No quarintine?

Well well,

Isn't this amazing!? The Apollo crew had to be quarantined.....however, the "new" astronauts don't?? Am I missing something here? I mean, they were exposed to space, were they not? Or, is there something on the Moon that we don't know about?

Makes one think hey?

Originally posted by TortoiseKweek
Well well,

Isn't this amazing!? The Apollo crew had to be quarantined.....however, the "new" astronauts don't?? Am I missing something here? I mean, they were exposed to space, were they not? Or, is there something on the Moon that we don't know about?

Makes one think hey?

From my understanding, the Apollo was the last mission to actually go to the moon. Anyone going up nowadays goes only into low earth orbit, which is still considerably well shaded via the magnetosphere and ionosphere. No need to send people much past there for now.

eh, I'm not an expert, but I believe the Apollo crew had to pass through the Van Allen Belt to reach the moon. This is supposed to be highly radioactive. Our shuttles are not stationed beyond earth's magnetic field, so they are not exposed to the space radiation and such that would be present, say, on the moon.

reply to post by drsmooth23


"No need to send people much past there for now."....I'm sorry, guess I missed the boat!!

reply to post by drsmooth23


May I say that I was just "busting your nads?" You are obviously an intelligent person!

Ok, so maybe I should be asking these questions:

Were the Apollo crew members quarantined for radiation only?

I thought they were also quarantined for possible microbes, viruses, etc from outer space?

Sounds like it, according to this article

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

Where it states: "All four men are wearing biological isolation garments, awaiting helicopter pickup and transport to the U.S.S. Hornet. They stayed in quarantine for three weeks."

Biological? Ok, so the shuttle opens up to do spacewalks etc, doesn't that put it at risk of having microbes etc etc enter the shuttle?

I don't know, just asking the questions, as it seems pretty strange to me

reply to post by TortoiseKweek

haha, its all good. The only reason I knew that is that I have a popular mechanics magazine with a graph that shows every single shuttle launch from 1969 to 2004, and 98% percent of all those stopped at the point in the atmosphere where because of the effects of gravity, you can pretty much easily get into a geosynchronous orbit around the earth without plummeting back to earth.

But thats a good question about the microbes around the shuttle. My only guess is there isnt that much mass for the microbes to accumulate on in that layer of the sky. but your still under the Van Allen radiation belt, which keeps some pretty nasty cosmic rays from killing us instantly, or at least covering us with radiation.

The moon has virtually no atmosphere, and it gets bathed in cosmic rays all the time, which is why it would be alot safer to make a human facilitated base on mars, because the atmosphere of mars acts in a similar way to the earths.

The main reason we dont need to send people off to study Titan or Venus or any other extrasolar planet or mass is because, simply put, robots do a MUCH better job at collecting data and they are exponentially more efficient at data collection than any human (They dont sleep). If you where to take the 9 month trip to mars, 95% of all the weight in your vessel would be food and water and stuff to make the trip not mind numbingly long. When we send probes and data collectors, we dont have to worry about life support systems, air, water, heating and cooling, which makes us able to pretty much fling a toy into space and let it send the numbers back to us.

[edit on 26-5-2009 by drsmooth23]

reply to post by TortoiseKweek


Yes, in the early days of space exploration it was thought that astronauts might bring back some unidentified microbes, that we would have no defence for, thats all.

There's no conspiracy, since we discovered that the moon and space are sterile, and since the astronauts never leave the "environment" of the shuttle or space station theres no need to quarentine them.