To be fair to NASA there are some good reasons to have used a carrier battle group. First, it's a strong deterrent against interference, from either the Soviets, proxy forces, terrorists, or some independent 3rd party (pirates?).
Second, it's handy to have 1st world medical care available immediately just in case. If a bad landing caused severe trauma, burns, or what-have-you, or if an emergency appendectomy was needed then care would be right at hand.
Third, speed of recovery was important, which meant big ol' helicopters, which means aircraft carriers.
Fourth, a worst case scenario survivable landing could involve the capsule landing significantly out of the drop zone, causing injury to the crew (partial chute failure, very hard landing), and sinking forcing the crew to evacuate the capsule. Potentially all without radio contact. In that scenario you'd want to be able to mount a robust search and rescue operation, which is just the sort of thing that a carrier battle group excels at.
With more experience, less geopolitical pressure, and more capable spacecraft we can ratchet that response way down, but it wasn't entirely unjustified at the time.
Edit: Case in point, the 2nd ever manned flight in the US (sub-orbital even) Liberty Bell 7 had the capsule sink and the astronaut, Gus Grissom, swimming without much assistance in the open ocean. If recovery had taken much longer (even by minutes) it's likely he would have drowned. That set the tone for the later recovery operations.
Just a nitpick; you have to have your appendix taken out to travel to Antarctica, so I highly doubt they're sending up astronauts without having the procedure done!
In 1961, this wasn't the case, and a surgeon was forced to operate on himself:
I found it kind of amazing that it is actually so hard to find information on this sort of thing. You would think there would be some checklist somewhere for "I am going to the Antarctic" or "I am going into Space", but no such luck.
Your statement was right at one point, it is just outdated and its not like updates show up in the air. hmm... a push new facts services on subjects I care about hmmm....
Makes me wonder: what system was in place in the time of the Apollo missions for determining the exact location of a reentering spacecraft? Was it just, "here's the probable drop zone, commence search-and-rescue"? I imagine GPS would make that a lot easier.
"Makes me wonder: what system was in place in the time of the Apollo missions for determining the exact location of a reentering spacecraft?"
The system was called the Apollo Unified S-Band System. For further reading, this document describes the various telemetry parameters, operating spectrums and transmission details:
This is a nice resource as well. Don't miss the articles at the bottom of the page from CQ that discuss the system. The Proceedings of the Apollo Unified S-Band Technical Conference document is definitely worth your time (it's also at the bottom of the page).
Second, it's handy to have 1st world medical care available immediately just in case. If a bad landing caused severe trauma, burns, or what-have-you, or if an emergency appendectomy was needed then care would be right at hand.
Third, speed of recovery was important, which meant big ol' helicopters, which means aircraft carriers.
Fourth, a worst case scenario survivable landing could involve the capsule landing significantly out of the drop zone, causing injury to the crew (partial chute failure, very hard landing), and sinking forcing the crew to evacuate the capsule. Potentially all without radio contact. In that scenario you'd want to be able to mount a robust search and rescue operation, which is just the sort of thing that a carrier battle group excels at.
With more experience, less geopolitical pressure, and more capable spacecraft we can ratchet that response way down, but it wasn't entirely unjustified at the time.
Edit: Case in point, the 2nd ever manned flight in the US (sub-orbital even) Liberty Bell 7 had the capsule sink and the astronaut, Gus Grissom, swimming without much assistance in the open ocean. If recovery had taken much longer (even by minutes) it's likely he would have drowned. That set the tone for the later recovery operations.