LONDON — Sir Aldous Tremaine-Gosse, the 71-year-old shipping heir, biscuit-fortune scion, and self-described “lunar sanitation philanthropist,” announced Wednesday from his estate in Wiltshire that he would commit $100 million of his personal fortune to the retrieval, repatriation, and “dignified terrestrial archiving” of the 96 bags of human waste left on the surface of the Moon by Apollo astronauts between 1969 and 1972.
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The bags, which are real, were jettisoned by Apollo crews to reduce payload weight prior to lunar liftoff, and remain in place to this day, scattered across six landing sites in a state that NASA has officially described as “stable” and Tremaine-Gosse described Wednesday as “an absolute fucking embarrassment to the species.”
“We went up there. We did the bit. We took the photographs. And then, gentlemen, we shat in bags, and we left the bags,” Tremaine-Gosse told a small gathering of reporters in the topiary garden of his estate, gesturing with a glass of something amber. “Ninety-six of them. Ninety-six. The Moon is not a service station. The Moon is not a Travelodge in Swindon. The Moon is the Moon.”
The mission, which Tremaine-Gosse has provisionally named Operation Sweep but which his press team has been quietly trying to rename to almost anything else, would deploy a privately funded robotic lander equipped with what engineers at his foundation are calling “a discreet retrieval apparatus” and what one source described, on background, as “a very expensive scoop.”
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The retrieved material would, per Tremaine-Gosse’s stated wishes, be returned to Earth, displayed briefly at the Natural History Museum in London “for educational and accountability purposes,” and then interred in a specially constructed marble vault on the grounds of his estate, “where it can be visited by schoolchildren and reflected upon in silence.”
NASA, asked for comment, declined to provide one for several hours before issuing a statement that read, in its entirety: “We are aware of Sir Aldous’s proposal. We thank him for his interest in the Apollo program. We have no further plans regarding the items in question.”
The astrobiology community has responded to the announcement with what one researcher described as “polite, prolonged confusion.” The bags themselves are, in fact, scientifically valuable — multiple peer-reviewed papers have suggested that any surviving microbial life within them could offer extraordinary insight into how terrestrial bacteria fare under five decades of cosmic radiation, vacuum, and thermal cycling. The scientific consensus is that the bags should, eventually, be retrieved and studied.
The scientific consensus is not that they should be retrieved by a man who has, on his estate, a marble vault.
“It’s a yes-and-no situation,” said Dr. Priya Vellanki, a planetary protection researcher at the Open University. “Yes, we’d love them back. No, we did not anticipate the recovery effort being led by a private individual who keeps referring to them as ‘the lads.’ Science is, in this case, having to take what science can get.”
Tremaine-Gosse’s interest in the lunar waste is, by his own account, of long standing. According to a 2017 profile in Tatler that ran 4,200 words and ended with the writer apparently giving up, the billionaire became “transfixed and grieved” by the existence of the bags upon learning of them at age 53, during a dinner party at which a guest had mentioned them in passing as a piece of trivia. Tremaine-Gosse reportedly stood up from the table, walked into his garden, and remained there until 4 a.m.
“He was changed,” the dinner guest told Tatler. “He came back inside and asked the butler for a globe of the Moon. We didn’t know there was such a thing. There was such a thing. He has six of them now.”
In the years since, Tremaine-Gosse has commissioned three independent feasibility studies, funded a graduate fellowship at Imperial College that requires its recipient to write a doctoral thesis specifically on Apollo-era waste management, and produced what aides describe as “a 200-page document, single-spaced, that he reads aloud at parties, sometimes in full.”
He has also developed, reportedly, a complete classification system for the 96 bags, dividing them into categories he calls the unbothered (intact bags presumed to be in original condition), the wanderers (bags that may have shifted position due to micrometeorite impact or seismic disturbance), and the gentlemen (bags he believes, on instinct alone, “carry themselves with a certain dignity”).
Pressed Wednesday on whether any element of the project might be considered, by some, slightly mad, Tremaine-Gosse blinked twice, took a long sip of his drink, and said: “Madness is leaving the bags up there. What I am proposing is the opposite of madness. What I am proposing is housekeeping.”
Public reaction in the United Kingdom has been mixed. A YouGov poll conducted Wednesday afternoon found that 41% of Britons supported the mission, 33% opposed it, and 26% requested that the polling company please not contact them again about this. Among supporters, the most commonly cited reason was “well, someone’s got to.” Among opponents, the most commonly cited reason was “this is precisely how the British end up doing colonialism in space.”
Tremaine-Gosse has stated that the mission will launch “no later than 2031,” that all retrieved material will be subject to “full and respectful provenance documentation,” and that he has personally written a brief eulogy to be read at the moment each bag is loaded into the return capsule.
Asked whether the eulogy would be made public, Tremaine-Gosse said it would not.
“The bags,” he said, “have been alone for long enough.”
At press time, Tremaine-Gosse’s foundation had filed preliminary paperwork with the United Kingdom Space Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, and, for reasons no one has yet been able to explain, the Royal Horticultural Society. NASA has reiterated that it has no further comment. The Moon, contacted for response through several channels, did not return our calls.