Our mission in its essence is quite simple; we want to clean up a plastic bag. The fact that this bag is located on the moon makes things more complicated. It has been left behind after the landing of one of the Apollo Moon missions [+].The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the third United States human spaceflight program carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which accomplished landing the first humans on the Moon from 1969 to 1972.
[ wikipedia ] and so became one of the many pieces of human litter left in space. The plastic bag was used as a cover to protect the LRRR [+]The ongoing Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment measures the distance between Earth and the Moon using laser ranging. Lasers on Earth are aimed at retroreflectors planted on the Moon during the Apollo program (11, 14, and 15) and the two Lunokhod missions. The time for the reflected light to return is measured.
[ wikipedia ]
, a piece of equipment that helped in gaining a lot of valuable information about the position and orbit of our Moon.

Image credit:
NASA; Apollo 11 Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment

Our goal with this mission is to combine two of our interests, spacetravel and caring for the environment, and to challenge ourselves and others into finding new ways of pushing the limits for both of them. Our journey to the moon is one of symbolic meaning; if we succeed in cleaning up the moon a little bit, it can’t be that hard to do the same here on Earth.

The negative effects of plastic in the environment on Earth are already more than well known. [+]Since the 1950s, one billion tons of plastic have been discarded and some of that material might persist for centuries or much longer. Serious environmental threats from plastic have been suggested in the light of the increasing presence of microplastics in the marine food chain along with many highly toxic chemical pollutants that accumulate in plastics.
[ wikipedia ] And now, in this relatively new era of spacetravel and space colonisation, we have an oppurtunity to reflect on our current human habits and to start afresh, and to become intergalactic environmentalists.