posted 01-28-2025 09:49 AM               

Just a tiny fraction of over three years ago, having learnt what a launch cover was in Astrophilatelic terms, I decided to amass a collection of every satellite launch up until the end of 1972.

Naivety in spades!

In order to fulfill my ambition I obviously needed some ground rules... Let's start with how many satellites there are! Do you count just the launches, or do you count the actual satellites (remembering of course that some launches inject multiple satellites into orbit)? I decided that one launch cover per rocket would be sufficient.

But then, I discovered almost immediately that it was impossible to get a launch cover for the two Chinese satellites. So I compromised my rules and decided contemporaneous covers from nowhere near the actual launch site would do. This also helped with the USSR launches too. So I collected space club launch covers from Tartu, Archangelsk etc. in order to add to the total.

And then came the problem of a list to tick them off by. I have used various sources to compile my own list, prominent amongst it at the beginning being Astronautix (despite certain members of collectSPACE denigrating it. No names, no pack drill).

Almost immediately I hit a conundrum; Pioneer. Was a space-shot towards the moon to be counted as a satellite, even though technically it was suborbital and fell back to Earth without orbiting it? And therefore were the later really high apogee Blue Scout missions to be counted too?

And what about the successful probes; moon probes, planetary probes, and heliocentric probes - did I count them?

In the end I did. But to this day I still do not have a complete list of what it is I need to complete my challenge!

And I'm nowhere near completion of my under-defined challenge anyway... I have less than a fifth of covers for the Cosmos series, and a tiny handful of the Molniyas just for example.

Does anyone actually have a complete, or even complete partial collection (such as all US satellite launches)?

posted 01-28-2025 12:31 PM               

My recommendation of a place to start for US launch information is Jack McMahan's Philatelic History of the Conquest of Space, if you have not already seen it. This is my go to reference for US based activities and covers everything soup to nuts from 1946 V-2 flights at White Sands through 1973 Skylab 4. If you don't have a copy, I'll provide you with one, just reach out via email.

I share your desire to have a large enough quest to keep things interesting but also designating some ground rules to allow it to be theoretically obtainable.

One of my current open goals is to get one cover from every day of a US manned program mission from Mercury, Gemini, Apollo (MR-3 through Apollo 17).

1. Launch cover (from Port/Cape Canaveral or KSC).

2. Cover from each day of mission, all days in between launch and landing (try for mission control city but ok for other space city, Houston, Canaveral, KSC, PAFB, etc.). These are the fun ones to search for!

3. Recovery ship cover (when not recovered by prime get both designated prime and actual).

posted 01-29-2025 05:52 AM               

In the odd spare moment I get I have been trying to compile a searchable database from that remarkable list along with, Astronautix, Gunther's Space website, Un-manned Satellite website (Hillger & Toth), the RAE Table of Earth Satellites, the Encyclopedia of US Spacecraft (Bill Yenne), Artificial Satellites (Ovenden), Space Almanac (Curtis), the Complete Encyclopedia of Space Satellites (Caprara), HR Pfau's stamp catalogues 4 vols, BIS journals, Spaceflight magazines that I have accumulated, and many specialist publications such as Prelude to the Space Age and Rockets & Missiles of White Sands Proving Ground, all aided and abetted by great big dollops of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.

Many of the above sources contradict each other. As Walter Hopferweiser has discovered, even the English and German versions of Wikipedia quite often have contradictory information on the same launch.

Therefore I decided to go right back (where I can) to the source material for the sources, but it is a slog. I'm pretty sure I will never complete it to my satisfaction, as I'm searching for every early rocket launch pre-1942 (including rocket mail flights), and every space-bound launch post-1942, whether sub-orbital or otherwise, up until the end of 1972.

My searchable database tries to encompass the launch time and date (GMT and local), launch site, Rocket type and stage information, Payload/satellite/probe names (technical and common), payload mass, mission objective and results, apogee (and for orbital satellites, perigee) data, and reentry date.

The mass of data is overwhelming, so I am in the preliminary tables concentrating on rocket launch data and satellite names.

And that's just the cataloguing! Then comes the actual collecting!!

And like you, I have decided to collect as much material as possible from the manned missions (they are, for the most part, satellites after all). And yes, I try and get exactly what you listed... but I'm skimping on the day to day portion, I expect that will be a filler-in later on for me to concentrate on. Although, in the case of manned missions, I do also have extra criteria I am collecting: 1st, 5th, and 10th anniversary covers; official post-mission visits by crew; and post-mission locations on tour and display for each return module.

[EDIT: Oh, and one each for every manned mission of the STADAN & MSN tracking stations.]

posted 02-04-2025 05:03 PM               

• Covers for every day in space from Mercury through ASTP. This was completed a few years ago with covers from the final Skylab flight.
  
• Secondary Recovery Ship covers.
  
• Lifting Bodies.
  
• Covers for all Shuttle deployed payloads.
  
• Space Craft Covers.
  
• Bob Whitney covers.
  
• Beck Recovery Ship Covers
  
• Astronaut and Test Pilot autographs.
  
• Interplanetary Probes.
  
• And many, many satellite programs.

posted 02-06-2025 03:11 PM               

I'm glad that you are having all the space covers that were with him shipped down to you. Then with over 18,000 (!) space covers in your collection, maybe you could revive you and your dad's E&E Space Cover business. It would be a benefit to space cover collectors. But I'd imagine instead that they would just be a fantastic addition to your great collection.

posted 02-06-2025 04:54 PM               

That's a great list and endeavor of your space cover pursuits, Eddie, and it's so cool that you and your Dad shared a father-and-son collecting relationship. I knew your Dad from a correspondence level going back for years and know he would be so proud of you in going forward so passionately with what he started back in the hey-day of our national space program during the 1960s.

Just in this country alone, we've had over 8,500 space shots here from the Cape since Bumper 8 in 1950. Let me recheck those figures in breaking down from a U.S. space shot not orbited to those that did and beyond of all categories. I'll get back unless Robert has already done so.

posted 02-07-2025 08:20 PM               

Bob, I can say I will not be reviving E & E Space Covers as the covers are all part of the shared collection we have been able to amass over the past 55 years or so. I have promised my mom and my brother that I will not sell anything as we all want to see the collection stay together.

Ken, yes I do have a fairly complete Space Craft Cover collection but as we find out periodically that there is always something we do not have. It proves that nobody has everything but everyone has something!