Ken Havekotte
Member Posts: 3498
From: Merritt Island, Florida, Brevard
Registered: Mar 2001
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posted 08-24-2022 05:27 PM
   
During the week I was sorting through some old shuttle cover boxes and came across an unusual envelope or cover that had not been stamped nor postally cancelled. It's one of four (but I only have this one) that may be the very first computer-generated cachet space cover! While not too much to look at and very primitive when it comes to the actual cachet itself "printed" at top left, it had been given to me by a space friend on Aug. 10, 1988 while covering shuttle Discovery's Flight Readiness Firing (FRF) of mission STS-26 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. While sitting down at my work station area inside the News Center at Press Site 39, my friend, a space cover collector and a science, astronomy, and aerospace journalist, came over to me and was a little bit excited at what he wanted to show me. I said to him, "What's you got buddy" He told me he was able to "print out" a few color cachet envelopes for today's FRF on his personal computer and wanted my opinion on them. Unfortunately, only this one came out somewhat presentable, but he was able to program this image that you see using the envelope itself — and that's nearly 35 years ago when I never heard of a personal or home computer that could actually produce or print-out envelope space covers. Unfortunately, and I don't know why, but I never did have the cover posted and kept it blank. In its place, though, I've included a couple of other FRF-event covers to go along with the cover topic along with a FRF decal sticker that came from Rockwell Space Division in Palmdale, CA, home of the shuttle orbiters while they were being constructed. Since that time, I have lost the information that I jotted down on an insert card he had, but I would image that my friend had used an Apple Laser Printer or perhaps a Commodore 64 setup in 1988. Unlike me, he was one of the top computer wizards that I knew at the press site in those days and had the foresight to start cover cachet collecting in this new capacity. |
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