t believe, for example, that anyone has ever fully documented the position of all of the boot prints of the Apollo astronauts on the Moon.

 We know what they look like. We know that they’re there. They’re reproduced in countless photographs of the Apollo sites.But has anyone ever actually catalogued them? Has anyone studied them for what they can tell us about how these human bodies moved across the lunar landscape, how they adapted to this environment so different to that of Earth?Read More