Benefits of a Proposed Process to Preserve Lunar Sites

Assets in lunar orbit and on the surface, whether operational or defunct, have the ability to cause inadvertent interference with proximity operations. As missions to the Moon continue to proliferate, and as more actors become involved, a mechanism is needed to bring communities together to ensure ones' actions do not inhibit the mission objectives of another. A mechanism may also be needed to determine whether any locations on the Moon or in its orbit are of high value to various users, and, pending potential decreases in this value due to interference and other concerns, warrant mitigative actions to preserve these locations. Such a mechanism could provide benefits to all those involved, including governments, industry, academia, and other interested groups. We present a notional process to aggregate community interests for lunar sites and orbits. We then consider two user needs and explore how this process could be used to identify potential alignments and misalignments across communities.