It does make sense. I don’t think they wanted to set the precedent that coming back from certain types of spaceflight “didn’t count” in terms of needing to pass through customs and it was just a free-for-all. It’s the same way you still have to pay your taxes when you’re the president, a relic of an older and more adherence-to-the-system time than the modern day.
I mean, it was clearly at least partly in jest, but apparently the form was real and they really did go through customs for real.
https://www.space.com/7044-moon-apollo-astronauts-customs.html
It does make sense. I don’t think they wanted to set the precedent that coming back from certain types of spaceflight “didn’t count” in terms of needing to pass through customs and it was just a free-for-all. It’s the same way you still have to pay your taxes when you’re the president, a relic of an older and more adherence-to-the-system time than the modern day.
It also drives home the old idealistic ‘space is not owned, space is not for war’ thing they were trying to push, at least in public, at the time.