Okay, before you flat-earthers start forwarding this to your conspiracy theorist buddies on Reddit, the Moon landing was real! I promise.
Neil Armstrong really did say those famous words right before he bounced around on the Moon in one-third of Earth’s gravity. There is no question there.
The question here is whether the quarantine procedure for the Apollo 11 mission was faked?
VERDICT:
TRUE
In May 1969, merely a couple of months before the “giant leap for mankind” moment, a novel – The Andromeda Strain – was released. The plot was about a mysterious plague from outer space that caused the death of dozens of people in a small desert town. Of course, this sparked widespread panic about the possible alien germs that could be brought back by Armstrong and co when they return from their extraplanetary lunar excursions.
Luckily, Nasa did have a quarantine plan – a semblance of one, anyway.
When the Apollo 11 crew returned from their mission, they were immediately ushered into a state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar facility in Houston, where they spent three weeks.
While the quarantine protocol looked reasonable on paper, the new research suggests that despite the money and resources invested in it, Nasa’s “planetary protection” efforts were largely for show.
“The quarantine protocol looked like a success only because it was not needed,” Dagomar Degroot, a historian at Georgetown University, wrote in a new research published in the science history journal Isis.
Degroot went on to explain that Nasa knew the protocols were not adequate.
For example, the Apollo spacecraft was not designed to prevent contaminants from the Moon 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 the astronauts out, and the air inside the module was also vented into Earth’s atmosphere as the craft reentered, ensuring that the crew wouldn’t suffer carbon dioxide poisoning.
But the “faked” protocol was enough to convince the panicky public, with their imagination running wild of alien germs eating their brains or something, that everything was ok.
So, there. The Moon landings were real. The Apollo 11 crew did not bring back microscopic ET. Or did they? Now that’s something to write to your conspiracy buddies about.
References
https://www.journals.uchicago.
https://www.space.com/apollo-
