[perihelions]

These things were mainly publicity stunts. The supposed biohazard quarantine for returning Apollo astronauts was a theater performance, too.

https://www.livescience.com/space/the-moon/the-apollo-moon-l... ("The Apollo moon landing was real, but NASA's quarantine procedure was not")

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/science/nasa-moon-quarant... ("A review of archives suggests that efforts to protect Earth from contamination by any organism brought back from the lunar surface were mostly for show")

[GCA10]

My father was one of the scientific Principal Investigators (PIs) who analyzed the Apollo 11 lunar samples, back in 1969. Flipping through some of his notes from back then, it sounds as if a rotating assortment of bureaucrats injected themselves into the chain-of-custody with weird and embarrassing effects. To wit:

Some Agriculture Department folks decided that their legal authority to quarantine soil samples brought into the U.S. applied to lunar soils, too. They insisted on building a three-week quarantine facility with slivers of lunar samples, exposed to "germ-free mice born by cesarean section." Only after the mice survived this ordeal was it safe to release the fuller batch of samples.

Another character insisted that the aluminum rock boxes be sealed, while on the moon, with gaskets of indium (soft, rare metal) which would deform to create a very tight seal. The geochemists on earth protested, in vain, that this procedure would ruin their hopes of doing any indium analysis of the samples themselves, shutting down an interesting line of research. No luck in changing the protocol. Turns out that the indium seals didn't work, and the rock boxes reached the earth-based quarantine facilities with normal air pressure anyway.

There's more silliness about trying to keep the lunar samples in a hard vacuum while designing rigidly mounted gloves that could be used to manipulate/slice/divide the samples without breaking the vacuum. Maybe we know today how to sustain flexible gloves in such an environment. We didn't, back then.

[dmix]

> They insisted on building a three-week quarantine facility with slivers of lunar samples

There was a ton of money flowing in for space and it was the big new thing of the future. Makes sense other agencies would try to insert themselves and try to seem relevant to the new popular thing in the news and latch themselves onto any future spending/authority.

[stinkbeetle]

Yep, government bureaucracy has always been horribly corrupt, incompetent, and self-serving, unfortunately.

[jrockway]

I can kind of see why someone whose job it is to quarantine soil samples from other places on Earth would want to quarantine soil samples from another planet. Sort of.

[lazide]

Good thing corporations don’t have different divisions vying for relevancy by being super important to the new hotness (cough AI cough), and this is just the government being weird eh?

[robertlagrant]

As long as they're wasting profits from people giving them money voluntarily and not taxes taken on pain of imprisonment, it's fine.

[simgt]

Bureaucracy is always corrupt, incompetent and self-serving to varying degrees. There is no way around it, it's a necessary evil for communication and organisation. At least governments in democracies have some form of oversight on them, there is less oversight in corporations or dictatorships.

Maybe an AI dictatorship would rid us of bureaucracy, but we'd both end up in a paperclip sweatshop.

[qwery]

Paperclip sweatshop? I thought all three of us would end up in a paperclip.

[throw8449485]

Ok, just some facts:

- moon dust has very fine particles. It is very irritating for skin, and there was a very good chance it could damage lungs like azbestos.

- Electronics and dust do not mix well

- electrostatic properties were not known, it could stick to every surface and coat it, perhaps prevent vacuum seals etc... Look at images from inside capsule, before and after landing! And that was just dust, brought on suits, not full samples!

- it had horrible smell

[xtiansimon]

> “… moon dust has very fine particles…”

What’s more: “Unlike dust particles on Earth, dust on the Moon’s surface is sharp and abrasive – like tiny shards of glass – because it hasn’t been exposed to weathering and elements like water and oxygen.”

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/kennedy/nasa-tec...

[pyuser583]

>It is very irritating for skin, and there was a very good chance it could damage lungs like azbestos.

and

> it had horrible smell

We shouldn't know what it smells like. That's forbidden knowledge, just like the taste of uranium.

[Pigo]

I never thought about the smell.

Does it smell strong because of it's composition or because the vacuum of space has a strange effect on it? Like the particulates not dispersing enough?

[garyrob]

I don't know. What if there happened to me some unimaginable pathogen that Earth animal life had no way of resisting, and that multiplied rapidly in the presence of our kind of life?

Extremely improbable. Astronomically improbable. Virtually impossible. All that is absolutely, 100% true.

But given the stakes, similarly astronomically high, I'm not sure it didn't actually make sense to do a quarantine for a few weeks. Yes, I know the indium seals didn't work. But the fact that we failed to create a quarantine doesn't mean it was worthless to at least make an attempt. It cost us virtually nothing in comparison to the stakes.

That's my personal response, anyway, and reflects the opinion I would have expressed at the time if I happened to have been involved in the project.

