posted 04-08-2011 09:25 AM               

Space Cover #104: Yuri Gagarin

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Vostok 1 flight of Yuri Gagarin and the two year anniversary of the Space Cover of the Week thread on collectSPACE, I thought I'd show Russian covers commemorating the previous anniversaries of the flight.

As a sidenote, April 12 is also the 30th anniversary of STS-1 the first space shuttle launch with crew of John Young and Bob Crippen.

posted 04-08-2011 11:22 AM               

Finally 150th anniversary of the Civil War with dual stamps for Ft. Sumter and First Battle of Manassas.

posted 04-09-2011 01:25 PM               

The six of us (all US collectors) involved in presenting space covers of the week have been somewhat amiss in not featuring more foreign space covers, as there certainly is a huge and fascinating number of them. And we certainly would welcome any non-US collectors to join us in presenting their covers on a regular basis, or even just occasionally.

And John's presentation is for week #104, which is two years of presenting our weekly Space Cover of the Week - 104 Space Covers of the Week on collectSPACE.

posted 04-10-2011 07:36 AM               

This is a Minsk "club cachet" postmarked on Gagarin's flight date April 12, 1961 (although it is likely a backdate). Commercial cachets were not available in the Soviet Union in the early days of the space race, so the cachets came from local stamp clubs (in this case the Minsk Stamp Club). And the existence of Baikonour was still a secret, so there were no covers postmarked there until Baikonour was officially acknowledged in the 1970's.