What are Some of the Possible Positive/Negative Outcomes of this Kind of Outbreak on Human's Present and Future History?

Space Craft Sanitization

• 1967, most nations sign the Outer Space Treaty, which among other things, made nations responsible for any damage they do to celestial bodies, including infection. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty)
• Committee on Space Research  is created in 1958, establishes different classes of space missions, with different required sterilization standards    (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection)

• Clean Rooms, heat, chemicals, and radiation are commonly used today
• Low-temp vaporized hydrogen peroxide treatment in development
• The Apollo missions used a quarantine system, using low pressure filtered air in a trailer until tests could be conducted on personnel or samples. This was considered effective, but if a contagion went unnoticed, there would be nothing to kill it or contain it after quarantine.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Quarantine_Facility)

• Reentry typically effectively sterilizes external of spacecraft, but not completely and does not affect inside.
• The Extra-terrestrial exposure law gave NASA the ability to quarantine people or items that have been in direct contact with or inside the atmospheric envelope of another celestial body, or in direct contact with another of such items. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra-Terrestrial_Exposure_Law)

The Risk Taken

The Project Scoop had potential to bring in knowledge of outer space life, and new biological agents promising to the human race, but the project also could have brought back a deadly virus that could wipe out the human race.  In The Andromeda Strain, the risk was taken, and it almost cost the lives of millions of people.  If the building did explode, the andromeda strain would have multiplied in the energy from the explosion and spread throughout the world, faster than it could be combatted.