posted 05-04-2014 07:02 AM               

Space Cover #263: Little Joe II

Next week will be the 50th anniversary of the first inflight abort test of an Apollo spacecraft. This was performed on May 13, 1964 at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico using a Little Joe II booster and boilerplate Apollo spacecraft BP-12. The cover above was produced by SpaceCraft Cachets to commemorate this flight. It is listed as Vukotich #78, with 300 produced, and carries a White Sands machine cancel for the launch day. Cachet designer Carl Swanson has autographed this one. Cachets for the other Little Joe II flights are not nearly as ornate as this one – usually White Sands generic rubber stamped cachets.

The Little Joe II was a beefier successor to the Little Joe booster that was used to test the abort systems for Mercury. Each Little Joe II was configured with different clusters of solid rocket motors to power the capsule to the right altitude and speed for each particular test before lighting off the escape tower.

Spacecraft Cachets usually added a typed insert into their covers, and the typed insert for this one compares the Little Joe and Little Joe II boosters (below).