posted 06-10-2018 04:35 AM               

Space Cover #470: The rarest Mercury Little Joe cover?

To protect the Mercury astronauts in the event of a booster failure during launch, an escape system was developed for the Mercury spacecraft. It consisted of a tower attached to the top of the spacecraft that would fire a small rocket motor to pull the spacecraft away from the booster in the event of a failure.

In order to test the system under actual conditions, NASA developed the Little Joe rocket. The Little Joe would launch from Wallops Island, Virginia and the escape system would be tested during actual flight conditions. I won't go into the details of the Little Joe booster or the escape system but instead focus on the rarity of the covers produced to commemorate these launches.

There were a total of eight Mercury Little Joe launches between August 1959 and April 1961. As far as I know, covers exist for six of the eight launches.

Covers are available for the final three launches of LJ-5 (11-8-60), LJ-5A (3-18-61) and LJ-5B (4-28-61). These are fairly common and usually do not command a high price.

Covers are also available for two earlier flights. LJ-2 (12-4-59) carried the monkey Sam and LJ-1A (1-21-60) carried the monkey Miss Sam. Covers for these flights are available but are harder to come by and do command a higher price. Goldcraft Covers produced cachets for these two flights that are quite attractive and highly sought after.

This brings us to the first three Little Joe flights. In over 40 years of collecting I have never seen or heard of covers being produced for LJ-1 (8-21-59) or LJ-6 (10-4-59). However, there are at least a couple of covers that exist for LJ-1A (11-4-59).

The cover pictured above currently resides in my collection and is one of only two that I have seen for this flight. I acquired this about 15 years ago from the collection of Richard Learn. Dick had told me that he acquired the cover from Bob Boudwin and was previously in the personal collection of William B. Hudson who was the postmaster at Wallops Island in Virginia and produced the covers. The only other example of this cover I have seen belonged to Dr. Ben Ramkissoon.

The cover is exceedingly rare and I'm sure is on almost everyone's want list. It certainly earns the title of the rarest Mercury Little Joe cover. Unless of course anyone has covers for the LJ-1 or LJ-6 launches. If you have covers for either of these launches or have yet another example of the above pictured LJ-1A cover please let us know. We'd love to see it!

posted 06-10-2018 06:36 PM               

For collectors of Space Craft Covers, the Grissom Airmail is highly sought after and is a prized cover for those of us lucky to have one. However, the general space collector isn't willing to pay the high dollar amount for the cover as they are able to pick up any number of Grissom launch covers for very reasonable prices.

posted 06-11-2018 01:05 AM               

Although normally rare covers mean also expensive prices, this is not a correct relation. We all know expensive covers that are not rare, just expensive. It is possible to acquiry that cover for a lot of money at any time.

However, rare covers are hard to get, even if someone is willing to pay a fortune. Otherwise, they are rare covers that are cheap only because they are not very sought after.

In summary, rare contains the idea of few items (similar to term scarce) meanwhile rare and expensive are linked if the item is very sought after; if not, the item keeps rare but not expensive.

An example of rare but not expensive could be some tracking covers printed/produced in low quantity but not sought after (maybe because they are unkown for most of collectors or maybe because the topic is really specific).

posted 06-29-2018 07:56 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Eddie Bizub:
I believe this is the same cover that was owned by Dr. Ben Ramkissoon.

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Thanks for confirming, I'll keep my eyes out for any others I come across.