From SyFy Wire
Michelle Hanlon moved around a lot while growing up. Her parents were part of the Foreign Service, the government agency that formulates and enacts U.S. policy abroad, so she found herself in new places all the time. Despite relocating often, one memory of her childhood remains constant. "We always had Star Trek," Hanlon tells SYFY WIRE. "You know how families have dinner around the table? I remember eating meals in front of Star Trek, watching it no matter where we were."
That connection to Star Trek, in part, inspired Hanlon to create For All Moonkind, a volunteer non-profit with the goal of preserving the Apollo landing sites on the Moon, alongside promoting the general preservation of history and heritage in outer space.
Hanlon, who is a career attorney, has always had an interest in outer space. She didn't study engineering or other sciences while at school, though, so she felt it couldn't be more than a hobby. But after Johann-Dietrich Wörner, the head of the European Space Agency, made an offhand joke about how China may remove the United State's flag from the Apollo moon landing site during a press conference, Hanlon started thinking about space preservation and what would eventually become For All Moonkind. She started the group in 2017 with her husband after returning to school to get a master's degree in space law.
One point Hanlon and For All Moonkind stress is the idea that we can only preserve our history in space if we put the space race behind us and do it together — an ideal partially inspired by Star Trek. "I've never felt that I couldn't do what I wanted because of my gender or race because I grew up with Star Trek," Hanlon, who has a Polish father and Chinese mother, says. "The diversity [in] Star Trek was a reflection of my life; I was shocked to not see it when I came back to the U.S."
Hanlon especially looks up to George Takei, who was one of the first Asian actors to play a heroic character on TV as Star Trek's Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu. And she remembers the story of how Martin Luther King Jr. convinced Nichelle Nichols to remain on Star Trek after the actress wanted to leave her role as Communication Officer Lieutenant Uhura. Both are examples of Stark Trek as a progressive melting pot. Stories like those, and the overall diversity of the cast, helped shape her worldview.
That same mindset, where diversity and cooperation will be the only way we'll get further in outer space, has seeped into her work with For All Moonkind. The organization helped get the One Small Step to Protect Human Heritage in Space Act — a law that would see "all U.S. government licenses related to space include requirements preserving the Apollo landing sites" — passed in the Senate in July 2019. The bill is currently waiting to go through the House of Representatives, although both Hanlon and other space experts believe it's not a high priority for lawmakers with the election underway.
Hanlon and other volunteers are also working with international governments and organizations to pass a resolution through the United Nations. "We keep reaching people and getting positive feedback, we've gotten a lot of informal support," she says. "People keep saying come back. We count that as a win."