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.
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 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...).
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.
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.
The source paper for both articles is paywalled, so maybe it has a better argument than the articles. But to call it theater or a publicity stunt is to imply it didn't have a point beyond public relations, which isn't the case.
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.
I can imagine a bunch of short-sleeve wearing dudes, sitting around and shooting the shit to come up with absurd formalities for theatre. It would have been fun.
"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."
> 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.'
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.)
"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."
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.
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.
I think at least one astronaut needed to file a request for tax deadline extension due to being “out of the country” at filing time. Didn’t have an entry in the system for “off the planet” I guess…
The story in the editor's note is charming enough that it's worth calling out:
>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.
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 the moon isn't a foreign country and they just did a there and back.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Who would have guessed the regulations would have been enforced so rigorously in 1969 when three men returned to the U.S. from a rather long business trip – to the moon and back.
I mean, I'd imagine it was mostly done for the joke aspect.
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.
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.
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.
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?
“Are you bringing with you: plants, food, animals, soil, disease agents, cell cultures or snails? Declare all articles that you have acquired and are bringing into the United States.”
It's interesting that they specifically mention snails
Sometimes I thought, even today's generation and technology are unable to land on the moon properly. And back to earth? wow. My school life was ruined.
The US gets a lot of flak for still using forms instead of modernizing, but imagine the nightmare this would be with an inflexible system with dropdowns.
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.
The equipment that is left on the moon and you can literally see by yourself with a good enough telescope is also an illusion plotted by the government
perihelions|7 months ago
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")
GCA10|7 months ago
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.
cgriswald|7 months ago
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...).
gmueckl|7 months ago
CobrastanJorji|7 months ago
shayway|7 months ago
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.
xattt|7 months ago
montjoy|7 months ago
hammock|7 months ago
Wow. What else about Apollo was theater performance?
whycome|7 months ago
skeezyboy|7 months ago
tomtomhowling|7 months ago
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guywithahat|7 months ago
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smnrchrds|7 months ago
"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
ceejayoz|7 months ago
> 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.'
peeters|7 months ago
Err, D-Day anniversary airdrop. That headline has only one correct literal interpretation, and it's wrong (not ambiguous, wrong).
wat10000|7 months ago
bitwize|7 months ago
ortusdux|7 months ago
"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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_insurance_covers
I-M-S|7 months ago
magicalhippo|7 months ago
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.
lucianbr|7 months ago
9dev|7 months ago
jleyank|7 months ago
elijaht|7 months ago
Bluestein|7 months ago
aspir|7 months ago
>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.
yardie|7 months ago
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.
ethan_smith|7 months ago
tempodox|7 months ago
csomar|7 months ago
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.
jedberg|7 months ago
ceejayoz|7 months ago
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."
zhobbs|7 months ago
potato3732842|7 months ago
more_corn|7 months ago
nevster|7 months ago
hiccuphippo|7 months ago
Ylpertnodi|7 months ago
the__alchemist|7 months ago
rob74|7 months ago
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?
caseyohara|7 months ago
jlarocco|7 months ago
nullbyte|7 months ago
It's interesting that they specifically mention snails
whycome|7 months ago
naganotonicbuy|7 months ago
MathMonkeyMan|7 months ago
> TO BE DETERMINED
mathgradthrow|7 months ago
DataDaemon|7 months ago
ahmeneeroe-v2|7 months ago
TZubiri|7 months ago
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
woodpanel|7 months ago
computerthings|7 months ago
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guesswho_|7 months ago
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whatever1|7 months ago
edm0nd|7 months ago
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