Crew’s quarantine facility built in Ohio

Third of the mission spent in travel trailer from Jackson Center.

Apollo 11 was no vacation trip, but its crew spent a third of the mission in an Ohio-built travel trailer.

When their capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, a recovery team quickly hustled Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins into a Mobile Quarantine Facility aboard the USS Hornet aircraft carrier. NASA’s “MQF” was a highly modified, 35-foot Airstream trailer, built in Jackson Center a dozen miles from Armstrong’s boyhood home in Wapakoneta.

Scientists doubted the airless lunar surface harbored life, but they couldn’t risk letting some deadly moon bug loose on Earth.

So, after eight days in space, the astronauts spent another four sealed up in the trailer — even while a cargo jet flew them to NASA’s Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston, according to the NASA History Office’s Apollo 11 timeline. NASA kept them quarantined in the lab until Aug. 10, but no moon germs ever surfaced.

Airstream founder Wally Byam built his first trailer in California in 1929. He relocated it to Jackson Center in 1952. Thor Industries acquired Airstream in 1980 and continues to make trailers in Jackson Center. Today, Apollo 11’s quarantine trailer is on display in the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. In 2017, Airstream posted a bogus April Fools Day announcement that it was building a travel trailer for Mars.

This is the last in a series of weekly columns about the Apollo program. It celebrates the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, the first landing on the moon, which ended successfully on July 24, 1969. To learn about Apollo-related events and exhibits around Ohio, visit apollo-moon.com.

NASA Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin talk to President Richard Nixon from their mobile quarantine unit on board the USS Hornet in the Pacific Ocean.