Ken Havekotte
Member Posts: 3323
From: Merritt Island, Florida, Brevard
Registered: Mar 2001
|
posted 10-27-2021 05:08 PM
   
To commemorate the recent launch of NASA's Lucy space probe, the first to study the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, the below project emblem cachet cover has postal launch day cancels at both Kennedy Space Center (top) and Cape Canaveral (bottom) on Oct. 16, 2021. On this particular launch that took place from Space Launch Complex 41, both cancel locations are correct to use, but perhaps more-so on this mission. Why, because Pad 41 is geographically located on the far-southern end of the KSC-NASA installation across the Banana River side. All the other launch pad complexes, except for pads 39A/B, where all of the Apollos (except Apollo 7), shuttles, and Crew Dragons have lifted off from, were built south of SLC-41 on U.S. Air Force property at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The provided map section clearly outlines where KSC is (in green) and CCSFS (in white), formerly indicated on the map as the Cape Canaveral Air Station in 1997, are situated within their compound boundary areas. You can see the boundary line just south of Pad 41 and north of Pad 40, just over a mile area apart from the later-day Titan launch pads. No. 41 is currently in use for the Atlas V rocket by United Launch Alliance with Pad 40, operated by SpaceX, for Falcon 9 launches. Therefore, any past or current launch from the old Launch Complex 41, previously used by the Air Force for Titan III and IV launch vehicles from 1965-1999, should qualify for either a KSC or CC launch postal strike. By drawing a straight line from Pad 41 to the KSC post office across the Banana River, it's a distance of just over six miles. That distance would be nearly 14 miles, though, if a similar straight line connected from the pad to the CC post office south of the Port Canaveral harbor. So what's more important when it comes to space cover cancel validation; distance or geographic location? Or perhaps both qualify equally in this case. |
advertisement