Whatever was in place after the crew returned home, with or without moon bugs, NASA would at least look prepared to the rest of the world. A quarantine of the astronauts would also portray an image to outsiders that NASA was prepared for anything (besides there was the outside chance that something could come back with them). Even the crew of Apollo 11 agreed that there was little chance of bringing back "moon bugs" that would infect the earth, but understood the political necessity of quarantine.
So then, well before the crew of Apollo 11 began preparing for the first lunar landing mission, people at NASA were preparing a system to insure that the astronauts were successfully quarantined after their lunar mission. The quarantine system that was in place by the conclusion of the flight of Apollo 11 was the best NASA could install with the money and time they were afforded. Paramount though, before the quarantine, was the safety of the crew during this process.
The following is the system that the ICBC developed and the system NASA put into place. After splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, had just ended a successful trip to the moon. Soon after splashdown, the hatch to the Apollo 11 capsule was opened, since it was floating in the sea any organisms that may have been brought back from the moon now had direct access to the open air on the surface of the largest ocean in the world. This was acceptable, however, because it was estimated that the environmental control system on board Apollo 11 filtered out any contaminants inside the capsule. If there were lunar organisms on board, they would most likely be inside of the crew. The idea of an alien virus--one that developed on a completely different evolutionary system than earth's--infecting the crew in a few days on the return trip was found to be theoretically impossible. Besides, if this happened there was the possibility that the crew would show signs of illness before reentry. There was talk early on of having the crew stay inside the capsule until it was hoisted on to its recovery ship, an aircraft carrier called the USS Hornet, but there was risk that the crew could be injured during the transfer. While the crew was shutting down their spacecraft and preparing for egress, frogmen diligently swabbed down Apollo 11 with a disinfectant called Betadine (an organic iodine solution). The crew then donned special biological containment garments (called BIG's) that sealed them off from the outside world. These special suits could not be stowed inside of Apollo 11 because they weighed too much (if this was really a critical issue planners would have made weight allowances so they could be stowed inside the capsule and then put on by the astronauts while still sealed inside). The astronauts were then scrubbed down with Betadine by frogmen. After a short helicopter ride to USS Hornet, they briskly walked into a specially designed self-sustaining Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) that was built around the shell of a Streamline recreational vehicle without wheels. While the trip to the moon and back was over, another more tedious trip was just beginning.
