My father was one of the scientific Principal Investigators (PIs) who analyzed the Apollo 11 lunar samples, back in 1969. Flipping through some of his notes from back then, it sounds as if a rotating assortment of bureaucrats injected themselves into the chain-of-custody with weird and embarrassing effects. To wit:
Some Agriculture Department folks decided that their legal authority to quarantine soil samples brought into the U.S. applied to lunar soils, too. They insisted on building a three-week quarantine facility with slivers of lunar samples, exposed to "germ-free mice born by cesarean section." Only after the mice survived this ordeal was it safe to release the fuller batch of samples.
Another character insisted that the aluminum rock boxes be sealed, while on the moon, with gaskets of indium (soft, rare metal) which would deform to create a very tight seal. The geochemists on earth protested, in vain, that this procedure would ruin their hopes of doing any indium analysis of the samples themselves, shutting down an interesting line of research. No luck in changing the protocol. Turns out that the indium seals didn't work, and the rock boxes reached the earth-based quarantine facilities with normal air pressure anyway.
There's more silliness about trying to keep the lunar samples in a hard vacuum while designing rigidly mounted gloves that could be used to manipulate/slice/divide the samples without breaking the vacuum. Maybe we know today how to sustain flexible gloves in such an environment. We didn't, back then.
dmix · 2h ago
> They insisted on building a three-week quarantine facility with slivers of lunar samples
There was a ton of money flowing in for space and it was the big new thing of the future. Makes sense other agencies would try to insert themselves and try to seem relevant to the new popular thing in the news and latch themselves onto any future spending/authority.
cgriswald · 5h ago
The actual claims of the paper are not that this was 'for show', but that NASA considered the risks unlikely and prioritized the more likely risks to the astronauts lives. I see how the authors got to 'so it was all for show', but it simply isn't true.
There is plenty of evidence that the risk was taken seriously (regulations and treaties surrounding the issue, ICBC activities in the years prior to launch, the expense on things the public would never have known about, medical and biological testing done for the first three missions, NASA's openness with the ICBC about the imperfection of the system and the existence of contingency plans...).
nickff · 5h ago
On one of the Apollo documentaries (I can't remember which one), the astronauts joked that it was the least effective quarantine ever; they talked about how there was a stream of ants going in and out of the Airstream they were in.
dmix · 2h ago
They quarantined in an Airstream van? That's hilarious. Very 1960s
A stream of ants would not necessarily render a quarintine ineffective.
ben_w · 4h ago
If you're protecting against the possibility of an unknown hypothetical pathogen that can survive on the moon, but which you have no specific reason to think favours or disfavours any randomly selected Earth life, you want something that can at the very least stop ants.
jeremyjh · 1h ago
That’s right, it made it completely a joke.
joezydeco · 4h ago
Seems incongruous to take your national heroes and make them sit in a hot trailer for a few days "for show" instead of whisking them home for their debrief and ticker-tape parades.
Unless it was not for the benefit of the astronauts, but the skeptical public back home? Hmm.
tsimionescu · 4h ago
A quarantine is never for the sake of those you quarantine, it's for the sake of the public, by definition.
scottyah · 2h ago
I assume the "hot trailer" was better than the small capsule in space, which was also just "for show".
gmueckl · 5h ago
I see that customs declaration in the context of the Outer Space Treaty from 1967. It stipulates that outer space cannot be appropriated by by any nation. My hypothesis here is that the political message underneath this customs form stunt is an acknowledgement that the crew has left the United States and returned. However, I have nothing that supports this claim.
umanwizard · 5h ago
Do US Navy sailors in international waters have to go through customs on returning to port in the US? I don’t know the answer, but that’s probably the closest analogy.
jcranmer · 4h ago
I don't think so, but you do need to fill out a customs form to ship a package to someone on a US Navy ship.
RandomBacon · 21m ago
If you're shipping the package from the U.S., that is incorrect.
I ordered Amazon packages addressed to me on U.S. Navy ships.
Ships have FPO addresses which are treated and formatted like a domestic ship.
kevin_thibedeau · 1h ago
I met an AF cargo loadmaster once who told me that they can smuggle anything back to the US that they can fit in the plane. He was importing E-bikes from Japan.
ofalkaed · 3h ago
No, not even civilians need to do that. Ultimately the only time you have to is when there is documentation of your being in the a foreign country and if there is no documentation you probably don't want to draw attention to yourself. This is why so many people where able to go to and from Cuba when it was technically illegal, US and Cuba agreed to not document/stamp the passports of private citizens.
umanwizard · 2h ago
It is still technically illegal to go to Cuba without a specific whitelisted reason (and tourism isn’t on the list). It’s just not strictly enforced.
ofalkaed · 1h ago
So it is not illegal? you just need to go through the proper bureaucracy as you do with every countries. Last I looked into it a few years back it was easy to get the paper work, one person I found who went there just signed up for guitar lessons in Havana to study Cuban guitar, showed the paperwork for the guitar classes and was good to go because it was for educational reasons even if the guitar lessons only accounted for a tiny portion of their time there. The white listed reasons are fairly broad and easy to work within, sure you can't just hop on a plane for a weekend visit but that is true of many countries that no one would say it is illegal to go to.
umanwizard · 40m ago
The point is nothing has changed about the legality. It has always been allowed to go for one of these whitelisted reasons, you just had to apply in advance.
