Man, my dad tells me stories of Buzz Aldrin almost being deported, until Niel gave his passport back ('cause he swiped it just before the EVA). Those wacky astronauts…
I’ll say no. If you’re going to launch to the station from Russia and you don’t live there, you’d probably need it to get to Baikonur Cosmodrome, but you wouldn’t need it on the way back.
I presume your question is aimed at, say, the above situation, when the return flight is landing in the US? So Russian/Japanese/etc. astronauts would need a passport for Russia… but they know they’ll be landing in the US eventually. Hmm…
As I recall, NASA has agreements with other countries to cover the contingency of an unplanned landing. No passports required. That would seem to cover the present situation, especially since it has been planned for some weeks now.
Or throw your ass into jail. This may actually become an issue once the various private interests develop space travel.* Although I assume that there will be all sorts of announcements to whatever the appropriate official bodies are, can you imagine the situation if a private US spaceship landed in North Korea or Myanmar or places even less hospitable to outsiders?
(Dick Rutan is closest, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for the tourist trade to start.)
I don’t know the answer to the OP, but my guess is that precedents can be easily found: What happens on an airline when hijackers steal your passport en route? Or when an emergency causes an airplane to land in an unexpected country?
My guess is that governments can easily supply temporary passports for such situations.
Well, most of the current US astronauts are military officers, and military don’t need passports when they deploy overseas. Their military ID cards suffice for this.
In any case, I’d think it would be extraordinarily bad PR for a nation to take an astronaut prisoner because his spacecraft landed in their country.
I think that only applies to countries that have treaty agreements to allow it. I don’t know if Russia is one of them, but I suspect not.
As for the story about Buzz Aldrin, where would they have deported him to? Back to the Moon? And did they get a visa to visit the Moon in the first place?
So even if American astronauts crash-landed in Cuba or Syria or somewhere the U.S. isn’t too cozy with (except maybe North Korea, who never ratified it), there still shouldn’t be any trouble.
I suppose that this doesn’t actually say anything about planned landings, but it’s hard to believe that the protocol would be much different.