[jcynix]

Hmm, did they check whether their shoes where clean? Mine always have dirt underneath when I return from outside ;-0

[cgriswald]

The actual claims of the paper are not that this was 'for show', but that NASA considered the risks unlikely and prioritized the more likely risks to the astronauts lives. I see how the authors got to 'so it was all for show', but it simply isn't true.

There is plenty of evidence that the risk was taken seriously (regulations and treaties surrounding the issue, ICBC activities in the years prior to launch, the expense on things the public would never have known about, medical and biological testing done for the first three missions, NASA's openness with the ICBC about the imperfection of the system and the existence of contingency plans...).

[nickff]

On one of the Apollo documentaries (I can't remember which one), the astronauts joked that it was the least effective quarantine ever; they talked about how there was a stream of ants going in and out of the Airstream they were in.

[dmix]

They quarantined in an Airstream van? That's hilarious. Very 1960s

Found the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_quarantine_facility

[Gracana]

You can go look at one up close at the Udvar-Hazy Center in VA. I highly recommend a visit there if you are in the area and interested in aerospace stuff. They've got a ton of amazing exhibits.

[philsnow]

The USS Hornet is the ship that picked them up, it's permanently docked in Alameda, CA and has been transformed into a museum. They have footprints painted on the floor to show the astronauts' path walking (across the deck) into the Airstream. You also get to walk on the (wooden) flight deck and see the jet elevator, etc.

https://www.wired.com/2009/07/hornet/

https://uss-hornet.org/

[bawolff]

A stream of ants would not necessarily render a quarintine ineffective.

[ben_w]

If you're protecting against the possibility of an unknown hypothetical pathogen that can survive on the moon, but which you have no specific reason to think favours or disfavours any randomly selected Earth life, you want something that can at the very least stop ants.

[jeremyjh]

That’s right, it made it completely a joke.

[marcusverus]

I think it's a mixed bag. It seems like they were genuinely concerned about contamination that could harm the astronauts or others on the team, but not particularly concerned about other biological contamination. From the article:

> For example, the Apollo spacecraft hadn't been designed to prevent potential lunar contaminants from being exposed to Earth's environment; once it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, the capsule's cabin had to be fully opened in order to let astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins out.

Another obvious "oversite" was that the "biological isolation garments" (BIGs) they wore were tossed into the open capsule door, and donned by the potentially contaminated astronauts! It's true that they were sprayed down with disinfectant afterwards, however the spray and whatever it washed off were drained directly into the ocean.

[joezydeco]

Seems incongruous to take your national heroes and make them sit in a hot trailer for a few days "for show" instead of whisking them home for their debrief and ticker-tape parades.

Unless it was not for the benefit of the astronauts, but the skeptical public back home? Hmm.

[tsimionescu]

A quarantine is never for the sake of those you quarantine, it's for the sake of the public, by definition.

[rogerrogerr]

Except after the 2019 strain of coronavirus was identified, then we turned it all upside down and said “stay home, stay safe” as loud as possible for two years straight.

[tsimionescu]

"Social distancing" was not quarantine. It was a recommendation to reduce the frequency of meeting with others, but it wasn't strictly enforced: you were allowed to go out and do things, but in limited capacity. And this was both for your own sake to some extent, and for the sake of everyone else to some extent - and it was explicitly presented as such, at least in more in-depth discussions. It wasn't just "stay home, stay safe", but "stay home, keep yourself safe, keep others safe". Especially since the main goal has always been to avoid overwhelming hospitals with serious cases, since the most disastrous death rated were seen in areas where this happened, at the start of the pandemic (in Wuhan, in the Milan/Bergamo area, in Iran).

You still had actual quarantines during the pandemic - anyone who had a positive test and anyone who had been in direct contact with them for the last X days, were often strictly forced to stay either at home or in isolated hospital rooms. This was quite explicitly not for their own sake, but to keep the public at large safe from them.

[jrockway]

I mean, if people had quarantined then we wouldn't have had a pandemic.

[scottyah]

I assume the "hot trailer" was better than the small capsule in space, which was also just "for show".

[gmueckl]

I see that customs declaration in the context of the Outer Space Treaty from 1967. It stipulates that outer space cannot be appropriated by by any nation. My hypothesis here is that the political message underneath this customs form stunt is an acknowledgement that the crew has left the United States and returned. However, I have nothing that supports this claim.

[umanwizard]

Do US Navy sailors in international waters have to go through customs on returning to port in the US? I don’t know the answer, but that’s probably the closest analogy.

[pyuser583]

The US Space Treaty rejected using the high seas as a legal metaphor. Instead it went with Antarctica.

