Eight days, three hours, and eighteen minutes after launch, the Apollo 11 capsule splashed down 900 miles southwest of Hawaii. Navy divers from the USS Hornet retrieved Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, who were immediately placed in quarantine for fear of lunar contamination. President Nixon watched the recovery from the carrier's deck.
The astronauts endured a fiery re-entry at nearly 25,000 miles per hour before three orange-and-white parachutes bloomed against the sky and the capsule dropped into the Pacific eight days after leaving Cape Kennedy. Waiting below was the USS Hornet, where President Richard Nixon stood on deck to greet the crew, calling it 'the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation.'
Because NASA scientists could not rule out the possibility of lunar microbes, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins were sealed inside a Mobile Quarantine Facility—essentially an Airstream trailer—for the trip back to Houston, where they would spend three weeks in isolation. They waved to cheering sailors through a small window, grinning behind glass, unable to touch solid ground until the medical all-clear came. The precaution turned out to be unnecessary, but it captured the eerie uncertainty of an era when humans had just walked somewhere no one had walked before.
Key people: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Richard Nixon