The Apollo 11 astronauts spent approximately 21 days inside the LRL. It took them about a week to write their official pilots report and then another week to talk with engineers about the performance of the Saturn V rocket and the Apollo spacecraft. In between all of this they talked to family members by phone or through a glass window, watched TV or movies and played pool or table tennis. The LRL was even equipped for minor surgery should an emergency arise. However, it was decided early on that if a life-threatening event occurred while in quarantine it would be broken and the person would be taken to a hospital. A few days into the quarantine at the LRL the astronauts were joined by three technicians who were "contaminated" by moon dust when gloves they were using in a vacuum chamber were exposed to samples. Like the rest of the people in the LRL they showed no ill effects. Neither did any animals or plants that were exposed to the lunar samples. On Sunday August 10 after almost a month of being inside a sealed compartment of some size the astronauts were released into the world.
The next lunar mission, Apollo 12 would follow basically the same procedure. Although, there were a few changes now that NASA realized that lunar germs probably did not exist. For instance, the crew did not have to wear BIG's once they left their capsule after splashdown. Instead they wore clean flight suits and a small respirator. They were also released about 36 hours earlier than expected from the LRL because there was no need for them to stay any longer. There simply was no danger.
With the mission of Apollo 12, however, came one of the biggest surprises of the Apollo missions. The primary object of the mission was to show that a crew could land the Lunar Module in a precise place. The literal "X" on the map was a small lunar probe called Surveyor III that had landed on the moon in 1967. Amazingly, only 2 years late on Apollo 12, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, landed a craft called Intrepid a few hundred feet from Surveyor III. When they walked over to the probe, they snapped off a small part of it so that it could be analyzed back on earth. What scientists found when they examined it must have given them a momentary shutter of excitement. When they analyzed the pieces of Surveyor III they found life. Had they found life on the moon? The answer was remarkable but less exciting. A few years before a technician, who had probably had a cold, coughed on Surveyor III before it was launched. The germs from his cough then attached themselves to Surveyor III. During the nearly 250,000 mile trip, through intense radiation and absolute zero cold, the streptococcus mitus germ survived. Even after sitting on the harsh conditions of the moon for almost two years the germ had managed to survive. The findings were less amazing than the discovery of life on another planet, but surely a testament to the strength and wonder of organisms here on earth.
