Day: July 24, 2019

(Image credit: NASA/U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.)

Before the ticker tape parades and the inevitable world tour, the triumphant Apollo 11 astronauts were greeted with a more mundane aspect of life on Earth when they splashed down 50 years ago today (July 24) — going through customs.

Just what did Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins have to declare? Moon rocks, moon dust and other lunar samples, according to the customs form filed at the Honolulu Airport in Hawaii on July 24, 1969 — the day the Apollo 11 crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean to end their historic moon landing mission.

The customs form is signed by all three Apollo 11 astronauts. They declared their cargo and listed their flight route as starting Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral) in Florida with a stopover on the moon.

Related: Apollo 11 at 50: A Complete Guide to the Historic Moon Landing

The form was posted to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website in 2009 to mark the Apollo 11 mission’s 40th anniversary. A copy was obtained by Space.com at the time and verified by NASA.

“Yes, it’s authentic,” NASA spokesperson John Yembrick told Space.com. “It was a little joke at the time.”

It’s more humor than fact, because Apollo 11 splashed down 920 miles (1,480 km) southwest of Hawaii and 13 miles (21 km) from the USS Hornet, a Navy ship sent to recover the crew. It took two more days for the astronauts to actually return to Hawaii on July 26, where they were welcomed with a July 27 ceremony at Pearl Harbor.

The catch? The astronauts were trapped inside a NASA trailer as part of a quarantine effort just in case they brought back any germs or diseases from the moon. They even wore special biological containment suits when they walked out on the deck of the USS Hornet after being retrieved.

NASA transported them to Houston, quarantine trailer and all, and they emerged from isolation three weeks later. (Nowadays, astronauts returning from space exit their spacecraft almost immediately, though some long-duration astronauts receive medical checks after spending months in weightlessness.)

(Image credit: NASA)

Today, NASA astronauts still have to go through customs, but for more conventional reasons.

Astronauts on missions headed for the International Space Station must train not only in the U.S., but also in Japan, Canada, Europe and Russia in order practice with the different systems, modules and tools they’ll use while visiting the outpost, which is the product of 20 years of space construction by 16 different countries.

Two Russian Soyuz crew vehicles, a Russian Progress cargo spacecraft and a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft are currently docked at the International Space Station. 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.

“They do have a government passport, but they do have to go through customs,” NASA spokesperson Nicole Cloutier-Lemasters told Space.com. “Just like the rest of us.”

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in 2009 and updated for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission in 2019. 

Have a news tip, correction or comment? Let us know at community@space.com.

After months of mounting user complaints and media pressure, Nintendo appears to have finally caved in full to the issue of “Joy-Con drift” on its Nintendo Switch controllers.

Tuesday’s news comes courtesy of Vice Games senior reporter Patrick Klepek one day after a lengthy summary of the issue went live at Kotaku. Klepek’s report claims that if Switch owners report incorrect joystick data being fed to their consoles due to faulty joysticks, Nintendo’s customer service reps are authorized to offer a completely free, outside-of-warranty repair of affected controllers (after walking users through a troubleshooting process).

What’s more, according to Klepek, if users recently sought such a repair and were charged for the trouble, Nintendo’s reps may be able to offer those users a refund. Klepek cites “a source familiar with Nintendo’s updated customer support documentation.”

Joy-Con drift is a lot like that phrase sounds: even when a Switch controller’s joystick stays perfectly still, it may send movement data to your Switch. The system may also “resist” the direction you’re pressing in favor of a stuck direction. Due to the potentially mechanical issue of the failure, a simple system-menu joystick recalibration won’t fix it for affected users.

If this issue sounds familiar, that’s because Switch users have been complaining about it on various forums for months. Kotaku’s Monday article linked to a July 2018 post at Reddit, whose author alleged that they had sent eight Joy-Con controllers to Nintendo for the sake of joystick repairs. A lengthy April 2019 video from Spawn Wave includes a teardown of an affected Joy-Con controller to show exactly how the hardware’s current design leads to wear and tear on specific contact points, which is as good of a technical explanation for the defect as we’ve seen.

After all, Nintendo hasn’t formally commented on the exact cause of this issue (which I admittedly haven’t been able to reproduce in my six official Joy-Con controllers). In response to Vice’s questions about the reported drift issues, and the authenticity of Vice’s own report, Nintendo sent the following statement. Ars’ questions about the authenticity of the Vice report received the same statement in response:

At Nintendo, we take great pride in creating quality products and we are continuously making improvements to them. We are aware of recent reports that some Joy-Con controllers are not responding correctly. We want our consumers to have fun with Nintendo Switch, and if anything falls short of this goal we always encourage them to visit https://ift.tt/LEV4gs so we can help.

The news follows years of complaints about another Switch gamepad, the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, which has suffered from a “mushy” d-pad since it launched alongside the Switch hardware in March 2017. I can report personal experience with that issue, as I sent both my retail Switch Pro pad and its first customer-service replacement back to Nintendo following my own complaints of unwieldy d-pad performance in early 2017. Users have gone on to suggest

a “tape” fix

, which requires opening up the Pro controller and affixing clear tape to any, or all, of the contacts where the d-pad touches the controller’s circuit board.

Another example of an early 2017 Joy-Con problem came in the form of wireless performance, which users took into their own hands with a single-wire soldering fix.