Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)(magazine.uc.edu) |
Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016)(magazine.uc.edu) |
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.
- moon dust has very fine particles. It is very irritating for skin, and there was a very good chance it could damage lungs like azbestos.
- Electronics and dust do not mix well
- electrostatic properties were not known, it could stick to every surface and coat it, perhaps prevent vacuum seals etc... Look at images from inside capsule, before and after landing! And that was just dust, brought on suits, not full samples!
- it had horrible smell
Extremely improbable. Astronomically improbable. Virtually impossible. All that is absolutely, 100% true.
But given the stakes, similarly astronomically high, I'm not sure it didn't actually make sense to do a quarantine for a few weeks. Yes, I know the indium seals didn't work. But the fact that we failed to create a quarantine doesn't mean it was worthless to at least make an attempt. It cost us virtually nothing in comparison to the stakes.
That's my personal response, anyway, and reflects the opinion I would have expressed at the time if I happened to have been involved in the project.
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...).
> For example, the Apollo spacecraft hadn't been designed to prevent potential lunar contaminants from being exposed to Earth's environment; once it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, the capsule's cabin had to be fully opened in order to let astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins out.
Another obvious "oversite" was that the "biological isolation garments" (BIGs) they wore were tossed into the open capsule door, and donned by the potentially contaminated astronauts! It's true that they were sprayed down with disinfectant afterwards, however the spray and whatever it washed off were drained directly into the ocean.
Unless it was not for the benefit of the astronauts, but the skeptical public back home? Hmm.
Not sure about the quarantine, but the customs form is a nice touch. Cheap, simple, effective and harmless.
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.
Wow. What else about Apollo was theater performance?
"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
"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."
AFAIK all of them were former military and obviously current government employees so their families would have been entitled to any military life insurance they purchased as well as any pension benefits due (military and federal civilian). I can't give you the exact amounts because it has changed over the years and also depends on how many years of military and/or civilian service you had.
But generally all government employees covered under the retirement plan have an annuity or monthly survivor benefit available that is some portion of their final salary at death or their average salary whichever was higher. Often there is a fixed adder as well (basic death benefit adder right now is $41,000 per year so your spouse would get 50% of your final salary plus $41k).
In addition the federal plan (and social security) pays monthly for surviving children until they reach age 18. The federal plan is a bit nicer in that it pays until 18 or 22 if you are a full time student. Both pay for life if the child is disabled (though the government definition of disabled is rather strict).
All of this is just survivor benefits. Once your surviving spouse retires they are entitled to the pension payments you would have received.
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.
And if zero, how often do they just get mistakenly processed as zero value?
>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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
It's interesting that they specifically mention snails
> TO BE DETERMINED
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
> 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.
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.
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.
What’s more: “Unlike dust particles on Earth, dust on the Moon’s surface is sharp and abrasive – like tiny shards of glass – because it hasn’t been exposed to weathering and elements like water and oxygen.”
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/kennedy/nasa-tec...
and
> it had horrible smell
We shouldn't know what it smells like. That's forbidden knowledge, just like the taste of uranium.
Does it smell strong because of it's composition or because the vacuum of space has a strange effect on it? Like the particulates not dispersing enough?
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.
Random example: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/101.8
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.
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.
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.
> An oil platform getting towed into place is one piece, not an IKEA kit or similar.
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.
Found the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_quarantine_facility
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.
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_...
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.
Whereas D-Day was something soldiers used to describe that specific day even before it happened. And you would hear things like "D-Day plus 23" to describe points in time, you wouldn't have to specify the year
So to me the Independence Day analogy is a little weak.
But if you said "D-Day" without context people would assume you meant the event in WWII. So yeah, I guess the original headline is definitely misleading, if not strictly inaccurate.
You still had actual quarantines during the pandemic - anyone who had a positive test and anyone who had been in direct contact with them for the last X days, were often strictly forced to stay either at home or in isolated hospital rooms. This was quite explicitly not for their own sake, but to keep the public at large safe from them.
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.
Maybe an AI dictatorship would rid us of bureaucracy, but we'd both end up in a paperclip sweatshop.
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.
The high seas are easy to use commercially, but also very prone to conflict. Wars are fought over tiny straits, and understandably so.
The Antarctic treaty decided the antarctic was too useless to fight over, so the signers decided to make it difficult to use in exchange for making it difficult to fight over.
Obviously space is a more like the seas. But nobody wanted a war over outer space (just look at the reaction to the Star Wars programs in the 1980s).
Antarctica is just a legal dead zone. What happens if a scientist on a station murders another scientist? On an American station, it was unclear until the 1980s. What happens if a passenger on a cruse ship murders another passenger? The FBI has people on standby - you'll be arrested when you return to your home port. Probably sooner.
The legalities are space are difficult because we decided to make them so. This is changing, and fast. Which is good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?