The Moon: Humanity’s First Space Dump—200 Tons and Counting

 

When Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon in 1969, the world celebrated a giant leap for mankind. What went unnoticed was the start of something far less glamorous: our first extraterrestrial garbage dump. Alongside the footprints, Apollo 11 left behind over 100 items—including urine collectors, vomit bags, and Buzz Aldrin’s fecal containment system.

That was just the beginning. Today, the Moon is home to an estimated 200 tons of human-made debris—a bizarre archive of our off-world adventures.

The lunar junk list reads like something out of a dystopian yard sale:

• 72 spacecraft, including crashed orbiters from five countries

• 5 moon buggies, their frames slowly distorting in relentless solar radiation

• 96 bags of human waste, perfectly preserved in the vacuum of space

• A family photo, left by astronaut Charles Duke in 1972

• 12 pairs of boots, ditched to save weight for the return trip

• A golden olive branch, Apollo 11’s symbol of peace—now space litter

Among the most haunting remnants are the Lunar Module descent stages, still standing like skeletal memorials at Apollo landing sites, surrounded by discarded food wrappers and wipes.

NASA says the garbage is sterile. But some scientists warn that 50-year-old excrement might be a petri dish for mutant microbes—something future lunar colonists might not want to discover the hard way.

Could we clean it up? Technically yes. Practically? Not so much. Bringing back even a single glove would burn through around $1 million in fuel. So instead, we’ve designated much of the debris as “heritage sites”—a strange, solemn tribute to the beginning of humanity’s untidy journey beyond Earth.