Apollo 11 splashed down 950 miles southwest of Hawaii

Apollo 11’s command module Columbia splashed down in the Pacific Ocean about 950 miles southwest of Hawaii on July 24, 1969, 195 hours and 18 minutes after liftoff, ending the first crewed Moon landing mission.

It did not come down where it was first meant to, and once it was down, fear of unknown lunar microbes shaped everything that followed.

From splashdown to release

• The day before: flight managers moved the target 250 miles to the northeast because of bad weather at the original recovery site.
• Reentry: Columbia’s computer used the capsule’s lift to fly a small skip manoeuvre that stretched its path over the storm. Overcast skies stopped the carrier USS Hornet from navigating by the stars, so it reached the new spot by dead reckoning and was still 13 miles away at splashdown.
• July 24, in the water: Columbia landed upside down, apex pointing into the sea in what NASA calls the Stable 2 position, until three flotation bags inflated and righted it within minutes. Decontamination officer Clancy Hatleberg passed Biological Isolation Garments through the briefly opened hatch, and Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin climbed out into a raft, where he wiped them down with sodium hypochlorite solution and sprayed the capsule with Betadine.
• Aboard Hornet: they went straight into a sealed Mobile Quarantine Facility, where President Richard Nixon welcomed them from outside.
• Two days later: still sealed in, they reached the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston.
• Three weeks on: the quarantine ended 21 days after their first exposure to lunar material, long enough that Armstrong spent his 39th birthday inside.

Tests on the crew and on lunar samples found no sign of lunar organisms. Only three Moon crews were ever quarantined: those of Apollo 11, 12 and 14.