Now it is still legal to go for exactly the same set of reasons, they just don't bother actually checking. There's no "paperwork" you need to get; you just tell the check-in agent which legal reason you fall under.
csours · 5h ago
Following this line of thought - this is may be the exact analogy that NASA wanted to counteract.
umanwizard · 4h ago
Why? What's the difference between a US spacecraft in international space and a US watercraft in international waters?
quartz · 4h ago
Since the astronauts were up there planting flags... I'd think it's less about the vessel in space and more about making it clear that the land visited isn't considered claimed as part of the US.
nrb · 4h ago
If the distinction is that the US watercraft are military and as such are not subject to customs, then making it clear that returning astronauts are not on a military mission sends a diplomatic signal.
csours · 4h ago
NASA wants space to feel non-militarized.
US Service Personnel don't follow the civilian process for Customs, so making astronauts actually follow the civilian process reinforces the non-militarized feeling for space.
agagagag · 4h ago
Of course not, if we did they’d find my dog I bought in Vietnam
jki275 · 3h ago
If we make port calls anywhere outside the US we definitely go through customs on return.
bongodongobob · 3h ago
I don't think so because the ship is technically US soil afaik.
CobrastanJorji · 4h ago
It's funny. You want to blame NASA for the ridiculous publicity stunts, but they were totally right that a loss of public interest was one of the biggest risks to the program. Neil Armstrong stood on the moon in 1969, but by 1971, Nixon had cancelled Apollo.
jeremyjh · 1h ago
Because it was done. The goal was to win the race against the Soviets. The future mission plans were mostly budget padding to ensure that was accomplished.
shayway · 5h ago
The source paper for both articles is paywalled, so maybe it has a better argument than the articles. But to call it theater or a publicity stunt is to imply it didn't have a point beyond public relations, which isn't the case.
Microbes can't be completely contained - easily, anyway - and we knew that perfectly well back then. But we also knew to minimize contact with potentially infected people. Put it this way: if there were lunar germs that the astronauts took back with them, would it have been better to skip the containment procedures, as inadequate as they may have been? Of course not.
NASA played up their ability to contain extraterrestrial microbes for sure. But the containment procedure itself was the best that could be done. If 'absolute isolation' is the bar to which containment is held, by that logic everything short of just not visiting other celestial bodies is theater.
xattt · 3h ago
I can imagine a bunch of short-sleeve wearing dudes, sitting around and shooting the shit to come up with absurd formalities for theatre. It would have been fun.
montjoy · 6h ago
This. Also, maybe setting legal precedent?
refulgentis · 6h ago
No. They're saying it was a stunt. Not setting legal precedent. There was no practical value.
"modern passport not existing in past" ≠ "free human movement"
borders have largely had guards, who had no obligation to let people through, or even to treat them fairly and not rob them. frontiers had bandits who existed solely to prey on travelers.
even if you could move to a different settlement, you did not have the same legal rights as citizens of that city.
the "modern passport" has done more for free human movement than anything that came before.
csomar · 5h ago
Cities had guards. There was no border pre-1900 because there was no tech to enforce it. If you moved from one place to another, you were mostly at the whims of thieves and pirates.
Alupis · 5h ago
Pre-1900? Are you aware of how many wars were fought around the world just in the 1800's regarding border and territory disputes?
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 5h ago
Insanely misinformed.
What kind of tech do you imagine is needed? Have you heard of Hadrian's Wall? The Great Wall of China?
Or more generally: forts, outposts, coastal batteries, scouts, patrols?
9rx · 3h ago
> What kind of tech do you imagine is needed?
Agriculture, at very least. Before we created that tech you'd be way too busy trying to find something to eat to have time to stand around defending artificial borders. 1900 BCE mightn't be perfectly accurate, but close enough for a stupid comment on the internet.
codetrotter · 3h ago
> 1900 BCE
Nothing in the comment that we are talking about indicates that "pre-1900" is referring to 1900 BCE. It sounds squarely like it's referring to 1900 AD to me. Which is why people are saying it's ridiculous.
9rx · 3h ago
> It sounds squarely like it's referring to 1900 AD to me.
What part of "If you moved from one place to another, you were mostly at the whims of thieves and pirates." suggests 1900 CE to you? Have you never looked at a history book?
codetrotter · 2h ago
There was plenty of pirates around still in the 1800s AD. Aka "pre-1900" AD.
There are still plenty of pirates around to this very day; a "significant issue" according to your own link. Despite that, the aforementioned statement doesn't make me think it has anything to do with today. What, specifically, makes you think it has something to do with the time leading up to 1900 CE rather than 1900 BCE?
codetrotter · 2h ago
> What, specifically, makes you think it has something to do with the time leading up to 1900 CE rather than 1900 BCE
Normally when someone says "1900" they are referring to 1900 AD. Unless BCE had already been mentioned, which here it had not. And if they were referring to 1900 BCE they normally would specifically say 1900 BCE. That's why.
And furthermore, the parent comment above the one talking about "pre-1900" was talking about modern passports. Why would anyone immediately jump from modern passports to 1900 BCE? That don't make no sense at all. Jumping to 1900 AD however, that does make sense. You see?
9rx · 2h ago
Absent of any other context one might reasonably assume "1990" Refers to 1900 CE. But we have additional context, such as:
"Cities had guards.", "you were mostly at the whims of thieves and pirates."
