posted 01-28-2014 07:38 PM               

Looking inside a special edition of NASA's Roundup newsletter for Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) workers, "Gemini... Teamwork in Action," published in Dec. 1966 after the last Gemini flew the month before, is an interesting article about the Astronaut Office of the MSC's Flight Crew Support Division. From the article:

An average of some 20,000 autograph and photograph requests are answered each month by the astronaut mail room.

It would certainly appear that signature requests of the Mercury and Gemini astronauts were indeed more numerous than many first thought and quite active during the mid-1960s.

But why do we hardly see any Gemini crew-signed photographs from this era? Even crew-signed pictures of the Gemini flight teams with autopen signatures are few and far in between.

posted 01-28-2014 08:39 PM               

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Originally posted by Ken Havekotte:
With an average of 20,000 signature and photograph requests each month, for those autographs provided, just where are they now, both hand-signed and/or autopen applied?

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That leaves Gemini 3 / 4 and 7. I've never seen a complete crew a/p for the first two and only once have I come across a Gemini 7 that included Ed White's "signature".

In fact, Gemini 3 and Gemini 4 are the only crew autopens I don't have across the entire history of US space flight.

I've witnessed many of the Gemini autopens bring extraordinary prices (e.g. a Gemini 8 litho on eBay with all four "sigs" and disclosed as an autopen over $200), so clearly there's a strong market for them.

That's just my experience, but I don't have any doubts that the Gemini program autopens are far harder to find than any crews for Mercury, Apollo, Skylab and the shuttle.

All that said, I suspect a more than fair percentage of those 20,000 requests would have been directed to individual astronaut portraits as opposed to crews.

posted 02-05-2014 05:39 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Ken Havekotte:
But why do we hardly see any Gemini crew-signed photographs from this era? Even crew-signed pictures of the Gemini flight teams with autopen signatures are few and far in between.

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I wonder if complete crew signatures were not yet in high demand from collectors at this point of the space program. Perhaps most autograph requests were for still focused on individual astronauts.

With the Gemini program only lasting two years (for the period in which manned flights were taking place), it was over and done with fairly quickly. It appears that the general public forgot about Gemini once the Apollo flights started and that any efforts to collect "complete" crew signatures over the next several decades were mainly focused on Apollo, not Gemini.

posted 02-12-2014 09:29 PM            

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Originally posted by Mike Dixon:
In fact, Gemini 3 and Gemini 4 are the only crew autopens I don't have across the entire history of US space flight.

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posted 02-12-2014 09:35 PM               

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Originally posted by X-Plane Fan:
Ironically, the only a/p in my collection just happens to be for Gemini 3.

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