NASA officials overestimated their ability to contain alien microbes after the first moon landing, a new analysis suggests.
President Richard Nixon welcomes the Apollo 11 astronauts back to Earth after their historic voyage to the moon. The astronauts were confined within one of NASA's Mobile Quarantine Facilities for 21 days to ensure they would not contaminate Earth with any potential lunar bacteria after their short lunar sojourn. (Image credit: NASA)
In a small desert town, dozens of unsuspecting people suddenly drop dead from a mysterious plague. The infectious agent has come from outer space; it has no known cure, and the U.S. government must scramble to contain it before it destroys the world.
This is the plot of "The Andromeda Strain," a 1969 novel by author Michael Crichton. The book was published just two months before humans first set foot on the moon, and it sparked widespread panic about what the Apollo 11 astronauts might bring back. Luckily, NASA had a quarantine protocol in place for the mission. But those measures might have been largely for show, according to new research published in the science history journal Isis.
When astronauts first returned from the moon in 1969, NASA officials were concerned that they might carry some weird space microbes back to Earth with them. At the time, neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. had successfully returned a probe from the moon — let alone one with soil samples and actual humans aboard. As a result, nobody knew for sure whether or not the moon harbored microscopic life.