posted 09-26-2015 02:15 PM               

Space Cover #336: Barbarella rocket launch

Space launch bases as Baikonur, Cape Canaveral, Jiuquan, Kourou, Plesetsk, Sriharikota, Tanegashima, Vandenberg, Wallops Island… are among the best known. But the space history has seen as many others have been used only temporally or only one time. Similarly, rockets as Ariane, Atlas, Delta, Long March, Saturn, Soyuz… are familiar to astrophilatelists.

However, along the space history exploration, there have been some space launch places and rockets that time seems to have forgotten. Nowadays and thanks to space covers it is possible to recover the space history exploration. It is the main goal of Astrophilately: registering space events through space covers.

A good example is the above shown cover. It was postmarked with a 000 red meter (used as favor for philately purposes) at Eckernfoerde (Eckernförde) in the north of Germany, close to Denmark frontier on March, 12 1974 commemorating the launch of first German hybrid-rocket Barbarella from a mobile jack-up drilling platform (Hubinsel in German) named Barbara Y844 and located in Baltic Sea. This platform was installed in June 26, 1964 and out of service in December, 15 1995. Eckernfoerde, a city facing the Baltic Sea, is the nearest place to exact launch site, as a post office was not available from the Barbarella platform.

The Barbarella hybrid-rocket was developed by students of Technische Universität von München (Munich Technical University) under the management of R. Schmucker, W. Schauer and the German space engineer Prof. Harry Oskar Ruppe (he signed in the left top cover) who was appointed to the Munich Technical University in 1966 and took over the chair of Astronautics, the position he held until 1994.

The Barbarella rocket is currently displayed in the Deustches Museum in Munich.

posted 09-27-2015 08:35 PM               

The name if the city, by the way, is Eckernförde. The text in the cancellation might be a bit crackly.