It would have been a small step for mankind, but a very big one for the lunar microbes – if they had existed. It was considered a marvel of engineering that the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission returned unharmed to Earth on July 24, 1969 after a successful lunar landing. What was overlooked was that the story could have had an ugly ending for Earth if the mission had brought dangerous pathogens with it. This is what the science historian Dagomar Degroot from the University of Georgetown points out in the specialist magazine isis there.
In the 1960s, it was by no means clear whether the moon was actually a lifeless satellite. As recently as 1964, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) held a high-level conference to discuss the dangers of contamination. “They agreed that the risk was real and the consequences could be huge,” Degroot said New York Times. It was assumed that, in the worst case, lunar microbes could become just as dangerous to humanity as the viruses of the Europeans once were to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In fact, the Americans poured more than $100 million into preventive measures. And weren’t there the images from the shielded Lunar Receiving Laboratory, where the astronauts and the material they brought with them were quarantined?
The security measures were largely for show, judges Degroot, who has rummaged through previously untapped files of the Apollo program and discovered various security gaps. “Despite this beautiful complexity, there were numerous fundamental flaws.”
The fact that the space capsule was simply fished out of the sea and the astronauts opened its hatch was negligent. There would have been security gaps and glitches in the quarantine lab itself. 24 employees were contaminated with lunar material and also had to be quarantined. Inspections found cracks and leaks in insulated glove boxes and pressure vessels. Contamination would also have occurred in emergencies, in the event of fire or medical crises.
“If there had been lunar organisms capable of reproducing in the ocean, we would have been fried,” admits John Rummel, once a NASA planetary security official New York Times. “The quarantine program only looked like a success because it wasn’t needed,” writes Degroot. Apparently, even the participants in the NAS conference did not believe that real protection was possible: “Measures against contamination must assume that there will be an infection of the earth, if it were even possible,” Degroot quotes from the files.
Even if NASA promises to exercise more caution in future Mars missions, Dagomar Degroot warns: “The most important message of my study is that large risks with only a low probability of occurrence are downplayed by institutions and scientific networks if there are only strong motives and power dynamics.”