The high seas are easy to use commercially, but also very prone to conflict. Wars are fought over tiny straits, and understandably so.

The Antarctic treaty decided the antarctic was too useless to fight over, so the signers decided to make it difficult to use in exchange for making it difficult to fight over.

Obviously space is a more like the seas. But nobody wanted a war over outer space (just look at the reaction to the Star Wars programs in the 1980s).

Antarctica is just a legal dead zone. What happens if a scientist on a station murders another scientist? On an American station, it was unclear until the 1980s. What happens if a passenger on a cruse ship murders another passenger? The FBI has people on standby - you'll be arrested when you return to your home port. Probably sooner.

The legalities are space are difficult because we decided to make them so. This is changing, and fast. Which is good.

[jcranmer]

I don't think so, but you do need to fill out a customs form to ship a package to someone on a US Navy ship.

[RandomBacon]

If you're shipping the package from the U.S., that is incorrect.

I ordered Amazon packages addressed to me on U.S. Navy ships.

Ships have FPO addresses which are treated and formatted like a domestic ship.

[RandomBacon]

Corrction: … like domestic address.

[jki275]

If we make port calls anywhere outside the US we definitely go through customs on return.

[ofalkaed]

No, not even civilians need to do that. Ultimately the only time you have to is when there is documentation of your being in the a foreign country and if there is no documentation you probably don't want to draw attention to yourself. This is why so many people where able to go to and from Cuba when it was technically illegal, US and Cuba agreed to not document/stamp the passports of private citizens.

[umanwizard]

It is still technically illegal to go to Cuba without a specific whitelisted reason (and tourism isn’t on the list). It’s just not strictly enforced.

[ofalkaed]

So it is not illegal? you just need to go through the proper bureaucracy as you do with every countries. Last I looked into it a few years back it was easy to get the paper work, one person I found who went there just signed up for guitar lessons in Havana to study Cuban guitar, showed the paperwork for the guitar classes and was good to go because it was for educational reasons even if the guitar lessons only accounted for a tiny portion of their time there. The white listed reasons are fairly broad and easy to work within, sure you can't just hop on a plane for a weekend visit but that is true of many countries that no one would say it is illegal to go to.

[umanwizard]

The point is nothing has changed about the legality. It has always been allowed to go for one of these whitelisted reasons, you just had to apply in advance.

Now it is still legal to go for exactly the same set of reasons, they just don't bother actually checking. There's no "paperwork" you need to get; you just tell the check-in agent which legal reason you fall under.

[agagagag]

Of course not, if we did they’d find my dog I bought in Vietnam

[kevin_thibedeau]

I met an AF cargo loadmaster once who told me that they can smuggle anything back to the US that they can fit in the plane. He was importing E-bikes from Japan.

[csours]

Following this line of thought - this is may be the exact analogy that NASA wanted to counteract.

[umanwizard]

Why? What's the difference between a US spacecraft in international space and a US watercraft in international waters?

[quartz]

Since the astronauts were up there planting flags... I'd think it's less about the vessel in space and more about making it clear that the land visited isn't considered claimed as part of the US.

[nrb]

If the distinction is that the US watercraft are military and as such are not subject to customs, then making it clear that returning astronauts are not on a military mission sends a diplomatic signal.

[csours]

NASA wants space to feel non-militarized.

US Service Personnel don't follow the civilian process for Customs, so making astronauts actually follow the civilian process reinforces the non-militarized feeling for space.

[bongodongobob]

I don't think so because the ship is technically US soil afaik.

[CobrastanJorji]

It's funny. You want to blame NASA for the ridiculous publicity stunts, but they were totally right that a loss of public interest was one of the biggest risks to the program. Neil Armstrong stood on the moon in 1969, but by 1971, Nixon had cancelled Apollo.

[GuB-42]

I didn't feel like the original author was blaming NASA. The entire Apollo program was a publicity stunt. That doesn't make it less awesome. A moon landing definitely earns you the right to show off.

Not sure about the quarantine, but the customs form is a nice touch. Cheap, simple, effective and harmless.

[jeremyjh]

Because it was done. The goal was to win the race against the Soviets. The future mission plans were mostly budget padding to ensure that was accomplished.

[shayway]

The source paper for both articles is paywalled, so maybe it has a better argument than the articles. But to call it theater or a publicity stunt is to imply it didn't have a point beyond public relations, which isn't the case.

Microbes can't be completely contained - easily, anyway - and we knew that perfectly well back then. But we also knew to minimize contact with potentially infected people. Put it this way: if there were lunar germs that the astronauts took back with them, would it have been better to skip the containment procedures, as inadequate as they may have been? Of course not.

NASA played up their ability to contain extraterrestrial microbes for sure. But the containment procedure itself was the best that could be done. If 'absolute isolation' is the bar to which containment is held, by that logic everything short of just not visiting other celestial bodies is theater.