What in that speaks to 1900 CE over 1900 BCE? There is evidence of pirates in both time periods, so that feature alone isn't telling. But the context doesn't end with that feature in a vacuum, does it?
joecool1029 · 4h ago
Do you think they will be shocked to find out color wasn't invented in the 1900's?
bigfishrunning · 2h ago
It has always existed in the merry old land of Oz.
refulgentis · 5h ago
Purple prose tripe re: some personal hobbyhorse masquerading as relevant commentary. Their obvious plan to subjugate hasn't come to fruition 50 years later, so its time to adjust your priors.
whycome · 6h ago
What aspect of the review suggested that it was mostly for show?
stronglikedan · 5h ago
Considering the source, the source is probably the only thing that "suggested" it, as they are known to do.
cynicalkane · 5h ago
Are you claiming the New York Times is more likely than a comparable newspaper to fabricate random suggestions about astronauts? This is something they are "known to do"?
If you actually read the article, they include a direct link to the sources they cite and explain specifically what those sources say.
whycome · 4h ago
Okay I didn’t have access to paywalled article before.
The NYT article is about one specific study that’s a review of archival material. It doesn’t actually seem to suggest that it was a “publicity stunt” or “theater” as OP suggested. Rather, it says that NASA believed that the threat was very real. The threat was real enough to hold a “high level conference” (held by National Academy of Sciences). The outcome there was also that “the risk was real and the consequences could be profound”.
So, the major spending on the quarantine system wasn’t out of nowhere.
The study conclusion seems to be more that it would be nearly impossible to contain the threat if it existed. But, that wouldn’t mean that the precautions taken were only for show — just that it would be really fucking hard to stop. And with the hypothetical microbe, they couldn’t know anything about means of transmission or lifespan — so the precautions could have some value.
Even in the failure of their quarantine procedure, it still demonstrated that they thought it was (in principle) important:
“24 workers were exposed to the lunar material that the facility’s infrastructure was supposed to protect them from; they had to be quarantined”
It wasn’t security theater so much as it was just quarantine procedure that had many gaps, failures, and trade offs.
hammock · 6h ago
>These things were mainly publicity stunts. The supposed biohazard quarantine for returning Apollo astronauts was a theater performance, too.
Wow. What else about Apollo was theater performance?
AdamN · 5h ago
The expense report for mileage was another one. Kind of cute and an interesting insight into the time period but it wasn't really needed.
ta1243 · 5h ago
The entire thing was theater. It was to show off American technical superiority (the US having already lost the space race in terms of first sub-orbital flight, first satellite, first animal in orbit, first man in orbit, first spacecraft to the moon, first woman in space, first spacewalk etc)
pinkmuffinere · 6h ago
It feels as if this question is intended to make a strong implication, but I'm not sure what the implication is -- Can you clarify? I almost think you are suggesting the moon landing was fake, but that's very stereotypical, so I don't want to assume.
schneems · 5h ago
Not OP but: The very essence of the program was publicity. As soon as the public lost interest (mission accomplished!), the program was canceled. We built Saturn V rockets that we never launched.
That being said, I know a lot of things were unknown. We didn’t know if the surface of the moon would interact with the atmosphere inside the capsules to combust. Some of these unknowns were downplayed. Some others were played up for dramatic effect.
The whole process of getting a person to the moon took hundreds of thousands of involved workers and the. coordinated effort of a country’s politicians and populace to fund it. I think it’s unfair to boil it down to “just publicity” but it is a big part in keeping it afloat.
skeezyboy · 6h ago
allowing the "to be determined" answer sat at odds with the implied dilligency of the customs agency
refulgentis · 6h ago
Unlikely, it was a stunt.
smnrchrds · 7h ago
Semi-related:
"Passports please! British paratroopers met by French customs after D-Day airdrop
British paratroopers recreating an airdrop behind German defences to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day were met by French customs officials at a makeshift border checkpost.
Moments after the paratroopers had hit the ground and gathered up their chutes, they formed an orderly queue and handed over their passports for inspection by waiting French customs officials in a Normandy field."
> Lord West said: "It wasn't one of the best days in my time. I had a phone call from the military commander saying, 'Sir, I'm afraid something awful's happened.' I thought, 'Goodness me, what?' And he said, 'I'm afraid we've invaded Spain, but we don't think they've noticed.'
> "They charged up the beach in the normal way, being Royal Marines—they're frightfully good soldiers of course, and jolly good at this sort of thing—and confronted a Spanish fisherman who sort of pointed out, 'I think you're on the wrong beach.'
ahi · 5h ago
"Juan Carlos Juarez, the town's mayor, said at the time: "They landed on our coast to confront a supposed enemy with typical commando tactics. But we managed to hold them on the beach.""
I would not have been able to get this out without giggling.
medstrom · 6h ago
"First Sea Lord" is such a great rank.
pyuser583 · 6h ago
One of my favorite.
umanwizard · 5h ago
Swiss soldiers have accidentally crossed into Liechtenstein a few times. Similarly, nobody made a fuss.
skeezyboy · 6h ago
the british armed forces are atrocious. i simply cannot fathom how britain controlled so much of the planet at one point
lenkite · 5h ago
Because they had a good officer corps producing some ridiculous military geniuses in their age of empire. As an example, the Duke of Wellington (Arthur Wellesley) was a monster who was unstoppable in the military conquest of India. Many other British commanders failed battling Indian states, but he seemed to win just about every battle, at times being both outnumbered and outarmed.
I would go on to say that it wasn't for that man, it is likely the British conquest of India would have been confined to only a limited territory. Indian states were modernizing and militarizing rapidly (relatively for that era), so any delays in conquest would have made India a hard nut to crack.
bee_rider · 5h ago
This was 2002. They are friendly countries, seems like everyone responded appropriately.
bigyabai · 6h ago
> i simply cannot fathom how britain controlled so much of the planet at one point
Boats, optionally guns.
