151–160 of 204 posts
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?
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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.
> 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.
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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
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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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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.
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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.
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…
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.
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.
>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.
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