Humanity Parks

There is some talk in the space community, still not quite fifty years after Sputnik, about saving some areas on celestial bodies of scientific or historical importance or particular natural beauty as parks, so future generations will have them. The impulse behind such an idea is the same that has led to the development of national and international park systems around the world.

Some candidate sites are obvious, like Apollo 11's Tranquility Base-- and perhaps all Apollo landing sites on the Moon. What about the landing sites of U. S. and Soviet lunar probes that paved the way for human missions? They dot the lunar surface on the near side. On Mars, perhaps the area being explored now by NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers would be set aside, even though the recent dust storm may have wiped out the rovers' tracks.

For sheer natural beauty and power, there are several magnificent impact craters, Copernicus and Tycho certainly near the top. Of course, one point of establishing parks is to allow people to visit them. We may be just entering an era in which adventurous, financially well off people could visit a hotel perched on the rim of Tycho, rather as similar people in the 1870s visited the new national park called Yellowstone.