When you reflect on how easily America became an imperialist crybaby, it can't have been hard for Britain either.
peeters · 6h ago
> Passports please! British paratroopers met by French customs after D-Day airdrop
Err, D-Day anniversary airdrop. That headline has only one correct literal interpretation, and it's wrong (not ambiguous, wrong).
arrowsmith · 3h ago
I don't know about the US, but in the UK you can definitely say "D-Day" to mean "an anniversary of the original D-Day", not strictly 6/6/1944. It's not wrong.
Just like you can say "Independence Day" to mean July 4th of any year, not only the specific historical date on which the US declared independence.
nemomarx · 2h ago
This would make sense if there's often D Day ceremonies. In the us I think that's all moved to memorial Day, so D-Day pings only as the original event here
glimshe · 6h ago
I'm not a betting man, but I were, I'd bet on most readers having understood it correctly. I suspect it was meant to be click bait, though.
lucianbr · 6h ago
The headline definitely didn't make any sense to me (I was thinking maybe an Onion article?) before reading the rest.
simonklitj · 6h ago
Made me do a double take for sure.
wat10000 · 4h ago
Strange article. Of course you have to go through passport control when you cross an international border.
bitwize · 6h ago
These French customs officials seemed more on the ball than the one I encountered. (Checked my passport, but didn't stamp it, causing problems for me upon landing for my next leg in Helsinki.)
metabagel · 6h ago
I don’t think there is any requirement to stamp passports. Some people specifically ask for a stamp, because they want the memento.
bitwize · 5h ago
The stamp is acknowledgement of your tourist visa. Maybe EU citizens don't need one, but as an American entering France I certainly did. If I didn't, I sure wish the visibly armed Finnish lady who led me back near one of those beat-you-up interrogation rooms had known, it could've saved us both some hassle and me a major scare.
ta1243 · 5h ago
In the Schengen area, if you are a non-EU person, until recently you needed to ensure you are stamped in and out otherwise you'll run into issues with them thinking you may have overstayed.
After UK went all freedumb and left the EU this caused a lot of issues, I have a UK colleague that visited his wife's family in Poland over a Christmas, didn't get a stamp on the way back, then ran into problems a few months later as they argued he had been in Europe for months.
ortusdux · 6h ago
Makes me think of the Apollo insurance covers:
"The Apollo insurance covers are autographed postal covers signed by the astronaut crews prior to their mission. The primary motivation behind this action was the refusal of life insurance companies to provide coverage for the astronauts. Consequently, the astronauts devised a strategy involving the signing of hundreds of postal covers. These were to be left behind for their families, who could then sell them in the event of the astronauts' deaths.[1] The insurance covers began with Apollo 11 and ended with Apollo 16."
A country that sends men to the Moon but isn't able to guarantee the wellbeing of their families shouldn't be able to send men to the Moon.
thescriptkiddie · 3h ago
an interesting implication of this is that the government probably didn't want to issue them life insurance because then they would have to explain why they don't do that for all military personnel
CSMastermind · 1h ago
When I was in we had life insurance. Before every deployment they had lawyers come in and walk us through creating a will, explaining the benefit, etc.
jki275 · 2h ago
The US government does issue life insurance for all military personnel. It's a nominal cost (20 bucks a month IIRC) for something like 400k of coverage. It's been around since 1914[1].
As far as I know all of the astronauts were military at that time, so they probably would have been covered by this program. There could be any number of nuances I'm not aware of though.
Reminded me of when I got to see one of the customs declaration for an off-shore oil platform built here in Norway.
It was a single-item declaration: one oil plaform.
However, the elecronic customs message format didn't have enough digits to fit the item value, over a billion NOK IIRC.
After some calls with customs, they had to send it with a fictitious item value and add the true value in a free-text field.
This worked fine since there were no duties or taxes on exporting oil platforms, so no cross-checks that would fail.
lucianbr · 6h ago
Couldn't they split it into "Oil platform part 1" "part 2" and so on? Or "Oil platform metal parts" and such. Kinda seems like one object being too large in some measure for a single message is a predictable edge case.
Lovesong · 4h ago
They can, the problem is that if you declare this as different parts then you will have to pay taxes accordingly to the chosen HSCode for each one in the declaration.
If you search for the HSCODE you will find that offshore oil and natural gas drilling and production platforms have their own, 8431434000, which means if you declare only this one you will pay no taxes.
magicalhippo · 4h ago
In my experience they're also a bit particular about declaring things as they are on the border.
An oil platform getting towed into place is one piece, not an IKEA kit or similar.
That said, could very well be the local customs officer was just totally unprepared and this was the solution they came up with on the spot. I've seen other cases where different companies have gotten directly contradictory instructions from different customs offices on the exact same scenario.
Lovesong · 4h ago
Yes, the final say is always on the particular custom where the goods will get the clearance, so they will call the shots on the way the procedure should be done.
The IT system in place is just there to accommodate how customs should proceed, so if they have different ways to solve the problem, the customs officer will just find the one he's more used to.
But you're right that if there's a HSCode for something built, furniture vs wood for example, then the more "accurate" should be used, as they will have different tariffs too.
lsllc · 5h ago
I think Customs is on to that -- that was how Saddam Hussein got the precision parts of his "supergun" out of Europe into Iraq, the parts were all labeled as oil industry related.
ceejayoz · 6h ago
I'd be worried about that raising money laundering flags, like someone splitting transactions into a bunch of $9,999 chunks.
lucianbr · 6h ago
Since they were talking it over with customs, they would clear any flags as "we agreed on this solution because the item cost was too large to fit the message format".
