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.
Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)
101–110 of 204 posts
Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
Do you think they will be shocked to find out color wasn't invented in the 1900's?
Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 expens…
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.
A stream of ants would not necessarily render a quarintine ineffective.
Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)
#104Reminded 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 wor…
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.
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.
Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering the source, the source is probably the only thing that "suggested" it, as they are known to do.
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.
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.
Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)
#106Well, you can’t say this is a problem you’ll encounter with Trump
Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Of course not, if we did they’d find my dog I bought in Vietnam
Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
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.
Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
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.
Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.