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These things were mainly publicity stunts. The supposed biohazard quarantine for returning Apollo astronauts was a theater performance, too. https://www.livesc
by perihelions 1y ago
These things were mainly publicity stunts. The supposed biohazard quarantine for returning Apollo astronauts was a theater performance, too.
https://www.livescience.com/space/the-moon/the-apollo-moon-landing-was-real-but-nasas-quarantine-procedure-was-not https://www.livescience.com/space/the-moon/the-apollo-moon-l... ("The Apollo moon landing was real, but NASA's quarantine procedure was not")
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/science/nasa-moon-quarantine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/science/nasa-moon-quarant... ("A review of archives suggests that efforts to protect Earth from contamination by any organism brought back from the lunar surface were mostly for show")
- skeezyboy 1y agoallowing the "to be determined" answer sat at odds with the implied dilligency of the customs agency
- refulgentis 1y agoUnlikely, it was a stunt.
- montjoy 1y agoThis. Also, maybe setting legal precedent?
- refulgentis 1y agoNo. They're saying it was a stunt. Not setting legal precedent. There was no practical value.
- Lammy 1y agoThe practical value is reinforcing among the general public the idea that humans should not be able to move freely around their own planet. In the future only money will have that right. The modern passport didn't even exist until World War Ⅰ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521634938 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521634938 / https://archive.org/details/pdfy-S0NQwPjPkMlzZ2eS/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/pdfy-S0NQwPjPkMlzZ2eS/mode/2up
- refulgentis 1y agoPurple prose tripe re: some personal hobbyhorse masquerading as relevant commentary. Their obvious plan to subjugate hasn't come to fruition 50 years later, so its time to adjust your priors.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago"modern passport not existing in past" ≠ "free human movement" borders have largely had guards, who had no obligation to let people through, or even to treat them fairly and not rob them. frontiers had bandits who existed solely to prey on travelers. even if you could move to a different settlement, you did not have the same legal rights as citizens of that city. the "modern passport" has done more for free human movement than anything that came before.
- csomar 1y agoCities had guards. There was no border pre-1900 because there was no tech to enforce it. If you moved from one place to another, you were mostly at the whims of thieves and pirates.
- Alupis 1y agoPre-1900? Are you aware of how many wars were fought around the world just in the 1800's regarding border and territory disputes?
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoInsanely misinformed. What kind of tech do you imagine is needed? Have you heard of Hadrian's Wall? The Great Wall of China? Or more generally: forts, outposts, coastal batteries, scouts, patrols?
- joecool1029 1y agoDo you think they will be shocked to find out color wasn't invented in the 1900's?
- guywithahat 1y ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 1y agoSource? Or are you just extrapolating from the businesses you've worked at?
- guywithahat 1y agoYeah just my experience from my time at NASA. People would joke that "they're going to send you to safety" if your skills are obsolete
- hammock 1y ago>These things were mainly publicity stunts. The supposed biohazard quarantine for returning Apollo astronauts was a theater performance, too. Wow. What else about Apollo was theater performance?
- pinkmuffinere 1y agoIt feels as if this question is intended to make a strong implication, but I'm not sure what the implication is -- Can you clarify? I almost think you are suggesting the moon landing was fake, but that's very stereotypical, so I don't want to assume.
- fragmede 1y ago[dead]
- schneems 1y agoNot OP but: The very essence of the program was publicity. As soon as the public lost interest (mission accomplished!), the program was canceled. We built Saturn V rockets that we never launched. That being said, I know a lot of things were unknown. We didn’t know if the surface of the moon would interact with the atmosphere inside the capsules to combust. Some of these unknowns were downplayed. Some others were played up for dramatic effect. The whole process of getting a person to the moon took hundreds of thousands of involved workers and the. coordinated effort of a country’s politicians and populace to fund it. I think it’s unfair to boil it down to “just publicity” but it is a big part in keeping it afloat.
- ta1243 1y agoThe entire thing was theater. It was to show off American technical superiority (the US having already lost the space race in terms of first sub-orbital flight, first satellite, first animal in orbit, first man in orbit, first spacecraft to the moon, first woman in space, first spacewalk etc)
- AdamN 1y agoThe expense report for mileage was another one. Kind of cute and an interesting insight into the time period but it wasn't really needed.
- whycome 1y agoWhat aspect of the review suggested that it was mostly for show?
- stronglikedan 1y agoConsidering the source, the source is probably the only thing that "suggested" it, as they are known to do.
- cynicalkane 1y agoAre you claiming the New York Times is more likely than a comparable newspaper to fabricate random suggestions about astronauts? This is something they are "known to do"? If you actually read the article, they include a direct link to the sources they cite and explain specifically what those sources say.
- whycome 1y agoOkay I didn’t have access to paywalled article before. The NYT article is about one specific study that’s a review of archival material. It doesn’t actually seem to suggest that it was a “publicity stunt” or “theater” as OP suggested. Rather, it says that NASA believed that the threat was very real. The threat was real enough to hold a “high level conference” (held by National Academy of Sciences). The outcome there was also that “the risk was real and the consequences could be profound”. So, the major spending on the quarantine system wasn’t out of nowhere. The study conclusion seems to be more that it would be nearly impossible to contain the threat if it existed. But, that wouldn’t mean that the precautions taken were only for show — just that it would be really fucking hard to stop. And with the hypothetical microbe, they couldn’t know anything about means of transmission or lifespan — so the precautions could have some value. Even in the failure of their quarantine procedure, it still demonstrated that they thought it was (in principle) important: “24 workers were exposed to the lunar material that the facility’s infrastructure was supposed to protect them from; they had to be quarantined” It wasn’t security theater so much as it was just quarantine procedure that had many gaps, failures, and trade offs.
