Posts: 13
From: 43° 35' 53" N 1° 26' 35" E
Registered: Mar 2007

posted 12-30-2010 04:13 AM               

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I recently bought on eBay this first day cover of the launch of Interkosmos 6:

What is funny of this is not only the satellite depicted, which has nothing to do with the real IK-6 (it was a Vostok-class recoverable spacecraft), but that it was launched from Baikonur, while the cover has it launched from Kapustin Yar! Any idea?

Posts: 660
From: Northville MI USA
Registered: Aug 2005

posted 12-30-2010 10:45 AM               

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You are correct. This is a Space Craft Cover (SCC) produced by cachet artist Carl Swanson. This is the Intercosmos 6 date, but the wrong cachet. As for the cancel, I believe that this is a MOSCOW cancel. All the covers in this series bear the same cancel. The covers were purchased from the USSR government, who produced them.

One guess, they were sloppy. Another possibility, were they revealing the true nature of space launches at this time? This was still cold war times, so this may have been identified as a communications satellite. Not likely as a contemporary source, TRW Space Log lists the correct information that this was as scientific satellite with a recovered payload, not a comm sat. It was launched from Baikonur, the first Intercosmos to be launched from there. I'm going with sloppy. It's possible that no images were available like there were for most US satellites, and thus Carl used what was given/available to him by his contact in the USSR. This was also a time when Carl was in some turmoil. Not long afterward he decided to hang it up as a cachet maker. He probably didn't check the details of what he was given. Also Joe Fitzpatrick (Carl's partner in SCC who was deceased by this time period) was the guy who did the research for all those years, so Carl was out of his element as he was an artist.