As NASA rolled the mega moon rocket to the launchpad Thursday night, the astronauts preparing to ride it watched the spectacle from screens in their quarantine facility.
As of Wednesday evening, the Artemis II crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen — reported to Johnson Space Center in Houston to begin their mandatory two-week isolation.
It’s a milestone moment for any space mission, but one the foursome has already experienced twice before for launch dates that came and went. Mission managers have been trying to launch the 10-day lunar voyage since February, but crews keep finding problems requiring repairs. Now they’re shooting for a launch window that begins April 1.
No one yet knows whether the third quarantine is the charm for Artemis II, but the policy protects the crew and their spaceflight from being derailed by everyday germs. After all, Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen will share extremely tight quarters in a sealed spacecraft as they journey around the moon. The Orion capsule, which they’ve named Integrity, is about the size of a studio apartment. Even a mild virus could spread quickly among them.
“We choose to isolate the crew for 14 days before a launch because most infectious diseases take 10 to 14 days to be transferred from one person to another,” said Dr. Raffi Kuyumjian, the Canadian Space Agency’s flight surgeon, in a video.
Medical teams test astronauts when they enter quarantine and again just before liftoff to try to catch any warning signs of illness.
If the idea of that long isolation sounds bleak, know that the quarantine rarely involves astronauts alone. Medical staff, support crews, and technicians who work closely with them often join the protective bubble so they don’t pass anything on either. Family members may also join.
NASA quarantine history
Agency policies have come a long way since the Apollo era. Astronauts used to have to go into quarantine before and after returning from the moon. Those pioneers would remain isolated and monitored for 21 days after splashing down on Earth, in case they had been exposed to any microorganisms in the lunar environment.
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Their Mobile Quarantine Facility was made out of a modified Airstream camper. The vehicle was carefully filtered so that it couldn’t vent anything harmful into the air.
It wasn’t until 1971 that NASA ended the post-flight quarantine procedures, following a recommendation from the Interagency Committee on Back Contamination.
NASA discontinued using the modified Airstream campers as post-flight quarantine facilities after Apollo 14.
Credit: NASA
The Artemis 2 crew quarantine
A week before launch, the crew will move to group facilities at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for the final stretch of quarantine. There they keep training but mainly focus on relaxing. They run through last checklists, sit down with flight directors for final briefings, and complete their last medical exams. They also spend what time they can with family before heading to the launchpad.
“They need to be well-rested because the mission will be very busy,” Dr. Kuyumjian said.
But the quarantine is really just one layer of defense to protect crew health. The astronauts and support staff receive vaccines, such as for the flu and COVID-19, to lower the risk of those viruses boarding the spacecraft.
Launch delays can complicate the system. If the schedule slips by a day or two, astronauts generally stay in quarantine until the new launch time. But if a mission is pushed back by several weeks or longer, they come out of quarantine and then start a fresh 14-day isolation before the next attempt.
On the rare occasions when someone has gotten sick in quarantine, it has usually involved mild respiratory infections that did not end up changing the mission. Only if the illness is serious do mission leaders consider delaying the launch or swapping astronauts.
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That’s an option rarely used, though Jack Swigert is a famous example of a last-minute substitute for Apollo 13. Just three days before the mission, NASA pulled astronaut Thomas Mattingly from the mission because of his exposure to the German measles. As history would show, Mattingly never ended up getting sick — but also didn’t end up on that ill-fated flight, which nearly killed the crew.
“It didn’t take an awful long time for me to get rid of my hostility for doctors,” Mattingly said in a 2001 oral history project interview. “They [had] done me a really good favor.”