[xattt]

I can imagine a bunch of short-sleeve wearing dudes, sitting around and shooting the shit to come up with absurd formalities for theatre. It would have been fun.

[montjoy]

This. Also, maybe setting legal precedent?

[refulgentis]

No. They're saying it was a stunt. Not setting legal precedent. There was no practical value.

[Lammy]

The practical value is reinforcing among the general public the idea that humans should not be able to move freely around their own planet. In the future only money will have that right. The modern passport didn't even exist until World War Ⅰ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521634938 / https://archive.org/details/pdfy-S0NQwPjPkMlzZ2eS/mode/2up

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

"modern passport not existing in past" ≠ "free human movement"

borders have largely had guards, who had no obligation to let people through, or even to treat them fairly and not rob them. frontiers had bandits who existed solely to prey on travelers.

even if you could move to a different settlement, you did not have the same legal rights as citizens of that city.

the "modern passport" has done more for free human movement than anything that came before.

[csomar]

Cities had guards. There was no border pre-1900 because there was no tech to enforce it. If you moved from one place to another, you were mostly at the whims of thieves and pirates.

[Alupis]

Pre-1900? Are you aware of how many wars were fought around the world just in the 1800's regarding border and territory disputes?

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

Insanely misinformed.

What kind of tech do you imagine is needed? Have you heard of Hadrian's Wall? The Great Wall of China?

Or more generally: forts, outposts, coastal batteries, scouts, patrols?

[refulgentis]

Purple prose tripe re: some personal hobbyhorse masquerading as relevant commentary. Their obvious plan to subjugate hasn't come to fruition 50 years later, so its time to adjust your priors.

[hammock]

>These things were mainly publicity stunts. The supposed biohazard quarantine for returning Apollo astronauts was a theater performance, too.

Wow. What else about Apollo was theater performance?

[AdamN]

The expense report for mileage was another one. Kind of cute and an interesting insight into the time period but it wasn't really needed.

[ta1243]

The entire thing was theater. It was to show off American technical superiority (the US having already lost the space race in terms of first sub-orbital flight, first satellite, first animal in orbit, first man in orbit, first spacecraft to the moon, first woman in space, first spacewalk etc)

[pinkmuffinere]

It feels as if this question is intended to make a strong implication, but I'm not sure what the implication is -- Can you clarify? I almost think you are suggesting the moon landing was fake, but that's very stereotypical, so I don't want to assume.

[schneems]

Not OP but: The very essence of the program was publicity. As soon as the public lost interest (mission accomplished!), the program was canceled. We built Saturn V rockets that we never launched.

That being said, I know a lot of things were unknown. We didn’t know if the surface of the moon would interact with the atmosphere inside the capsules to combust. Some of these unknowns were downplayed. Some others were played up for dramatic effect.

The whole process of getting a person to the moon took hundreds of thousands of involved workers and the. coordinated effort of a country’s politicians and populace to fund it. I think it’s unfair to boil it down to “just publicity” but it is a big part in keeping it afloat.

[whycome]

What aspect of the review suggested that it was mostly for show?

[stronglikedan]

Considering the source, the source is probably the only thing that "suggested" it, as they are known to do.

[cynicalkane]

Are you claiming the New York Times is more likely than a comparable newspaper to fabricate random suggestions about astronauts? This is something they are "known to do"?

If you actually read the article, they include a direct link to the sources they cite and explain specifically what those sources say.

[whycome]

Okay I didn’t have access to paywalled article before.

The NYT article is about one specific study that’s a review of archival material. It doesn’t actually seem to suggest that it was a “publicity stunt” or “theater” as OP suggested. Rather, it says that NASA believed that the threat was very real. The threat was real enough to hold a “high level conference” (held by National Academy of Sciences). The outcome there was also that “the risk was real and the consequences could be profound”.

So, the major spending on the quarantine system wasn’t out of nowhere.

The study conclusion seems to be more that it would be nearly impossible to contain the threat if it existed. But, that wouldn’t mean that the precautions taken were only for show — just that it would be really fucking hard to stop. And with the hypothetical microbe, they couldn’t know anything about means of transmission or lifespan — so the precautions could have some value.

Even in the failure of their quarantine procedure, it still demonstrated that they thought it was (in principle) important:

“24 workers were exposed to the lunar material that the facility’s infrastructure was supposed to protect them from; they had to be quarantined”

It wasn’t security theater so much as it was just quarantine procedure that had many gaps, failures, and trade offs.

[skeezyboy]

allowing the "to be determined" answer sat at odds with the implied dilligency of the customs agency

[refulgentis]

Unlikely, it was a stunt.