50 Years Ago: Apollo 11 Preparations

North American Rockwell of Downey, California, manufacturer of the Apollo Command and Service Modules, shipped the Apollo 11 spacecraft to KSC on Jan. 23, 1969. Workers transferred the modules to the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building (MSOB), where they removed them from their shipping containers. On Jan. 29, they mated the two modules and installed the assembly in an altitude chamber for testing. Earlier in the month, the Grumman Aircraft and Engineering Corporation, had delivered the Apollo 11 Lunar Module to KSC. The three stages of the Saturn V rocket arrived in January and February for stacking in the Vehicle Assembly Building.

NASA was preparing key facilities designed to receive astronauts returning from the Moon. The Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL) was a critical ground component of the Apollo program. The 83,000-square-foot facility, residing in MSC’s Building 37, was specially designed and built to isolate the astronauts, their spacecraft, and rock samples returning from the Moon to prevent back-contamination of the Earth by any possible lunar micro-organisms, and to maintain the lunar samples in as pristine a condition as possible. The building was completed in 1967, and over the next year its laboratories and other facilities outfitted. A 10-day simulation in the facility concluded in November 1968 found some deficiencies that NASA addressed promptly. On Jan. 23, 1969, workers brought a mockup Apollo Command Module into the LRL’s spacecraft storage area for fit checks. Gen. Samuel L. Phillips, Apollo Program Director at NASA Headquarters, conducted a readiness review of the facility on Feb. 3, in preparation for a 30-day simulation planned to begin in March to verify that all components of the LRL would be ready to support crewmembers returning from the Moon as early as July 1969.

An integral component of the back-contamination prevention process was the Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF). Following lunar landing missions, the MQF housed astronauts and support personnel from their arrival onboard the prime recovery ship shortly after splashdown through transport to the LRL. Under contract to NASA, Melpar, Inc., of Falls Church, Virginia, converted four 35-foot Airstream trailers into MQFs, delivering the first unit in March 1968 and the last three in the spring of 1969. The first unit was used extensively for testing, with lessons learned incorporated into the later models. On Jan. 21, 1969, the first MQF was loaded aboard a U.S. Air Force C-141 cargo plane at Ellington Air Force Base near the MSC and flown to the Norfolk Naval Air Station in Norfolk, Virginia. Six recovery specialists from the MSC spent 10 days inside the MQF, first aboard the helicopter landing-platform USS Guadalcanal and then the destroyer USS Fox, including attaching a flexible tunnel to a mockup of an Apollo Command Module. The overall exercise was a rehearsal to test all MQF systems aboard ships and aircraft as would be done during recovery operations after a lunar landing mission.