I’m reading my way through Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 series.  One of Clarke’s magnificent little ideas dropped, seemingly-lackadaisically, into the narrative really grabbed my attention.  In the third book, 2061: Odyssey Three, Clarke makes mention that the Soviet rescue ship Leonov from the second book

Now hover[s] high above Farside [of the moon] as one of the main exhibits at the Lagrange Museum…

Clarke presents a solution of what promises to be a problem of the physical legacy of the early history of space exploration: what to do with obsolete but significant space hardware?  The inevitable end of the International Space Station’s (ISS) lifecycle is perhaps the most significant chance to begin to answer this question.

NASA, under the direction of President G.W. Bush had planned to deorbit the ISS in 2016.  Fortunately, the Obama administration has decided to try to extend the operation of the most expensive single thing ever built by humanity (at an estimated cost of $157 billion) until 2020.  Evidentially, the international support program for the station ends in 2016, but talks are currently underway to extend funding to 2028.

How could the station be deorbited?  If left to its own devices, atmospheric drag would eventually slow the ISS until it came flaming into the atmosphere.  An accidental deorbit could end badly (see Skylab v. Austrailian Outback).  It turns out that the maneuvering thrusters on the station do not posess enough power to perform a controlled deorbit, so a variety of solutions have been studied, including employing a modified resupply vehicle or specially constructed craft to push the ISS into the atmosphere.  Interestingly, the Russians value things with history and embodied costs, and are making plans to detach and save their own modules before the station meets its fiery demise.  Good thinking (though they have decided to name their new station built from salvaged modules the Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex.  Maybe it’s more catchy in Russian).

Obviously, it costs a great deal to maintain the station for inhabitation, but even if it were mothballed, orbital velocity would need to be actively maintained against atmospheric drag.   But if it takes effort to bring the station down, couldn’t we employ similar efforts to take the station up, into a hirer orbit?

Or, as Clarke suggests, to a Lagrange point?

If you’re not in the know when it comes to orbital mechanics, a Lagrangian point

Mark[s] positions where the combined gravitational pull of the two large masses provides precisely the centripetal force required to rotate with them. They are analogous to geostationary orbits in that they allow an object to be in a “fixed” position in space rather than an orbit in which its relative position changes continuously.

In other words, any object placed into a Lagrange point between orbital masses will be held stationary in relation to one of the masses by gravity alone.  There are five Lagrange points (L1-L5) between any two orbital masses, such as the Sun and the Earth or the Earth and the Moon.  Already, there are several satellites in the Earth-Moon and the Sun-Earth Lagrange points respectively.  Additionally, the Lagrange points frequently hold other celestial objects: the Trojan Asteroids hang out in the Sun-Jupiter Lagrange points, for example.  President Obama has suggested that future missions to Lagrange points might serve as helpful proving grounds for future deep space manned-missions.

Back to Clarke’s Lagrange Museum.  What if L1, the Lagrangian point between the Earth and the Moon became a place to deposit future space hardware and vehicles with historical significance.  Already, there are plenty now-or-soon-to-be-discarded future-exhibits: Saturn IVB rocket stages that took Apollo astronauts to the moon, the Hubble Space Telescope, a whole Lunar Module left unused by Apollo 10, and of course, the ISS.

Certainly, moving the ISS, which has a mass nearly 400,000 lbs to the L1 point, almost 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, is beyond our technical and financial means today.  But who knows what the future holds, right?

And what of the planetary legacy of the first 50 years of space exploration?  On Mars for example, there are the Viking, Pathfinder, Surveyor, and Pheonix landers from the United States in addition to a few crashed and quasi-successful Soviet missions.  Mars experiences weather, so who knows in what condition we’ll find our unmanned landers if and when we finally land a man or woman on the surface.

The Moon is a different case entirely.  With only slight disturbance from its low gravity and space weathering, the six Apollo landing sites and countless other unmanned probes and landers should be in pristine condition.  Apollo 12 touched down near the Surveyor 3 lander in 1969, which itself had landed on the Moon in 1967.  This was the first time a manned mission had “caught up” to an unmanned one.  Several parts of the lander were brought back to Earth for study, where it was found that bacteria that had inadvertently contaminated Surveyor’s camera had survived dormant on the Moon for one and a half years.  For this reason, the Galileo probe studying the Jovian system was intentially crashed into Jupiter to insure it would not one day contaminate the moon Europa, which was shown to have saltwater seas (again, see Clarke 2010: Odyssey Two).

How will the Apollo 11 National (Lunar?) Park need to be constructed if we are not to disturb Armstrong and Aldrin’s first footsteps on another world?