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[i]There are several weaknesses in the system. First of all, the spacecraft, having been linked to the lunar module, the lunar module was on the surface of the Moon. So we had to rule that out, and the thought processes there were that the heat of reentry would possibly destroy anything that was coming back on the exterior of the spacecraft, which seemed logical. Or if when it landed into the water, the dilution factor of the ocean was another backup to the heat of reentry. But the spacecraft vented in the air. So there wasn't anything we could do about that, except when the pararescue men got there and put the collar — you know what I'm talking about on this flotation collar that we put around all the spacecraft — and that was put on, a lot of people say, "Well, that was put on so it didn't sink." Well, it was put on primarily to give the pararescue men a platform to work from to assist astronauts out of the spacecraft. So the pararescue men put the collar around the spacecraft, and they had tanks of betadyne, and they sprayed the entire top deck of the Apollo spacecraft to decontaminate it, because that's where the ventilators were. Then a weakness in the system here, one of the pararescue men — I call them pararescue men, these were Navy people, UDT, frogmen — opened the hatch and threw in what we called "the bag of BIGs," the bag of biological isolation garment. So here again, you open the hatch. What else are you going to do? We went through these processes with this Interagency Committee and got their approval, and we challenged anybody, "If you can think of something else, have at it."[/i]
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