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Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)

magazine.uc.edu

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Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)

#131

Post by arrowsmith »

peeters wrote: post #21
smnrchrds wrote: post #13

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 inspe…

> 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).

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.

Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)

#132

Post by 9rx »

codetrotter wrote: post #130
9rx wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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?

Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)

#133

Post by GCA10 »

perihelions wrote: post #6

These things were mainly publicity stunts. The supposed biohazard quarantine for returning Apollo astronauts was a theater performance, too. 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 con…

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.

Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)

#134

Post by jki275 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #87
gmueckl wrote: post #81

Earlier 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.

If we make port calls anywhere outside the US we definitely go through customs on return.

Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)

#135

Post by codetrotter »

9rx wrote: post #132
codetrotter wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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?

There was plenty of pirates around still in the 1800s AD. Aka "pre-1900" AD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy

Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)

#136

Post by jki275 »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #127
I-M-S wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

[1]https://benefits.va.gov/benefits/infographics/pdfs/timeline_...

Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)

#137

Post by 9rx »

codetrotter wrote: post #135
9rx wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

There was plenty of pirates around still in the 1800s AD. Aka "pre-1900" AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy

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?

Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)

#138

Post by magicalhippo »

Scoundreller wrote: post #31
9dev wrote: post #23

Earlier 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?

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.

Re: Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)

#140

Post by School-Cotton »

ofalkaed wrote: post #125
School-Cotton wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.
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