Forty Years Ago Today X-Splashdown

Apollo 11 splashed into the Pacific Ocean at 11:51 A.M. CDT on July 24, 1969, ending what I consider the greatest journey in history. The mission had lasted 195 hours, 18 minutes, 35 seconds and it had fulfilled John F. Kennedy's goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

I remember being a little worried that the capsule had ended up upside down in the water, but a few minutes later it was right side up and the divers and rafts then made it to the scene. What followed was a carefully rehearsed recovery process of isolation and decontamination:

The possibility of the astronauts bringing a dangerous Moon germ back to Earth was considered remote, but not impossible. At this point in the recovery, the UDT decontamination specialist, LT Clancy Hatleberg, jumped into the water from helicopter #66 and swam to one of the rafts. He donned a special Biological Isolation Garment (BIG suit) and then handed 3 other BIG suits into the spacecraft so the Apollo 11 crew could put them on. These suits created an effective biological barrier for the astronauts who had come in contact with lunar dust so any germs wouldn't spread to the recovery team.

More details at that link. I don't think anyone but the usual crackpot crowd seriously thought that Apollo 11 would bring back any kind of organism, but even the slightest possibility could not be ignored. The astronauts would spend three weeks in quarantine until being declared 100% fit to take part in the huge number of parades and celebrations that awaited them. They seemed endless to me at the time and I never got tired of seeing them on the news.

I have more to say about Apollo 11, but I'll end this "forty years ago today" stuff with a picture of three astronauts. Not the three Apollo 11 astronauts, not that they aren't deserving, but of the three men who seemed mostly forgotten this past week or so, and who gave their lives while training for the first Apollo mission; Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

The accident that killed them led to major redesign of the command module and a tightening of standards in production. It was a terrible blow to NASA and the nation at the time, but the lessons learned resulted in the successful Apollo 11 mission two and a half years later. RIP, men.