posted 02-14-2015 02:14 PM               

Space Cover #304: Mercury-Atlas 7 Captain's Covers

Mercury-Atlas 7, launched May 24, 1962, was the fourth manned flight of Project Mercury. The Mercury spacecraft, named Aurora 7, made three Earth orbits, piloted by astronaut Scott Carpenter. He was the fourth American in space following Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and John Glenn.

A targeting error during reentry took the spacecraft 250 miles (about 400 km) off-course, delaying recovery of Carpenter and the spacecraft. In this case, the secondary recovery ship the USS John R. Pierce became the prime recovery ship for the space capsule. A helicopter from the USS Intrepid recovered Carpenter.

The designated prime recovery ship was the USS Intrepid. The captain of the USS Intrepid, Captain J. Lloyd Abbot Jr., commissioned the printing of a special cachet for the mission which was printed on a large number of collector envelopes as shown at the top of this post.

On a significant number of these covers Captain Abbot added his rubber stamp corner card "J. L. ABBOT, JR. / Captain, U. S. Navy / Commanding Officer" with his signature J. L. Abbot Jr. above the corner card.

I originally thought these two versions were the only captain's covers for the mission but there is also a third variety. The third variety has the MA-7 captain's printed cachet added to the captain's official envelope with a printed corner card of "CAPTAIN J LLOYD ABBOT JR USN / COMMANDING OFFICER USS INTREPID / FLEET POST OFFICE NEW YORK" with his signature of J. Lloyd Abbot Jr. above the corner card. This variety is on a #7-3/4 size envelope (3 7/8" x 7 1/2").

posted 02-16-2015 09:06 AM               

I bought this cover, signed by Carpenter, from pioneer space collector Dr. E. V. Smith in 1980 for $50, and as indicated by the rubber stamp address, it originally came from another pioneer collector, Donald Schultz.

Schultz is best known as the author of three classic space cover reference booklets, the first of which is entitled: "Project Mercury... One Step into Space."