After lunar voyage, a new threat loomed
Fear of moon bugs kept Apollo 11 astronauts confined
After Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins splashed down from the lunar landing in July 1969, President Richard M. Nixon was ready and waiting to greet them.
But one thing separated Nixon from direct contact with the three astronauts after they came aboard the USS Hornet: quarantine.
“There was a concern internationally as well as nationally that the first men on the moon might be exposed to some germs that don’t exist on Earth and that once on Earth could propagate and cause an epidemic,” National Air and Space Museum Curator Allan Needell says in a Smithsonian video.
“So a very elaborate procedure was developed to deal with such a contingency.”
For the first days, the astronauts lived in the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a hermetically sealed defense against any deadly lunar microbes that conceivably might have returned with them. Almost everyone thought the idea was highly improbable — NASA’s director of medical research argued the moon was too dry and the temperature swings too great to sustain life — but no one thought it was impossible.
The National Academy of Sciences advised that “the introduction into the Earth’s biosphere of destructive alien organisms could be a disaster. We can conceive of no more tragically ironic consequence.”
The presence of Nixon on the
aircraft carrier heightened the anxiety. He would tell the crew their eight days in space was “the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation.”
‘Bored in a hurry’
The facility was a highly modified, 35-foot-long aluminum vacation trailer, equipped with elaborate air ventilation and filtration systems and complete with living room, sleeping quarters, bathroom and kitchen that featured an early microwave oven. Negative pressure ensured no contaminants could escape.
The astronauts were accompanied in the quarantine by a NASA physician and a recovery engineer who oversaw the moon-dust cleanup. The astronauts never developed so much as a sniffle.
It nonetheless was not their favorite experience.
“The unit was comfortable, but there was little to do and nowhere to go so we got bored in a hurry,” Aldrin wrote in his autobiography, “No Dream Is Too High.” A NASA history of the mission called it “oppressive.”
Such isolation was nothing new for the crew. Not only did they spend eight days in space, they were secluded before the launch because of concern they could pick up someone’s germs before the mission. Even Nixon was not allowed to join them for a pre-launch meal.
The effort to protect the Earth from space and moon contamination began before the astronauts entered the quarantine. After Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins splashed down, a frogman opened the hatch of their space capsule, threw in three biological-isolation suits and quickly closed the hatch. After donning the suits, the trio climbed onto an inflatable rubber raft and got a bath that included a germkilling iodine solution.
From there, they were hoisted by helicopter to the USS Hornet and sent directly to the quarantine facility. After 65 hours there, the facility was ferried in the belly of a C-141 transport plane to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the astronauts were transferred to the more spacious Lunar Receiving Laboratory for two more weeks of quarantine.
The quarantine ended Aug. 10, 1969 — 2½ weeks after splashdown in the north Pacific Ocean.
During the quarantine, scientists injected lunar solutions derived from moon rocks into fish, animals and plants to determine if they contained any germs.
Better next time
Quarantine also was enlisted for the astronauts of the Apollo 12 and Apollo 14 missions, but the requirement was eliminated thereafter. By then, evidence had proved that the moon was sterile and there was no risk to the Earth of contamination.
The Apollo quarantine efforts haven’t stood up so well over the years. Aldrin tweeted in 2015 that the rags used to clean the crew of moon dust “were dropped in the ocean,” the worst place to deposit them if they had harbored life.
Officials also failed to sterilize equipment sent from Earth, which resulted in some bugs surviving for a time on the moon. At meetings early this century about possible trips to Mars, participants agreed that NASA would have to do better than it did during the Apollo missions.
Still, the Apollo 11 quarantine gave the world one of the endeavor’s enduring images, the famous photograph of Nixon speaking by microphone to Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins while they peered out from the mobile facility’s rear window, in the words of one Smithsonian article, “like kids wishing they could come out to play.”
“The unit was comfortable, but there was little to do and nowhere to go so we got bored in a hurry.”
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, in his autobiography, “No Dream Is Too High”