You can fly to the moon, but you still can't escape paperwork. In August 2015, astronaut Buzz Aldrin -- the second man to set foot on the moon in 1969 -- started tweeting some of the mundane forms from his historic Apollo 11 journey, which ended on July 24, 1969, when they landed back on Earth.
Aldrin shared the below customs declaration form that he, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins. Like responsible travelers, they declared that they were bringing samples of "moon rock" and "moon dust" into the country. Of course, most people took this to mean that the first thing they did after their splashdown in the Pacific Ocean was to be checked out by a customs official. The fact that they did declare this to customs would be correct, but the timing is wrong.
As NASA History explained recently, the customs paperwork is indeed real. But the legend that the moon crew's first contact back on earth was with a finicky customs agent hell-bent on getting the paperwork filed is nothing but a myth. As it turns out, the forms, most likely created by the Customs Service's District Director for Hawaii, were signed by auto-pen weeks later in 1969, when the astronauts were back at NASA headquarters.
The flight number on the form dated July 24, 1969 is listed as "Apollo 11" and the flight routing is comically shown as Cape Kennedy to Honolulu via "Moon." Most ominously, in the section marked "Any other condition on board which may lead to the spread of disease," the response was "To be determined."
Aldrin also shared his travel voucher from Apollo 11. In case you're wondering how much Buzz claimed in travel expenses for a trip to the moon -- he was reimbursed exactly $33.31 for his share of the trip, which looks to be for transportation to Cape Kennedy. Too bad he wasn't able to claim the mileage for that trip.
If Aldrin does come across any Apollo 11 receipts, he might want to consider auctioning them off. Judging by the over $9,000 that his 1966 space selfie from the Gemini 12 mission fetched recently -- which was about ten times more than expected -- there's likely someone out there willing to put a price tag on any bit of moon minutiae.
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47 years ago I submitted my travel voucher reimbursement for my trip to the moon.
47 years ago today we returned to earth. The world celebrated but we missed the whole thing!
