posted 11-06-2024 10:47 AM               

Astronaut letters are certainly an excellent collecting topic, with several collectors I know having exceptional astronaut signed letter collections. At least one dedicated and determined collector has signed NASA stationary letters (such as the John Young NASA letter below) from all Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab astronauts; a remarkable achievement. (Me? Because of the difficulty, I mainly concentrated only on letters of the 12 moonwalkers; a challenging endeavor in itself, but certainly doable.)

Ideally, an astronaut letter should have interesting and informative content. Anything included about their spaceflight experience is always desired.

Presented here are letters from five astronauts: John Young, Jack Swigert, Fred Haise, Jerry Carr and Dan Brandenstein. One letter's content contains remarks about an upcoming spaceflight to the moon, and another about personally removing netting from the doomed Apollo 13 lunar module Aquarius.

In this NASA letter, John Young mentions about being selected to the Apollo 16 moon landing mission and its planned landing site.

In this letter on his personal stationary, Jack Swigert thanks me for my contribution to his campaign for the US Congress.

In this extraordinary letter from Fred Haise, he responds to my question about the netting he removed from Lunar Module Aquarius that was later attached to presentation cards. He states: "I pulled it loose from the restraining straps before we abandoned Aquarius." The entire letter is a great example of superb content in a letter.

Below the letter is one of the cards that Haise referred to in his letter that has a piece of netting he personally removed from Aquarius and was attached to the card. Of note is that all these cards with flown material have authentic autographs of the Apollo 13 crew.

On his company's stationary, Jerry Carr describes memorable experiences about his Skylab flight and contains interesting content.

Most space collectors have at least one of the 250,000 famous STS-8 flown covers. This one was signed by four of the five crew members (with Dan Brandenstein signing in person). Brandenstein's letter informs the recipient of the crew's decision not to sign the covers.

posted 11-07-2024 05:55 PM               

Like Bob, I have always been keenly interested in collecting signed astronaut letters for a variety of reasons as he has pointed out. They can be quite historical with their personal observations, opinions, and remarks by our space pioneering heroes.

While I do own countless numbers of autographed astronaut letters of various formats and types from Mercury to Space Shuttle, I do lack a full assembly, I am sure, of those first NASA selected astronaut groups from 1-7 (1959-69) of only signed NASA letterhead (or stationery) letters of those first 73 astronauts from Mercury to Apollo-Soyuz (ASTP).

Included, but not posted here at the moment, are signed different types of letters by Grissom, White, Chaffee, Bassett, and See, but do lack those of Givens, Freeman (I think), Williams, Chapman, Michel, and many from the shuttle program era. But with so many shuttle astronauts, flown or not, long ago I have decided not to pursue a primary collecting goal of signed shuttle astronaut letters (perhaps Bob along with a few others can do so and good luck)!

For now, let me start with our nation's first astronaut or spaceman pioneer, Alan Shepard, that everyone knows as the first American in space and ten years later became the fifth human to explore the moon's surface.

Seen below are a few signed Shepard letters written during the 1960's, 70's, 80's, and concluding with the late 1990's. I've tried to show different letterhead designs (two are by NASA) along with different types of autographs, hand-applied and typed letters (one being a memo), a signed air force flying authorization form, signed contract documents, different letter contents, and ending up with a more than 600-word penned draft proposal by Shepard in 1987 of a national astronaut space re-organization.

On a personal note, though, three of the depicted letters are of a personal basis while a couple of others were written to Space Age celebrities in their own right that Shepard knew and/or closely worked with. Of particular interest is the letter at top row addressed to space autograph collector friend Bob Glass of New York in 1967. Note that Shepard responded of NASA's autograph policy at the time when Gemini had ended and signed his name in full.

posted 11-09-2024 09:54 AM               

Concerning astronaut letters: they have never been a big part of my collecting interest, although I do really like them and consider them a great collecting topic, but not of interest to many.

Collecting them is not easy, as dealers and other collectors don't have big inventories of them and they can be quite expensive when found, such as signed letters by Armstrong, Grissom, Ed White, Jack Swigert and Bill Anders.

posted 11-09-2024 11:10 AM               

Most only have content that would be of interest to me, but here is a letter that I received from John Glenn in 1998 after I requested he take part in Ask An Astronaut, the first website to let the public interact with astronauts online.

posted 11-10-2024 07:57 AM               

• ...on the Melatonin experiment planed for STS-95.
  
• ...the lights in Perth, Australia.
  
• ...the progress of NASA programs.
  
• ...viewing stars during the shuttle mission.
  
• ...the results of the aging studies.
  
• ...the length of astronaut training.
  
• ...running for president.
  
• ...desires for the shuttle mission.
  
• ...items he took with him to space.
  
• ...the windows on Discovery.

posted 11-12-2024 02:37 PM               

I suspect my signature will be of little value to you now. People want autographs of those who fly space ships, not of those who drive dog sleds. None the less, I have signed the enclosed as you requested.

/s/ Palmer Bailey, Terra Geode Payload Specialist