posted 11-29-2023 10:06 PM               

For more than a decade, the space center's postal station accepted mail from KSC employees and the general public mainly for "launch day" and other specific space events being commemorated. The philatelic services at the Florida Spaceport provided a specific designed cachet on employee dropped-off and mailed-in covers that would receive a KSC-machine postal cancellation, mostly for major space launches. The first launch being the final unmanned Saturn 1/Apollo (SA-10) on July 30, 1965, ending with an unmanned Viking-B launch to Mars on Sept. 9, 1975. The first ONC applied for a manned launch would be Gemini V (GT-5) on Aug. 21, 1965, with the last being the final Apollo/Saturn launch (Apollo-Soyuz) in July 1975.

The space center's postal services were strictly limited to five covers per individual. For a selected space shot, only a launch date could be applied in conjunction with the ONC application placed on the left-side area of the submitted covers.

Under no circumstances would a launch ONC be applied for non-launch events. Note the depictions of a half-dozen ONC covers. All have the proper event ONCs applied, however, they also have "non-launch day" postal cancels at Kennedy that relate to the actual ONC event. For instance, see the ONC covers for the Apollo 13 oxygen tank explosion in space postmarked April 13, 1970, two days after launch, and the moonlanding cancel days for Apollos 14 and 17.

Also included are ONC cachet-applied events for a Skylab IV (SL-4) EVA- spacewalk, an Apollo-Soyuz crew signed ONC for splashdown-recovery, and an unmanned Viking-B launch to Mars. While the postal cancel was for the last Viking launch, what's so unusual about this cover is the postmark itself. It's not the required or standard KSC-machine slogan cancellation that all ONC covers should have, but rather, a special KSC-hand cancel strike for the nation's Bicentennial Expo on Science & Technology in 1976.