It's not like Google, where there's automatic inhuman consequences. And even Google can make exceptions if they want to, just they usually don't care.
9dev · 6h ago
LOL. I’m on the receiving end of these customs declarations, and stories like this are the reason the copies are so notoriously hard to parse programmatically… lovely, thanks for sharing.
Scoundreller · 6h ago
What’s the “escape value” that triggers people to read the free text field? Or is it just zero?
And if zero, how often do they just get mistakenly processed as zero value?
magicalhippo · 2h ago
In a case like this, they usually call ahead to let customs know, and follow up with the declaration ID once it has been sent.
Apart from that, customs is very tight lipped about what triggers manual processing of a declararion.
Though for example a large discrepancy between weight and value typically would lead to it getting flagged for manual processing, as I understand it.
9dev · 4h ago
Zero; or an arbitrary number; or a number that was destined for another field, but the commanding officer misread and filled the form wrong; or null; or as many digits as fit in the field. Any of these.
bdamm · 4h ago
Whatever it is is likely to be part of the endless arms race between customs agencies and smugglers, so I doubt you'll get the privilege of finding out.
jleyank · 7h ago
I think at least one astronaut needed to file a request for tax deadline extension due to being “out of the country” at filing time. Didn’t have an entry in the system for “off the planet” I guess…
If they said they were away on the moon that would be a lie.
Bluestein · 7h ago
I mean, technically ...
aspir · 1h ago
The story in the editor's note is charming enough that it's worth calling out:
>Thanks to UC alumnus Luama Mays, JD ’66, for sharing a copy of the declaration with UC Magazine. Mays was a pilot who befriended Armstrong while the former astronaut was teaching at UC and Mays was running an aviation company. Initially Armstrong called him, without even identifying himself, asking for a ride on Mays old "bubble-style" helicopter left over from the Korean War. It was exactly what Armstrong had trained on in preparation for operating the lunar module.
yardie · 6h ago
I did a 1100m passage from Puerto Rico to Miami. Anchored in the Bahamas bank but didn't step on land. And when we arrived in the US we weren't required to clear in since our last port of departure was PR. Pretty sure they were tracking us by drone, blimp, AIS, and radar the entire way because they weren't suspicious enough compared to my previous experiences.
Curious why Apollo 11 would have to clear customs since the moon isn't a foreign country and they just did a there and back.
ethan_smith · 5h ago
Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the moon is considered international territory ("province of all mankind"), so technically they were returning from outside US jurisdiction, triggering customs requirements.
soneil · 5h ago
That's the whole point of the parent comment - you don't trigger customs requirements by leaving and re-entering the country. You trigger them by entering from another country.
for example - you don't need a passport to travel from the US mainland to Hawaii. It doesn't matter that the aircraft cross international waters, it matters what country you were in last.
bdamm · 4h ago
This is all kind of too reductionist.
The US DHS agents in the US make a choice not to fuss over the airplanes or even cruise ships sailing from US ports to Hawaii and back. They could, but they don't. They probably validate the ship or plane's location via transponder, but it wouldn't even surprise me if they don't do that for regular commercial transport.
This kind of local and specific policy is great and it is enacted in lots of places within US jurisdiction.
mytailorisrich · 5h ago
You are entering from "another country" if you are coming from the Moon.
For this purpose "country" has to be interpret as stepping on any land outside of the US.
9rx · 3h ago
> For this purpose "country" has to be interpret as stepping on any land outside of the US.
"Land" is legally (and generally) defined as pertaining to planet earth. In this case the crew did not step on any land outside of the US. The moon does not have land.
vntok · 1h ago
> "Land" is legally defined as pertaining to planet earth.
Interesting. Where have you read this? Intuitively, it seems very weird for a lawmaker to specify the planet the law would apply to.
umanwizard · 5h ago
The trip as described passed through foreign territorial waters and probably also international waters.
tempodox · 6h ago
They could have smuggled moonshine.
csomar · 5h ago
> Pretty sure they were tracking us by drone, blimp, AIS, and radar the entire way because they weren't suspicious enough compared to my previous experiences.
Probably none of that. The border check is a bureaucratic operation. Modern day border checks are 0% contraband, 1% terrorism and 99% just messing with the public.
jedberg · 6h ago
Due to international treaty the moon is considered international land, like Antarctica.
lucianbr · 6h ago
You think some other country would have objected to the US not requesting cusoms declarations from their own citizens, reasoning it breaks the treaty obligations?
jedberg · 5h ago
I think it was more about the US insisting the rules get followed no matter what. Sort of like how astronauts today going to ISS have to fill out international travel forms, even when they leave from the USA.
hiccuphippo · 2h ago
There's a funny story about how any new territory falls under the jurisdiction of the dioceses from which the expedition departed, so the bishop of Orlando is the bishop of the moon.
Ylpertnodi · 1h ago
My god's bigger than your god.
rob74 · 2h ago
Yes, the form really does ask if a person is bringing in snails.
Even more curiously, it asks for animals in general, and then specifically for snails. I wonder what it is about snails specifically that US Customs are/were so interested in?
caseyohara · 2h ago
Biosecurity/agrosecurity. Some snails are highly invasive and destructive to crops so they are banned or tightly regulated by the USDA.
> Who would have guessed the regulations would have been enforced so rigorously in 1969 when three men returned to the U.S. from a rather long business trip – to the moon and back.
