posted March 28, 2010 09:50 AM               

Space Cover #50, Apollo 13 Grumman Contractor Cover

With the 40th anniversary of Apollo 13 rapidly approaching, the Space Cover of the Week Bunch (or perhaps a more current term would be "Posse" ) will be focusing on that mission for the next few weeks.

Back in June we took a look at the Apollo 11 Bendix Contractor Cover, where the Bendix Launch Support Team created their own cachets and had them serviced for launch. Today we are going to revisit contractor covers, this time for Apollo 13.

Grumman Aircraft built the Lunar Module for Apollo. However, they did not get into the contractor cover arena until Apollo 12. Then they produced another for Apollo 13 (pictured above) and then stopped.

The Apollo 13 Grumman Contractor Cover had a cachet with a line-art drawing of a Lunar Module, the notation of LM-7 (the official designation for Apollo 13's Lunar Module "Aquarius"), the Grumman logo, and "Launch Team KSC" below that. It was postmarked using the standard KSC machine cancel (detectable by the dark filled NASA meatball) on Apollo 13's launch day, April 11, 1970.

Little did the Grumman folks, nor the cachet servicers know what a life-saving role that LM-7 would play just a few days later...