(2 of 2)
At the Manned Spacecraft Center, the van will be rolled up to the Lunar Receiving Lab (LRL), an 83,000-sq.-ft., $15.8 million building designed specifically to house the astronauts and lunar samples during the quarantine period. After walking through an airtight plastic tunnel extended from the van, the Apollo crewmen and their two traveling companions will enter the astronaut-reception area, which occupies about a third of the laboratory. A dozen others —NASA physicians, technicians, a cook and a public relations man—will join them until the quarantine period ends.
In the LRL, each astronaut will have a separate room furnished in Sears, Roebuck Early American style with single bed, dresser, night table, chair and lamp. In identical adjoining rooms, there will be three physicians, one for each astronaut, to provide constant medical attention. The astronaut-reception area also contains a recreation room, a shower and locker room, a lounge lined with bookshelves, a dining room and a kitchen. In a nearby complex of rooms, NASA has also put together one of the most complete biomedical centers in the U.S. There the physicians will subject the astronauts to exhaustive clinical, chemical and microbiological tests.
Like the van, the astronaut area will be completely sealed off from the outside world, with its own air-conditioning and negative-pressure system. The air that the astronauts and their companions breathe will be continuously filtered and treated as it is recirculated, to cleanse it of any unwelcome organisms. Body wastes will be sterilized, and any notes that the astronauts wish to pass outside will be sterilized first for 16 hours in ethylene oxide gas. Even the traditional flight debriefing will be sterile. The astronauts will review details of their mission on one side of a glass wall while NASA officials question them and listen on the other side, communicating through a speaker system. In the same room, the astronauts will chat through the glass with their families.
Drastic Measures
NASA has not revealed how it would react to the outbreak of a strange illness inside the astronaut-receiving area. If the symptoms were mild, the quarantine would presumably be extended at least until the disease had run its course. NASA would have to consider more drastic measures to protect the health of the world's population if the illness proved disabling or deadly—like that in Novelist Michael Crichton's bestseller, The Andromeda Strain.
If, as NASA fully expects, no alarming symptoms develop in the astronauts, their attendants, or the test animals and plants in the adjoining lunar-sample laboratory, the three men of Apollo 11 will at last be allowed to emerge into the outside world in mid-August for a belated and well-deserved welcome.