posted 06-04-2013 06:52 AM               

Space Cover #216: Tracking Envelopes

A popular area for collectors is covers manually created from "tracking maps." The earliest covers of this type seem to be from the Apollo 12 mission with the use of the Earth orbital map showing the various tracking stations cancelled for the launch and splashdown dates and a Moon orbital map cancelled for the landing date.

Shown above are some tracking envelope covers for the Apollo 14 mission with a Moon orbital map cancelled from Houston for the orbit insertion and moon landing dates - if you look at the map on the envelope it shows the events for those two days. The second cover is cancelled from Houston for the splashdown date and is an Earth orbital map with the map area on the front of the cover showing the recovery area.

The original maps are cut into the shape of unfolded envelopes and then folded and glued into the envelope shape for processing as a regular cover.

The next scan shows covers created for the Apollo 15 mission with a moon landing cover from a Moon orbital map cancelled from KSC and a splashdown cover made from an Earth orbital map showing the recovery area cancelled from Western Samoa.

Covers like this are not just found in space event cover boxes but also in FDC boxes as well. The covers below are both on Moon orbital maps with FDI cancels for plate blocks of the Space Achievement stamps. Note the interesting cancel from Huntsville – FDI with no CDS to the left of it and the CDS on the right hand side in the selvage area of the block.

I have seen covers like these created for shuttle missions as well with "road maps" used to show the area around KSC and Edwards AFB used to create envelopes for the launch and landing dates. Does anyone have any to show?

Creating their own envelopes allowed collectors to show exactly what they wanted on the envelope to match the location of the event.

So next time you are looking for covers consider adding a few "map" covers to your collection.

posted 06-04-2013 08:01 AM               

I am including two space shuttle launch covers made from shuttle tracking maps and canceled in Houston, Texas, where Mission Control was located, for the respective space shuttle missions of STS-5(top) and STS-6 (bottom). These covers are the real thing; they are not reprinted maps or photo copied maps. They are actual tracking maps made into covers and are usually very modest in price to collect, $3 or so.

The covers are a great area to collect with a slice of real history for an actual mission added as a plus. Many thanks for highlighting it!

posted 06-04-2013 08:00 PM               

Earth orbital and lunar map produced cachet covers, provided by the MSC/JSC Stamp Club, started with the first manned lunar landing mission in July 1969 and included Apollo 11's FDI of C76, of which, there are a few in my own collection.

All throughout the Apollo and Skylab era, employees of the Houston-based space center operated stamp club were providing both Earth and lunar orbital tracking "map covers."

Employees of the Johnson Space Center stamp club continued on with the tradition of the popular tracking map covers (Earth only) with several of the first space shuttle flights throughout the 1980s, but later stopped producing them shortly afterwards.

It wasn't until the late 1980s (and again during the early 90s) that SpaceCoast Cover Service, after acquiring a bunch of shuttle tracking maps in mint or unused condition, arranged to have the original orbital maps cut, folded, and processed into standard-size envelopes by my firm's local printing company in Cocoa, FL.

Hundreds of them were produced and used for shuttle philatelic processing throughout the 1990s, mostly at the KSC/Cape/Patrick AFB postal stations, with a few even going to Houston, TX, for mission control postmarking.

A limited number of other map covers would be at Edwards AFB, CA, in covering milestone shuttle orbiter landings on site out there.

Others, afterwards, were saved and processed for use throughout the shuttle program to include later highlight missions, even until the final close of the shuttle program in 2011.

posted 06-04-2013 08:18 PM               

The majority of these early tracking map covers (if not all) were produced by Rand Philatelic Bureau in Houston. When I first became acquainted with Rand in the late 1980's, they had boxes full of tracking map covers for prior missions (including the one above), and were making more for the ongoing Shuttle flights at that time. As Ken Havekotte mentions above, he took over in the 1990's as Rand phased out.

posted 06-04-2013 09:27 PM               

But credit needed to be attributed to Rand's owner with the creation idea and initial production of the Apollo and Shuttle orbital tracking map covers.

What a great idea it was, huh?

posted 06-05-2013 06:16 AM               

One of my primary contacts for them, during various shuttle missions, would hand over to me unopened shrink-wrapped packs of them. If I recall correctly, there were either 25 or 50 maps of a single mission altogether in a package.

Sometimes I would get several packs of them for a certain mission, therefore, it would appear there were no shortages of them for general distribution purposes.

Of course, I did keep many of the original maps, not all for philatelic uses, but for my own collection, and I still have many of those in addition to some unused map covers.