Who will step up to preserve space age artefacts for future generations?

We remember 19th-century captains of industry like Andrew Carnegie because they funded vast cultural institutions. Will the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of our time do the same to preserve humanity’s spacefaring legacy?

11 November 2026

Around 40,000 years from now, the Voyager 1 probe will pass within astronomical spitting distance of the star Gliese 445. From there, it will continue drifting through the universe on an endless journey that marks humanity’s first attempt to reach the stars.

Voyager 1 – which on 18 November will have travelled one light day from Earth – began its odyssey almost 50 years ago, meaning it has been operating for the majority of the space age. That makes it a rarity: most of our iconic spacecraft ended their lives burned up in Earth’s atmosphere or in bits at the bottom of the ocean. Two of the most important missions still flying today, the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station, look set to share the same fate in the near future, even as scientists call for Hubble to be preserved.

While some craft like the space shuttles are on display in museums, our present space history is, essentially, in its dark ages, with little thought currently given to preserving spacecraft in situ, where our space-travelling descendants may wish to marvel at them. Even the Apollo hardware left behind on the moon has almost no protection in international law.

Perhaps we need an organisation like the UNESCO World Heritage Committee to designate important space artefacts for preservation, and encourage funding from cultural and heritage budgets, not scientific ones, to do this. Of course, with such budgets often under threat and the US set to leave UNESCO at the end of this year, this could introduce new problems.

Private philanthropy is another option. If humanity is to one day take its place among the stars, a fantasy that fuels many a tech billionaire, it would be a great shame to not be able to look back at how we got there. Just as we remember 19th-century captains of industry like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan for funding great cultural institutions, perhaps we should be lobbying for the creation of a Musk Space Museum or Bezos Orbital Institute.