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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)

#41

Post by lucianbr »

magicalhippo wrote: post #15

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 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.

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

#42

Post by ceejayoz »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #33
ceejayoz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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?

Probably a bit like this.

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.

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

#43

Post by bigyabai »

guywithahat wrote: post #37
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…

[flagged]

Source? Or are you just extrapolating from the businesses you've worked at?

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

#44

Post by hammock »

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…

>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?

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

#45

Post by metabagel »

bitwize wrote: post #19
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…

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.)

I don’t think there is any requirement to stamp passports. Some people specifically ask for a stamp, because they want the memento.

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

#47

Post by bigyabai »

skeezyboy wrote: post #30
ceejayoz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me a bit of when the UK accidentally invaded Spain on a training exercise. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-invade-spa... > 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 notic…

the british armed forces are atrocious. i simply cannot fathom how britain controlled so much of the planet at one point

> 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.

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

#48

Post by lucianbr »

jedberg wrote: post #32
yardie wrote: post #20

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 t…

Due to international treaty the moon is considered international land, like Antarctica.

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?

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

#49

Post by ceejayoz »

potato3732842 wrote: post #40
more_corn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Random example: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/101.8

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

#50

Post by em-bee »

whatever1 wrote: post #18
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, see, that equipment didn't go to the moon. But the government installed a large video screen there, so that if you look, you see what they want you to see, not what's actually there, which is not the equipment that you see. /s, if it wasn't blatantly obvious...

On a serious note though, we probably don’t remember how to go to the moon. I mean the gritty details not the first principles. Organizations are really just people, who when are gone, if they have not trained a successor, their expertise just goes with them.

while that's a pity, i am not terribly worried. we managed it once without previous experience, so we can manage it again. in fact the less we rely on past experience the more we develop the capacity to do difficult things without prior experience. (that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but i hope it makes sense. it's kind of like linux from scratch. or the learning benefits from reinventing the wheel. instead of improving how to travel to the moon we improve the process of how to develop moon travel)
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