The Apollo Quarantine

The first people back from the Moon spent most of a three-week quarantine in a sealed building at the Manned Spacecraft Center, in case they had brought something home. The Lunar Receiving Laboratory, Building 37, was begun in August 1966 to guard against what NASA called back-contamination of the Earth by lunar microorganisms. It held crew quarters, vacuum and sample laboratories and a radiation counting lab built 50 feet underground. The Apollo 11 crew reached Ellington Air Force Base at about two in the morning on 27 July 1969, still inside the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a converted trailer they had boarded on the recovery ship. Their families talked with them by telephone and saw them through its windows. The trailer went by flatbed truck to the laboratory, where Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins stayed until 10 August. The first lunar samples had arrived two days before them, and the command module Columbia followed on 31 July.

Apollo 12 and Apollo 14 crews went through the same 21 days. Nothing was ever found, and from Apollo 15 on the quarantine was dropped. The laboratory closed in 1973 and the samples moved to Building 31; since about 1979 they have been kept in the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility, Building 31N, which holds the 842 pounds of rock and soil the Apollo crews brought back.

Building 37 became a life sciences laboratory and has since been demolished. On 25 March 2026 NASA dedicated a Lunar Receiving Park on its footprint, with the building's original high-bay doors and sign and flower beds laid out in a grid that marks where the astronauts' living quarters were divided. It sits inside the badged campus and is not open to the public.