I mean, I'd imagine it was mostly done for the joke aspect.
> "Yes, it's authentic," NASA spokesperson John Yembrick told Space.com. "It was a little joke at the time."
zhobbs · 3h ago
Yeah, I think we're over analyzing it in this thread. Seems pretty light hearted and fun.
potato3732842 · 6h ago
It's easier to just have them fill out the form than get a common sense exception.
more_corn · 7h ago
No. This is one example of many.
NASA astronauts have to fill out government business travel paperwork for travel to the ISS.
The rules must be followed even if the rules don’t make sense.
ceejayoz · 7h ago
The article covers that.
> Space station crews launching on Russian Soyuz spacecraft have to make their way to the Central Asian spaceport of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. No matter what the mission, even astronauts have to go through customs, NASA officials said. As part of their routine airline flights to other countries and back, they of course encounter airport customs.
It's not to/from the ISS that's the issue there.
A US-only crew on a US-launched spacecraft that lands in US territory won't need to do it. (ISS may add a few complexities, but if you stay on, say, the Shuttle, you're not leaving US-controlled territory.)
sidewndr46 · 6h ago
For travel to Kazakhstan it makes sense to show a passport of some kind as they want to know why someone is entering the country. Traveling to Baikonur of course being a legitimate reason to enter the country. There's one aspect of this I don't understand entirely. What if the astronaut travels to the ISS from Baikonur, then used some of form return vehicle that lands in US territory? How would we handle that?
> Until 2025, patrons from Canada were permitted to enter the United States door without needing to report to customs by using a prescribed route through the sidewalk of rue Church (Church Street), provided that they return to Canada immediately upon leaving the building using the same route.
sidewndr46 · 6h ago
it says "most Canadians from entering via the main entrance in March 2025, except for Canadian patrons with a library card" - this is probably the only documented case of a library card being valid for international travel
9rx · 3h ago
Remember when you could travel between USA and Canada with nothing more than a nod? Such a sad state of affairs we've found ourselves in nowadays.
ahazred8ta · 6h ago
On a couple of occasions, cosmonauts came back from the ISS on the shuttle. A US immigration clerk came to stamp their passport.
sidewndr46 · 6h ago
That'd be really awkward if they were denied a visa and had to go back the way they came.
gaius_baltar · 5h ago
Would CBP pay the travel costs? :)
potato3732842 · 6h ago
If the rules don't make sense for a situation why do they apply? Why isn't there a carve out?
It's easy to screech about potentially unforeseeable future cases and precedents but it's not like this stuff is free.
The cost of this attitude applied at scale is mind boggling.
ceejayoz · 6h ago
There are carve-outs. They're just pretty general so human judgement can be applied to the odd edge cases - "at the discretion of the Secretary of State" sort of things.
At least as of a few years ago, the Qataris required foreign aircrew (e.g. fighter pilots) operating out of bases in their country to do this after every mission! What a pain.
nullbyte · 6h ago
“Are you bringing with you: plants, food, animals, soil, disease agents, cell cultures or snails? Declare all articles that you have acquired and are bringing into the United States.”
It's interesting that they specifically mention snails
whycome · 5h ago
Plants, animals, fungi, archae….
mathgradthrow · 6h ago
Of course they didn't. It's just funny.
TZubiri · 45m ago
The US gets a lot of flak for still using forms instead of modernizing, but imagine the nightmare this would be with an inflexible system with dropdowns.
It seems so relaxing to just be able to write whatever you want or draw doodles on a form and expect the operator on the other side ot either grok it, coalesce it into whatever other system, or handle it in whatever way they see fit.
Never change America
DataDaemon · 7h ago
I wonder if they checked their social profiles?
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 5h ago
Yes 100% these astronauts were extensively vetted to ensure compatibility with the ruling power of their day.
woodpanel · 4h ago
Well, you can’t say this is a problem you’ll encounter with Trump
https://www.livescience.com/space/the-moon/the-apollo-moon-l... ("The Apollo moon landing was real, but NASA's quarantine procedure was not")
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/science/nasa-moon-quarant... ("A review of archives suggests that efforts to protect Earth from contamination by any organism brought back from the lunar surface were mostly for show")
Some Agriculture Department folks decided that their legal authority to quarantine soil samples brought into the U.S. applied to lunar soils, too. They insisted on building a three-week quarantine facility with slivers of lunar samples, exposed to "germ-free mice born by cesarean section." Only after the mice survived this ordeal was it safe to release the fuller batch of samples.
Another character insisted that the aluminum rock boxes be sealed, while on the moon, with gaskets of indium (soft, rare metal) which would deform to create a very tight seal. The geochemists on earth protested, in vain, that this procedure would ruin their hopes of doing any indium analysis of the samples themselves, shutting down an interesting line of research. No luck in changing the protocol. Turns out that the indium seals didn't work, and the rock boxes reached the earth-based quarantine facilities with normal air pressure anyway.
There's more silliness about trying to keep the lunar samples in a hard vacuum while designing rigidly mounted gloves that could be used to manipulate/slice/divide the samples without breaking the vacuum. Maybe we know today how to sustain flexible gloves in such an environment. We didn't, back then.
There was a ton of money flowing in for space and it was the big new thing of the future. Makes sense other agencies would try to insert themselves and try to seem relevant to the new popular thing in the news and latch themselves onto any future spending/authority.
There is plenty of evidence that the risk was taken seriously (regulations and treaties surrounding the issue, ICBC activities in the years prior to launch, the expense on things the public would never have known about, medical and biological testing done for the first three missions, NASA's openness with the ICBC about the imperfection of the system and the existence of contingency plans...).
