Inside lunar astronaut quarantine
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 4 September 2019
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When the crew of Apollo 11 returned to earth after their historic mission to the Moon, they were immediately placed in quarantine for 3 weeks. It was done to protect the Earth from the dangers of possible lunar alien life. Dr William Carpentier was the flight surgeon for the Apollo 11 mission and was placed in quarantine with the crew to monitor their health and check for any signs of alien life. He talks to Alex Last about his memories of working with the Apollo programme and life in quarantine.
Photo: Apollo 11 astronauts (left to right): Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin peer from window of the Mobile Quarantine Facility aboard the U.S.S. Hornet after their July 24th recovery.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more watching listen on BBC sounds. |
| 0:30.9 | Hello and |
| 0:35.0 | welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last. |
| 0:40.0 | And today we go back to 1969 and an often forgotten part of the historic mission to the moon. |
| 0:47.0 | It's the story of Apollo 11's flight surgeon and the efforts to protect the Earth in the unlikely event the astronauts had brought back alien life from the moon. The goal that President Kennedy announced was to send men to the moon and return them safely to the earth by the end of the decade. |
| 1:21.0 | And it's that return to Earth, that hardest part of my job started. |
| 1:25.0 | Cornet reports a Sonic Boom a short time ago. |
| 1:29.0 | When man first returned from the Moon in July 1969 NASA faced a unique problem. |
| 1:35.4 | The main problem was the remote possibility that there could be anything on the moon that could be brought back to Earth that could be harmful. |
| 1:47.0 | Apollo 11, Houston and the blind air-losses a facial contact. |
| 1:52.0 | The probability that any life form could be on the moon was incredibly remote, but you know that nobody could say it's zero, so that's's why I decided that there would be a |
| 2:04.8 | quarantine and they would be isolated. Dr William or Bill Carpentier was the |
| 2:10.3 | flight surgeon for Apollo 11. His job was the health of the astronauts both pre and post-flight. |
| 2:16.4 | But on a Moon mission, that job took on a new dimension. |
| 2:20.8 | My job was to, you know, be with the crew while they were in quarantine and to do all the medical |
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