The Orion capsule from Artemis 1 a few months ago

The stardust spacecraft travelled farther, but only a return capsule came back.

We actually understood a lot about how viruses are transmitted at the time.

Those countermeasures we now think unnecessary at the time we’re necessary. Ineffective but necessary. Covid was a new disease killing a lot of people. We didn’t have enough knowledge about it so it was safer to overestimate safety measures. Like if we took every countermeasure for every kind of virus, then we know it’s airborne, so we take a step back to only those effective to airborne viruses. We dropped countermeasures as we discovered more about that specific virus behavior, but in general it’s within what we already knew about transmission.