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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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."

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Yeah, I think we're over analyzing it in this thread. Seems pretty light hearted and fun.

It's easier to just have them fill out the form than get a common sense exception.

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.

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 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.)

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.

it says "most Canadians from entering via the main entrance in March 2025, except for Canadian patrons with a library card" - this is probably the only documented case of a library card being valid for international travel

Remember when you could travel between USA and Canada with nothing more than a nod? Such a sad state of affairs we've found ourselves in nowadays.

On a couple of occasions, cosmonauts came back from the ISS on the shuttle. A US immigration clerk came to stamp their passport.

That'd be really awkward if they were denied a visa and had to go back the way they came.

Would CBP pay the travel costs? :)

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

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