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Regarding the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, in Sunburst and Luminary Don Eyles wrote in Debriefing (p.162 of 2019 edition):

...all this in case they had, against expectation, brought home some otherworldly microbe or other lunacy. For the doomsday case bulldozers were standing by to bury the laboratory under a mound of dirt, astronauts, staff and all.

I haven't found any other reference to this, and it seems to be contradicted by SP-368 Biomedical Results of Apollo, where the second point under "Quarantine Assumptions and Guidelines" is:

  1. The preservation of human life should take precedence over the maintenance of quarantine.

followed by the explanation:

Together, guidelines 1 and 2 provided the basis for the Lunar Quarantine Program; that is, although the probability that life existed on the moon was extremely low, the risk was sufficiently high that a quarantine program was justified. However, this risk was not considered great enough to permit an otherwise avoidable injury and/or loss of human life just to maintain the integrity of the program.

So is Eyles mistaken and there were no doomsday 'dozers (perhaps the idea was earlier floated?), or were situations envisaged where life wasn't sacrosanct (or might already have been lost)?

Basil Bourque
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Tom Goodfellow
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    Great question! Because it never happened, I never considered what NASA would have actually done had there been moon bugs found... My gut feeling is that even NASA didn't really have such plans by the time they ran the experiment and just needed to appear like they were taking the threat seriously. But that's not clear at all. Hence a great question! – user2705196 May 24 '21 at 19:15
  • I suspect scientists didn't feel much need for contingencies, because the possibility of there being life on the moon is based mostly in fantasy. "Oh, you're worried about catching something on the moon? How... interesting. OK, OK, you can have a quarantine." – Wayne Conrad May 24 '21 at 20:56
  • We know that now... however at the time there was no way to know for sure. Aside from natural effects, you had to consider the artificial: an interstellar society that wants to avoid other societies also going interstellar, so they seed deadly viruses on your inner worlds. – Harper - Reinstate Monica May 25 '21 at 00:19
  • @Harper-ReinstateMonica - so Clarke's "The Sentinel", only equipped with a very pointy stick. – Tom Goodfellow May 25 '21 at 00:36
  • @Harper-ReinstateMonica The idea of interstellar society is also based in fantasy, both now, and at the time. The distances between stars are too far. The physics just don't permit it. – Wayne Conrad May 25 '21 at 14:03
  • "For the doomsday case bulldozers were standing by to bury the laboratory under a mound of dirt..." In the unlikely scenario a microbe was brought back - we're talking about one that's survived eons in a supremely hard environment. So, bury in dirt? Yeah, that'll fix the problem. Or, surround the microbes in nutrients. – Don Branson May 25 '21 at 14:22
  • @WayneConrad The physics *you know of*. The "fantasy" is in the hubris of assuming we know all the physics, or that no civilization is more advanced than us. – Harper - Reinstate Monica May 25 '21 at 19:09
  • @Harper-ReinstateMonica My point is that the people planning the moon missions were scientists and engineers. Scientist and engineers don't make up laws of physics that they wish there were. The use the laws known to them to make decisions. If unknown physics comes into play, then your problem space explodes because literally anything and everything is possible. – Wayne Conrad May 25 '21 at 20:46
  • @WayneConrad That's where we differ. I feel the essence of science is the phrase "I don't know". – Harper - Reinstate Monica May 25 '21 at 20:55
  • Breaking the LRL quarantine if an Apollo crewman or support person became critically ill or injured is discussed in this answer. – DrSheldon May 26 '21 at 02:13

1 Answers1

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It's mentioned in the R. Bryan Erb Oral History on the Johnson Space Center oral histories page. Erb was manager of the LRL from 1969-1970.

ERB : You know, you fantasize about some of these scenarios, too. I thought supposing we do find something really deadly. What is the action? And it went through our minds that, well, you might, in fact, have to sacrifice everybody in the laboratory and bulldoze it under 100 feet of dirt. This sort of thing goes through your mind, if you really did have something that was seriously pathogenic. But fortunately, at least for the areas we visited, there was never anything of any serious hazard whatsoever.

Also mentioned in the official project history, but using the aforementioned interview as a reference.

There were a few breaks within the biological barrier in the early missions that led to a few staff members going into the quarantine with the astronauts, but all in all there were no serious problems. While lab managers had thought out extreme solutions in case there had been any serious danger from the lunar material, the “doomsday” predictions proved not to be accurate and any dramatic action, such as burying the laboratory under a mountain of dirt and sacrificing the lives of those still inside, ended up not being necessary.

Organic Marble
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    You beat me to it, I got the book and the section OP mentioned cites the "Lunar Receiving Laboratory Project History" tracked down the oral history and found the same section, was about to post my answer. – Mark Omo May 24 '21 at 01:00
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    FWIW, I went to ntrs and searched for "lunar receiving laboratory" and the project history came up. That sent me to the oral history. – Organic Marble May 24 '21 at 01:09
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    No doubt true, although the whole thing has an air of unreality about it. Why burry the lunar receiving laboratory? I mean can't lunar microbes live and spread in dirt? Wouldn't that just make matters worse? – Slarty May 24 '21 at 10:22
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    @Slarty I suspect that this option was considered means that they didn't seriously think the doomsday options had any chance of being needed. If they did the work would either have been done in the ocean far from shore, or the middle of a desert weapons testing site where in extremis a small nuke could have converted the entire facility to plasma. – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight May 24 '21 at 15:12
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    @DanIsFiddlingByFirelight Indeed, cauterizing it with a nuke seems to be the only realistic possibility, essentially the Andromeda Strain scenario. But I always wondered whether that would work; you would hardly be sure enough before it's too late, and anyway, somewhere behind some concrete a few bugs would survive and then get distributed really well. – Peter - Reinstate Monica May 24 '21 at 18:52
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    @Peter-ReinstateMonica IIRC using a nuke on the Andromeda Strain was the last thing you'd want to do. "There'll be a thousand mutagens, each killing in a different way. We'll never be rid of it." – Organic Marble May 24 '21 at 18:56
  • @Peter-ReinstateMonica only if the bomb isn't big enough to vaporize everything, and we know how big the fireballs nukes/how big the caverns the excavate underground are. Sizing a bomb several times larger than needed would be doable for a small facility. – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight May 24 '21 at 20:32
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    @OrganicMarble after refreshing my memory on Wikipedia (I last read the book sometime in the 90s or early 200s); the specific reasons against nuking Andromeda are sufficiently non-science that they belong on something like worldbuilding.se not here. – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight May 24 '21 at 20:32
  • So not a plan per se, but at least a what-if topic in the air, somewhat like the Manhattan Project calculating the likelihood that a nuclear weapon detonation could start an atmospheric chain reaction and autoclave the world. Thanks also for the additional reading pleasures. – Tom Goodfellow May 25 '21 at 00:16
  • it's perfectly sufficient to turn the module into an autoclave. Just set the HVAC system to 150C and wait an hour. – Harper - Reinstate Monica May 25 '21 at 00:24
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    @DanIsFiddlingByFirelight - another reason doomsday scenarios may have been discounted is that the quarantine was a haphazard process, with the capsule (thoroughly contaminated with moon dust) being opened at sea by personnel who didn't get quarantined, then helicoptered to the transport ship with disinfectant splashed around at various stages. So any lunar lurgy would likely be already long on the loose before a decision to sacrifice the LRL could be made. – Tom Goodfellow May 25 '21 at 00:32
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    Yes the idea of lunar bugs was a bit outlandish in the first place. Maybe the whole idea was just a sop to the more paranoid elements and hadn't been thought out very well. – Slarty May 25 '21 at 07:42