Last week Next Giant Leap participated in the NASA "Visiting the Lunar Historic Sites" forum. NASA is in the process of creating a set of recommendations designed to protect and preserve the historic and scientific associated with past United States lunar human activities. This is of particular interest to NGL as we plan to capture the GLXP Heritage Bonus. Because NGL's first lunar hopper mission will not carry a deployable rover, we will need to be extra careful to ensure our landing and takeoff exhaust plumes do not damage historic artifacts. Rocket exhaust plumes can create a "sheet" of high velocity regolith particles which travel out horizontally in all directions. These plumes can "sandblast" articles at great distances and care must be taken to mitigate risks to assets on the ground. For the NGL GLXP mission, we plan to overfly (not directly) our historic targets at an altitude high enough to prevent our plumes from impinging upon the regolith but low enough to allow good overview footage of the target area.
NASA emphasized several times that these are not "rules", but recommendations.
"Arrgh! They be more what ye'd call "guidelines" than actual rules, me hearties!"