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Comment by jjw1414 | Hacker News Reader

Before I clicked on the story, my first thought went back to the Apollo 15 "Postal Covers Incident". Each of the three crew members received $7K from a stamp dealer to bring stamp collector memorabilia to the lunar surface and then return them to be sold by the dealer. No criminal charges were filed, but I wonder if the incident might be more properly considered the "first allegation of a crime in space". From the the Wikipedia article: "There was a Justice Department investigation into the covers. Its Criminal Division decided in 1974 that no prosecution was warranted, but the Civil Division the following year assumed the covers would be retained by the government. Kraft wrote, "it was questionable that any law had been broken and [the Justice Department] realized that dragging astronauts into court would not be a popular pastime."

I was surprised that it was not mentioned in the BBC story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_15_postal_covers_incide...

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There's also the "Skylab Controversy" - when a group of astronauts aboard the Skylab went on strike and turned off their radios to protest too long of working hours.

I assume that since most astronauts are Air Force personal, they committed insubordination, although were never tried for anything.

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

Interesting take and I agree. I always thought of it as a labor-relations issue rather than a crime. However, the article states, "a single day on Skylab was worth about $22.4 million in 2017 dollars, and thus any work stoppage was considered inappropriate due to the expense". Makes the Apollo 15 scandal seem like peanuts.

It's interesting to consider how the balance of power tilts between strikers and management in a situation like that. On one hand, the astronauts cost NASA much more money and opportunity cost from lost experiment time than perhaps an ordinary strike. On the other hand, the astronauts only have limited supplies and the strike will eventually break itself.

On the other hand, NASA has been known to put astronauts on a "never flies into space again" list for even the smallest indiscretion or misstep. Engaging in something the equivalent of a very brief labor stoppage can be a literal career ender. Not that any of the astronauts on Skylab couldn't walk out the door of NASA and into a new job in the aerospace industry at probably 175%+ of their former government salary.

> Not that any of the astronauts on Skylab couldn't walk out the door of NASA and into a new job in the aerospace industry at probably 175%+ of their former government salary.

Curious, what are the job opportunities of ex-astronauts? I assume they're not the kind of openings to be found on linkedin.

I don’t know about modern astronauts, but bear in mind that at the point when the Skylab missions happened there were only about 50 astronauts total in the US. Only about half of those had actually flown in space. I have a feeling that being one of the ~25 people in the country with space flight experience was enough to open doors at basically every aerospace company, most large defense contractors, etc.

The astronauts finished all the experiments ahead of schedule, even with the "strike". It seems like taking a break (accidental or not) increased their productivity afterwards

Note that one of the astronauts has claimed that the incident was completely accidental and presumably a side effect of drastic sleep deprivation. (At that point all three of the crew were getting less than four hours of sleep a day, on top of the physiological effects of being first-time astronauts.)

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/did-skylab-4s-astronau...

> in David Hitt’s 2008 book Homesteading Space, Gibson says that the three men simply failed to synchronize their radio response shifts, and that as a result, “one day we made a mistake and for a whole orbit we all had our radios off!” The press, he says, misconstrued this as a purposeful action. “There was no ‘strike in space’ by any stretch of the imagination,” Gibson says in the book. “What could we threaten to do, go live on the moon?” He says the same in his oral history, calling it a “myth.”

That's far from the only thing smuggled into space, so dunno if there's something special about ‘postal covers’ (whatever that is).

Here's just a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_items_smuggled_into_sp...

Even Apollo 15 seems to have had another unlisted item, an aluminum figurine: https://newatlas.com/things-smuggled-space/45285/

Interesting list. I wouldn't be too fond of my Gemini crew mate who brought the corned beef sandwich.

What was special about the Apollo 15 postal covers, and relevant to the OP, was that the crew accepted monetary compensation to transport them without informing NASA officials. This was where the legality debate came into play.

As for "postal covers" [1], I had to look it up, too. I always thought that they brought collectable stamps.

[1] "essentially envelopes with printed decorative cachets". http://www.spaceflownartifacts.com/flown_apollo_covers.html

I don't even understand that. Why was it even such a problem? So they took some stamps to the moon so they could be sold as "stamps that have been on the moon". I don't understand why that should even be such a controversy. I can understand with regards to things like "moon rocks" or "lunar dust", etc, but something that was brought to the moon in the first place? What's the big deal?

The "big deal", at least according to NASA and congress, was that the crew accepted funds ($7,000 each) to transport the items to the surface of the moon without informing NASA officials.

I don't have a firm opinion on the matter. I just remember feeling a bit sad when I first read the story as a high-school kid, thinking that the Apollo astronauts would need to supplement their NASA salary with the 1971 equivalent of eBay. That may not have been the case, though.

Also cosmonauts smuggled Armenian cognac during Salyut 7. This was just before the dry laws of Soviet Union, when they started cracking down on drinking on the job.

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