| - "This isn't the space race NASA anymore." To be fair, Apollo engineering failed badly on similar problems (with moon samples), - "But in spite of all this beautiful complexity, there were just basic, fundamental mistakes,” Dr. Degroot said." - "NASA officials were well aware that the lab wasn’t perfect. Dr. Degroot’s paper details many of the findings from inspections and tests that revealed gloveboxes and sterilizing autoclaves that cracked, leaked or flooded." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/science/nasa-moon-quarant... https://gwern.net/doc/existential-risk/2023-degroot.pdf (pdf) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36266360 (33 comments) (The goal in that case wasn't to protect the sample integrity, but to contain alien pathogens). late edit: Another related example (lunar soil), - "Although this material has been isolated in vacuum-packed bottles, it is now unusable for detailed chemical or mechanical analysis—the gritty particles deteriorated the knife-edge indium seals of the vacuum bottles; air has slowly leaked in." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_soil#Availability_on_Ear... |