photo #6768496

The first Apollo astronauts to return from the Moon were greeted by cheering crowds but faced three weeks of isolation to ensure they hadn’t brought back any deadly pathogens from the lunar surface. While no one seriously expected life to exist on the Moon, the risk of introducing an alien microorganism was too significant to ignore. Scientists were cautious about the possibility of life adapting to extreme conditions elsewhere in the universe. This photo, taken at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, shows the quarantined housing facility being lowered from the U.S.S. Hornet onto a trailer for transport to Hickam Field. From there, it was loaded onto an Air Force C-141 jet and flown to Ellington Air Force Base in Texas, before finally being transferred to the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston, Texas.