Found the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_quarantine_facility
Unless it was not for the benefit of the astronauts, but the skeptical public back home? Hmm.
I ordered Amazon packages addressed to me on U.S. Navy ships.
Ships have FPO addresses which are treated and formatted like a domestic ship.
Now it is still legal to go for exactly the same set of reasons, they just don't bother actually checking. There's no "paperwork" you need to get; you just tell the check-in agent which legal reason you fall under.
US Service Personnel don't follow the civilian process for Customs, so making astronauts actually follow the civilian process reinforces the non-militarized feeling for space.
Microbes can't be completely contained - easily, anyway - and we knew that perfectly well back then. But we also knew to minimize contact with potentially infected people. Put it this way: if there were lunar germs that the astronauts took back with them, would it have been better to skip the containment procedures, as inadequate as they may have been? Of course not.
NASA played up their ability to contain extraterrestrial microbes for sure. But the containment procedure itself was the best that could be done. If 'absolute isolation' is the bar to which containment is held, by that logic everything short of just not visiting other celestial bodies is theater.
borders have largely had guards, who had no obligation to let people through, or even to treat them fairly and not rob them. frontiers had bandits who existed solely to prey on travelers.
even if you could move to a different settlement, you did not have the same legal rights as citizens of that city.
the "modern passport" has done more for free human movement than anything that came before.
What kind of tech do you imagine is needed? Have you heard of Hadrian's Wall? The Great Wall of China?
Or more generally: forts, outposts, coastal batteries, scouts, patrols?
Agriculture, at very least. Before we created that tech you'd be way too busy trying to find something to eat to have time to stand around defending artificial borders. 1900 BCE mightn't be perfectly accurate, but close enough for a stupid comment on the internet.
Nothing in the comment that we are talking about indicates that "pre-1900" is referring to 1900 BCE. It sounds squarely like it's referring to 1900 AD to me. Which is why people are saying it's ridiculous.
What part of "If you moved from one place to another, you were mostly at the whims of thieves and pirates." suggests 1900 CE to you? Have you never looked at a history book?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy
Normally when someone says "1900" they are referring to 1900 AD. Unless BCE had already been mentioned, which here it had not. And if they were referring to 1900 BCE they normally would specifically say 1900 BCE. That's why.
And furthermore, the parent comment above the one talking about "pre-1900" was talking about modern passports. Why would anyone immediately jump from modern passports to 1900 BCE? That don't make no sense at all. Jumping to 1900 AD however, that does make sense. You see?
"Cities had guards.", "you were mostly at the whims of thieves and pirates."
What in that speaks to 1900 CE over 1900 BCE? There is evidence of pirates in both time periods, so that feature alone isn't telling. But the context doesn't end with that feature in a vacuum, does it?
If you actually read the article, they include a direct link to the sources they cite and explain specifically what those sources say.
The NYT article is about one specific study that’s a review of archival material. It doesn’t actually seem to suggest that it was a “publicity stunt” or “theater” as OP suggested. Rather, it says that NASA believed that the threat was very real. The threat was real enough to hold a “high level conference” (held by National Academy of Sciences). The outcome there was also that “the risk was real and the consequences could be profound”.
So, the major spending on the quarantine system wasn’t out of nowhere.
The study conclusion seems to be more that it would be nearly impossible to contain the threat if it existed. But, that wouldn’t mean that the precautions taken were only for show — just that it would be really fucking hard to stop. And with the hypothetical microbe, they couldn’t know anything about means of transmission or lifespan — so the precautions could have some value.
Even in the failure of their quarantine procedure, it still demonstrated that they thought it was (in principle) important:
“24 workers were exposed to the lunar material that the facility’s infrastructure was supposed to protect them from; they had to be quarantined”
It wasn’t security theater so much as it was just quarantine procedure that had many gaps, failures, and trade offs.
Wow. What else about Apollo was theater performance?
That being said, I know a lot of things were unknown. We didn’t know if the surface of the moon would interact with the atmosphere inside the capsules to combust. Some of these unknowns were downplayed. Some others were played up for dramatic effect.
The whole process of getting a person to the moon took hundreds of thousands of involved workers and the. coordinated effort of a country’s politicians and populace to fund it. I think it’s unfair to boil it down to “just publicity” but it is a big part in keeping it afloat.
"Passports please! British paratroopers met by French customs after D-Day airdrop
British paratroopers recreating an airdrop behind German defences to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day were met by French customs officials at a makeshift border checkpost.
Moments after the paratroopers had hit the ground and gathered up their chutes, they formed an orderly queue and handed over their passports for inspection by waiting French customs officials in a Normandy field."
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/passports-please-britis...
Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7ZY4rlAQus
> Lord West said: "It wasn't one of the best days in my time. I had a phone call from the military commander saying, 'Sir, I'm afraid something awful's happened.' I thought, 'Goodness me, what?' And he said, 'I'm afraid we've invaded Spain, but we don't think they've noticed.'
> "They charged up the beach in the normal way, being Royal Marines—they're frightfully good soldiers of course, and jolly good at this sort of thing—and confronted a Spanish fisherman who sort of pointed out, 'I think you're on the wrong beach.'
I would not have been able to get this out without giggling.
I would go on to say that it wasn't for that man, it is likely the British conquest of India would have been confined to only a limited territory. Indian states were modernizing and militarizing rapidly (relatively for that era), so any delays in conquest would have made India a hard nut to crack.
