NASA, the agency responsible for everything from landing men on the Moon to asking billionaires nicely to pay their taxes, has now been slapped with a $57 million fine for littering in space. This is not metaphorical litter either. No, the fine is for actual, honest-to-goodness trash left on the Moon after decades of exploration, because apparently not even the barren and lifeless lunar surface is safe from humanity’s habit of leaving stuff behind and forgetting about it forever.
The not-so-gentle nudge came from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which normally concerns itself with regulating radio waves and fining FM stations for airing the occasional naughty word, but has now taken it upon itself to bring order to the cosmos too. In this case, they fined NASA after finding that the agency had failed to properly dispose of an old satellite called the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, which was deorbited in 2014 and sent crashing into the Moon’s surface. Apparently, even on the Moon, you cannot just toss your space junk over the side and pretend no one saw.
The logic, if one can call it that, is that even heavenly litter poses a long-term risk to future communications and safe operations in space. The official term NASA failed to comply with was “orbital debris mitigation,” a fancy way of saying they needed to have a neater plan for taking out the trash. Instead, LADEE was sent full speed ahead into a dusty grave on the Moon, with all the ceremony of a wayward Roomba running out of battery under the couch.
NASA, for its part, has not furiously contested the fine, opting instead to settle the issue the way a resigned parent pays the parking ticket they got while picking up their kid from school. While the astronomically bad littering bill won’t exactly threaten NASA’s budget, which is measured in the billions, it does serve as a bureaucratic reminder that no mess is too remote for paperwork to follow.
In conclusion, next time you consider exploring an alien world, do remember to check your landing gear, your return trip, and apparently your Moon-based waste management plan.
The Moon may be 238,855 miles away, but even from there you cannot escape the long arm of environmental regulations.