Saudi Heritage to Fly to Space in 'Sanctuary on the Moon' Capsule

Saudi cultural heritage will be included in Sanctuary on the Moon, a lunar time capsule carrying a compendium of human knowledge, art and science to the moon with support from NASA and UNESCO. The project, led by French engineer Benoit Faiveley, will deposit 24 sapphire discs engraved with cultural and scientific content.

The discs, each about 10 centimetres in diameter, are designed to hold billions of engraved pixels that can be read under magnification and arranged to show images visible to the naked eye. They will be sealed in a machined aluminium container and delivered on a lander via NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme.

The archive will preserve material spanning mathematics, culture, art and science, with a dedicated section for UNESCO World Heritage sites, including eight in Saudi Arabia. Four of the 24 discs will be devoted to the human genome, including instructions for decoding and complete sequences representing female and male genomes.

Saudi contributions will showcase cultural symbols from the Kingdom’s heritage, including rock art of Hima, the historic site of Diriyah, and expressions of the Kingdom’s ongoing cultural renaissance under Vision 2030.

The Sanctuary team has preliminary designs for part of the set and plans to complete the remainder by 2027, targeting a 2028 launch as part of the Artemis programme, with the exact site to be confirmed. The mission container, designated CT-4, is planned to touch down in the moon’s southern polar region.