The ancient landscape is barren and bleak. The primitive tools and footprints in the dust bear silent witness to the same ingenuity that mastered fire, stone tools and cave painting. A total of 106 artifacts and an uncertain number of waffle-soled boot prints are scattered across the lunar dust of Tranquility Base (Moon flag). They are 240,000 miles from the nearest collector, but still in need, some say, of Earthly protection.

"These are the first human tracks on a celestial body," says Beth O'Leary, an anthropologist at New Mexico State University and founder of the Lunar Legacy Project. "We think this site needs to be protected, either as a national landmark or a world heritage site," she told the World Archaeological Congress in Washington last June.

In the face of growing threats to archaeological sites and ancient monuments on Earth, Tranquility Base, and 'cultural sites' on other planets, might not sound like an emergency. But space agencies in China, Japan and Europe are laying plans for missions to the Moon. A host of private firms are proposing trips too. The trips range from "burials on the Moon" for cremated human remains to serious attempts to retrieve artifacts from Tranquility Base. The time to protect these places, O'Leary says, is now, before any threats are imminent.

Many of the sites on Earth that mark humanity's steppingstones into space, from Wernher von Braun's V-2 rocket center in Germany to NASA's Saturn 5 test stands in Huntsville, Alabama, are already treated on a par with the Wright Brother's bicycle shop. The notion of extending historic preservation beyond Earth's surface is still a cause in search of a constituency nearly 50 years after the launch of Sputnik in 1957 ushered in the Space Age.

After returning from the Moon in 1969, Neil Armstrong noted that he and Buzz Aldrin had "left a few things up there." NASA funded a study by O'Leary to find out what had been left. She found that more than 100 items had been left on the Moon's surface, including two pairs of boot covers, food packages, and urine bags.

NASA said that designating Tranquility Base a historic landmark might be construed as a U.S. effort to exert territorial claims to the Moon, something that's barred by treaty. The National Park Service pointed out it didn't have jurisdiction. That stance precluded Tranquility Base becoming a U.N. heritage site. There are five other Apollo landing sites. These would encompass thousands more artifacts, including the golf balls hit by Alan Shepard on Apollo 14 and the Lunar Rovers driven by the astronauts.

Primitive man probably did not give it a second thought when he broke a spear point or wore out a stone axe and threw it away. Today, such discarded tools, provide archaeologists with a glimpse of a culture that no longer exists. The culture of the Space Age is not so different; the discarded tools are just farther away.

In addition to the six Apollo landing sites, there are about 15 other sites where spacecraft have either landed or crashed on the Moon. There are three locations on Mars where U.S. spacecraft have landed (remember rover Sojourner?) and more where U.S. and Russian spacecraft have crashed. Two U.S. landers and one from the European Space Agency are due to arrive at Mars in the next few months. Venus and Jupiter have both been visited by probes.

There are more than 8,700 objects larger than a marble currently being tracked in Earth orbit. These range from fragments of exploded rocket boosters to satellites that have reached the end of their useful lives. This growing accumulation of space debris is a navigation hazard to functional satellites and the International Space Station. Some of it will fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. Others are trying to find other ways to clear the debris, from lasers to incinerate it to robot salvage missions.

Just as discarded stone tools are now priceless artifacts, space junk can be treasures too. Among the items still being tracked is the grapefruit-sized globe of Vanguard I, launched by the U.S. in 1958 in an attempt to match Russia's launch of Sputnik.

"This is the material culture of the Earth in the early years of exploration." Australian archaeologist Alice Gorman says. "It marked a point at which space itself became a cultural landscape."

Mike Toner, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 30, 2003, pg. A1 and A7