Apollo Trivia Question

Chuck Stewart wrote:

Yeah, but that limits you to the speed of
the recovery ship, so wouldn't just having
a destroyer pick the capsule up be much
faster?

That's why I was angling for something an
available helo *could* pick up without
breaking quarantine too badly.

I wonder at what point in the program the
concept of strict quarantine was dropped?


Given the tiny odds of finding something on the lunar surface that could
survive that level of temperature shifts, vacuum, and the constant
bombardment of solar radiation the quarantine was primarily a feel-good
item rather than a real necessity.

Pat

David Lesher wrote:


I'm thinking something airdroppable. It could be, oh, I donno,
dropped by a Hercy or something else fixed wing. [I know it's fun
to have to run a C-130 from a carrier...]

And applicable in seas too iffy to safely allow a destroyer to
come along side the spacecraft immediately.



The Apollo 11 landing zone was easily in range of a C-130 coming out
from Johnston Atoll.

Pat

In message , Pat Flannery
writes


Chuck Stewart wrote:

Yeah, but that limits you to the speed of the recovery ship, so
wouldn't just having a destroyer pick the capsule up be much faster?

That's why I was angling for something an available helo *could* pick
up without breaking quarantine too badly.

I wonder at what point in the program the concept of strict quarantine
was dropped?

Given the tiny odds of finding something on the lunar surface that
could survive that level of temperature shifts, vacuum, and the
constant bombardment of solar radiation the quarantine was primarily a
feel-good item rather than a real necessity.

But the Apollo TV camera had a slow-scan feature specifically to look
for objects that moved between frames. So presumably someone thought
there might be _large_ living organisms, not just microbes.
As an aside, did anyone look at Surveyor pictures to see if anything
changed?