Boats, optionally guns.
When you reflect on how easily America became an imperialist crybaby, it can't have been hard for Britain either.
Err, D-Day anniversary airdrop. That headline has only one correct literal interpretation, and it's wrong (not ambiguous, wrong).
Just like you can say "Independence Day" to mean July 4th of any year, not only the specific historical date on which the US declared independence.
After UK went all freedumb and left the EU this caused a lot of issues, I have a UK colleague that visited his wife's family in Poland over a Christmas, didn't get a stamp on the way back, then ran into problems a few months later as they argued he had been in Europe for months.
"The Apollo insurance covers are autographed postal covers signed by the astronaut crews prior to their mission. The primary motivation behind this action was the refusal of life insurance companies to provide coverage for the astronauts. Consequently, the astronauts devised a strategy involving the signing of hundreds of postal covers. These were to be left behind for their families, who could then sell them in the event of the astronauts' deaths.[1] The insurance covers began with Apollo 11 and ended with Apollo 16."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_insurance_covers
As far as I know all of the astronauts were military at that time, so they probably would have been covered by this program. There could be any number of nuances I'm not aware of though.
[1]https://benefits.va.gov/benefits/infographics/pdfs/timeline_...
It was a single-item declaration: one oil plaform.
However, the elecronic customs message format didn't have enough digits to fit the item value, over a billion NOK IIRC.
After some calls with customs, they had to send it with a fictitious item value and add the true value in a free-text field.
This worked fine since there were no duties or taxes on exporting oil platforms, so no cross-checks that would fail.
If you search for the HSCODE you will find that offshore oil and natural gas drilling and production platforms have their own, 8431434000, which means if you declare only this one you will pay no taxes.
An oil platform getting towed into place is one piece, not an IKEA kit or similar.
That said, could very well be the local customs officer was just totally unprepared and this was the solution they came up with on the spot. I've seen other cases where different companies have gotten directly contradictory instructions from different customs offices on the exact same scenario.
The IT system in place is just there to accommodate how customs should proceed, so if they have different ways to solve the problem, the customs officer will just find the one he's more used to.
But you're right that if there's a HSCode for something built, furniture vs wood for example, then the more "accurate" should be used, as they will have different tariffs too.
It's not like Google, where there's automatic inhuman consequences. And even Google can make exceptions if they want to, just they usually don't care.
And if zero, how often do they just get mistakenly processed as zero value?
Apart from that, customs is very tight lipped about what triggers manual processing of a declararion.
Though for example a large discrepancy between weight and value typically would lead to it getting flagged for manual processing, as I understand it.
>Thanks to UC alumnus Luama Mays, JD ’66, for sharing a copy of the declaration with UC Magazine. Mays was a pilot who befriended Armstrong while the former astronaut was teaching at UC and Mays was running an aviation company. Initially Armstrong called him, without even identifying himself, asking for a ride on Mays old "bubble-style" helicopter left over from the Korean War. It was exactly what Armstrong had trained on in preparation for operating the lunar module.
Curious why Apollo 11 would have to clear customs since the moon isn't a foreign country and they just did a there and back.
for example - you don't need a passport to travel from the US mainland to Hawaii. It doesn't matter that the aircraft cross international waters, it matters what country you were in last.
The US DHS agents in the US make a choice not to fuss over the airplanes or even cruise ships sailing from US ports to Hawaii and back. They could, but they don't. They probably validate the ship or plane's location via transponder, but it wouldn't even surprise me if they don't do that for regular commercial transport.
This kind of local and specific policy is great and it is enacted in lots of places within US jurisdiction.
For this purpose "country" has to be interpret as stepping on any land outside of the US.
"Land" is legally (and generally) defined as pertaining to planet earth. In this case the crew did not step on any land outside of the US. The moon does not have land.
Interesting. Where have you read this? Intuitively, it seems very weird for a lawmaker to specify the planet the law would apply to.
Probably none of that. The border check is a bureaucratic operation. Modern day border checks are 0% contraband, 1% terrorism and 99% just messing with the public.
Even more curiously, it asks for animals in general, and then specifically for snails. I wonder what it is about snails specifically that US Customs are/were so interested in?
I mean, I'd imagine it was mostly done for the joke aspect.
edit: https://www.space.com/7044-moon-apollo-astronauts-customs.ht...
> "Yes, it's authentic," NASA spokesperson John Yembrick told Space.com. "It was a little joke at the time."
> Space station crews launching on Russian Soyuz spacecraft have to make their way to the Central Asian spaceport of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. No matter what the mission, even astronauts have to go through customs, NASA officials said. As part of their routine airline flights to other countries and back, they of course encounter airport customs.
It's not to/from the ISS that's the issue there.
A US-only crew on a US-launched spacecraft that lands in US territory won't need to do it. (ISS may add a few complexities, but if you stay on, say, the Shuttle, you're not leaving US-controlled territory.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Free_Library_and_Opera...
> Until 2025, patrons from Canada were permitted to enter the United States door without needing to report to customs by using a prescribed route through the sidewalk of rue Church (Church Street), provided that they return to Canada immediately upon leaving the building using the same route.
It's easy to screech about potentially unforeseeable future cases and precedents but it's not like this stuff is free.
The cost of this attitude applied at scale is mind boggling.
Random example: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/101.8
It's interesting that they specifically mention snails
It seems so relaxing to just be able to write whatever you want or draw doodles on a form and expect the operator on the other side ot either grok it, coalesce it into whatever other system, or handle it in whatever way they see fit.
Never change America