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[b]Space Cover 638: Surprise Apollo 11 official NASA/KSC cachets[/b] A surprise, because I didn't even know such things existed back in 1969. Way back then I was only a stamp collector, specializing in US stamps and First Day Covers, but also had a big interest in what was going on in space. But my space collecting only involved saving newspapers and magazines about the big space events, such as Alan Shepard's and John Glenn's Mercury flights and Apollo 8. But because of the excitement and historical significance of men landing on the moon on Apollo 11, I decided to send covers to the Kennedy Space Centr (KSC) post office for Apollo 11, expecting just canceled covers to be returned. But going beyond just wanting covers canceled for the launch, I also sent covers to KSC asking for them to be canceled for the moon landing and others also for splashdown - that was asking a lot. Upon receiving my covers back I was very pleasantly surprised to see the small blue Apollo 11 rubber stamp impressions nicely added to my covers. Not knowing anything about official NASA/KSC cachets (ONCs), I believed that they were a special one-time extra just because of the significance of Apollo 11. But later in 1972 when I belatedly started collecting space covers and upon learning about them did another surprise happen, as I learned that the KSC post office typically only applied their official NASA/KSC cachets for launch events and not for other events, such as moon landings and splashdowns. So ever since I have always wondered why my requests for Apollo 11 moon landing and splashdown cancels were also given the special treatment of ONCs for both moon landing and splashdown?! Of course, covers do exist with NASA/KSC ONCs for other non-launch events, but they often were the result of special favors for insiders and privileged collectors. So, whatever, these old covers, where I used cheap drugstore envelopes and addressed them with an old manual typewriter, have remained special parts of my collection and my first actual space covers. Many more were to follow starting with Apollo 16.
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