Apollo 50: Moon microbes

On 24th July 1969, at 16:50 UTC, Apollo 11 splashed down in the north Pacific, about 900 miles south west of Hawaii.

Worried about bringing back potentially harmful pathogens from the Moon, NASA had made arrangements for the astronauts to spend 21 days in quarantine. Navy divers gave them special isolation suits, which they put on in the capsule and wore during their relocation onto the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. Once onboard, they were ushered into a special isolation chamber – the Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF), a modified Airstream trailer. Inside the trailer they were free to move around as they pleased, they could take a shower and heat up meals in an early domestic-scale microwave. They could see their relatives through the glass, and speak to people outside via microphones. Compared to the cramped conditions of Apollo 11, it was almost a paradise.

The Airstream was a temporary measure, in any case. The USS Hornet docked in Pearl Harbor, and the MQF (astronauts included) was taken to Hickam Air Force Base, and onto an Air Force jet for the flight to Ellington Air Force Base in Houston. From there it was taken to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Johnson Space Center, where the astronauts could disembark into more spacious quarantine quarters, where they finally got their own rooms. They also had some rodent room-mates who were in charge of detecting (by getting sick, or not) any noxious germs.

[It’s not true that the astronauts went through customs in Hawaii, declaring their moon rock and dust samples. Although an official-looking document exists that suggests they did, it’s is a commemorative one, created weeks after the landing.]

An MQF was also used for Apollo 12 and 14, and would have been used for  Apollo 13