- shayway 1y agoThe source paper for both articles is paywalled, so maybe it has a better argument than the articles. But to call it theater or a publicity stunt is to imply it didn't have a point beyond public relations, which isn't the case. Microbes can't be completely contained - easily, anyway - and we knew that perfectly well back then. But we also knew to minimize contact with potentially infected people. Put it this way: if there were lunar germs that the astronauts took back with them, would it have been better to skip the containment procedures, as inadequate as they may have been? Of course not. NASA played up their ability to contain extraterrestrial microbes for sure. But the containment procedure itself was the best that could be done. If 'absolute isolation' is the bar to which containment is held, by that logic everything short of just not visiting other celestial bodies is theater.
- cgriswald 1y agoThe actual claims of the paper are not that this was 'for show', but that NASA considered the risks unlikely and prioritized the more likely risks to the astronauts lives. I see how the authors got to 'so it was all for show', but it simply isn't true. There is plenty of evidence that the risk was taken seriously (regulations and treaties surrounding the issue, ICBC activities in the years prior to launch, the expense on things the public would never have known about, medical and biological testing done for the first three missions, NASA's openness with the ICBC about the imperfection of the system and the existence of contingency plans...).
- nickff 1y agoOn one of the Apollo documentaries (I can't remember which one), the astronauts joked that it was the least effective quarantine ever; they talked about how there was a stream of ants going in and out of the Airstream they were in.
- bawolff 1y agoA stream of ants would not necessarily render a quarintine ineffective.
- ben_w 1y agoIf you're protecting against the possibility of an unknown hypothetical pathogen that can survive on the moon, but which you have no specific reason to think favours or disfavours any randomly selected Earth life, you want something that can at the very least stop ants.
- jeremyjh 1y agoThat’s right, it made it completely a joke.
- dmix 1y agoThey quarantined in an Airstream van? That's hilarious. Very 1960s Found the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_quarantine_facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_quarantine_facility
- tomtomhowling 1y ago[flagged]
- gmueckl 1y agoI see that customs declaration in the context of the Outer Space Treaty from 1967. It stipulates that outer space cannot be appropriated by by any nation. My hypothesis here is that the political message underneath this customs form stunt is an acknowledgement that the crew has left the United States and returned. However, I have nothing that supports this claim.
- School-Cotton 1y agoDo US Navy sailors in international waters have to go through customs on returning to port in the US? I don’t know the answer, but that’s probably the closest analogy.
- jcranmer 1y agoI don't think so, but you do need to fill out a customs form to ship a package to someone on a US Navy ship.
- RandomBacon 1y agoIf you're shipping the package from the U.S., that is incorrect. I ordered Amazon packages addressed to me on U.S. Navy ships. Ships have FPO addresses which are treated and formatted like a domestic ship.
- RandomBacon 1y agoCorrction: … like domestic address.
- csours 1y agoFollowing this line of thought - this is may be the exact analogy that NASA wanted to counteract.
- School-Cotton 1y agoWhy? What's the difference between a US spacecraft in international space and a US watercraft in international waters?
- CobrastanJorji 1y agoIt's funny. You want to blame NASA for the ridiculous publicity stunts, but they were totally right that a loss of public interest was one of the biggest risks to the program. Neil Armstrong stood on the moon in 1969, but by 1971, Nixon had cancelled Apollo.
- jeremyjh 1y agoBecause it was done. The goal was to win the race against the Soviets. The future mission plans were mostly budget padding to ensure that was accomplished.
- GuB-42 1y agoI didn't feel like the original author was blaming NASA. The entire Apollo program was a publicity stunt. That doesn't make it less awesome. A moon landing definitely earns you the right to show off. Not sure about the quarantine, but the customs form is a nice touch. Cheap, simple, effective and harmless.
- xattt 1y agoI can imagine a bunch of short-sleeve wearing dudes, sitting around and shooting the shit to come up with absurd formalities for theatre. It would have been fun.
- GCA10 1y agoMy father was one of the scientific Principal Investigators (PIs) who analyzed the Apollo 11 lunar samples, back in 1969. Flipping through some of his notes from back then, it sounds as if a rotating assortment of bureaucrats injected themselves into the chain-of-custody with weird and embarrassing effects. To wit: Some Agriculture Department folks decided that their legal authority to quarantine soil samples brought into the U.S. applied to lunar soils, too. They insisted on building a three-week quarantine facility with slivers of lunar samples, exposed to "germ-free mice born by cesarean section." Only after the mice survived this ordeal was it safe to release the fuller batch of samples. Another character insisted that the aluminum rock boxes be sealed, while on the moon, with gaskets of indium (soft, rare metal) which would deform to create a very tight seal. The geochemists on earth protested, in vain, that this procedure would ruin their hopes of doing any indium analysis of the samples themselves, shutting down an interesting line of research. No luck in changing the protocol. Turns out that the indium seals didn't work, and the rock boxes reached the earth-based quarantine facilities with normal air pressure anyway. There's more silliness about trying to keep the lunar samples in a hard vacuum while designing rigidly mounted gloves that could be used to manipulate/slice/divide the samples without breaking the vacuum. Maybe we know today how to sustain flexible gloves in such an environment. We didn't, back then.
- dmix 1y ago> They insisted on building a three-week quarantine facility with slivers of lunar samples There was a ton of money flowing in for space and it was the big new thing of the future. Makes sense other agencies would try to insert themselves and try to seem relevant to the new popular thing in the news and latch themselves onto any future spending/authority.
- stinkbeetle 1y agoYep, government bureaucracy has always been horribly corrupt, incompetent, and self-serving, unfortunately.
- jrockway 1y ago