Ken Havekotte
Member Posts: 3705
From: Merritt Island, Florida, Brevard
Registered: Mar 2001
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posted 10-13-2023 09:57 PM
   
This morning a Heavy Falcon rocket, SpaceX's most powerful operational launch vehicle, orbited the Psyche deep space probe from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, (also known as the Merritt Island Launch Area during the early 1960's). The Falcon Heavy rocket, first-time use by NASA, is comprised of three modified Falcon 9 boosters strapped together which makes it the second most powerful U.S. rocket in use today.The cover seen below is the very first Psyche postal cover to be hand posted Oct. 13, 2023, on Merritt Island, which is where the Kennedy Space Center is located on at the northern area of this barrier island. Psyche becomes the first launch from the space center since the spaceport's only post office was closed after Sept. 26, 2023.  This cover is one of 25 hand cancelled the morning of launch that contains an unusual cachet at left. The affixed cachet is actually an official Psyche cloth mission emblem patch, "Journey To A Metal World," in which only a few were done in this special way. In addition, a few single U.S. flag stamps were used for some postal strike impressions. Two forever USPS stamps were used for the limited Psyche covers; one features a full moon image with an Apollo 11 50th anniversary issue and a later Webb Space Telescope postage stamp. Another unusual feature about the Psyche covers today, in addition to the official program patch being attached, was their location being near the actual launch pad, about 2.5 miles away, during the liftoff. A few moon stamps were used because the Psyche spacecraft also carries NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications Technology Demonstration payload, which will test laser communications beyond the moon. It will take Psyche six years (until 2029) to reach the metal-rich asteroid by the same name orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter to study its composition for the first time. Once in orbit around the asteroid for 26 months, the Psyche space probe would have traveled on a 2.2-billion-mile journey to the far-away distant "metal" world. |
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