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The following image shows the Boeing X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) - 4, after landing at the Shuttle Landing Facility, Kennedy Space Center:

enter image description here

Why are these people wearing a white coloured suit (which looks like a radiation protection suit used in nuclear power plants) near the X37-B? After a quick search, I came to know these are SCAPE (Self Contained Atmospheric Protective Ensemble) suits, a type of Hazmat Suit, but in a totally different context (In that Wikipedia webpage, NASA technicians were wearing these to fuel a spacecraft). I didn't actually see rescue crew wearing these suits for Soyuz, Crew-Dragon (DM-1) landings (Sorry, I didn't notice this in Shuttle Landings). So what is the reason for this and why don't we see the crew wearing these kinds of suits during other landings?

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The answer is given in your link: "This was reportedly changed to a hypergolic nitrogen-tetroxide/hydrazine propulsion system."

Hydrazine is toxic and carcinogenic. But this hypergolic non-cryogenic storable fuel is very often used for orbital maneuvering of manned and unmanned systems. Mission durations of years are possible.

Apollo used hydrazin in the CM, SM and LM, the Gemini spacecraft and the Shuttle too. Protective suits were worn during tanking and removing residuals after landing.

Wearing protective suits when handling hydrazine is state of the art, so it should be done for all newer spacecrafts. But the astronauts do not handle hydrazine, it is done by specialized ground crew persons.

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    $\begingroup$ Ground crew on airports who handle kerosene typically wear oil-resistant gloves. Pilots, passengers and other ground crew typically don't. Why? Because they don't manipulate/handle the fuel systems. $\endgroup$
    – Dohn Joe
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 13:00
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    $\begingroup$ Astronauts were not supposed to be exposed due to very careful design but believe fumes from hydrazine caused this nytimes.com/1975/07/26/archives/… It is not awesome stuff to work with $\endgroup$
    – GremlinWranger
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 13:07
  • $\begingroup$ For more fun working with hydrazine see the book command and control on this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion or the work of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_recovery_convoy $\endgroup$
    – GremlinWranger
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 13:14
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    $\begingroup$ @GremlinWranger It may have been nitrogen tetroxide and not hydrazine in 1975. $\endgroup$
    – Uwe
    Commented Oct 24, 2019 at 17:55
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Ground crews first approaching the shuttle after landing wore similar gear and used a propellant fume detector on an extendible arm. No fumes detected they could back off and team to extract crew got to work. Later the first team would gear up and detank any residuals but was seldom caught on camera as attention was always on the astronauts.

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