Right. At some point gelatin as film base crept into the discussion. Traditional film base would be cellulose?
Cellulose acetate. By the 1990s Kodak was using mostly polyester. The base used for Apollo was thinbase, which had been used in aerial spy cameras and wasn't generally commercially available. It's amazingly thin, like cling wrap. We had some U-2 cameras at the museum that still had some thinroll in them. (They came with the U-2.) But when we sent the cameras off to be conserved they came back without the film. I didn't have a chance to grab any.
And it's the silver salts in the emulsion that respond to the UV...
To be sure, UV will affect the film
as it's being exposed—as in, through the lens. That's a problem in more modern photography with higher-speed film. On Earth we solve it by using UV filters. I habitually keep on on my lenses all the time. For Apollo photography with its slower reversal film, the effect is manifest mostly in a blue tint shift. The process is already formulated to correct for terrestrially-occurring UV. You just alter it to accommodate more UV for space use. This is akin to the way film used to be formulated differently for the color temperatures of artificial versus natural light. UV in space doesn't damage the film during the exposure. It just gives you undesirable colors.
The emulsion medium is "organic" only in the sense that it's a gelatin made of the same kind of hydrolyzed collagen that glue and Jell-O are made from: cow hooves. You add things to make it temperature stable. You let it outgas in a vacuum first if you're going to use it in space. But at the end of the process it hardly matters that it started out as an animal fingernail protein. It's no more susceptible to—or damaged by—radiation (of all kinds) than a sheet of paper.
Living organic tissue is another matter. That has to be protected from radiation for the obvious reason of protecting its role in biological processes. The kind of protection required depends on the kind and amount of radiation.
The use of animal-derived products in high-tech applications is ultimately responsible for the apparent loss of the Apollo 11 telemetry tapes. The binder on the Memorex telemetry tapes incorporated sperm whale oil to lubricate the tape's passage through the mechanism. Telemetry recorders run at a very high speed compared to audio recorders. Surprisingly there was no synthetic alternative. Attempts to formulate one resulting in gumming up—hydrolysis—that whale oil doesn't do. Yes, the space program ran on whale oil.
Beginning in the 1970s, the increased attention paid to sustainability and animal rights meant solving the hydrolysis problem. Memorex had solved it for slower audio tape. They
believed they had solved it for high-speed telemetry tape. Testing by NASA proved them wrong, however. This created a crisis as other space missions were in progress and needed tape to record the real-time data being sent back. This forced NASA to have to reuse Apollo-era tapes (the whale oil ones). Only later did they discover they had most probably recorded over Apollo 11's telemetry. Ordinarily that would be no great loss, as telemetry is about as exciting as watching paint dry, and all the engineeringly-interesting bits had been copied out to paper strip charts anyway. But in Apollo 11's case, the television signal was embedded in the telemetry. Recently we've been able to read some old telemetry tapes and use digital techniques to eke more signal out of the analog recording. With much sadness we realize we could have extracted the original television signal and cleaned it up.
But the larger lesson is that high-tech chemical engineering and materials science is forever playing catch-up. Sometimes nature provides, and we should respect that.