What were the total mission radiation doses for each Apollo lunar mission and how did they compare to Apollo 14?

1. What the historical record reliably reports about Apollo doses

NASA’s mission report for Apollo 14 gives net integrated personal dosimeter readings and concludes the three crewmen received roughly 1.15 rads to the skin and about 0.6 rad at 5 cm tissue depth — the largest observed on any Apollo mission — and explicitly states these were well below thresholds for detectable medical effects ^[2]. Summaries compiled after the fact put Apollo 14’s crew-averaged skin dose at 1.14 rads and note that the nine lunar missions’ crew-averaged skin doses ranged from 0.16 rads (Apollo 8) up to that Apollo 14 maximum, with an overall nine‑mission average around 0.46 rads ^[1].

2. How those rads translate into modern units and headlines

Contemporary summaries and science writers convert the historical “rad” values into SI and public-health friendly numbers: 1.14 rads is about 0.0114 Gy and, for the mixed low-LET particle spectrum encountered on Apollo, rough equivalent-dose conversions give roughly 0.02 Sv or ≈11.4 mSv — a number repeated in a few modern treatments ^{[4] [5]}. Reported mission-average skin doses for Apollo crews in popular accounts are often framed by comparison — the Apollo average skin dose has been reported as ~0.38–0.46 rad, roughly comparable to a couple of diagnostic CT scans in terrestrial medicine — but Apollo 14 remains the outlier at ~1.14 rads ^{[6] [1]}.

3. Gaps, measurement types, and why exact per-mission lists are messy

Different dosimetry systems (personal radiation dosimeters, helmet or module detectors, track-etch plates) and differing endpoints (skin dose vs. 5‑cm deep dose vs. effective dose) produce non-identical numbers; some studies report millirad or mGy figures that require conversion and quality‑factor assumptions, and some modern simulations re-evaluating the data produce different organ- or detector‑specific values ^{[7] [3] [8]}. The sources consulted give clear maxima and minima and averages (e.g., Apollo 8 ≈0.16 rad; Apollo 11 ≈0.18 rad in some records; Apollo 14 ≈1.14–1.15 rads) but do not provide a single authoritative, consistently-normalized table of total mission doses for each lunar flight in one place ^{[1] [9] [2] [3]}.

4. Why Apollo 14 was higher and what that means operationally

Analysts attribute Apollo 14’s higher measured skin dose in part to its specific transit geometry through the Van Allen belts and to solar-cycle modulation of galactic cosmic rays; mission reports and later analyses emphasize that no large solar particle events occurred and that most mission dose accumulated during belt transit rather than on the lunar surface ^{[1] [10]}. Even so, the measured level (~1.14 rads / ~11.4 mSv) was judged by NASA to be “well below” thresholds for acute radiation sickness and thus not an operational hazard for that mission ^{[2] [11]}.

5. How researchers and journalists should treat the numbers

The historical dataset is robust enough to state that Apollo 14 recorded the highest crew-averaged skin dose among the lunar missions (~1.14–1.15 rads) and that most other missions had substantially lower integrated skin doses (typical values near a few tenths of a rad) ^{[1] [2]}. At the same time, reconstructions and modern simulations sometimes report organ‑specific or detector‑specific doses in mGy or mSv that differ by an order of magnitude depending on assumptions, so comparisons must note which dose metric is in play (skin vs. deep tissue vs. effective dose) and which instrument produced the reading ^{[3] [7]}.